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♦ Venerable Langer's Deli now has a website that lets you pre-order your pastrami online.
♦ Nora Ephron on Tom Cruise (at the HuffPost): "My son Jacob off-handedly pointed out to me this week that Cruise has now become the new Michael Jackson, a weirdo, an all-purpose piņata, the freak celebrity that everyone concedes is crazy, a poster boy for career immolation, a bizarre case of arrested-development, a man still playing with childhood toys." She goes on to say he has a blog problem.
♦ Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes parses the incestuous connections on the search committee for Barry Munitz's replacement at the Getty. Green continues to label former city councilman Joel Wachs and ex-Harvard prez Neil Rudenstine "likely" candidates.
♦ L.A. City Nerd and Here in Van Nuys both blog-pile on the Santa Monica Boulevard expansion project through Century City and part of West L.A. It's over budget and years behind schedule, but they don't mention the likely traffic snarls that seem inevitable when three lanes merge into two.
♦ It's kind of odd that more news media didn't mention that in yesterday's raid on the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority, the badges and guns were discovered at the Bradbury home where auto racer Mickey Thompson was gunned down in 1988. I heard it on, I think, Fox 11's news last night.
♦ Ross Johnson wonders why Hollywood was ever scared of Anthony Pellicano: "Despite all his posturing with bimbos and outright lying to reporters about his prowess with a Louisville Slugger, Pellicano has always been a punk from Chicago who, as attorney Stephen Yagman is found of saying, 'escaped his punkdom and moved to L.A., where nobody knew he was a punk.'"
♦ Word at the Los Angeles Times is that Bill Rempel will leave the national desk to be an assistant sports editor in charge of investigations (and thus Michael Hiltzik's supervisor, if the reports are true that Hiltzik will land in sports.
♦ LAist discovers what looks to be an online-dating scam of some kind.
♦ John Stodder worked for the late Mike Qualls at City News Service and remembers a story he told about waking up on the campaign trail in a Wisconsin hotel room and calling his his editor at the Herald Examiner to ask, "where am I?"
Photo: Langersdeli.com