Afternoon snackage

♦ U.S. District Judge Gary Feess extended the full LAPD consent decree by three years, over the objections of chief William Bratton and the feds.
♦ The New Yorker has posted (free) this week's Peter J. Boyer piece on Sony's strategy for marketing The Da Vinci Code to Christians, including the financing of books and a website aimed at debunking the film's fictional basis. A little controversy never hurt a film, eh?
♦ Robin Fields, Evelyn Larrubia and Jack Leonard of the LAT are finalists for UCLA's Gerald Loeb Award for the "Guardians for Profit" series. Nice to see the Times didn't overlook Fields on the application, after dropping her from the Pulitzer-finalist entry for last year's stories on troubles at the Getty. All Loeb finalists
♦ Teresa Strasser, the Jewish Journal singles columnist. actress and Press Club award winner, starts this week as the morning news girl on Adam Carolla's show on 97.1 FM.
♦ Former LAT reporter Ken Silverstein is writing the new Washington Babylon blog "focused on political corruption in Washington, D.C.," for Harper's Magazine, which he recently joined as Washington Editor. Via Marc Cooper.
♦ Blogger benhigh at Blogging.la discovers the joy of seeing the La Brea tar pits pop up wherever in the neighborhood they wish.
♦ Lisa Mascaro, late of the Daily News, has been named Washington correspondent for the Las Vegas Sun.
♦ State Assembly candidate Jonathan Levey (41st district) has a media stunt planned for tomorrow morning. He and three supporters will test how long it takes to get from Agoura Hills to Encino by bus, cars and bicycle, then share their observations with the meed-ya.
♦ Fact-checking fiend Brady Westwater has a new best friend in the LAT's Scott Gold. In his Sunday story on Kim Cooper's campaign to save the orange Union 76 balls, Gold placed the Hollywood sign "in the hills above downtown."
♦ KCRW will air President Bush's address on illegal immigration live via National Public Radio at 5 pm. Other radio stations may be going live too, but I didn't hear from them so I don't know.
♦ Nomar Garciaparra: so far, so good.
♦ Larry Atteberry's brief flirtation with tabloid TV.
♦ KPCC's John Rabe had a letter to the editor in Sunday's NYT chiding the reviewer of Kelly Tyler-Lewis's The Lost Men.
♦ CBS2 reporter Dave Lopez, with Channel 2 since 1977, will pick up the Los Angeles Press Club's Joseph M. Quinn Award for Lifetime Achievement in June.
♦ The Times' Opinion blog runs another observation from China filed by editor Andrés Martinez.
♦ Kevin Arnovitz slips more pro-Clipper propaganda onto the pages of Slate.