• Last June, while praising Pixar's “Up,” I wrote the following about Dug the dog: “What makes him funny isn’t that he’s not like a dog—that he stands on his hind legs and sings a rap song, for example, as he might in other animated features—but that he’s exactly like a dog. Pixar finds humor intrinsically within the object.” So why am I quoting myself? I just saw the trailer for “Marmaduke,” a live-action feature about a giant dog (voiced by Owen Wilson), in which—ahem—Marmaduke stands on his hind legs, and sings, and dances, and romances, and tries to be hip. Out in June. I'll be in hiding.
• Speaking of dumb dogs: I began reading this exchange between David Brooks and Gail Colllins on who will lead the Republican party until I got to these lines from Brooks that stopped me cold. I never finished:

First, let’s all stop paying attention to Sarah Palin for a little while. I understand why liberals want to talk about her. She allows them to feel intellectually superior to their opponents. And members of the conservative counterculture want to talk about her simply because she drives liberals insane. But she is a half-term former governor with a TV show. She is not going to be the leader of any party and doesn’t seem to be inclined in that direction.

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is a media psychodrama and nothing more. It gives people on each side an excuse to vent about personality traits they despise, but it has nothing to do with government.

She is in 2010 what Jerry Falwell was from the mid-1990s until his death — a conservative cartoon inflated by media. Evangelicals used to say that Falwell had three main constituency groups — ABC, CBS and NBC.

• How does Collins let Brooks get away with this? We talk about Sarah Palin because liberals want to talk about her? She's the 2010 equivalent of Jerry Falwell? Falwell never held public office. He was not mayor nor governor nor—let me remind Brooks—the Republican Party's candidate for vice-president of the United States. Thus she is both heir apparent—as losing vice presidents or vice-presidential nominees often are—and a media phenomenon. The idea that she remains in the news because liberals want her there, as someone to feel superior to, is, I would guess, 90% untrue. Put it this way: Speaking as a liberal, I would love her to go wherever Joe the Plumber went, but I don't think I'll get that wish anytime soon.
• Speaking of people I'd love to never hear from again: We have another reason to hate A.J. Pierzynski. As if we needed one.
• Speaking of something that feels like cheating: Here's a Wall Street Journal excerpt of Gregory Zuckerman's book “The Greatest Trade Ever,” about John Paulson buying credit-default swaps on the riskiest home mortgages in 2006. A year later his firm made $15 billion, with a measley $4 billion for himself. That amounts to $10 million a day. Nice work! He's not the cheater, by the way. He just saw where things couldn't keep going and acted on it. The worrisome graf for the rest of us:

Housing prices had climbed a puny 1.4% annually between 1975 and 2000, after inflation. But they had soared over 7% in the following five years, until 2005. The upshot: U.S. home prices would have to drop by almost 40% to return to their historic trend line. Not only had prices climbed like never before, but Mr. Pellegrini's figures showed that each time housing had dropped in the past, it fell through the trend line, suggesting that an eventual drop likely would be brutal.

• Speaking of brutal: Here's what I wrote about Hanoi traffic last week. And here are some friends of Andy's videotaping their ride to work. Fun!
• Speaking of Andy: Here's his post about teaching poetry in Hanoi.
• Speaking of poetry: Rogert Ebert says what I said about “Kick Ass,” but shorter and sweeter.
• Speaking of ass kicking: Andrew Sullivan takes down the Tea Party here. His main complaint is mine: If it's government spending and debt you're against, all you white Republicans, where were you when your man George W. Bush was increasing the national debt from $5 trillion to over $10 trillion? Why save your rage for two months into the new guy's presidency?
• And speaking of irrational critiques of Obama: In The New Yorker a few weeks back, Judith Thurman relayed an interview that Philip Roth gave to Italian freelance journalist Tommaso Debenedetti, in which, among other subjects, Roth complained about Obama's presidency, how disappointing it was, and what empty rhetoric there had been on hope and change. The problem? The interview was a complete fabrication. “But I have never said anything of the kind!” Roth objected to another Italian journalist who asked him about the first interview. “It is completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.” In fact, Roth had never even spoken with Debenedetti, who also had an Obama-critiquing interview with John Grisham in the same right-wing tabloid. Regardless of whether Grisham and/or Roth sues, Roth delivers Debenedetti's epitaph. “Surely his career is over,” Roth says. Or he'll wind up on FOX News.