More celeb sightings:

Amanda Bynes--couple of times now: once near the (ex) Plaza Hotel & again in Columbus Ave (in City Diner?) having dinner late one Sunday night.
Bernadette Peters, yesterday, at 68(9)th & Columbus. Didn't realize she was so petite! But, she looks amazing!

Some new SNL skit titles/ideas:

o Keeping up with the Lehman's!
o Countrywide Auctions: "Iceland, Iceland, I got a nice Iceland here. She's a beaut folks, 100% pure Iceland, that she is. Goin' once, goin' twice, GONE!!".
0 Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, pepsi, pepsi: A re-make of this classic. The setting is a street-side vendor's stall in war-torn Iraq. People come in & order (dishes with especially Arabic-sounding names) but always finish up with a (clearly enunciated) , "And oh, also a WMD please!". The 'waiter', who's been diligently taking the customer's order up until the last statement, stares at him/her completely expressionlessly for about 2-seconds, then turns around and calls in to the 'kitchen/chef' the standard 'Cheeseburger, pepsi' order.
o BFDs: Bush Financial Derivatives. Ben & Hank are up @ the White House to try to bring Bush & his gang up to speed on the current financial crisis. A Blackberry RIM--from the 'spoils' of the Iraqi invasion (or, perhaps funnier still, from an "Operation Pinpoint Strike" al-Qaeda operation that's been pinpointing for the last however many years) and which Bush proudly displays to Hank & Ben--keeps upstaging Bush with the correct answers and keeps correcting him of his 'nukyulerosity'. Somewhere else (maybe in the White House itself), Cheney is undergoing successive heart-transplants--Rumsfeld himself oversees the task of tearing out the still-beating hearts of Iraqi/Afghani POWs to provide for the transplants while pontificating arrogantly, adamantly & complacently that this was not torture in any shape or form and that the CIA, NSC, FBI, ABC, NBC, FOX, the army, navy, airforce, the CICs, Harvarders, Yaleans, Stanfordites, all past & future Nobel laureates, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, the world, the known universe, were all utter and complete morons. Limbaugh comes in to confess that he's been 'self-medicating' himself! Meanwhile, Cheney's daughter is making out with Condoleeza Rice or maybe one or both of the Bush girls. The Obamas and McCains start a bidding war over the White House--Barney Frank, Freddie's, Fannie's & Merrill's CEOs assure & re-assure the Obamas & McCains that, of course they don't need any income verification & that of course they can provide any type of NINJA, Karate, Kung-fu and Kamakazi loans: btw, the estimated, BASEL II, SOX-compliant 'market value' of the White House is, naturally, 700 gazillion, ba-jillion, ka-drillion dollars!!

The whole skit should have the frenetic self-importance and pomposity of a super-ultra-uber West-Wing episode.

(And Tina Fey should be a shoo-in for a Sarah Palin lookalike--who should also be in there somewhere--sorry Tina :)

Jeez, it suddenly seems like I now can hardly walk about the city without tripping over yet another celeb. Having dinner with my cousin's 'ex' (what exactly is the term for your cousin's husband when she has died?) @ Mughlai when who should pop up next to us (on a date, no less) but Sex & the City's very own 'Burger'

So, just jotting down a few highlights:

Marathon training is a bust--I pulled the plug and canceled this morning.

Yesterday, I bumped, literally, into Christine Lahti at the SE corner of 59th & Broadway. She is tall! And absolutely charming--I, the clod that I am, bump into her and she ends up apologizing, profusely--and gorgeous.

And this afternoon, almost bumped into Isabella Rossellini on W86th. just past CPW. Now, I have to fess up, I am not a 100% sure it was indeed IR but, regardless, I made sure I apologized handsomely this time around. She, like a typical New Yorker, barely even gave me a glance: c'est la vie!

I'd signed up for the Nike Half-Marathon--the incorrigible glass-half-full guy that I am--back in May (March ?) thinking, in my incorrigible glass-half-full manner, 'Yeah, me dat!'

Dawns the day of the race--today--only to find me passed out on my bed (aka living-room-cum-dining-room-cum-kitchen-cum-whole apartment aka 'nyc studio' floor, oops, sorry, parquet floor) till well past the start (and possibly even the end) of the race.

To squelch those insidious mom-programmed guilt feelings, not to mention l'estomac that's had a 'big bang' of its own and been expanding faster than the universe, I decided, upon waking, I should at least go for a run in CP. Which I did and which, surprisingly, went not too badly: yes, I still wimped out and walked most of Heartbreak Hill (that 500-ft tall, arbored, monstrosity that rises, and rises and rises and rises...silent, fiendish, arrogant, mocking).

So, I'm done with my workout and I'm shvitzing down the footpath towards 81st & CPW. I come across this nice-looking couple strolling into the park. At first, I don't pay much attention--my brain, such as it is, is already overloaded with trying to normalize my asthmatic wheezes--when, some lone, half-crazed neuron somewhere fires, and I realize I've seen this guy (who's now wearing a French beret kinda thing) somewhere before. So, cliche-cliche, I double-take. The OMG moment, inevitably, strikes: I realize he's that actor who played the gun-toting, hard-assed, yet heart-of-gold, brother of Mollie/Rebecca Howe/Kirstie Alley in Look who's talking too. A shower, lunch and yadda-yadda yadda later, I fire up IMDB: turns out he is Elias Koteas (and he's done some American Dad work, yay!!).

My Marathon In the City continues...