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Hey, it's me, your Labor Day Weekend guest blogger Clint Eastwood, Sexual Cowboy, with some suggestions for spicing up you and your family's holiday.

We all know how unstructured time tends to spread out over a long weekend. Now luckily it's supposed to be nice tomorrow and Monday, but just in case you ended up cooped up inside with the kids, here's a terrific crafts project that they're sure to love. It's easy, and doesn't require any supplies you aren't likely to have on hand. And with school about to start up again, this will get the tykes back into the collaborative, art-class spirit!

Make a Construction Paper Cowboy Hat

(Instructions borrowed with thanks from this fine site, where you can also find the template.)

"Cut out the front of a cowboy hat from brown paper using a template, and cut out a long paper strip from a heavier weight paper from a headband to attach the hat to. Attach the cowboy hat to the center of the headband and decorate it. Once it is decorated fit the headband to your head and secure the length of it in place with tape. Now you are ready to ride the range!"

Hi, it's me, Clint Eastwood, Sexual Cowboy, here to take you through the holiday weekend. You know, one aspect of my life that I wish more people knew about is my love of jazz. In fact, I even dabble in it myself. (Though you won't catch me playing a brunch set at B.B. King's to a half-full room of bovine out-of-towners, like some actor-musician manques I could name!) I do so love to sing, and was so happy to work with the Broadway great Joshua Logan in Paint Your Wagon. Is that my sheet music in there?

This coming Sunday, 8coupons is teaming up with Snackalicious Falafel in the East Village to offer 8-cent falafel sandwiches from 5-9 pm. A falafel includes pita, chickpeas molded carefully into a falafel ball, fresh tomatoes, diced onions, shredded lettuce and that precious sauce. A lot of love and labor goes into a falafel. Something so good should cost far more than eight cents, but not this Sunday! How they do it, the world many never know…so, just, stop wondering. And eat. A lot. Because you may win the Snackalicious' falafel-eating contest. In addition to the gustative satisfaction and glory of consuming as many falafels as possible, you'll also prove yourself worthy of receiving one 8-cent falafel sandwich every day for an entire year.

Oh, and there's 8-cent yogurt at the nearby and newly opened 16 Handles as well, just in case you haven't whipped yourself into a food coma by then. Not surprisingly, the 888th person will get 8-cent fro-yo on the 8th of every month for the next 365 days. It's almost too much to comprehend on an empty stomach.

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Hi, I'm Clint Eastwood, Sexual Cowboy, and I'll be blogging here this weekend while Mark and Sharon take the holiday off. I'll mostly be posting some of my favorite videos, pictures, articles, crafts projects and other things of that nature, so stop on by, why dontcha, in between your holiday celebrations. Go ahead, I'll make your day!

"Short of dressing up as a leprechaun or lighting yourself on fire, you'd have to work super hard to stand out as the best- OR worst-dressed person in the room. When there's a woman in a bedazzled fur turban making the rounds, your skirt is beside the point, so just relax and ogle."

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Dahlia Lithwick, who touchingly continues to believe that things like Constitutional rights and stuff are winning issues for liberals (yesterday), wrote recently about why aren't Democrats hammering McCain on abortion? As in: in this election that will decide the makeup of the Supreme Court for the next generation or so, why aren't we saying that, despite being branded a "maverick" because once upon a time he ran a contentious primary campaign against George W. Bush, McCain is actually to the right of most of America on women's issues? Well, because as her colleague wrote once in his really good book, the left long ago let the right set the terms (and, crucially, the language) of the abortion debate, and it's kind of of a losing issue for us.

Now, John McCain has selected an honest-to-goodness lady as his Vice Presidential nominee, presumably because of all those (mythical?) Hillary holdouts really want to vote for change but can't stand Obama. Now they have a new tough broad to vote for. Is this the logic? Probably. Well, said lady also happens to be stridently anti-abortion (the above-linked Times article includes a ringing endorsement from Ralph Reed, not exactly a champ of women's issues in any forum). So perhaps now, in an effort to prove their credentials, the ticket with two dudes on it will actually have to talk aggressively about, like, protecting Roe v. Wade and stuff? I can haz frank and un-coded political debates about the importance of the right to abortion and government support of sex ed, birth control and family planning, plz?

Seriously, though, picking a lady so that ladies will vote for you... is progress?

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The title, it would seem, is more a declaration of simplicity than authoritativeness — this is a pleasantly scattershot dip into the contents of one guy's bookshelves, and an attempt at edifying pattern-making from there. The usually withheld critical "I" is here in abundance, exclamation points are unusually frequent and examples are given liberally, or made up in a spirit of fun. And, as you might expect, close readings of short passages are instructive — the "How" of the title is the key word here, this is an instructive book for people who'd like to ground readings of literary product in an understanding of literary process.

Wood is essentially talking about stuff that Does It For Him; I like listening to him talk about this stuff. Less so the stuff that Doesn't Do It For Him, because I like a lot of it. (Especially his frequent bugbear DeLillo, who's barely mentioned here and just as well for our purposes.) Wood wants fiction to be anchored (via a fresh style), to some sense of "lifeness" — he's stringent about fiction's responsibilities if not stodgy about its methods. Still, when he talks about Updike and Nabokov sometimes "freez[ing] detail into a cult of itself", and "metafictional trivialities", and "the cost to final seriousness" in Pynchon — these are all incidental references, little spurs sticking out from the course of the book — I go on red alert, because I find great value in the perhaps frivolous aesthetic or perhaps esoteric critical-theoretical purposes that fall outside the workings of fiction as they're presented here.

Having read this book, I went back to Walter Kirn's review — I still think it's an interesting and worthwhile one, for attempting to take Wood's tastes (what this book does is foreground that "I"), as demonstrated here and in his long paper trail, and arrange them more formally. The better to object to them — but still, I agree with some of them. Even if it is ultimately an overheated critique, and it overshoots in trying to make Wood's prizing for "the real" into an association with a particular genre, when it's more a matter of sensibility. But taste is a difference I can put aside here, even more so than I thought was going to be the case.

"I want to give a shout out to all my Saudi Arabian brothers and sisters and all my brothers and sisters from all the countries that have oil, if you could all please send me some oil for my jet I would truly appreciate it." - P. Diddy

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This is a public service announcement... with guitars!

Janet Frame is a dead writer from New Zealand who rather famously struggled with mental illness; this story, "found among her papers," as such things often are, is about a dwarf and ward of the state celebrating her 21st birthday celebration (and competency exam). We've previously dealt with Frame, earlier this year, with another previously unpublished story about mental illness — that one was narrated by an institutionalized woman, but her narration was vague and almost impersonal; while the narrator here identifies herself as "I" once, early on, and then proceeds to tell the story of poor, poor Naida.

As this "I", again nebulously defined, Frame dips into and out of the stunted (mentally as she is physically) perspective of Naida, essentially making us pity her (and the state's clumsy treatment of her) by juxtaposing her perceptions against the objective world (for instance, we hear about her grand romances, while mentions of the brand names of Naida's runny lipstick strike us as cheap), and by offering no explanations for her behavior better than she can come up with herself.

The "I", though, is again mysterious, and curiously forceful:

Gossip Girl Fever Is Totally In The Air, OMFG!!! It smells like the Hamptons, or what we think the Hamptons smells like, because, really, why go when you can live vicariously through a well-written show about heinously wealthy and beautiful city-living teenagers? Some veteran editorial staffers here at the L have even claimed the principal cast members of Gossip Girl as their iChat icons/possible alter-egos. Who is who? I'll never tell, xoxo, etc., etc. But you can guess. (Shockingly, nobody has claimed Chuck Bass.) UPDATE: He's taken. I mean, he's Chuck Bass, so, d'uh.

After you've exhausted all the exciting, very bad for you possibilities, perhaps you'd like to settle down with the new, five-minute-plus season two trailer the CW leaked today. It's a mix of old stuff and a few new teasing scenes, including a good look at Lonely Boy's new love interest--a/k/a the chick that's been sending Blake Lively into an insecurity shame spiral. Watch and judge.

Eight gold medals, a bunch of broken records, and a boatload of free swim trunks later, Michael Phelps isn't stopping until he's the winningest Olympian of them all. And that means a book deal! With a reported $1.6 million advance, according to the New York Post. Simon & Schuster's Free Press imprint is the lucky publisher, and the deal itself was brokered by the Waxman Literary Agency, which set a $1 million minimum floor price just to bid:

In the book, which is being called an "inspirational memoir," the publisher said that Phleps will reveal the secrets of his success, and give a behind-the-scenes look at his approach to training, competition and winning.

The narrative thread is expected to be the eight final swims of the 2008 games.