Hilarious show about the cold war from the Russian point of view last night. (Something's wrong with the TV feed at the gym, I went intending to watch "Chopped" but there were only a handful of channels available, just like Sunday.) Whenever there was a big event in the USSR, all the TV stations would broadcast "Swan Lake". One guy remembered a day he woke up hungover to find "Swan Lake" on TV, so he called his friend to ask what was going on. "Look outside!" the friend said, and there were tanks rolling down his street on the way to the White House for the attempted coup of 1991!

Another woman remembers that the lead story on the news was almost always about a record harvest somewhere.

Is crazy, dees modern world, no? I just got back from the gym, where I figured on watching the season finale of "Mob Wives", my current fave reality TV show, on the elliptical. Instead, there happened to be an hour-long interview with John Papola and Russ Roberts, the director and writer of the video I was in. If that weren't enough to keep my attention, in order to talk about the comedians who play Hayek and Keynes as rappers, they froze the very frame showing my big ol' face turned to the left, with the flabby chin stretching back to the right shoulder. Feet, do yo' stuff!

Back now from Minnesota, where the Twin Cities' economy seems to be driven by clinics, colleges and dollar stores. My favorite was a Family Dollar store on Nicollet where for the first time I saw they now have house brand products. My fave was the Family Dollar Pregnancy Test, but they also had house-brand food!

I was with my mom at the Mayo clinic Monday, where the first question everyone asks is where the other person's from. (We arrived Sunday, and let me tell you, there's nothing else to do in Rochester, Minnesota, Lourdes of the Prairie.) At breakfast, we were next to a probably 40 year-old guy and his mother from Iowa. When I admitted I live in New York, the guy said, "New York, huh? Can you believe that French guy? He was French, right, the banker? Can you believe he was paying three thousand dollars a night for a motel room?!"