Good morning. I'm Lance Mannion and I can get it for you wholesale. Just show up at the back of the warehouse Saturday afternoon. Bring cash. And remember, we don't know each other. I'm Mr Clements and if the guy at the desk asks, you're a friend of Pete's.

Sorry. I shouldn't goof around like that. I'm just the guest host for this week's blog round up, after all. I don't goof around like that on my own blog. At my place we're very serious, my commenters and I. It's all high-minded discussions about Art, and Film, and the Meaning of Life.

The gang at Crooked Timber comes to my blog to have their questions answered and they go home, bewildered and ashamed of their own ignorance, to tear up their diplomas and return their Ph.D.'s.

Speaking of Crooked Timber, John Quiggin is saying over there that it's time to dive back down the memory hole and remember that the looting of Iraq was a part of the original plan.

The New York Times scoops the world on this one: A lot of Republicans don't plan to vote for Hillary Clinton! That comes via Oliver Willis. Also Oliver admits that when forced to choose between a real science guy and a well-known conservative idiot, he reflexively sides with the real science guy. Go figure.

Avedon Carol says that Venezuela is looking a lot more like a democracy than some other countries she could name.

The Armchair Generalist follows up on a story that I missed the first go-round, about a couple of characters who got caught trying to smuggle a pound of uranium through Hungary. Story had the makings of a great thriller, says the Generalist, except for one thing. The uranium turns out not to have been weapons grade material.

Ben Cohen of the Daily Banter reports that Karl Rove is offering campaign advice to Barack Obama and it turns out, says Ben, that advice is not half-bad.

And mystery writer Laura Lippman has been at work copy editing her latest novel and reports on the quotidian details of the process, except that she can't use the word, quotidian, because one of the things she found out while reading her own work is that she overuses it and it has to go, along with via and literally and the extra e that does not belong in acknowledgment.

Done for today. Send tips and suggestions to lance AT lancemannion DOT com. And remember. The loading dock. Saturday. Act casual. And wear a necktie so I'll know you.