Out on the West Coast the week after next? We've got an event for you!

Have you mastered the art of self-praise disguised as self-deprecation? Do old people think you're a god to young people? Can you churn out the kind irrelevant blather that makes Andy Borowitz look like S.J. Perelman? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you might want to take a crack at the LA Times's Be Joel Stein! competition. That's right: If you can put together 700 words in the style of Stein, but with some humor added in, the paper may run your column alongside Stein's! Imagine the glory. Actually, even if you answered "no" to all those questions up there, give it a shot. How hard could it be?

While rain continues to fall upon New York, the West Coast finds itself beneath a cloud of its own as the L.A. Times debuts its new Sunday supplement. A cheapo fusion of the paper's once-standalone book review and its recently embattled opinion section, Current, the young beast appears, appropriately enough, to have no proper name. Like a couple joined together by arranged marriage, the new section is nothing more than the sum of its parts. And what's inside? Two sunny editors' notes, for starters; also, a phoned-in essay by Jonathan Safran Foer about the power of words.

ICM vs. famously screamy literary agent Richard Abate: the battle rages on downtown in court! The LA Times sums up the conflict nicely. "The agency painted Abate as a dishonest, opportunistic agent, envious of a colleague's promotion. His attorneys, in turn, portrayed ICM as a financially stressed company that was panicking over its pattern of losing high-priced agents to its rivals." Hmm... maybe they are both right. But since this is a lawsuit, someone is eventually going to have to be righter. Will it be ICM or Abate?

• The Onion, it turns out, has been nursing a master plan for domination for untold years. Either that or it's April 1 on Sunday. But we're pretty sure they're serious. Also, The Onion News Network is all about the communist-daycare style YouTube clip-sharing. Why? Because they are not idiots. [Variety]
  

Just three days after the paper's publisher axed the whole section, the L.A. Times' Sunday "Current" supplement is on newsstands, good as new.

Kelly Mullens, the girlfriend of recently-resigned L.A. Times opinion chief Andres Martinez, helped promote the special Brian Grazer edition of the paper's Sunday opinion supplement, according to Allan Mayer, Mullens' boss at the public relations firm 42 West.

Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea sent a strongly-worded memo to his staff an hour ago saying that while he did not want to "engage in mud-slinging" with Andres Martinez—the former editorial page editor who resigned today with guns blazing in the direction of the news desk—he was not going to "sit here like some silent lamb while he distorts my record and attacks this newspaper and my newsroom."

With newspaper redesigns happening every other week—and more and more of them being conducted by fun-loving text-haters like Mario Garcia—readers are getting more strident attempts at impact shoved in their faces. This guy's gone through the fairly new LA Times and counted 22 font uses (not, probably different fonts, as he says, but definitely different stylings) above the fold.

Maybe it started with Annie Hall, in which Woody Allen said that the only cultural advantage to living in Los Angeles instead of New York was that you can turn right on red. Or maybe it was when n+1 said all those things about McSweeney's. Or maybe—this one's unlikely—it started with that mean song by Death Cab For Cutie: You can't swim in a town this shallow / You will most assuredly drown tomorrow. Point is, the West Coast set is tired of everyone thinking that New York is the only American city where people read. Are they kidding?

If teen fabutard Cory Kennedy, she who dated hipster-documenter The Cobranake, "is an internet phenomenon, the internet doesn't really seem to be aware of that," read one of the posts defending the L.A. gal's deletion from Wikipedia back in November. Unfortunately, the internet's awareness of Kennedy is on the rise again, thanks to a 'she symbolizes the new Internet fame, what does it all mean?' piece that ran in the LA Times's West magazine yesterday.

Galleycat sniffed out a fun diatribe by Dallas Morning News books editor Jerome Weeks that starts on the hot topic of publishing-themed revenge -lit (sparked by the recent LA Times article about Blind Submission, which "isn't" about literary agent Sandy Dijkstra, and Because She Can, which "isn't" about Judith Regan) and quickly digresses into a discussion of assistant culture and the "female boot camp" of book publicity.

At least, that's what lawyer Bert Fields said when he announced yesterday afternoon that our favorite golden-gina'd battleaxe is going to sue the Jew cabal at HarperCollins for wrongful termination. He also contradicts HarperCollins lawyer Mark Jackson's assertions about the content of the phone conversation that prompted Regan's firing, and implied that he may have a tape of the conversation. "They should worry about that," Variety quotes him as saying.

Today's LAT reports that DreamWorks mogul and flawed Gay Mafia knight David Geffen has made a $2 billion cash offer for the paper, a bid that's been languishing for a month while its parent Tribune Company waits to see if an individual or corporation richer than even Geffen will step up and buy the entire company:

• Madonna signs a deal with H&M, under which she and all of her crew will be outfitted with a complete H&M wardrobe for when they're off-stage. You know, when no one will actually cares what they're wearing. [AP]
• Harry Potter mastermind JK Rowling has been named the greatest living British writer in a UK magazine poll. Huh? We expected this sort of outcome from Americans, but not the Brits. Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan cry into their pillows. [BBC]
• Just in time for summer, surf's up at the Williamsburg waterfront! Don't forget your syringes! [YouTube via Curbed]
• Fader magazine releases its entire issue on podcast. Paper — and reading, for that matter — is so provincial. [Fader]
• The Times' Kate Aurthur flees the coop, joins the LA Times as its new television editor. [LA Observed]
• Microsoft hires Demetri Martin for its upcoming campaign. Poor guy. [SPI via The Apiary]
• Angelina Jolie actually understands latitudes and longitudes. Good for her. [Us Weekly]
• Useful advice on how NOT to get murdered when thrown out of a club. [Clublife]

The LA Times' Howard Rosenberg joins the "Shut Up, Celebrities!" lobby in the war on Iraq. "If six anonymous pipe fitters called a news conference to rail against President Bush's drive to invade Iraq, how many camera crews or pen pushers with notebooks do you think they would attract? How many radio reporters? Try zero...What if the same pipe fitters had genius IQs, spoke Arabic fluently and had spent their lives studying foreign affairs? Same answer." Rosenberg says it's the media's fault for granting celebrities air time and print space. But he didn't specifically mention the Internet and we're apparently not a legitimate "media outlet"! (The Nicky Hilton interview on chemical demilitarization in Iraq is still on!)
Celebrities spout opinions, but who asked them? Blame media. [LA Times via IWantMedia]

Homophobic and idiotic, yes. Gay, no. Sandy Koufax is threatening to sever all ties with the LA Dodgers, which is owned by News Corp, because an item in Page Six may or may not have insinuated that he was gay. The LA Times very transparently defends Koufax's honor, as if he'd been wrongly accused of child abuse or mass murder. ("Take that, News Corp!") And I say "may or may not have insinuated" because it was a blind item. Common sense to Koufax: chances are, 99% of the people that read Page Six wouldn't know the item was talking about you if you weren't so loudly, publicly and repeatedly insisting it wasn't.
Koufax shuts out Dodgers [LATimes]

The Observer reports, via the LA Times, that Miramax has been boosting numbers for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Gangs of New York by adding "free sneak previews" of Chicago to ticket purchases.
Keeping mama hot [Observer]