We just wanted to check in after a month or so and see if the playing field has been leveled. It hasn't.

Monday brings this summer's Restaurant Week, when 201 eateries around town will offer three-course lunches for $20.12 (must the Olympics campaign overtake everything?) and dinners for $35. We're very much in favor of the Week (actually, two weeks this year), appealing as it does both to our foodie side and to our cheap side. As it happens, though, some restaurants are less supportive; it's hard to make the math work at those prices, and, as we've always suspected, some chefs skimp on Restaurant Week meals. The Times uncovers some schemes...

In New York, book deals are like cats: Everyone has one.

If they start locking up all the college jocks who think they're gods: um, who's gonna be left to play in the games?

• Us Weekly announces it won't use any photos "obtained through reckless means." Uberpublicist Ken Sunshine is skeptical: "Now let's see if they follow through." Strangely, we find ourselves siding with the flack. What an odd feeling. [NYP]
• Supreme Court lets stand FCC rules that prevent one company from owning absolutely everything we see and hear. Time Warner, Viacom, et al. will have to content themselves with only owning nearly everything — at least until Bush gets to appoint some new justices. [NYT]
• Like Simon agreeing to tour with Garfunkel a few summers ago, Woodward lets Bernstein attach himself to forthcoming Deep Throat book. [E&P]
• Don't get to hear enough from grumpy old former journalists? Thank God for the Internet. [From Hot Type to Blog via Romenesko]

New York magazine's latest Look Book borderlines on the shockingly normal. Brian Sullivan is a stay-at-home dad with a hankering for Irish lit — so much so that he's named his daughters te and Saoise. Spending his day at Bleecker park and reflecting on his evening art classes, Sullivan is wincingly cute and we are thus defenseless to his old-man trucker-hat charms. After the jump, Intern Alexis rounds up Hampton Stevens, Anna Arkin-Gallagher, and Zeke Reich for their haute commentary on daddy style.

That wunderkind new "Media Clips" columnist at the Voice, Syd Schanberg, this week looks at the Post/News pissing match. We think his point is that the two tabs should focus less on each other and more on aggressively covering the city (did we mention that prescriptive media criticism puts us to sleep?), but the best part is buried in an aside.

A helicopter carrying six tourists on a sightseeing trip crashed into the East River about an hour ago, just after takeoff from the South Street Seaport helipad.

Radar editor Maer Roshan sure seems eager to serve Kurt Andersen some retribution for his recent bitch-slapping of Radar. As such, today's Radar claims that Andersen was fleeced for "several thousand dollars" by Russian gadfly Inna De Silva, who was working with New York reporter Phoebe Eaton on a major piece about the New York's Russian call girl/mob scene. For whatever reason, Eaton's piece was eventually scrapped and, ten-odd years later, Radar has a story about how Kurt Andersen had bankrolled De Silva, bought her and Eaton first-class plane tickets to Monte Carlo, and "furnished" the Russian party girl with "extra pocket money."

We're told that Lisa Dallos, who just quit her post as head of corporate communications at Wenner Media, will be lunching at Michael's today with Stu Zakim, her predecessor at Wenner and now the chief flack for American Media, parent of Star, archrival to Wenner's Us Weekly. Let us know if you catch them impaling voodoo dolls of Jann with their butter knives.

Certainly you didn't think we'd let the most anticipated television debut since Nanny 911 go unnoticed, did you? Of course not, and so it is with much joy that Henry the Intern returned to his familiar position in front of the television to review MSNBC latest attempt at bursting the Fox News bubble, The Situation with Tucker Carlson. After the jump, Henry reports on Carlson's bowtie-defending debut, complete with back Jacko puns, bad cable news graphics, and chocolate bikinis.

Do you remember — oh, you must — the September 2004 Vogue? The one that was terrifying thick and added point-and-click shopping on a special companion Web site? It ran to an awe-inspiring 832 pages — some 190 of which, publisher Tom Florio said then, were ads for new advertisers presumably drawn in buy the shop-online angle. It brought in $60 million in revenue.

We're looking forward to the ensuing debate on proper comma usage.

In case you hadn't yet found reason to feel ashamed this morning, here's a little something:

The Nation's got something new today on our long national Deep Throat-a-thon:

As we do every morning, we go through our handy Times email and scan the headlines for things of personal relevance. So of course we noticed today's health piece on mental illness — which reminded us of Sunday's health piece on mental illness. Which, in turn, reminded us of last Tuesday's health piece on mental illness.

Hurdles? Really, you think?

• Was the winning entry in The New Yorker's new cartoon-contest feature really just a recycled Far Side? [NYT]
• We're shocked, shocked to learn that Jon Alter, the leftie Newsweek columnist, and Roger Ailes, the GOP operative turned Fox News Channel chief, don't much like each other. [All sorts of links, all via FishbowlNY]
• Also shocking: Celeb gossip is hot! [NYT]
• Yesterday, NYT discovered blogs. [NYT]
• Not that Jarvis liked what the paper had to say about them. [BuzzMachine]

We expect our fratty brother to be focused on whether or not Michael Jackson will, um, get off. But he recently posted a new line that appeals to our more rarefied tastes: BetUS.com has odds on the first to score a post-verdict interview with MJ. So far, it's Barbara Walters' race to lose. But we're thinking it's a shame this didn't all go down, as it were, back in the '90s, when Anderson Cooper was in his right-out-of-college Channel One days. Somehow we think fresh-faced Cooper could have made Jackson an interview offer neither Barbara nor Katie nor Diane could match.

We actually went with the above hed because, really, how often do we get to write about Alan Dershowitz and lesbians?