"What Is Your Least Favorite Word?" "Bitch Betta Have My Money."

This can't be true, can it?

James Lipton, the host of U.S. talk show, Inside the Actors' Studio, once worked as a pimp in Paris, France.

The revered TV presenter, who has sat down with Hollywood's biggest names for in-depth chats about their life and work over the last 13 years, has revealed he once procured clients for French hookers.

He says, "This was when I was very very young, living in Paris, penniless, unable to get any kind of working permit... I had a friend who worked in what is called the Milieu, which is that world and she suggested to me one night, `Look, you'll be my mec... We would translate it perhaps... as pimp.

"We were earning our living together, this young woman and I, we made a rather good living, I must say."

I stopped watching Lipton when he ran out of actors and decided to interview noted thespian Billy Joel, but I think I'll have to start again. At least when the comedians go on. How could you NOT bring up that he was a French pimp?

By the way, if I'm a young American looking for action in Paris, the last person I'm going to go to for help in trying to get my rocks off is James Lipton, whose face and voice just screams "will cut you up in an alley and dump you in the Seine."

News of the Odd

Just some fun stuff, some political, some not, I've noticed over the past couple weeks.

• This Jonah Goldberg mini-controversy is hilarious. Anyone who says he's writing a book that "is a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care," especially when the book has a cover of a smiley face with a Hitler moustache on it and is called "Liberal Fascism,"... well, is there any need to mock? Oh yeah, by the by, the book is about 24 months late in publication. Probably because he is so diligently making it more thoughtful and more serious. And Wolcott has the last word:

Parenting Bleg [Jonah Goldberg]

Okay, so my four year old daughter desperately wants me to do more magic tricks. All I can really do for her are variations of "Hey, I found a quarter in your ear" stuff. And even then, the prestidigitation isn't really up to snuff. If she were five, she'd be on to me. So, I need really simple, stupid in fact, magic tricks that can be done with little skill, that will impress a four year-old. Any suggestions? -03/24 01:09 PM

Perhaps you could pull a completed manuscript out of your ass and watch those little eyes light up with wonder.

• Ann Althouse bullies yet another person who dares mention the fact that she criticized a liberal blogger for the unforgivable sin of having breasts. This one's on video, and it's pretty hilarious.

• Missile defense strike called on account of rain. Seriously, how much money have we sunk into this crappy system, which can't even FIND targets, yet alone blow them up? And if it rains, it gets washed out? Fortunately, thanks to global warming, that may not be a problem anymore.

• Batshit crazy Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann, bucking for the Katherine Harris scattered-mind-a-like award, wrote campaign supporters asking them to send in astroturf letters to local newspapers as a show of support. The only letters this plea elicited were from a State Senate staffer and the son of a Bachmann aide.

• The former "Pimp of the Year" is headed to prison for running a prostitution ring. Couldn't they have busted him the moment that he won the "Pimp of the Year"? For that matter, shouldn't the runner-up, and indeed every applicant for Pimp of the Year, be similarly arrested? Incidentally, this is serious, he abused these women he employed, but this is among the best quotes ever:

"If he gets out, I know he'll do it again," she said. "That's all he ever talks about - pimping and ho-ing."

• Scientists made a sheep that's 15-percent human. This is yet another example of the President not following through on his promises. He totally said he would ban human-animal hybrids (by the by, if you read that link, you'll see that human-animal hybrids actually have a role to play in medical science and should not be banned at all).

• Rahm Emanuel says Democrats should stay away from Stephen Colbert. Colbert fights back, calls him "Emanuelle," as in Emanuelle in Space.

• Three Jeopardy contestants ended up tied for the first time ever. Full disclosure: this should have happened to me. I was on Jeopardy (almost four years to the day before this tie) and ended up tying for first, and the third contestant would have tied as well, but in Final Jeopardy she crossed out the correct answer and put in a wrong one. I'm just peeved that I didn't get in an AP story.