Apologies to Herb Caen

ROUX CONFESSIONS: I'll admit reading the comments made on Internet news stories. So witty and enlightening. Regular Oscar Wildes most of them. Found one guy making comments whose screen name was "your an idiot." Ah, public schools... Completely hooked on honkey-jocks Rick and Bubba in the morning and, truth be told, I only understand about every third word.

MICHELIN (MAN) GUIDE: How's this for culture: Tuesday, Ben Stein's "Expelled"; Wednesday, the Met's HD broadcast of Massenet's "Thais"; and Friday the high school's staging of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" in the gym/multi-use room. Mix up the lead characters from these three productions and you've got the makings of a memorable nightmare... Of course, prior to the Twain, I had to take my lovely wife out to a little Italian place I know, The Olive Garden.

PHIL HER UP: Bought gas at Kroeger's. Twenty-five cents a gallon higher than a week ago. A bit later I saw a picture of the Saudis parachuting $3 million dollars onto a hijacked oil freighter to pay off Solmali pirates. I'd like to see a pie chart showing where our gas dollar goes. I'm thinking a pretty good slice is going to feed swashbuckling Somalis at this point. Another question: who polls better, the Somali pirates of the Saudi sheiks? To me it's a toss up.

NAME PHREAK: The New York Times ran an op-ed essay making the point that cocaine use among white teenagers is some four times higher than among black teens. The author? Charles M. Blow.

I SAID I'M SORRY: OK, I took a swipe at The Olive Garden a couple of paragraphs ago. (Or was I taking a swipe at myself? Not important.) But today I had the leftover lasagna for lunch and it was tops. So, Olive Garden, if you're reading this, please accept my apologies.