I’m heading out to Jersey early in the morning for a Thanksgiving dinner in Vineland. To my American readers, and to everyone else, Happy Thanksgiving!

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here is the footage of Michael Richards (of Seinfeld fame) losing the plot on stage the other night. Truly mezmerizing. Like watching a car crash in slow motion.

You can read the New York Times report into his later appearance and apology on David Letterman’s show here. (It looks like CBS had the YouTube video of the interview pulled.) Via Clive Davis.

It’s almost winter and I have not read a work of fiction since the spring. In fact, I had almost forgotten that I read that book, Lonesome Dove, until I remembered that I took it on holiday to Texas in March.

Nowadays, I’m ashamed to say, my reading list is crammed with non-fiction works: mainly collected writings, histories and biographies. I’m currently 400 pages into Robert Caro’s 1,100-page The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Will I ever be set free?

I mentioned this to an American friend who works as a fiction editor at a London publishing house the other day and she told me that I had caught the “American Disease.”

The American Disease, as she described it, is a never-ending desire for knowledge. (I’m not convinced this is a purely American disease; I’d hazard a guess that it goes on in the UK too.) Why waste valuable hours on make believe when you can learn something instead?

The answer is, of course, that it is possible to learn a lot more from a work of fiction than purely facts and figures. Great novels are an exploration of great (and often timeless) ideas. But they require a great deal more independent thought than a work of non-fiction. When I finished Yuri Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment I had explored the concepts of time and memory. The subject still fascinates me. When I finish Caro’s biography of Robert Moses I will have a better understanding of the city around me. But will I have learned anything about the human condition, other than one man’s monomaniacal vision for New York City and State?

However much I miss fiction, I cannot escape my hunger for fact. As I cast an eye towards the end of the year and our week-long Christmas vacation in the Danish countryside, I have started to put books aside for the trip. Much as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Bonfire of the Vanities keep tempting me, the two books currently in the lead are 1776 and Dangerous Nation, with A Short History of Nearly Everything jostling for attention. All three—you guessed it—non-fiction.

Cross-posted at Television is Furniture.

There is something oh so special about the public toilet story.

For a start, it’s generally not the sort of tale a person wants to read over breakfast or lunch. And then there’s the inevitable problem of what to say about a place where people, well, you know.

The story that follows, published recently in the Brooklyn Papers, does a valiant job of solving both problems. Light-hearted, clever and wonderfully silly, it keeps you reading all the way to the end.

Cub reporter Paul Koepp has quite a career ahead of him.

Behold the beauty of Hitting the Head at Owl’s Head:

(A story in today’s New York Times about new toilets in Times Square pulls off a less entertaining, but by no means less valiant, attempt.)

Could support for celebrity MP George Galloway be waning? The Halifax Evening Courier reports:

FEWER than 20 people turned out to see Respect MP George Galloway greet the latest additions to his party.

The Bethnal Green and Bow MP – who hit the headlines after donning a cat suit in Celebrity Big Brother – came to Calderdale to welcome eight Labour Party members who have defected to his party.

But only two new members turned up at Milan’s Hotel Function Suite, Halifax, to meet him and National Secretary John Rees.

Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party when he disagreed with Tony Blair over the war in Iraq, seemed unphased and welcomed an announcement by Sajid Mehmood of Shalimar Street that he intends to stand for the Respect Party in Halifax next May.

Shabir Akhtar, Arshad Mahmood, Tariq Hussain, Majid Nawaz, Mahmood Sultan, Amir Butt and Mohammed Zabair, also switched allegiance.

So where were the other six defectors?