No sooner had Saturday Night Live’s Rachel Dratch shelved her spot-on Harriet Miers impression than the president unveiled his new, improved, now-with-100-percent-more-judicial-experience Supreme Court candidate, archconservative Samuel Alito. The nomination had Democrats dropping “the F-word,” as one senator called it: Filibuster! It also raised the specter, should Alito be confirmed, of New York’s becoming to accessible abortions what Las Vegas is to quickie weddings, sometime around 2008. But thankfully the week provided a few nonpartisan, non-apocalyptic distractions, at least for those New Yorkers not fretting about their star rating in the Michelin guide. The Knicks entertained basketball optimists, trotting out yet another new-look edition, led by the wanderlusting Larry Brown and an oversize underachiever named Eddy. Lil’ Kim entertained her jailmates in Philly by rapping aloud in her cell, a habit that totally won’t get tiresome over the course of her yearlong sentence. Camilla Parker Bowles entertained the kind of people who get excited about Camilla Parker Bowles. And Freddy Ferrer, his campaign roaring toward concession, entertained sniggering bloggers and animated-porn enthusiasts (more or less the same constituency) with a cartoon TV ad that may or may not have featured Mike Bloomberg giving the president a hand job while riding next to him on a horse. The abnormally balmy weather was a mixed blessing: great for lunching in Bryant Park, which looked ever more Jardin du Luxembourg–ish in the late-afternoon light, but not so great for ice-skating at the park’s new rink. Those who sloshed glumly through the puddles could console themselves afterward with a collectible ceramic rolled-up-newspaper pencil cup from the nearby New York Times store, complete with a front-page Judith Miller byline. Miller herself might find consolation in the recent words of Martha Stewart: When asked by an interviewer what lessons she’d gleaned from her public ordeal, Stewart replied, “I have learned that I really cannot be destroyed.”

Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Jim Holt
• Table of Contents: November 14, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!