Known Plaintext

In Silver Spring there's a restaurant, Planet Bollywood, that offers good Indian cuisine and a lot of photographs of Bollywood stars. For so long as I've eaten there I've always taken the table beneath a large photograph of Priyanka Chopra. I've never been able to articulate why: she looks like someone I once knew, but … well. Let's just say lots of guys say that a Miss World winner "looks like someone they once knew." It's more often testament to the mutability of memory than it is to whether she actually bears a resemblance to a Miss World winner.

I would like to announce that Priyanka Chopra, Miss World 2000, does not look like someone I used to know.

Priyanka Chopra, Miss World 2000, is someone I used to know.

She and her family used to live in Cedar Rapids, a stone's throw down the road from me. I used to run into her in '99. I was spending a lot of time hanging out in the bookstores on Collins Road, and she was often there browsing. Describing her as "distinctive" and "memorable" is putting it mildly. We weren't close friends or something: we were just two people who were often in the bookstore, sometimes we'd have a brief conversation while in the attached coffeeshop. She was much younger than I was and I didn't want to be thought of as a skeevy type, so I never asked her name or did anything more than share a few words.

Now I get to enjoy lamb rogan josh under a larger-than-life photograph of a girl from my hometown. There's something comforting in that coincidence.

If a visual helps —

And, continuing a recent theme — more disgraceful behavior, but this time it seems to be a Tea Party candidate lashing out against Red State for characterizing her as being drunk while giving a speech.

I can't say as how this conflict matters much to me, but it's nice to see someone on the right (Stacy McCain) giving equal coverage to accusations of smears against the right (Radtke) when they originate from the right (Erickson) as when they originate from the left.

I rarely recommend reading Stacy McCain's work. Frankly, he's so right-wing I think he'd cause many of my friends' heads to spontaneously explode. That said, he does know how to pursue a story and do it diligently, and there's something to be said for respecting that wherever it's found.