Fearless leader C. Cuellar is sick at home with a nasty-sounding viral fever, which she reports is "now below 100, so that's good." Soldiering through the slings and regurgitations of outrageous fortune, she will forge ahead with the weekly newsletter and so encourages her editorial army to submit their weekly summaries, per usual.

Alex is manning the City Desk, which should keep him out of all but conceptual trouble.

Minnie got the quote she was looking for from Denton police chief Roy Minter and will now go to work on her profile of Denton fire chief Ross Chadwick.

Teresa is working up her Best Bites feature, hopefully clearing her palate between insightful remarks with a bracing salt water gargle.

JPM (yours truly) is putting the polish on film reviews (concentrating this morning on the eerie Spanish creepshow El Orfanato) while keeping his figurative ears to the North Texas pavement. Beyond these provincial boundaries, he's just stumbled across an amusing Times interview piece with the Coen Brothers, whom Brit scrivener Dalton describes as "those elusive pimpernels of the anti-interview." Who could resist reading beyond that subhead?