I pre-ordered The Slippery Slope from Amazon.com. I didn't check around too much, but it seemed the best deal, and I already had a small credit with them. I also ordered Never Mind the Pollacks, which ships a few days after The Slippery Slope. Last time I ordered Pollack's book, I ordered it with Al Franken's new book, but then the whole lawsuit thing moved its release date up, and so I had to cancel the order and reorder the Franken book (with a Willie Nelson CD to get free shipping), in order to not wait a month for it. As it is, I'll have to wait a week before getting the Lemony Snickett book, but it comes out the first day of school for me, so I probably would do well not to have the distraction.

Amazon.com is offering a download of chapter one of The Slippery Slope when you pre-order it now. I'm not going to read it right away, need to build the suspense a little bit. Amazon is also offering, if you pre-order Randy Newman's new CD, Songbook, an audio stream of the entire album. I would love to hear that, but Amazon's price is over $5 more than Deep Discount CD's. Of course, they ship much slower than Amazon, but since there's no new material on the CD (just unaccompanied piano versions of previously released songs), I don't mind a brief delay. On the other hand, Lyle Lovett's new album, My Baby Don't Tolerate, will most like be pre-ordered from Amazon or another prompt shipper.