How successful authors impress their kids: by appearing on The Simpsons

Courtesy Publishers Marketplace, this LA Times Service story on several famous authors looping parts on The Simpsons for an episode to be broadcast in 2006. The excited writers included Michael Chabon, Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Franzen and Gore Vidal.

"We started with the idea of Moe as Charles Bukowski," explains Matt Warburton, who wrote the episode. "We brought Lisa in as the person who discovers in scuzzy, barfly Moe something that we've never seen before: a poet."

Meanwhile, backstage at The West Wing, writers were trying todecide whether to dread or look forward to the moment when they have to deal with the death of John Spencer, the actor who played Leo McGarry on the long-running TV series (which, by the way, jumped the shark a couple years ago with that President's-daughter-kidnapped sequence of episodes).