"Oh my God!" gasps a Boston University student as he enters the room. "I'm like a little schoolgirl!" In her excitement, she spits on my knee.
She is Amanda and she has not just seen Brad Pitt. Or David Ortiz. Or the Crocodile Hunter's ghost. The 34-year-old bearded dude who just caused Amanda to expectorate is not bringing sexy back. Rather, he is a six-foot-two native North Dakotan who has been called everything from "the voice of a generation" to "the new Hunter S. Thompson" to a "saggy ass-head." He is wearing a jean jacket that could have been an iron-on canvas for Guns N' Roses back patches 20 years ago. He is Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman: pop-culture critic, four-time author, celebrity profiler, Esquire columnist, ESPN Page 2 sportswriter, former Spin senior editor, unrepentant Billy Joel fan. And he makes girls spit.

In the midst of a fascinating treatise on the differences between Survivor and Lost and how the varying reception of those programs offers a statement about the social pathologies of the American public, Chuck Klosterman notes the following:

Rather than once again make our case against "reluctant" "celebrity" Chuck Klosterman, we're simply going to strip some of the quotes out of this recent AP profile of the man and let you judge for yourself. When it's all read together, it becomes some weird sort of treatise, a philosophie de la sac de douche, if you will. After the jump, a 34-year-old man with a Radiohead poster on his wall explains it all for you.

• Katie Couric gets her nun on. [Tabloid Baby]
• Seth Mnookin wants some context from the press. Here's some context for ya: Seth Mnookin rides a scooter. [Seth Mnookin]
• "When we launched For Me a little over a year ago, we thought that there was a market for a young woman's lifestyle magazine which was not focused on gossip." Well, that's your problem right there. [FishbowlNY]
• Jodi Kantor gives you the angle on airports that Greg Lindsay couldn't. Don't try and do everything on your first day back, Jodi. [NYT]
• How much do we love Slate's "investigation" of brunch? Um, a lot, actually? Almost as much as we love their look at Chuck Klosterman? Slate, we're sorry we've been mean lately, full stop. [Slate]

So we recently asked you to put yourselves in the mind of Chuck Klosterman, whose mystery marketing promotion inspired so much curiosity in us. Well, we've seen your responses, a distressing number of which were simply the line "Apply directly to the forehead." There were, however, a few good ones. Our second runner-up suggested that the piece itself was actually the marketing effort, being a signal to corporations that Esquire writers are so clearly unedited that Chuck could slip any kind of advertisement past them. It's a plausible option, especially when you consider the entire oeuvre of A.J. Jacobs, but it didn't quite do it for us.

Over at Frink Tank, blogger Not Shitashi notes a sidebar to the recent Chuck Klosterman Snakes on a Plane essay. As non-Esquire readers (we feel like GQ provides us with all the crappy homoeroticism we need for the month), we were unaware of this piece, since it was unavailable online. The helpful Frintankers chose to transcribe it. It's entitled "The Best Idea I've Ever Had" (really, the jokes write themselves), and, after the jump, we'll bring it to you in full, along with the opportunity to win a prize.

I don't want him to go over the Reichenbach Falls.

You like the Klosterman, kids? We tend to fall on the dubious side of the line. Don't get us wrong, we have a certain admiration for him: That whole low-culture-loving earnestness shtick was a terrific seam for a writer to mine back at the beginning of this young century, and we don't begrudge him any of the success he's achieved working that routine in the ground. Still, there's something about him that sort of bugs us, something that we think is perfectly encapsulated in his latest column. Chuck discusses Snakes on a Plane, the blog-driven movie that he takes pains to alert you he has yet to see. SoaP vexes Chuck; yea, it causes much gnashing of the teeth from his corner. What bothers Chuck is not the fact that the movie is being made, but how the movie is being made: based on the input of (wait for it) bloggers.

There was a time when huge, iconic print portraits took as their subject the worthy, those few who defined their times and bestrode the world confident in the knowledge that their actions and utterances had the power to change lives. You know, "Stalin: Man of Action," "Mrs. Thatcher Remembers," "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," that sort of thing. These days, however, the sheer acreage of space wanting to be filled ensures that almost anyone is worthy of this kind of treatment, which is how you get a piece like " The Cult of Klosterman," Vince Darcelango's staggering cover story in the latest Boulder Weekly. For an idea of how Darcangelo views Klosterman, read this:

As Spin spins, the roiling music mag has lost its grip on the nation's preeminent dork-chic indie-hipster-nebbish zeitgeist chronicler, Chuck Klosterman. Mediabistro's new star reporter, Dylan Stableford, broke the news a bit ago on the job-listing site's FishbowlNY, reporting that Klosterman "has decided to pack it up." We hear from people who know that while it certainly was his intention to pack it up — Klosterman was tight with Sia Michel, and he was planning to leave now that she's been sacked, we understand — he never quite had the chance; management eliminated his position. So: Fired or quit? Well, tomato, tomahto.

• How to solve many of clubland's problems: The Guid-o-meter, patent pending. [Clubland]
• The L calls Chuck Klosterman's new book " a dismal, shoddy piece of work." Which, given their standards, might be a compliment. [The L]
• Seth Mnookin changes subtitle, appends corrections, and adds an afterword by the author in forthcoming paperback version of Hard News. But where will he put corrections to the afterword? [E&P]
• Bonnie Fuller's memoir finally has a pubdate (April 11, 2006) and an official title, "The Joys of Much Too Much: Go For the Big Life — The Great Career, The Perfect Guy and Everything Else You Ever Wanted (Even If You're Afraid You Don t Have What It Takes." At 33 words, that title would be feature story in her last few magazines. [WWD (second item)]
• Socal burger joint Fatburger invades the tristate area. We'll stick with the Corner Bistro, at least until In 'N' Out gets here. [Bergen Record]

Gawker correspondent and mascot Andrew Krucoff IM'd us yesterday afternoon with a plea. This in itself was not unusual — The Krook's a little needy, we've come to realize — but we were surprised to learn he had an inspired idea: What about a Party Crash of Chuck Klosterman's book party?