CULTURAL ICON WATCH: We have a few items this morning. (All bold-font emphasis below is mine.) First, in the Newark Star Ledger a sports columnist named Jerry Izenberg takes someone named Jason Giambi to task for an insufficiently clear apology, apparently involving steriods.

More precisely, where were they on Thursday when Jason Giambi spoke to the media in code or in tongues or, possibly, even in early Aramaic. They would have been a long, long shot to make some sense out of the proceedings but probably the only ones who could have broken the Yankee-Giambi code.

The Yankees stage-managed a press conference that for all intents and purposes will go down alongside such unsolved mysteries as why the Druids built Stonehenge or the meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the exact location of Atlantis or the name of Casey Stengel's diction teacher.

Here we have Aramaic as a code for incomprehensible language (cf. "it's all Greek to me") and the Dead Sea Scrolls , as often, symbolizing abstruse, esoteric lore. Glossolalia and Atlantis are thrown in for good measure.

Then the Scrolls appear again in the same role in The Spoof, in a piece on Prince Charles's wedding plans which seems intended to offend, if not quite everybody, pretty near. The relevant passage reads:

According to transcripts of recently released translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Charles's startling bombshell co-incides with revelations accredited to the mysterious Three Secrets of Fatima - universally acknowledged to be the source of all accurate predictions concerning the Apocalypse, Armageddon and the meteoric rise to public office of George Walker Bush.

Finally, the Glasgow Herald has a piece by Brian Morton which seems mostly to be about the occupational risks to the arteries of French restaurant critics. It opens:

The French may be passionate about food, but they are morbidly obsessed with food writing. The real driving force behind nouvelle cuisine, cuisine minceur and Bernard Loiseau�s bold cuisine des essences wasn�t public taste, but the health and well-being of a motley horde of restaurant critics; not just the showbizzy newspaper writers, but the anonymous reviewers for Guide Kleber, Gault-Millau and above all the Michelin Red Guide, which is to other food guides what the New Testament is to the Apocrypha.

The Michelin Guide is thus the true canonical authority, while the other food guides are of lesser if not dubious authority.

All in all, an impressive Sunday morning for popular cultural memes involving ancient Judaism.