Hey, it’s rather unusual that I have items, thoughts, material I’d like to transmit to the cognoscenti, and these things are a bit outré, special or offbeat. Not meant for a newspaper column. So here are a few odds and ends.

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We never see enough of the hugely talented cartoonist writer Jules Feiffer. And he is married to another good writer, Jenny Allen. Now, from them and their two children comes a greeting card reading “Happy Election Year.” On it is our perennial favorite target, Richard Nixon, drawn by Feiffer. Take a look. Perfect timing for 2008. (This went to the special Feiffer mailing list, which I am on, so I’m sharing it with you.)

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If you familiarize yourself with this site, you’ll know that the "Gypsy" is a nickname for one of our founders, the advertising genius Mary Wells Lawrence. Well, the Gypsy and I went recently to the relatively new Bar Boulud across from Lincoln Center for dinner. We had such delicious cheese rolls before ordering a main course that we almost gave up on dinner. The Gypsy only weighs a few pounds, but even she ate her share of these delicious gruyere laden treats. Of course, it helped that she first said to the wine steward: “Bring us your very best red wine!” He did.

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Dame Helen Mirren sent me a fascinating e-mail saying she wants to become a contributor to the wowowow.com site, and telling me what a good time she has had making "Love Ranch" in Reno, with the amazing actor Joe Pesci. (In this film, Helen plays the madam of a whorehouse. Something of a departure from playing the Queens of England, which she did last year winning the Academy Award, the Golden Globe and everything else in sight.)

I wrote Helen back about my own experiences with Joe Pesci, a man I adore, on the night he won the Oscar for "Goodfellas." I was backstage with the print and TV press when Joe came through clutching his little gold guy. He looked at me and winked and then proceeded to answer every single question put to him with an expletive included. He added, “Fuck! Shit! Motherfucker! Cocksucker!” and some exotic variations to each statement, leaving the media short-handed, with nothing they could show to their viewers or quote exactly to their readers.

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Do you sometimes think that the environment, energy and other such serious matters never seem to lend themselves to real solutions? One of my favorite magazines, The Week, is the kind of publication where you don’t need a hell of a lot of other things for catching up on what’s going on. Recently, they had a dynamite story I didn’t see elsewhere, titled, “For Energy Here Comes the Sun.”

It goes: “Environmentalists have been touting solar energy for years, but engineering problems have limited its usefulness, and solar now provides only one percent of the world’s energy. But, wisely respected futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil says that’s about to change. He foretold the explosive growth of the Internet, the common availability of wireless access, and the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Kurzweil says in five years, nano-engineered materials being developed will transform solar energy into an alternative to oil and other fossil fuels. Sunlight will be converted to electricity. The sunlight falling on the Earth offers 10,000 times the amount humans consume yearly. We will be energy rich! He suggests we go to LiveScience.com for more on this.

He winds up saying that in two decades, the sun will produce most of the energy we need. Hooray for that. Feel better?