Good Help Is Hard to Find: John...

Good Help Is Hard to Find: John (Dapper Don) Gotti doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the help at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he’s in solitary confinement after a Sept. 10 argument with guards. Gotti got into the tiff when he refused their order to move his belongings from one cell to another. “He is not complaining,” said Gotti’s lawyer. “Jail does not bother him and never has.”

Full Press: U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, a frequent critic of the American media, is writing a book on the First Amendment, politics and the press, and he says it won’t be pretty. “It will be very different from what the press perceives itself to be, I assure you that,” the Wyoming Republican boasted in Cheyenne, Wyo. Simpson has tangled with nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and skewered CNN reporter Peter Arnett for broadcasting from Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. He later apologized to Arnett.

The Other Academic Chair: The Duchess of York--the former Sarah Ferguson--gained double academic honors late last week with an honorary doctorate and a new position as university chancellor. Fergie’s academic status at Salford University in northern England, though largely ceremonial, drew biting comment in the British press, which pointed out that the duchess only went to secretarial college and was best remembered at school for gluing a teacher to a chair.

Phoenix: A bomber like the one George Bush flew during World War II has been recovered from dense woods in northern Maine so it can be restored and dedicated to honor the President. The TBM Avenger in Maine had been reduced to spraying crops before it crashed in 1972. The resurrected craft will be displayed at an aviation museum in Rhode Island. In 1944, Bush’s TBM Avenger was shot down over the Pacific Ocean during a bombing raid on a Japanese radio installation.