Mwahahahaha!!!

From one of the NY Daily News's gossip columns:

Famed editor Jason Epstein, husband of jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller, has lately been making himself scarce at the federal facility in Virginia where his wife has been incarcerated for the past three weeks.

(snip)

In a frothy social column yesterday about a celeb-glutted Mediterranean cruise, featuring everyone from Isabella Rossellini to J.K. Rowling aboard the ocean liner Silver Shadow, the New York Sun's A.L. Gordon revealed:

"One passenger with his mind soberly on home is the literary icon Jason Epstein. ... Ms. Miller would have been on the cruise had she not gone to jail."

His wife's in the slammer and he cruises the Med?

"We all serve our time in our own way," quipped Miller's attorney Robert Bennett.

My pal Christopher Buckley, comic novelist and editor of Forbes FYI, imagined what Epstein might have said to Miller prior to his departure.

"Darling, I'm sure it's not going to be a very nice cruise. I hear they don't even have beluga caviar, just a slightly inferior grade of osetra, and I'm sure the Champagne will be, well, not too warm exactly, but probably not as chilled as I normally like it. And I'm sure people will get seasick and there won't be anyone interesting to talk to, nor any beautiful unattached women.

"Darling, I wouldn't be able to enjoy myself even if it were a nice cruise. While I'm dining on foie gras, I will be thinking only of you, sitting behind bars in 110-degree heat, eating baloney and being brutalized by prison matrons."

Ummm, I mean, that's terrible. Really.