There's no denying it, I've fallen for Drea de Matteo. (What's a weblog for, but to list your crushes for the world to see). I'm not made of wood. In the latest episode of the Sopranos, her character Adrianna almost hooks up with the mob boss Tony, even though she's engaged to his #2, Chris-tuh-fuh, as she calls him.

Tony is recently separated but nonetheless, the plot line reminded me of something from Martin Amis's novel "Yellow Dog." Joseph Andrews is a high-end porno producer and - sorta like Tony - a semi-retired London crime boss.

'Crazy 'Jo', it turns out, was in the habit of 'doing' his favourite lieutenants' 'birds', and if the lieutenants complained he'd 'do' them as well, though in a different sense. 'Hey Jo. You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you're me?' suggests Keith the Snake, the most favoured lieutenant of all. 'You want to stuff my bird so you can pretend you're her?' Earlier on, there's an allusion to the scene in Blue Velvet in which the sex-crazed villain, Frank Booth, shows that he's in love with his disturbing associate Ben. But the movie never spells it out, unlike Yellow Dog. 'He wants to have them so he does them,' Xan says. 'And has their wives.' 'Mm,' his interlocutor says. 'Hence the love of pain: he's correcting himself for it.'

I'll never forget a dinner where activist professor Rashid Khalidi confessed he couldn't understand what his son saw in the The Sopranos. The encyclopedic polymath Christopher Hitchens added he didn't like it either, but then he doesn't watch TV. He does go to movies and didn't care for Tom Cruise's Last Samurai.