A South Philly Halloween Night to Remember. All aboard for night train!

Washington's 99.5 played the "Into You" version featuring Ashanti this afternoon; as Pitchfork notes, she "tries to diva up the track with unnecessary improvisations." Although her approach does stand out from Tamia's minimalism — originally done for the video — I'm surprised the difference was enough to make top 40 radio generally stick with Tamia.

Virginia Heffernan writes about Tina Fey for the New Yorker. Amy Poehler tells Heffernan: "She's not the first girl to belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else's flops and then writes a play about it."

I was driving through your campus the other night on the way to the all-you-can-eat pasta special at Listrani's. That's one hell of an intersection you've got there at Nebraska and New Mexico. Traffic lights, sidewalks, good-looking people. If you make it down to MacArthur Boulevard, I recommend the fettuccine alfredo.

Rapper Fabolous has taken up residency on your local top 40 station with the smoothly produced but lyrically bumbling Into You featuring Tamia (or Ashanti, depending on single vs. album tendancies of the computer running the station). Today we briefly examine Fabolous' lyrical bumbles and how they fall below the rest of his bling-induced versifiying.

By now, society has become accepting of thug love as just a different kind of love. Because behind every thug with a record contract, there is a rising female singer willing to sing a hook. On Fabolous' latest, we find Tamia on the radio mix — and to the credit of the producer, we find her understated and sliding in and out of the music. Where things fall apart is at a little intersection I like to Yacht and Apricot.

Carly Simon famously began her 1971 You're So Vain with "You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht," and then infamously followed it with "Your hat strategically dipped below one eye / Your scarf it was apricot." A winner of a line, then a loser. But as strong as the rest of the song was, the coupling wasn't too harmful, Robert Christgau noted at the time.

The quality of the Fabolous song is more debatable; your thug milage may vary. But the rapper undoubtedly has a flair for dubious rhyme denouements. "Into You" provides us an opportunity to parse these lyrics with a little thing I like to call Simonizing.

Yacht:

"I wanna be more than a friend to you now…"

Apricot:

"…when they ask, I mention my babygirl in the interviews now."

Yacht:

"Maybe I speak in general now

But girl, imma do whatever just to keep a grin on u now…"

Apricot:

"…where I roll, they wear bikinis in the winter too now

What you think about tan lines on the skin of you now?"

Yacht:

"It�s more than a flashin'

I woulda traded it all in orderly fashion…"

Apricot:

"…my villa in Florida we crashin'

Just off the shore so you can hear when the water be splashin'"

Yacht:

"I don�t wanna trip, but the truth is…"

Apricot:

"…girl, the way you cook a steak

Remind me of them trips to Ruth Chris"

Yacht:

"But ever since, this superwoman has come to my rescue

My winter�s been wonderful, my summer�s been special…"

Apricot:

"…that�s why the same bar while the villa been painted

Just so we can really get acquainted"

So much goes awry when Fabolous attaches bling to his ying. Even the plausible nod to Stevie Wonder's Superwoman is wasted on a villa, a style of building that should be referenced by no one other than the Swiss, skiers and Smoove B.

Smoove would probably love the song, but your similarities to Smoove are your own concern. Both he and Fabolous apparently reserve the right to jump from the reasoned to the sentimentally irrelative. With that in mind, it's worth pointing out here that not all bumbles bounce.

Via Jim Romenesko's Obscurestore, we learn why Dunkin' Donuts has stopped selling the cruller. To play doughnut devil's advocate here, crullers have always struck me as a holdover with an earlier time, before the invention of glaze. Back then I imagine the doughnut makers had to impress customers with looks, not tastes. If it weren't for the Depression, would the cruller have survived at all?

Also, University of Maryland students prove the old adage: If you're going to vandalize, vandalize with a sense of humor.

Today's Chicago Tribune reports on the obvious popularity of Steve Bartman costumes this Halloween. But in the time since the article was finished, Renegades Baseball sweatshirts have sold out.

Also in today's Tribune, "Where's Hubert?" begins.

The two-disc Springsteen extension to Sony's "Essential" line releases in stores in two weeks, offering a solid retrospective and, unlike the rest of the line, throwing in a third bonus disc with B-sides, soundtrack songs and — wonderful to see — previously unreleased material.

I'll address the third disc in a post later today, but right now I want to focus on the first two. After all, dedicated Springsteen fans will take any and all new tracks. But get selective with the existing material and you've got yourself a fight.

At least the Essential title does away with any pretense of Greatest Hits. His GH release of 1995 was more a sampler than anything else. If you want Springsteen's real greatest hits, buy Born in the USA and download Hungry Heart, Streets of Philadelphia and Secret Garden off the Internet. That's all the hits right there.

But with Essentials, the record company is saying, "It's a sampler, only cooler." While any compilation is strange for an album artist like Springsteen, I can stand that admission. The track listing works through the material in efficient fashion, drawing on song that have typically receive the best reception on the tours of the last few years. There are some exceptions made for space reasons — all of Born to Run can't fit — but any attempt at variety must be welcomed after 1995's overreliance on 1984 (four songs from Born in the USA while only two from Born to Run and one from Darkness on the Edge of Town).

Still, satisfying everyone will be as impossible as P.T. Barnum famously said it was. Of the Sony Essentials line, I only have the Sly and the Family Stone discs so far. Although the album works well for me, it works for reasons the Springsteen discs won't be able to.

With Sly's limited output — a CCR-like hits stretch plus a healthy number of outliers — the album can be deep instead of wide. Stand and There's a Riot Going On make it to the compilation almost in their entirety and to very good effect. On these albums "the Family Stone nailed both sides of the countercultural coin — euphoria and bummer churned out in a blast of undulating, groundbreaking groove," writes Amazon reviewer stolenmoment. Not bad to fit that kind of narrative onto a compilation.

Fortunately and unfortunately, Springsteen has had 30 years of output without tremendous disparity in quality. Even the 1992 replacement band albums have their redeeming spots. With this history, the wide vs. deep equation gets drilled down to more minute levels. Forced to broaden, Springsteen's narrative choices drop down to the likes of those seen on Blood Brothers, the 1995 documentary of the GH compiling and brief E Street Band reunion.

The decisions were only on the margins: Should the then never-released Frankie make the disc? Should the rerecorded Secret Garden have strings? No and no were the answers. Despite holding a vote that went in favor of the strings, Springsteen eventually decided they "distracted from the narrative" and threw out his own poll.

With Essentials, the two-disc length extends the margins some but not much. Essentials may be able to capture the albums' flavors more than GH, but I think it will take a few spins to determine how well. How do you use the two-disc depth to do the albums justice without making buyers wish they had the albums instead? Halfway into the darkness is a difficult place to stop running.

The third disc and its previously unreleased tracks could be the final weight in the compromise. Album fans on this set won't get the second side of the Wild and the Innocent, and they'll only get a tenth of The River. But fans of albums are also suckers for what never made the albums. You know the old joke about digging half a hole? The task's impossible, no doubt about it. But if the digging's good, why would you mind?

Jim Caple's ESPN.com column Thursday: "If you're going to be World Series champions, you have to have the best team and that means 25 guys," said Jeter, who had three more hits, two runs and an RBI Thursday in between taking minutes at the Justice League of America meeting.

Steve Spurrier, remarking on his new and improved relationship with Redskins owner Danny Snyder: Dan and I are cool, as they say.

Train's Meet Virginia: We just like to sit at home, and rip on the President.

Let me make a few things clear on the last item. Let the record show the mention of this lyric does not constitute an endorsement of Train. The engine doesn't seem to be gaining speed. Rolling Stone gives their last album one star: "Radio-ready, professional and utterly dull, Train are a roots-rock band only a corporate accountant could love."

As for the more famous Drops of Jupiter… Jessica Simpson has the dropping metaphor down pretty well.

$3.5 million in a Netherlands lottery, according to the e-mail. My lucky numbers were apparently 13-15-22-37-39-43. I'm sure glad I didn't play my birth date — it's not any of those numbers!

My favorite line in the spam: "Due to the mix up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep this award strictly from public notice until your claim has been processed and your money remitted to your account."

Just as interesting is the rise in the Nigerian spam's use of cnn.com. Two e-mails in the past week, including one from former Liberian President Charles Taylor, have cited CNN URLs as proof of legitimacy. I haven't seen that concept applied before.

Finally, among the best subject lines received in the last week, we find:

"“"Fw: Flinstones ebfaqca" for generic Viagra, obviously trying to make a Captain Caveman kind of connection;

"“"ANYTHING Y0U WANT!! Y0U G0T IT" for a porn site, making me think Roy Orbison and whatever ad that song is now; and

"“"chilfish cofe" for a sweepstakes newsletter, making me think Chillfish Coffee would be a great name for band.