Links, things to know and observations to start the day.

•  Writer, humorist, KCRW impresario and blogger Harry Shearer has sold his first novel. Not Enough Indians is "about a down-and-out town that applies for Native American tribal status and the misadventures when they open a casino," says Publishers Lunch Weekly.
•  That alleged victim of sexual harassment by People magazine's Todd Gold has transferred to In Style and been offered a deal to write a book on Nicole Ritchie, Page Six reports.
•  James Flanigan, who moseyed out of the L.A. Times in July after two decades as economics columnist, surfaces in today's New York Times Business section with a new monthly column on small-business trends in California and the West. It gets a spot on the third Thursday of each month.
•  Robert Greene is all over today's issue of the LA Weekly: Politics of the Southwest Museum, raises for DWP workers and the 10th district election that wasn't. The cover story by newcomer Eric Berkowitz examines and endorses the Wilshire subway idea, though I could do without the hype of "24-hour gridlock." Where exactly does that occur? There's a nice sidebar on L.A.'s transit past.
•  Aloha to the Villaraigosas, who left Wednesday on a vacation in Hawaii.
•  Councilman Eric Garcetti gets CityBeat's Third Degree from Perry Crowe.
•  "Chief Parker," the apparently best connected (and least anonymously belligerent) of the political bloggers at Mayor Sam, gets the LAist Interview treatment from retired founding editor Tom Berman.
•  Harold Meyerson gives the musical history of Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills in a piece that only made it to the LA Weekly website.
•  The LAT takes a peek inside the private Martini Bar at Dodger Stadium.
•  Tonight's Life and Times looks at tow truck ripoffs that victimize drivers. 6:30 p.m. on KCET.
•  Reagan confidante Armand S. Deutsch sounds a lot more interesting in today's New York Times obit than in yesterday's LAT send-off: "He shared a box at Dodger Stadium with Jack Benny and then with Walter Matthau, traveled the world with the publisher Bennett Cerf, lunched regularly with the director Billy Wilder and had dinner every Christmas for years in the Beverly Hills home of James Stewart...But none of his stories was more diverting than that of his childhood brush with death in Chicago as one of the kidnapping and murder targets considered by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the young killers intent on committing a perfect crime."