Alan Peppard

Austin writer Bill Minutaglio has scored another big publishing deal thanks to his Dallas literary agent, David Hale Smith. This time, it's to write a bio of Texas political columnist Molly Ivins, who died last year of breast cancer.

A former Dallas Morning News reporter, Bill was the first writer on the scene of a now-booming genre – the George W. Bush biography. In 1999, he published First Son, George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty.

Coincidentally, his Ivins book has been bought by PublicAffairs, the New York house that released Scott McLellan's current Bush White House stinger, What Happened.

In two minutes, Bill told me more about Molly Ivins than I'd known from years of reading her columns.

"She lived a rather intense, complex life," he says. "She grew up in gilded circles in Houston, alongside George W. Bush, and her father was the president of the Tenneco Corp. She went on to appear in 400 newspapers, write national best-sellers, have a stint on 60 Minutes , become best friends with Ann Richards and suffer through several major tragedies. This will be a full-dress biography, and there is some early film buzz."

The book should be released in 2009.

Oh, how I would love to reprint the line that got Molly Ivins fired from her job at The New York Times, but I want to avoid the same fate.

Instead, I'll paraphrase from memory her description of the impotence of the Texas Legislature: "If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then The Lege is as pure as Ivory Soap."

And of one Dallas congressman, she wrote, "If his IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day."

Dallas catalog pioneer and Broadway producer Roger Horchow celebrated his 80th birthday on Thursday with a pilgrimage he could have made blindfolded.

He went to the venerable Stoneleigh P restaurant and bar, where nothing ever changes. OK, a few things changed on Thursday.

In honor of Roger's milestone, it changed its name for the day to the Stoneleigh R.

For the last 25 years, Roger has had a weekly lunch meeting at the P with his good friend Jacques Vroom.

Even more shocking than the name change: For the first time in memory, the restaurant served french fries (gasp) and ketchup (double gasp).

On its perch atop the W Hotel, Ghostbar doesn't rest on holidays. MTV asked to bring film crews to Thursday night's second anniversary party to shoot a performance by musician Cisco Adler (from the VH-1 series The Rock Life).

Record producer-rapper Timbaland is scheduled to appear at Ghostbar tonight. He has no plans to perform, but one never knows. He and Justin Timberlake rattled the windows there last October with an impromptu show.