The weekend news that Roman Polanski’s French lawyers have presented yet another new bail offer (bigger, and in cash) for the director’s release from a Swiss jail may sound odd to Americans, but is not so unusual.

Swiss authorities have denied the third bail request from Roman Polanski’s French attorneys, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

The bond proposal, submitted yesterday, reportedly upped the amount offered by Polanski’s side and for the first time involved cash assets.

The big glass-cube Superior Court Building on Commonwealth Avenue once belonged to a health-insurance company. Visitors to Judge Peter Lichtman’s courtroom Wednesday morning found a case less in need of health care than of immediate triage.

Lawyers for Frank and Jamie McCourt are scheduled to meet in court to launch the opening salvos in what promises to be the Dodgers’ most popular post-season spectacle since the 1988 World Series.

(First of 2 parts; read Part 2 here)

Yesterday the L.A. Times flagged a Calvin Trillin poem, teasing Roman Polanski apologists, that  had been published a month ago in The Nation.

Some lines:

Why make him into some Darth Vader
For sodomizing one eighth grader?
This man is brilliant, that's for sure--
Authentically, a film auteur.

It can’t be easy being Carrie Prejean. Last April she outed herself as a homophobe on national TV, which doubtlessly crippled Miss California 2009’s chances of capturing the Miss USA crown. Yet the experience transformed the 21-year-old into a Joan of Arc for family values groups, especially after the Miss California organizers took away Prejean’s title when topless photos of her surfaced, taken when Prejean was 17 and 20.

The lesson from this afternoon’s LAX punch-up might be, don’t pick a fight with a boxer.

At least the way ex-heavyweight champ Mike Tyson tells it, an aggressive paparazzo poked him in order to provoke a photogenic response.

According to police, the photog got one – right in the face.

City News Service reports that the 4:30 p.m. incident occurred in Terminal 7, near a United Airlines counter.

This Friday the 13th won’t be just another day in a Swiss jail for Roman Polanski. By then the director will have sat behind bars, awaiting extradition to Los Angeles, for 48 full days -- a significant figure for legal numerologists.

Not only is it a longer period of incarceration than Polanski spent in Chino State Prison for psychiatric observation in 1978, but, when added to those 42 days in Chino, it adds up to the magic number of 90.

That's his proposed sentence reached under the plea deal 32 years ago.

This morning one set of high-powered lawyers in the civil case of Matthew Krane vs. Haim Saban (pictured) prepared to move a multi-million dollar case from Austria to Los Angeles, while their equally super-charged opposites were set to do everything to keep the proceedings right where they wanted them to stay. In the land of Mozart.