Couches and Waiting: Notes from the DSK Stakeout

As news lags, coverage turns to the minutiae of life under house arrest

With the Dominique Strauss-Kahn story in a holding pattern, many don't want to let it go. His next court date is on Monday, and he seems pretty intent on staying low-key until then. But the stake-outs at his TriBeCa townhouse continue, and as the days go by, the available news angles get smaller. Today, for example, several outlets reported that Strauss-Kahn had taken delivery of some furniture (the New York Post was pretty funny about it: 'Frog gilds the lily pad"). That news follows the Post's Tuesday stake-out summary that led with the observation that only men had been seen cleaning the windows and taking out the trash. That story also included the news (which we naturally pointed to right away) that Strauss-Kahn's wife Anne Sinclair, and his daughter Camille had gone shopping for linens at Crate & Barrel.

The New Yorker got into the act yesterday, with an interview with Strauss-Kahn's neighbor, David Schwab. The neighbor was good-humored about it, shooing away reporters and half-joking about setting up a web-cam to catch a shot of Strauss-Kahn escaping, which he said would be easy to do from the terrace. "Beyond the glass walls [of the terrace] stretched the flat roof of a one-story garage that led to Leonard Street. If there was a guard on that side, Schwab couldn’t see him." Apparently a photo of Strauss-Kahn and Sinclair together could fetch $50,000 from a French magazine.

The other option for those longing for more Strauss-Kahn scoops is to indulge the freaky theories put forth by places like the EU Times, which has an item claiming that a Russian intelligence report had determined that Strauss-Kahn had been arrested not for an alleged sexual assault, but for discovering that all the gold had mysteriously vanished from Fort Knox. What a scoop! It's strange that story hasn't gotten more pickup.