New York City is too broke to install a fancy $14 million bus-tracking system. Who will come to the rescue? Internet entrepreneur John Geraci — if he can overcome his wandering attention span.

Alex McCord is still unemployed and still blogging over at the Huffington Post. But now she has some bad news to share: It seems she's come down with a nasty case of Fifth's Disease, which has resulted in a dreadful rash that runs up and down her legs. How unfortunate! In other McCord news, her neighbor was terribly nasty to her two sons and she also thinks there may be a rudeness epidemic exploding across the city, but that's probably just McCord generalizing based on personal experience. [HuffPo]

If you write something on the Internet, you can't later claim it was private. That's the surprisingly commonsensical ruling in the case of Cynthia Moreno, a California college student who sued her hometown newspaper.

New York is facing an unprecedented $4 billion budget deficit. Who will rescue us from the ruin? The gays! The city kicked off an new ad campaign today designed to attract gay tourists to New York City. The $1.9 million marketing effort, which features the tag line "Join the rainbow pilgrimage," hopes to position a visit to NYC as a "rite of passage," a message that if the city truly took to heart would involve a night out at The Cock, not reduced rates at the Sheraton and discounted tickets to Phantom of the Opera and Madame Tussauds' wax museum. But, hey, the gays sure do love a recession, so it's worth a shot. [AP, Crain's]

This bitter war over a fee(!) to post on the Park Slope Parents listserv is perfectly in character. Park Slope is where New York's most annoying parents sequester themselves in a twee, self-important doombubble.

Like a delicious dirty martini, history can be dry and salty. Boo. Who wants that? Nobody! The only difference between history and now is that history happened a long time ago.

Like a delicious dirty martini, history can be dry and salty. Boo. Who wants that? Nobody! The only difference between history and now is that history happened a long time ago.

Well, exit the Kings. NBC has moved its lush, sweeping, and increasingly good dramatic experiment from its valuable Sunday night slot to Saturdays, where it will play out its remaining eight episodes, then die. Sad.

Jake Tapper, a.k.a. the Littlest Sam Donaldson, told the National Review that he's so so serious about reportorial objectivity that he doesn't vote. Which is funny because he once dated John McCain's flack!

The Times Square Virgin Megastore has been closed and cleaned out. The Union Square outpost will suffer the same fate next month. [Racked, Reuters]

In your traditional Tuesday media column: Dan Abrams insists he's clean, the Great Magazine Die-Off continues, newspapers are not doing well, TV on the good trains, and more!

On Monday at a Manhattan screening of We Live in Public, a documentary about Pseudo's late-'90s experiments in 24/7 Internet broadcasting (you can watch the trailer here, a bearded man got up and started ranting about how his obsession with one of Pseudo's programs, Toilet Boys, forced him to seek high-speed Internet access at the local library at 11:30 at night. He then called Harris a "fucking megalomaniac," lept onto the stage, and attacked him.

It appears Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Rihanna have fragrances in the works. Chris Brown? Not so much. [WWD]

[The pop star leaving a restaurant in London last night; image via INF]

If the Beatrice Inn were to close forever, rather than just temporarily, what would we say at its funeral? Because we're feeling wistful this afternoon, we're going to attempt something of a eulogy.

What do you do when you're a celebrity trainer who can't find clients willing to pony up $900 a month to join your new downtown gym? Head to the Marriott Marquis, apparently. Tracy Anderson, the woman who takes credit for Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow's buff bods and Scarlett Johansson's newly svelte frame, will be holding two classes there this month, charging $200 for a three-hour workout and one-hour Q&A session. Anderson isn't promising any of her famous clients will show up, but that probably won't deter any of the people staying at the hotel, who likely booked the Marriott Marquis because they were under the impression they'd be situated in the hottest nabe in NYC. [NYO]

Iraqi courts have cut the prison sentence for the hero shoe-hurling-at-Bush journalist from three years down to one. Huzzah! And on the same day Obama visited Iraq. Coincidence??? Open your eyes, sheeple! [WSJ]

The slack economy is costing America more than $1 trillion per year in lost output. But there's an upside: Great deals, on everything!

Olivia Palermo's fake career in fashion has yet to teach her much about men's clothing. At least according to Johannes Huebl, Olivia's award-winning model boyfriend, who says that while Olivia's style is "pretty good," her fashion expertise is limited to "women's only." You can expect Olivia to dig a stiletto into Huebl's neck later this evening for expressing doubt in her omniscience, not that this revelation will prevent her from taking full credit for every outfit Huebl wears as long as they're together. [What He Wears]

After Google bought Dodgeball from him and shut it down, New York entrepreneur Dennis Crowley knocked off his own idea to create Foursquare, a new friend-finding app. The coverage likewise feels familiar.