"Brownstone Bride" turns out to be crazy jilted woman! [Brooklyn Paper]

New York's completely most awesome councilman, Charles Barron, will announce his campaign for Brooklyn Borough President this weekend. Yes please! [NYO]

Tonight, tens of thousands of happy New York children will stay up past their bedtimes, lining up at bookstores for when the final "Harry Potter" book is released at a minute after midnight. But how safe will they be? Cross-referencing the list of local Harry Potter parties with the sex offender registry, we can reveal that these children will be surrounded by literally dozens of baby rapists and other offenders! Is no place safe? Actually, yes, some place is! We've identified the safest New York-area place to take your child tonight. The answer may surprise you!

The gentrification of Carroll Gardens, the land of pregnancy, is hitting a sticky patch. A bunch of Brooklyn parents are upset at the behavior of some of the teenagers in Carroll Park, at Smith and Carroll Streets. On Wednesday, Gowanus Lounge posted some of the parent's complaints and summed them up thusly:

The person who's been crapping outside of houses in Boerum Hill has been identified as a "rather mentally ill black woman with very short dreds." [Brownstoner]

Now there's a 20,000 square foot workspace for them all. [Brooklyn Record]

Spotted on several lampposts in the vicinity of the Starbucks at 7th Ave. and Garfield Place in Park Slope.

The fate of the Brooklyn Inn, the much beloved Boerum Hill watering hole, is in dispute. We reported earlier this week that the place would be closing next week, to be reborn as an upscale bistro. But it turns out the story is more nebulous and the only certain thing is uncertainty. Will the bar close or not close? Will it be a bistro or remain in its Inn incarnation?

• Los Angeles Times to offer buyouts to 150 employees. Editor Jim O'Shea tells everyone not to panic; they do anyway. [LA Observed]
  

"Live With A Douche" is a Gawker PSA service rounding up the most deleteriously douchy apartment postings we can find. Surely we respect the universal right to demand a roommate who conforms to one's higgidypiggidy expectations—but some warrant special attention. Have you found a particularly ridiculous listing? Let us know at tips@gawker.com

Those chroniclers of the ridiculous at Brooklyn Paper bring us this gem of an article about folks who push their doggies around in strollers. It may be impossible to unpack the crushing depression and sadness that swirls about this story, infecting everything. We may be going home early, or forever.

A tipster alerts us to an incident involving Andrew Bird (whose great new record, Armchair Apocrypha, is a frequent presence on the office soundsystem) during a secret show last night at Brooklyn's Union Hall:

The best part about the Brooklyn Paper's expos on an illegal Bay Ridge raw milk ring is the notion that there is some hardscrabble Jack McCoy detective out there chasing down reports of illegal raw milk sales. (Maybe this imaginary detective's father died of raw milk poisoning in Southie or perhaps he was sold into milk-maidery at a tender age!) Due to, well, the reporting and a reticent source named Deep Milk, the article itself is entirely devoid of substantive details but does include some creamy gems.

Well, look at that! 'Vice' is doing a public service announcement about all the nasty-ass crap that's in the air and soil in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Not that that's news, exactly, but we do like their implication that anyone buying one of those lovely million-dollar lofts springing up in the neighborhood is just asking for a great big case of cancer. They've got the obligatory quote from the hardened longtime Greenpoint resident, who tells the camera, "If I had that type of money I would be so out of here it wouldn't even be funny." Of course, they can't resist introducing the whole thing with a quickie anthropo-cultural tour of the area: "If you've been kicked out of art school anywhere in America in the past three years you're more than likely tending bar somewhere in the neighborhood." Or pretending to, at least.

Yesterday we mentioned Steven Rinella, a bird-killing dinner-party thrower and the author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine. Turns out he could easily transition from cuisinist to criminal. Rinella recently hunted a number of small Brooklyn critters, including two sparrows and a few mourning doves, and gathered a couple of the literary world's more cavalier eaters for a dinner party. According to the Audubon Center, among the common sparrow species that call Brooklyn home are the field sparrow, the swamp sparrow, the song sparrow and the American tree sparrow. And those who kill migratory birds are not only making Baby Jesus weep, they're breaking the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (16 U.S.C.

Yesterday we were invited to a Fort Greene dinner party by the Brooklyn Food Group, which features cuisine they like to call "free-range Brooklyn." As it turns out, those guys are wusses. Today's Times teaches that free-range Brooklyn is something much more exciting and darkly awesome. Meet Steven Rinella, there holding a cute little sparrow in his hand. That is, the hand that will later behead it and serve the still-twittering body to the likes of Jay "I Heart Jay McInerney" McInerney, Bill "I Heart Ramsay" Buford, and other foodie literati at, you guessed it, a Fort Greene dinner party.

With contemptuous Jews and indulgent Gentiles, squadrons of strollers and the occasional stuck tampon, Brooklyn outpaces its smaller brother Manhattan in as many measures as man can devise. One such measure we devised: The Most Pretentious Dining Club Invitation Circulated on A Brown Alumni Message Board. Representing Brooklyn is the Brooklyn Food Group. Among the nearly unimpeachable arguments in Brooklyn's favor, "Dress is Brooklyn chic, that is, casual" and "Setting will be elegant, company will be eclectic, and cuisine is what we call 'free-range Brooklyn'—always seasonal, always fresh, always exciting." Ooh, free-range Brooklyn? I can't wait for a free-range Brooklyn toddler gently roasted in a cilantro-lime marinade.

The two loft buildings on McKibben street—in the lands between the Morgan and Montrose L stops—rise like beacons of Manhattan developers' real plans for the wilderness of Brooklyn. But now this site, where the hipsters frolic in American Apparel and party until dawn appears, has strangely been uprooted, leaving many of its inhabitants confused.

Arise, ye lowly denizens of Brooklyn, and avail yourselves of the comfort of the Hampton Jitney. Yes, even though thee are of lowly, outer-borough stock, the ceaseless efforts of Marty Markowitz, your portly champion, have borne fruit: Come the first note of green in the meadow, the fancy carriage formerly reserved for the lords and ladies of Manhattan will deign to enter your foul-smelling territory (possibly even at multiple stops) and transport you to your jobs as scullery maids to the gentry of the East End and South Fork. Be sure to wear shoes; this ain't no LIRR.

The Department of Health's latest anschluss has shuttered one of Brooklyn's best pizzerias, Di Fara. Pizza partisans claim the closure is merely DOH politicking, but a perusal of the DOH health report uncovers a ton of shit—or as they like to call it, mice excreta.