This morning we stopped reading Daily Candy's New York Quiz at the opening sentence: "Hard to believe, but there's more to being a New Yorker than having the Soho House concierge on speed-dial."

· Thom Filicia, design doctor of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy team, didn't actually get the B.A. in Interior Design his bio claims: he's a dropout! Shriek! [Queerday]
· The giant inflatable rat used by unions to shame non-union employers has been parked in front of the Church of Scientology processing center in Manhattan. The alleged scandal? Employing a non-union outfit that allegedly abuses immigrant workers. No word on whether this abuse consisted of forcing the workers to watch Scientologist John Travolta's films. [NY Post]
· What Bonnie Fuller got to leave Us Weekly: "AMI offered Fuller $1.5 million in stock equity, a $1.5 million annual salary, a similar bonus plan, unlimited car and driver and $18,000 a year for a personal trainer." Go Bonnie! [Daily News]
· Nightclub Limelight is re-opening... yet again, after totally tanking as "Estate" last year. Someone should hire some pagan witches to smudgestick that cursed place. Or at least some feng shui? [Cindy Adams]

A towering billboard of porn starlet and tireless but fun mediawhore Jenna Jameson was erected in Times Square yesterday, triggering complaints about... porn in Times Square.

Gawker Stalker sightings are submitted by readers. Send to tips@gawker.com. In this issue: David Duchovny, Kevin Bacon, Darryl Hannah, Antonio Banderas, Johnny Knoxville, David Byrne, Amy Jo Johnson, Meryl Streep, Dave Attell, Jennifer Esposito, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
· Sunday evening I saw David Duchovny at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on Broadway and 63rd at a 7:05 showing of Whale Rider. He was with a MUCH older (read: white haired) woman. Probably his mother or he's trying in vain to be like Ashton Kutcher. He looked as good as he does on screen. His hair looked freshly washed and I really wanted to smell it. (TMI?) He played with his hair through the whole movie and then left as soon as it was over before the lights came on. Not sure if he cried during the film, but I did. [Ed. Note: Yes, sources confirm it was his mother. Sources do not note the state of his tear ducts.]

"Have you heard of the latest, most hippest, bullishit fad to come out of New York City? You got that right!!! It's called The Blackout. This is the coolest fucking thing to happen since flash mobs and electroclash concerts (for the three minutes when they were cool.) Try a fucking earthquake on for size, you whiners. And instead of meeting thousands of dorks at a random location and making animal noises for no fucking reason, I like to go to the beach in December and stare at hot chicks with fake tits.

· 'Phish' Bassist arrested for taking pictures of 9-year-old girl in a secluded boathouse after Jones Beach concert. The girl's father is described as a "Hells Angels leader." Whoops. [Local 6]
· Kelly Osbourne dating ugly man. Like mother like daughter. [NY Post]
· Ben Affleck's birthday party includes performance by "accused child molester" R. Kelly, and worse, attendance of professional tanner and former actor George Hamilton. [NY Post]
· Now that Sex and The City has a black love interest, the shocking truth comes out: "[T]he world [Candace Bushnell] writes about is extremely white," says star Cynthia Nixon. [NY Daily News]
· Melissa Rivers joins PETA. Mother Joan searches the alphabetized index cards in her joke box under the topics "fur," "naked," and "I'm going to disown my daughter." [NY Mag]

We have a winner in Gawker's search for dirty blackout stories. A very special reader writes in with this little gem:

Gawker stalker sightings are submitted by readers. Send to tips@gawker.com.

Gawker's kind of done with the whole blackout thing. It's so very last week. Really, there are people in this world who've never even had a frappuccino, much less suffered for a day without one.

Charity begins and ends at home for the team at the online magazine The Morning News. They got a practical idea while the lights were out in Brooklyn: get drunk and cook up everything that would soon spoil. Why they chose this over bowling rotten chicken carcasses past starving tourists in the lobby of the Tribeca Grand, or chucking spoiled eggs at all those do-gooders directing traffic for free at every intersection, we'll never understand.

Writer James Esch on the validating aspects of the blackout: "Size matters. The biggest power outage in North American history is like having a monster cock. My blackout is bigger than your blackout. And California? Bunch of pussies with their wimpy rolling blackouts. Even Arnold the Terminator must be feeling a little bit of wattage envy. New York has this claim on Godzilla sized disasters like no other place. It's all fifties sci-fi panic, millions pouring into the streets, their hair on fire, screaming about terrorism and destruction and besides that their cell phones that won't work."
Blackout. [Turks Head Review]

· 60-year-old "four-time loser" Geraldo Rivera is now married again, this time to a 28-year-old former assistant. Every day, perfectly ordinary women go insane and marry men like him, to the horror of their parents — just ask Kurt Vonnegut, former father-in-law of Mr. Rivera. [NY Post]
· What if the Governator loses the race for California? Shriver will dump him like a sack of steroid-fatigued potatoes, some predict. "Kennedys need power like a heroin addict needs a fix." [Cindy Adams]
· Toronto resident and New York Poster Child for Tourist-Victims Lili Sun came back to New York last week. On her first visit this month, she was brutally attacked by a bottle-swinging wacko. On her return trip, she was getting some free orthodontia for injuries sustained during her assault... until the power went out mid-treatment. And you thought your blackout sucked. [Daily News]
· Bill Reilly, conservative Fox News talk-show host famous for shouting down and threatening a man who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks, has written a thriller. We hear he will next work on a catty, thinly-disguised roman-a-clef, "Roger Ailes wears Sansabelt." [NY Post]
· Joe Conason's "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" accuses Ann Coulter of being a faghag. Uh, shocker. [Daily News]

Two hours trapped underground with her fellow New Yorkers left blogger Amy Langfield seemingly unscarred, unknifed, and unpregnant.

I'm away for the next few days, and as promised last week, blogger Choire Sicha will be filling in. (Alright, so by "away" I mean "working on a couple of projects," "substitute evil-ing at Page Six" and "going five whole business days without composing a Gawker to-do list for the first time since mid-December 2002." I realize that these may not sound like thrilling vacation plans to most of you, but I didn't say what those "projects" were, now did I?)

Do y'all need the Terminator over there, dudes? He will kick blackout's ass. No questions asked.

From LasagnaFarm's "Interview with a Young Manhattanite Left Digitally Mute by the Blackout of 2003":
Q: We hear the power's out? That true?
YM: Hells yeah. It's darker than Mike Ovitz's soul here.
Q: But it's day
YM: True, but I have no coffee
Interview [LasagnaFarm]

· Blackout dissection begins [Gothamist]
· Blackout! [JVG]
· Phonecam shots of the blackout [Collision Detection]
· Pic Patrol
· Zap! [Boro6]
· Blacked out in NYC [Indiewire]
· Blackout moblog
· Even the media outlets were without power [Ryan Seal]

The power's back on and the water's running again at Gawker headquarters. (No hot water, though. Fuckers.) The warm beer and drum circles have thankfully disappeared as well.

Friendster creator Jonathan Abrams gets a little defensive about deleting fake profiles, or "fakesters" (i.e., "Jesus," "Death," "Anna Wintour") from the service: "Friendster's affable chief operating officer, Kent Lindstrom, [says] the only fakesters that the company would likely remove would be ones it received complaints about. (On Friendster, users can 'flag' somebody's profile for the company to review, and write comments about why it offended them.) But Abrams shakes his head emphatically when I mention this. 'No. They're all going,' he says, his voice steely. 'All of them.'" The occasional problem: real celebrities (or pseudo-celebrities, in this case) get kicked off of Friendster because the administrators think the profile is fake.
Attack of the smartasses [SF Weekly]

· Rocker Courtney Love's mother is claiming that she's the daughter of actor Marlon Brando. [Page Six]
· Actor Josh Pais was filming a public service announcement in Grand Central the other day that required him to yell at the top of his lungs, "Can anyone explain to me alternate-side-of-the-street parking?" Page Six reports that "Pais was tackled by a phalanx of cops and National Guardsmen who [unaware that he was shooting a commercial] handcuffed him and dragged him off to a booking room for 'disorderly conduct.'" [Page Six]
· Robert Bryan, the men's fashion director for NYT mag says "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's" Carson Kressley "looks like he was freeze-dried in 1978 and brought back to life as a stereotypical 1970's queen." [Page Six]
· "Pop owner Roy Liebenthal is opening Pop Burger, a high-end fast-food counter with an ultra-hip restaurant-lounge behind it, at Ninth Avenue and 15th Street next month." [Page Six]
· Dr. Laura Schlessinger, on why she's renouncing her religion (Orthodox Judaism): "I felt that I was putting out a tremendous amount toward that mission, that end, and not feeling return." [NY Daily News]