· Martha Stewart's brother on her potential jail time: "Jail will be good for her, because it will humble her...It will mellow her and instill in her a more sincere, heartfelt experience towards others." Jealous much? [NY Daily News]
· From the Chic Happens boys: "Madonna, who announced earlier this week she will be appearing in ads for the Gap, has signed on as the spokesperson for discount chain Strawberry. A mouthpiece would not confirm rumors that the Immaterial Girl would also be making an appearance at the Manhattan opening of Red Lobster." [Chic Happens]
· Marc Jacobs on a party at Slide: "I wasn't going to drink, I wasn't looking for drugs, I didn't want to pick up the stripper...To see people sitting there drinking, to see someone I used to buy drugs rom at the bar, and then not be able to smoke - I thought, what the hell am I doing here?" [Page Six]
· Preview of Tina Brown's talk show tonight: "Nora [Ephron] says Hillary [Clinton] on TV 'was like one of those Dr. Seuss books, 125 words or less, over and over again. You just want to say 'Come on, there's a person in there!' Whoopi [Goldberg] says in words too explicit to repeat that Hillary irritated (she didn't say 'irritated') the wrong people and they are biting her in the rear (she didn't say "rear.')" [Liz Smith]

Also from Bazima, a bit of literary gossip: "At the outdoor food court near City Hall where I get my morning plug-in, [Everything Is Illuminated author] Jonathan Safran Foer was on his cell phone and freaking out over having to wait for his order. 'Bagel-toasted-melted-muenster? I'm still waiting?' he called out over my shoulder to the Mexicans at the grill. They assured him it was coming and looked at him like he was insane. 'Yeah. It's coming,' the novelist hissed into his cell phone. "Meanwhile, they've taken three other people's orders. I have to be on the air in twenty minutes, mmm'kay?'" A reader adds, in the comments: "Jonathan Safran Foer is fucking vile. I sat near him at a reading once. He was reading after 3 other people. During their readings, he kept whispering to the mortified guy next to him, 'Make it end! Make it stop!' about the other readers. He would be TERRIBLE in bed, it's so obvious."
Signs of summer [Bazima]

· MarthaSings.com [via Anil]
· Panoramic pics of New York
· "Hillary Clinton lets it all in" [via MeFi]
· Why are the best six restaurants in New York all French?

· Demi Moore took Ashton Kutcher to a school event for her kids. No word on whether this was considered, in UES soccer mom parlance, a "play date." [NY Daily News]
· A socialite named "Muffie" plays punk rocker. [Ed.I know that's not really big news, but no matter how many times I see her name, I can't get over the fact that there actually is an Upper East Side socialite named "Muffie."] [Page Six]
· Assemblyman Daniel Hooker was shouted down in the state legislature by Rosie O'Donnell's gay brother Daniel after arguing against a bill that would ban harassment of gay students on the basis that "children need to get a consistent message that homosexuality is not ok." [Page Six]
· Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein is writing an autobiography. Note to the horrified reading public: Don't worry; by "writing," we mean "paying for someone else to write." [Ed.suggested title: People I've Eaten.] [Page Six]
· Hugh Grant on the Hamptons: "I visit the Hamptons occasionally because my brother has a house there. But I find American WASPiness more terrifying than British snobbery." [Cindy Adams]

I've been in Boston for the last three days, suffering from Manhattan withdrawal. (My publisher, Nick Denton, was writing Gawker.) As for the experiencethere was Bostonian food and there were Red Sox fans, both of which tend to give me indigestion. I sat on a media panel at a blogging conference where I think I was expected to say that blogs would kill the New York Times and that Big Mediaas in "Big Media, the homogenous monolith"was screwed. Which is just silly. Even I am not that stupid. Big Media does a perfectly good job of screwing itself without the help of blogs. (See Blair, Jayson.) Alsoan important lesson from dinner on Sunday: when the waitress says the restaurant "specializes in generous portions," it's a clear warning sign. Quantity should never be emphasized. Leave the restaurant immediately.

The Observer asked a panel of novelists to critique Hillary Clinton's new book. The results weren't pretty. Francine Prose, in particular, took Hillary to task for creating dialogue she couldn't have possibly remembered verbatim and uses the critique to comment on Jayson Blair-style journalism: "Even those of us who have given up the losing battle against the misplaced modifier and the dangling participle still believe that certain rules of English grammar are not optional, and that their importance is not merely linguistic, but philosophical and moral. One of these is the rule that says that to put dialogue between quotation marks signifies (unless you re writing fiction) that those words were spoken as written, and were transcribed directly from what we call real life. I've sometimes wondered if the increasingly common confusion about this simple relationship between truth and punctuation may be at the heart of some of the media's current problems with journalistic ethics and accuracy."
Hillary's 6000 crises [Observer]

· Sam Waksal, Martha Stewart's friend and stock tipster, gets seven years [Reuters]
· Gotti family places In Memoriam ads in Daily News one year after mobster's death [Smoking Gun]
· New York gay makeover [Gothamist]
· Fashion wunderkinder sniff at Vanity Fair cover [New York Times]
· Celebrity fashion picks [USA Today]
· No red carpet at CFDA party [Look: Daily Fashion Report]

At a dinner party last Friday, an occasional writer who had once studied game theory, told me he'd landed a job as a conflict manager on a reality television show. The position required him to devise scenarios which would force contestants to clash. Here, from Craigslist, is an even more intriguing position: the employer is a woman who suspects her boyfriend may be cheating. "So, here is what I need. I need a girl/woman (should look 21-34), to act as Bait. He works as a bartender so this should be easy - all you have to do is go to the bar and work your magic... Sad to say but you should probably be a good liar yourself or a good actress." Any other weird jobs out there? Write in to tips@gawker.com.
Bait [Craigslist]

· Helen Hunt, with a wry smile from Mad About You and a tired waitress-after-long-shift face, lunching at Bubby's in Tribeca, with two men of indeterminate celebrity status.
· Chloe Sevigny, just now (1pm) in front of the Chase at 18th & Park Ave. South, getting onto the back axle pedals of some grungy guy's bicycle. Looking pretty grungy herself: no makeup, feather stuck in her arm band, daisy dukes.
· I realize that they are pretty all over the place, but I saw Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon walking down 12th Street on Friday. He looked very puffy and they both scowled at me. She is a miniature version of a normal human.
· @330p monday afternoon.. columbus ave in the mid-60's.. "amalie" star Audrey Tatou, strolling uptown with a male companion. she's shorter than i imagined.

·Puffy runs off with the bling-bling [Intelligencer]
· Rosie O'Donnell rejects $4m offer from Gruner & Jahr to settle magazine suit [Roger Friedman]
· Martha Stewart snuck into the FBI for a mugshot and fingerprint [NYDN]
· Jayson Blair takes refuge with parents [Page Six]
· Janeane Garofalo blames Bush for killing her show [Page Six]
· Supermodel dating news [Page Six]

No cultural theme would be complete without a quote from Kurt Andersen, the author and commentator. Here he is, heroically shoring up a column about Sammy Sosa, Martha Stewart, Howell Raines, and the fall of the modern icon. ''What's interesting about Sosa and Stewart, is that neither really needed to do what they did. Stewart still has millions of dollars. Sosa hits home runs anyway. The superfluousness of what they did helps us enjoy the spectacle even more — and to my mind makes what happened with Raines the fuller tragedy. Because whatever kind of martinet he was as a manager, Raines was genuinely trying to make the Times a good newspaper.... It wasn't about personal gain.''
How the mighty have fallen [Boston Globe]

· Hairspray wins eight at the Tony Awards [New York Post]
· Gay clubs disappear from the Hamptons [Gotham]
· A brief history of New York transportation [Gotham Gazette]
· Missed connections at Radiohead concert [Craigslist]

· Britney may be dropped from the NFL's kick-off concert if she's spotted again partying at Manhattan hotspots [Page Six]
· Ricky Martin's English-language CD pushed back [NYDN]
· Hamptons oneupmanship: weddings captured on film [Page Six]
· Edward Norton spotted with woman not Salma [Page Six]
· MTV tweaked by rival music video channel [Page Six]

The weekend's celebrity sightings...
· Sunday 6/8: 2:00 pm: Paul Rudd, in full hipster regalia: trucker hat [!], denim jacket, t-shirt, jeans, and scruffy facial hair, with similarly-clad friend, strolling up 6th Avenue around 15th street.
· Thom Yorke of Radiohead, between concerts, at the Apple store in SoHo on Friday afternoon.
· Stroke Albert Hammond, Jr., at — where else — Pianos for Sunday night's "Tinkle," hanging out with host David Cross before the show, wearing a honkey afro and nothing else worth mention. Minus the Strokes connection — he's got the looks of an extra in Rocky I at best.
· Laurence Fishburne, with posse, at Florent in the Meatpacking at 3am on Saturday morning. Looking short and chunky.
· Friday 6/6, 8:40 pm: Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart strolling hand-in-hand down 8th ave. between 18th and 19th Street.
· Sunday 6/8, 12:40 pm: Julianna Margulies—applying lip
gloss and wearing a white raincoat—walking on Bleecker Street near Abingdon Square. She then ducked into Miracle Grill.
· Spotted Ed Norton and two buddies (no Salma, unfortunately) on Saturday at the 2:30 showing of Finding Nemo at the Union Square theater. They got there late, saw that it was packed, and walked out.

Minneapolis columnist James Lileks, having followed a link yesterday to DonnaBarnes.com, discovers a page about a film in which Ms. Barnes once appeared titled, Flies on Cupid. (Donna Barnes is better known as the lead in To Live and Date in New York.) Flies on Cupid is described as "Pulp Fiction meets Something About Mary" and is currently looking for distribution. Lileks' analysis: "Someday I want a pitch a movie and say 'it's Tora Tora Tora meets Double Indemnity' just to see if the person receiving the pitch scowls and barks 'get oudda here and stop wasting my time.' At this point in human history any artistic conception that includes the word 'meets' is just admitting it has no new ideas, but is simply smushing together two differently colored was of Play-Doh. The small picture of the poster for 'Flies on Cupid' seems to feature George Michaels passing a corkscrew through his intestine."
Friday, 11:37 AM [Lileks.com]

· "Ewa [Glowacka] has been telling all her Polish friends, including Raines' wife, Krystyna Stachowiak, that [her daughter] Zuza [Jayson Blair's girlfriend] was just friends with Blair and that he was actually dating her roommate." [Page Six]
· Ex-GQ Editor Art Cooper collapsed yesterday at lunch and is in the hospital. [Page Six]
· Iraqi car dealers have dubbed the Toyota Land Cruiser "The Monica" after Monica Lewinsky. "'They are a very tempting car,' explained another dealer. 'Just as Monica tempted Clinton, they will tempt you.'" [NY Daily News]

An ex New Yorker in Shanghai needs your help. For as little as a cup of coffee, you can Save the Ex-New Yorkers: "The devil doesn't wear Prada, it speaks Chinese, wears badly tailored suits in cheap materials and spits at random although with satanic precision. You're getting this first hand from an ex New Yorker barely surviving on the paltry socio-cultural fare available in much hyped Shanghai. Case in point for what Shanghaiese hipsters consider the highlight of their weekly social and possibly intellectual life: soirees spent doing mystery night quizzes in bars, answering questions in the vein of 'what burns more calories, a real orgasm or a fake one?'... To rescue the many ex New Yorkers languishing away in cultural catatonia, far from the centre of the universe, I suggest introducing a column for usex New Yorkers comment central or some such thing. Also post this link. we can either relieve our NY nostalgia by commenting on whatever is happening in NY or by commenting whatever is not happening wherever we are. Come to think of it, if I organize a ex New Yorkers meeting in shanghai, will I get arrested for holding subversive capitalist roadrunner gatherings or for transgressing SARS prevention rules?"

A reader reports on The State of the Soho House: "Apparently the Soho House is going for the aging-English-manor look: the whole building was leaking like bloody hell [Wednesday] night during the storm, with everyone navigating their too-high-for-you Jimmy Choos around rather pedestrian red plastic buckets. And multiple comments regarding the piece-of-crap foosball table. Can't have everything, I guess..."

· Jayson Blair CBS interview video link
· Fashion designer name pronunciation [via NoGoodForMe]
· "Light my Bloomberg" t-shirts
· "My smoke breaks with Lizzie Grubman"

A reader just spotted a Segway in an NYC Starbucks and sent me a snapshot and for reasons, I can't fully explain, it seems kind of disturbing. Maybe it's because I think of the Segway as a West Coast phenomenon where the remaining gainfully employed Silicon Valley nerds zip around the Mission in their identical khakis and cobalt blue button-downs, balancing their soy lattes on the handlebars. [Or maybe I'm just using this post as an excuse to gratuitously bash San Francisco...Nah, that can't be itI don't need an excuse.]