The Morning News' Rosecrans Baldwin tours Chinatown eateries with Harvey Spiller, a self-taught gourmet and expert on Chinese cookery. Says Spiller, "I walked into this restaurant on Mott Street. It was Thursday and the place was empty, which was weird because it s good and famous. I didn't understand what was going on, so I went to talk to the owner, the mother, only she s sitting at a table being filmed for Chinese TV. So I wonder, what's up? Then her son, who I've known since the place opened in the late '80s, he comes over and goes, 'Why'd you come today?' 'Because,' I say, 'I haven't been here in a long time and I missed your soup!' And he says, 'Oh, haven't you heard? I'm dead!' Turns out all the Chinese newspapers reported that he died of SARS and now nobody's going to that restaurant."
Eating with Harvey Spiller [TMN]

Friday afternoon...checking the tips box...

· NYT internal memo, RE: Jayson Blair
· Paris Hilton drunk
· TONY Award nominees [via 601am]
· Green Apple maps: eco-resources in NY [via Muxway]
· Subway cinema: Asian film festivals in NYC [Muxway]

Greek shipping-heir-turned-social-critic Taki explains how he acquired his first yacht: "[After my first wife left] I moped for weeks, boring everyone with stories about the perfidious nature of the weaker sex and threatening suicide. That's when my father came to the rescue. 'Your mother is worried about you,' he told me over the telephone from Greece. 'I know you're faking, but do go and buy yourself a boat. And charge it to me.' This was 1968. My only regret after accepting my father's generous offer was that I had not thought of threatening suicide before."
Yachts of luck [Forbes via 601am]

Felix Salmon's analysis of Raising Victor Vargas and class divisions on the Lower East Side: "Raising Victor Vargas is...set in what all the film reviews insist on calling the Lower East Side, although nearly all of it takes place north of Houston Street. Still, the moniker is fair: what we're seeing is Loisaida Avenue, not Avenue C. (For those of you who don't live here, they're physically the same, but conceptually very different: the former is old-school Hispanic; the latter new-school yuppie.) The big divide in this (my) neck of the woods these days is not Houston Street so much as it is disposable income: there are many poor families living on welfare and clipping supermarket coupons, as well as bars with $2,000 bottles of champagne and a new hotel which will charge up to $2,500 a night."
Raising Victor Vargas [FelixSalmon]

· JFK: cokehead and gossip-junkie. [Page Six]
· Oliver Stone spent Mother's Day with Fidel Castro. [Page Six]
· "Not only did Jayson Blair plagiarize and make up stories for The New York Times - he drove dot-com era publicists batty by being a no-show." [Page Six]
· Cybill Shepherd on playing Martha Stewart in the upcoming NBC movie, "Martha, Inc.": "I was attracted to the idea of playing someone that people thought I was. But I'm not a rage-a-holic and a control freak." [Liz Smith]
· Michael Moore's new film about 9/11, "Fahrenheit 911" is now being funded by Miramax. [NY Daily News]

· "Last night, after a couple of flicks at Tribeca Film Fest (including the unbelievable 'Song for a Raggy Boy' with Aiden Quinn), went to Tribeca Grill (where else?). While waiting to go, a woman in a black leather jacket walks in and asserts to the hostess, 'I'm Nora Ephron and THAT's my table.'"
· "Larry Clark and Warren Fischer from Fischerspooner at the opening of "8.5x11" at jen bekman. making an appearance late in the evening were some lunkheaded cops who were unnecessarily rude and aggressive about clearing the street (traffic on Spring was nearly blocked). everyone decamped directly across the street to Sweet & Vicious for the afterparty, amid loud threats of summonses and arrests. (way to support new downtown businesses! go NYPD!)"
· "Saw the Culkin brothers...Macauley & Kieran on Sunday 5/11 Mother's Day at 12:00 on the corner of 79th & Broadway. Kieran was carrying flowers & Macauley a Virgin bag & they looked like they were on their way to see Mother Culkin."

Reader reports:
· "I'm in Clinton, Arkansas (no, not
named for he-who-can't-be-named)...I was reading a bit of the local press (Arkansas Times, arktimes.com), which was starstruck enough to mention the filming [of Paris Hilton's "Green Acres"-style reality show] even though they had apparently never heard of her before...the one minor tidbit which was interesting, was that Paris and [gal pal Nicole] Richie spent time in a kissing booth in a fundraiser for the local school/hospital/etc. I've been to Altus before. I know what the typical older rural gentleman is like in Arkansas. The thought of these two women puckering up, for one dollar from the dirty hands of a grizzly greasy guy, in the torn 'big dog' shirt, who might not have bathed this week because the plumbing is out in the single-wide, is really really precious. (Not to give in to stereotypes too much because I do realize most people in my former home state take baths regularly, but there's enough of the true troglodytes, who live in the windowless trailers down dirt roads, who would show up at local events for the cheap beer and funnel cakes, that this scenario is very very probable)."

Salon's Larry Smith creates an anthropological classification system for the volunteers at the KittyKind cat shelter in the Union Square Petco:
Alpha: "They rescue and name the cats (though some alphas find naming the cats sort of wrong because it pre-assigns a name, look, feel, and, naturally, personality to the cats)...They are all women."
Beta: "They do some of the above, but with somewhat less intensity...They receive birthday cards in the shape of a cat."
Zeta: "They get nervous when you ask them a question, like, "Can I hold this cat," and direct you to an alpha or beta...These are exclusively gay men."
Dorothy: "The lady adorned with a pair of fake cat ears who sits in a chair and yelps, 'Pennies, nickels, dimes for the kitties! Pennies, nickels, dimes for the kitties!'"
I survived the terror of New York's kitty gatekeepers! [Salon]

Atkins may be gone but the diet isn't. A new federal survey reports that New Yorkers spend more on steak than residents of any other city in the country. They also spend less on entertainment and the most on clothes. San Franciscans spend the most on alcohol and books. This seems a bit counterintuitive to me as most of the San Franciscans I know are too busy playing Everquest to read anything. (I'm also pretty sure 99% of my disposal income goes to "alcohol and books," but I'm not going to tell you what the ratio is.)
New York pays for the steak; Boston the cigar [NYT]

Whitney Museum of Art Director Maxwell L. Anderson has resigned after five years of service, citing creative differences with the Whitney's Board of Trustees. The board's decision to abandon plans for a $200 million Rem Koolhaas-designed expansion was particularly upsetting to Anderson, who says the board was previously "thrilled" with the plan. He will leave in the fall to become a Leadership Fellow at the Yale School of Management. [Ed.*Sigh.* B-school is always the default for people who don't know want they want to be when they grow up.]
Director of the Whitney resigns. [NYT]

Google (one of our favorite search engines) has decided to add approximately 100 programmers to its New York office, providing a microscopic little boost to the faltering Manhattan economy. Google's Director of Technology promises that the New York office will be similar to the West Coast offices: "employees on both coasts plan to take field trips to see the film 'The Matrix: Reloaded' this week. And 'we have free M&M's here as well.'"
Google hiring engineers for a New York office [NYT]

A Conde Nast publication waxes philosophic on public transportation. (Again.) Nick Paumgarten introduces the "pizza theory" espoused by a patent lawyer 23 years ago in the NYTthat the cost of a subway fare almost always mirrors the cost of a slice.
Two bucks [New Yorker]

· The London stage version of Toby Young's media memoir, "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People," is getting mixed reviews because the star is too good-looking and confident to convincingly play Toby Young. [Page Six]
· Steve Jobs' wife is angry that he had his picture taken for the cover of Fortune with Sheryl Crow and didn't tell her about it. [Page Six]
· Ted Turner on AOL: "I'm an old-media guy," says the man who is due to step down down as vice chairman at this week's shareholders meeting. "I had a general knowledge of what AOL did, but ... I'm not a nerd. There's nothing wrong with being a nerd, but my secretary gets my E-mail. ... My E-mail goes to my female." [NY Daily News]

I interviewed David Amsden, the author of Important Things That Don't Matter, a couple of weeks ago for Salon. Amsden on being a writer in New York: "The best thing about being in New York is that it really demystifies the publishing industry...Some people get really distracted in New York and want to pursue being famous more than writing. That could really happen. But really, the thing with writing is that you never get, you know, really famous. I mean, even if you are, you're still like... [ES: No one's walking up to you on the street and asking for your autograph.] Yeah. I mean, I've always liked that about it. These things like getting into the New Yorker, publishing a book, seem as palpable as one day going to the moon. And once you're here, you're like, 'Oh, I know—that idiot used to work at X publishing house; now he works at Y. He hates me because I wrote this one thing two years ago,' and you understand that it's like 85 people who have all, to one degree or another, fucked each other over and made love to each other. So shit's gonna come up."

Don't hate David Amsden because he's brilliant, celebrated and 23 [Salon]

· Graydon-spotting: "Spotted: Graydon Carter, entering the elevator banks at 4 Times Square. As he approached the gate, he patted his pockets and said to the security guard, "I forgot my wallet." He was buzzed through. Graydon was not wearing blue jeans with his suit, nor a facial expression describing the gravity of wartime," and "Sighting of Graydon Carter: Shopping w/ wife or daughter (kinda hard to tell in these Botox days) at Tracey Feith in Soho around 4PM-ish on Sat. Face looks exactly like that in Leibovitz s photo, complete w/ the hair flip on the side (kept in place by hairspray?). Serious chicken legs!!"
· "[Friday] 3:30 p.m.: I saw Matt Dillon on the corner of 79th and Columbus with three other people, two of them the requisite tall thin blonde types. He looks much less angular in person than he does on screen (hello magical movie makeup), but just about as male model duh. I pointed
him out to the dogwalker I was talking to and she said, 'Oh god, look, someone's getting an autograph.' We both made wretching noises."
· "As I write this, 10pm Saturday May 10, Parker Posey is eating dinner with a female companion at on outdoor table at Le Singe Vert, on 7th Avenue between 19th and 20th Streets. She is wearing a silly-looking, pink woolen hat (or maybe its not wool but synthetic), but clearly is having a good evening"

We've analyzed our traffic logs and it has become fairly obvious to us that most of you are reading Gawker on weekdays between the hours of 9 and 5. (Not only are we contributing to the further degeneration of the English language; we're also decreasing worker productivity one GDP point at a time.) Your editor has also had a sudden revelation about the downside of extended sleep deprivation, which tends to occur when you have to be up at a certain time to post things to your blog 7 days a week and you can't always get to bed at a reasonable time the night before. So as of next week, Gawker will cease publishing on the weekends. (Unless, of course, Paris Hilton does something really exciting and I can't help myself.) UPDATE: We'll be issuing a weekend to-do list on Friday and a weekend review on Monday, so don't worry; there will be no two-day informational void.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to create a new verb: "to zeta-jones," meaning "to eat ravenously, as if downing last bowl of Sally Struthers-provided rice in the midst of a famine." Shortly thereafter, someone used it in a sentence for a Gawker stalker item: "Anna Wintour zeta-jonesing on a McVeggie at the gaudy, fou-fou McDonald's on 42nd btw 8th & b'way wearing powder blue Old Navy summer dress and beaded Pearl River flip-flops." And today, William Safire dissects "to zeta-jones" in NYT Magazine: "The allusion is to the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones, cattily scolded for adding a few pounds since her Oscar-winning performance in 'Chicago.' Cruelly but creatively, the blogger applies her hyphenated last name to the lusting after a tasty burger by the hungry editor. To take the meaning of this nonce variation from the context, zeta-jonesing is 'indulging in a craving for (meatless) food.' This specialized usage returns jonesing to its original state of a proper noun in participle form."

· The Matrix as religion [via Fark]
· Photo series: "They all become New York" [via TMN]
· New York and Amsterdam [via MeFi]
· More blowjob marketing: new Mastercard ad

The Smoking Gun breaks their ban on mentioning the Hilton sisters to bring you the details of Nicole Richie's arrest for possession of heroin. (Nicole is starring in a Fox reality show based in Arkansas wherein she and pal Paris Hilton "do farm chores, pump gas, and sling sandwiches at the Lakeside Foodmart."
Nicole Richie [TSG]