Well, dagnabit, we don't know how we missed this one. Sure, there's Fleet Week bringing thousands of horny, muscled sailors to New York this weekend. And, sure, there's also the Bingham Cup bringing 1,000 jocky, beefy gay rugby players to town. But now it turns out tomorrow is also the start of New York City Hoedown 2006, which will bring a hotel full of sequined, line-dancing gay cowboys to Manhattan for three days of dances and parties.

There's no particularly great reason to be telling you about this, except that several people excitedly told us about it yesterday and, knowing the proclivities of a good chunk of you folks, we suspect you'll be excited about it, too. There's a gay rugby tournament coming to the city this weekend. That is to say, there will be something like 1,000 big burly gay jocks wandering the streets of Manhattan this weekend.

What happens when you stick a handful of VCs into a room and ask them to pontificate? Apparently not much. By the time that notables like John Doerr and Steve Jurvetson got to this late excerpted part of their panel at the Churchill club, they were playing the Valley version of those late-night college bull sessions — "Dude! Dude! The girls on The O.C. are all hot but if you HAD TO PICK JUST ONE..." — with the usual "Who's the next ___" talk.

• Tonight: We'll have fun fun fun at the Wired Rave Awards (you're not invited), where winners include Steve Jobs (winner of the Steve Jobs award. I'm not making this up), local developer Jesse James Garrett (inventor of Ajax), Valleywag's big sister Lifehacker, and...drumroll...George Clooney! Granted, Clooney (pictured receiving a real award) didn't show for the TIME 100 ceremony, so Wired's chances are slim. And it may actually be boring. But we'll really have fun fun fun at the Rave Awards Afterparties (you're not invited), so I'll be at both to see how fast the Blizzard Entertaingment team (winners, Games category) get drunk.

You have things to do this weekend! You are very busy and important!

After the big show, the winners pose for the photos. One is not surprised that David Remnick and Jim Kelly end up in the middle while VQR's Ted Genoways is foisted to the side. One is surprised, however, that Esquire's David Granger (second from left) went long tie and wing collar, for the fratboy-as-groomsman look.

Reporting live to you from Jazz at Lincoln Center, your go-to venue for all media prom nights:

We're just hours away from tonight's big National Magazine Awards extravaganza, and Ellie Madness is reaching a fever pitch. By last night's deadline, 14 mag wags had entered our high-stakes pool. We've tallied their picks and are now pleased to present Gawker's wisdom-of-crowds predictions for tonight's winners. (Methodology: The wisdom-of-crowds pick for each category is the title that received a plurality of votes from the participating pickers. In categories where two or more titles tied for the lead, no winner is predicted.)

The Time 100 party was held last night at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It was a swell event filled with local swells, all dolled up in black tie and entertained by Stephen Colbert, the Dixie Chicks, and Paul Simon. (Liberal media, you say? Feh.) We were standing off to the side of the room when rhymin' Simon started playing, and we had a spectacular view. Until Malcolm Gladwell decided he liked our view, too.

Why is Simon Dumenco mad this week? Ellie Madness, naturally. Well, not the madness itself; rather, he's mad about the Ellies. He makes several perfectly reasonable points about things fucked up with the magazine biz's big awards. His suggestions:

OnHollywood, the conference held by the Tony Perkins's AlwaysOn Network that's just now wrapping up, shows the signs of a good and bad event. The good: A decent Flickr pool. The bad: A cluster on Tech Memeorandum. But the Flickr stream proves this was a missable event, or at least required a Web 2.0 Kool-Aid apéritif.

Hump Day's over! Got a couple minutes in the office? (Of course you do, you work at Google and leaving before 7 would be gauche.) Chill with this video of the latest SuperHappyDevHouse, the recently reported geek-out with the cooked-books-detector and sex in the cramped bathroom (sex not in video).

I was so stoked. Noah Robischon, editor-at-large of Valleywag's big brother Gizmodo had passed me an invite to Google's May 10 Press Day (Hear Eric Schmidt speak! Bump/rub/brush shoulders with John Battelle! Ask Marissa Mayer to take a Turing Test!). After gleefully tapping in my info and getting a "thank you" page, I assumed I was in — in a few weeks I'd be back on the Plex, my first visit there in a Gawker Media capacity.

• Tonight: Schmooze with organizer Vincent Lauria and other dot-commers at the Silicon Valley New Technology May Meetup (Upcoming.org). E-mail Lauria if you didn't RSVP but are very important.

Yes, we went to Washington for the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but, no, we did not actually go to the dinner. And thus we have not yet seen Stephen Colbert's either staggeringly brilliant or thoroughly mediocre keynote performance. Judging from yesterday's email, this silence is troubling you. Wrote one old high school pal, who now toils for a major media company helping to produce TV shows about how much we all enjoyed pop culture in previous decades:

This weekend, PBWiki founder and coder Dave Weekly hosted the ninth in his grand series of SuperHappyDevHouses (where guests have included the inventor of the mouse, and where each iteration is unpredictable, like a fractal and unlike a King of Queens episode).

This is the weekend you make your first billion.

ConFonz is off in his own special universe this week, a world of orgies and extreme public deviance. Before checking into rehab AND a mental clinic, he filed a report from the ongoing Ad:Tech conference that reads like the script for The Aristocrats.

Yesterday we suggested — while acknowledging we were basically talking out of our asses — that Jann Wenner wasn't inviting his Rolling Stone staffers to the music mag's big-deal 1,000th issue party. Today comes some clarification on that front. While we received another email early this morning from an insider who'd been snubbed — "it is in fact true that most wenner employees were not invited to this huge party that we're all working so hard for" — we were also forwarded the following email, proving that all editorial folks, even regular freelancers, had been invited:

Dust off the Gevil tees and trek to the Southern Plex. A Yahoo mail user (employee? maybe) says: