A 32-year-old man was fatally shot last night in what police are saying is the fourth local hate crime targeting gay men in the last two weeks.

Crazy homeless lady in training Courtney Love is about to be homeless for real because her landlord is evicting her from the $27,000 a month Village townhouse she's been living in since February. Apparently Courtney tried to burn the place down. Of course she did.

An 18-month court battle over a woman's right to have a backyard treehouse for her kids has ended, and the treehouse won. New York artist Melinda Hackett yesterday beat her cranky neighbor and even won landmark status for the structure.

In Page Six today: a woman was paid to write a book - "How Not to Act Old" - in which she notes that Greenwich Village isn't hip or youthful anymore because you need money to live there. [Page Six]

How bad is it out there? So bad that innocent citizens are being assaulted in fawncy downtown NYC much more than they were last year! Panic! How bad is it really? It's not that bad:

It's one thing for Graydon Carter to deem you worthy of, say, a 7 pm reservation at his 70-seat Waverly Inn. But if you really want an emblem of the Vanity Fair editor's approval, try getting your child admitted to the 45-child freshman class of Carter's other exclusive West Village institution, the forthcoming Greenwich Village High. The school is the brainchild of Carter deputy editor Aimee Bell, as first reported in the Observer, and her neighbor Sara Goodman. But according to the Times it's becoming something so much posher than all that!

The central section of Greenwich Village, near that haven for nostalgic expats called Tea & Sympathy, has always drawn the English. A 1902 New York Times guide to the 'British Quarter' describes rather unflatteringly the neighborhood's inhabitants: "ruddy, grizzled, thick-necked, opinionated and slangy." We owe this vignette to Toby Young, the famously unsuccessful Vanity Fair writer who parlayed his failure in New York into an amusing book, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, the basis for an upcoming movie starring Simon Pegg and Jeff Bridges.

• Willie Nelson and friends have been issued misdemeanor citations for posessing about 1.5 pounds of weed and 1/5 of a pound of mushrooms. And this surprises you not in the least. [Billboard]
• Bono tells the fashion crowd to "take your fucking finger food and fuck off." Which at least implies that someone was actually eating. Baby steps. [OAN]
• Did you miss the Brooklyn Book Festival? Aren't you lucky. [Galleycat]
• Cheers to the Times for throwing in a good old spoiler for fans of The Office. [NYT]
• It always helps to have your wife working in your favor on Amazon. [Greatest Living Poet]
• Greenwich Village reaches boiling point; gay teens and cranky old potheads to throwdown before November. [WaPo]
• Robert Hughes would like to thank radical Islamic terrorists for removing that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" from the New York skyline. [The Australian]

If you've ever been overcome with moist, turgid urges by the "sex table" at Greenwich Village's Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, litblogger Maud Newton has a clarification to help stem the tide of bad thoughts. The store's website may be down, but like every spunky kid these days, they're still posting on Myspace. Therein lies a managerial statement on the use/misuse of the sex table: