• With the disclosure of Karl Rove's phone call to Robert Novak, today's the day the Cooper/Miller/Novak/ Plame/Rove saga finally becomes a genuine -Gate, says the epperific Greg Mitchell. [E&P]
• Finally: Janice Min's new, 2-year Us Weekly contract is signed. [NYP]
• Even as TV loses its audience, it hangs onto its advertisers, says Sexy Jon Fine. [BusinessWeek]
• If you just spent $35 million on some dying biz mags, why spend an additional chunk of change on a Times ad celebrating the purchase? "To make a bold statement," says new Fast Company and Inc. owner Joe Mansueto. Obviously. [Folio:]

You're enablers, all of you. Just because we've recently become inexplicably obsessed with media softball games doesn't mean you have to encourage us. We were hoping, after all, that if we just ignored this new neurosis it would eventually go away. But instead a new email arrived to keep our obsessive fires burning.

Click to enlarge.

It's a tad overdue, but Times restaurant fetishist Frank Bruni has finally stopped by Bungalow 8 doyenne Amy Sacco's latest venture, her new restaurant Bette. But what does Frankypants think of the fare at the new London Terrace hotspot? We've no idea, actually. The numbers for his article speak for themselves:

And with another year and a dozen more committee members — or, at least, with the resources of our Times — the paper also could have recommended that puppies be considered adorable, apple pies delicious, and Hitler a very, very bad man.

And how is tonight different from all other nights?

CNBC has replaced its head of primetime programming. Bob Meyers, the Tartikoffian genius behind such blockbusters as Topic A With Tina Brown, Dennis Miller, and McEnroe — Johhny Mac's show, you'll recall, once drew a rating of zero — has been reassigned to the "execution of key business initiatives at CNBC."

Finally. After so many long, lonely years, Drudge finds the solution to all of his problems.

It's a good day today at Broadway and Leonard — although, we suppose, they're pretty much all good days down there. The boys of CollegeHumor.com — you know, that quartet of 20-somethings you read about in The New Yorker back in January, the guys who from their $10,000/month Tribeca loft run a website you've never seen but your younger brother seems to find diverting — today signed a movie contract. It's not for any specific project yet; it's just a development deal, says Variety, "aiming to find feature projects reflecting the college experience along the lines of 1978's hit comedy 'National Lampoon's Animal House.'"

If you've ever stolen a bathrobe from a resort, salt and pepper shakers from a restaurant, soap from a motel, or one of those Mont Blancs from Ducasse, the Times is on to you. Today's (discomfitingly hetero) Thursday Styles looks at otherwise law-abiding people who swipe stuff from public places — restaurants, hotels, wineries, airlines. And, natch, it finds a professor who studies such things to weigh in:

• The Emmy nominations were announced this morning, and Desperate Housewives tied Will & Grace for the lead, with 15. Marcia Cross, Teri Hatcher, and Felicity Huffman, are up for best actress; Eva Longoria and Nicolette Sheridan are not. But we're sure that won't cause any tension. [NYT]
• At least there's one upside to prison: "The New York Times and Miller will cleanse themselves of their WMD sins," says Margaret Carlson. There must be an easier way. [LAT]
• An ailing Peter Jennings, once a longtime ABC correspondent in London, played a big role in last week's bombings coverage. [USAT]
• Martha Stewart to write how-to business book. No. 1 tip: Don't piss off Doug Faneuil. [NYP]
• We hate ourselves for this, but we can't resist pointing you to Greta Van Susteren's yacht. [Tamby Bay Illustrated via TVNewser]
• Americans actually don't hate anonymous sources nearly as much as Plame prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wants you to think they do. [AJR]

Ladies, meet Jacob Manczyk. An Upper West Side currency trader bedecked in the finest khakis, Manczyk hit the Makor/Steinhardt Center singles night in search of a single Jewess to capture his heart. It's not easy, however, to find mishpacha-making material:

Dying to know who won the other night's New Yorker-Vanity Fair softball game? Of course you are. And because we're here to serve, we ferreted out a samizdat copy of Coach Dellinger's postgame wrapup. Seems it was a bad day for the monocle'd set:

"How'd we fuck up this picture so badly?"

To save you 1,600 words in the Times House & Home section: Nuvo is a new Japanese robot. It costs $6,000. It plays New Age music. It takes pictures. And it makes little whirs and clicks and flashes that are supposed to feel companionable. But it doesn't clean, it doesn't cook, and, while it will apparently sleep with you, it won't, you know, sleep with you.

Doesn't this remind you of Chariots of Fire?
As our obsessions are nothing if not fleeting and misguided, we thought we'd drop by and see how two of our former flames, Radar and the HuffPo, were doing since we stopped paying them much mind (the former because it hasn't really, um, done much of anything; the latter because it's seemingly normalized into a stable soapbox for the otherwise unstable). We're not sure we like what we see. Clearly, Radar editor Maer Roshan is like a delicate flower: He needs sunlight, soil, and our constant attention to survive.

Infanticide? Shit, we'd even pay to watch that.

We could excuse our failure to quickly address the launch issue of The Brooklynite magazine as a result of our typical derision reserved for the domesticated borough from which it hails, but we won't. Rather, we'll just honestly confess to not knowing about the free magazine (though our ignorance has something to do with the fact that the publication hails from a domesticated borough we often deride).

From left to right: Hijinks! Hilarity! Craziness!
It's Tijuana like you've never seen it before, flush with journalism's unbuttoned blue collar. Courtesy of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Convention, the Animal House of alt-weekly culture.

It's like an age-old Japanese koan, except neither age-old nor Japanese: If you publish a blog that's mostly humor, but Google News doesn't label you as satire, are you actually funny?