Scrappy litterateur Dale Peck, writing with all the animosity of a jilted lover, takes up 2,500 words of this week's Observer to decry the crass commercialization of the Star Wars franchise. It's a riotous, metaphor-laden jaunt through the series' history (SPOILER ALERT: Peck reveals that Darth Vader is Luke's father), with stops along the way that include comparisons to the search for weapons of mass destruction, Michael Jackson's public displays of affection, and a jewel-bedecked Liberace expiring in Las Vegas. You know, your typical negative review. We're not sure that we know what all the big words mean, but we are so looking forward to the inevitable Dale Peck just got bitch-slapped by an Ewok at Caf Mogador e-mail that's sure to hit our inbox momentarily. AB

Last night, a window on William Morris Place was thrown open, and the screams of anguish could be heard from Shutters on the Beach to Dodger Stadium: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke sent out an e-mail blast reporting that WMA has hired Scary Hollywood Lawyer Bert Fields to "go after" the NY Post's Page Six (quotes hers, we would've gone with "deliver a legal donkey punch") for spreading "blatantly inaccurate" gossip that is "fed by rivals." The gossip rag frayed the agency's last nerve on Sunday, when they printed a rumor that the agency was so cash-strapped that they were looking to sell their spiffy headquarters to make sure they were kept in Cristal, Armani, and only the freshest babies for their breakfast buffet for a little longer. WMA, of course, is filthy rich; five minutes spent wading through the room where they discard the teeth yanked from the mouths of departing agents would yield enough gold fillings to pay all of their overhead for at least two years. Tears, retractions, and unprotected make-up sex to follow...developing.

And they both loved Mandy Patinkin.

From the lofty precincts of The Sun (I know, but follow me for a minute) we descend to the urine-soaked gutter. The New York Press, the discerning homeless person's second-favorite choice of bed linens, also seems to be taking a hard line with some of its staff. According to a source at the paper, publisher (and recent Vegas migr ) Chris Rohland has canned Jim Knipfel's weekly Scent of a Woman column on the grounds that it isn't New Yorky enough. (Our source claims the real reason has something to do with a column Knipfel wrote that complained about being moved from an office to a cubicle; you can't get more New Yorky than that.) Whether you see this as a case of editorial good judgment or a fit of personal pique is unimportant; what you want to take away here is this: Chris Rohland fired a blind man. Talk about insulting your paper's major demographic. AB

The New York Sun — yes, it's still around — isn't doing so well, and it would seem that deputy managing editor Robert Messenger is on the case. According to a tragic email sent our way, Messenger wants to refocus the paper: it's time to confess that the Sun is no general-interest publication and restructure accordingly. Of course, he might not really care, because we also hear he's trying to move to The Atlantic.

I don't want to raise any false hopes, and it may just be premature reshuffling that in the end presages nothing, but the four boxes on the front page of Radar 's website, previously in the center of the screen, have now moved to the top of the page. What could it all mean? Hold me, I'm scared. AB

An email from LA Weekly's Edward R. Murrow-clone Nikki Finke reports that the William Morris Agency has hired rabid lawyer Bert Fields to "go after" the New York Post, according to agency sources currently gathered around the mailroom watercooler.

After my long (er, 24-hour) sojurn beyond the Mason-Dixon line, I returned yesterday afternoon to the cold, hard truth: UK Maxim editor Greg Gutfeld fucking owns the Huffington Post. For those of you who claim Gawker doesn't love anyone or anything, let it be known that we'd amorously dry-hump the Huffington Post so long as Gutfeld keeps kicking his internet game. To wit:

It's come to our attention that Radar, the "high-octane" magazine that continues to chug its way down the media track, exists in a realm beyond that of Gawker's self-flagellating obsession! In fact, we're hearing that there just might be a few copies of the first issue floating around for those oh-so-involved with Maer's BuzzBot.

The New York Times editorial page never shirks the Big Questions, and today it pronounces on a Long Island City reality-art thingamee at the Flux Factory called Novel: A Living Installation. The deal is a trio of aspiring fiction hands gget locked into isolated cells for 25 days until they emerge with completed novel manuscripts. And the Times being the Times, no artsy publicity stunt is too trivial to pontificate upon: part of the meaning of making a novel is commanding the time to do so and owning the workings of imagination, however they pace themselves.

No, they're not gone; Radar Trading Cards simply took a long weekend. (It was lovely at the beach, they report, if a bit chilly.) This time we're checking in on Radar's No. 3, deputy editor Chris Knutsen. Radar's designated low-key mensch, Knutsen is variously described as "a nice guy," "a good guy," and "a guy who has no pictures floating around on the web." He's a vet of The New Yorker—where, for a period, he oversaw Shouts & Murmurs, which means he's experienced in editing a recurring butt of hipsterati scorn—and book publishing, and he was managing editor of Radar 1.0. He snagged an articles-editor slot at GQ in the inter-Radar period, but he abandoned the Si life to sign back on with Maer for 2.0. Why take the jump? "How often do you get to start a magazine?" he justified to Keith Kelly. ("Well, at least twice, apparently," Kelly jabbed back.) The co-editor of a well-regarded anthology titled Committed: Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment, and Marriage, Knutsen is also the token straight man among Radar's top management. —JO

Wow. We've been so fixated on the preppy loucheness of New York magazine, we forgot how tumescent the rest of the New York media world has gotten—even the muckraking fiftysomethings at yon tribune of the dead counterculture, The Village Voice. Yes, children, spring is in the air, and the Voice's sap is definitely rising, to judge by reporter Aina Hunter's dispatch from a recovery school for johns in Brooklyn:

In a previous item, we carelessly referred to LA Weekly s Nikki Finke as a notorious crackpot. Upon further reflection (and a brief note from Ms. Finke) we ve come to realize that Nikki Finke is, in fact a former AP foreign correspondent in Moscow and London, Newsweek correspondent in Washington DC and Los Angeles, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, West Coast Editor for the New York Observer and then New York Magazine, etc. Furthermore, having strong opinions like she does, "sourcing those opinions with accurate journalism, and expressing them literately, does not make her a crackpot or notorious. It makes her a columnist with bonafides.

In fact, the more we think about it, the more we ve come to realize that not only is Nikki Finke not a notorious crackpot, she is in fact the Edward R. Murrow of alternative weekly papers that make most of their money off of the tranny ads in the back. Gawker regrets the error. Please don t cut us. AB

Just when you thought the world was boring, Perez Hilton, the diabolical blogger behind PageSixSixSix, makes the bold statement that all of our glossy tabs are beginning to look the same. Shocking, yes, we know. And just like sisters in a sorority, a pecking order has emerged amongst the sycophantic weeklies:

You might think that it's far too early in the great online B-list circle jerk known as The Huffington Post to single out individual contributors and entries for special acclaim. But you would, of course, be wrong: The sheer magnitude of thoughtless self-infatuation on display every moment on the Huffa-lator is simultaneously so exhilarating and so spiritually toxic that, based on a solid 15 minutes of copious online research, we proudly announce the Huffalumps, in recognition of a corpus of so vast and so fatuous that it may one day render Gawker utterly redundant. After the jump, the awards. MnG

Before everyone flips out about how inappropriate this headline is, they need to realize that Chocolate Hole's favorite couple met at a tsunami telethon. It's not tasteless, it's adorable! Also, it's perfectly apt: When we heard the news about the secret wedding, we instantly wished that our village would be wiped out by a tidal wave before we had to see them on the cover of People.

An epistemological question: If you hold a party celebrating something that doesn t exist yet, do you still get the free drinks? The small, blurry image you see above is an invitation to the launch of Radar. Leaving aside our rather tedious jokes doubting the eventual appearance of the publication, we re somewhat stumped by the choice of image for the invite: Does Michael Jackson represent the model for Radar s talent acquisition? Or is it simply symbolic of the fact that pretty soon Mort Zuckerman s going to be millions of dollars in the hole as well? AB

This week's Look Book provides you the opportunity to mock the door guy at Crobar, rather than the other way around. (Actually, if you're the sort of person who stands on line at Crobar you deserve exactly what you get, you status-obsessed twat.) After the jump, Sarah Gray, Caroline McCloskey, and Rakyesh Satyal tell intern Alexis why they'd keep this guy behind the velvet rope. Or whatever - we don't usually read this feature.

We turn our attention once again to The Huffington Post, which continues to impress with its roster of contributors: Walter Cronkite, Larry Gelbart, Jerry Brown Apparently, the idea is to give young people a feeling of what it was like to live in the seventies. But don't take our snide criticisms as the final word: Listen to what notorious crackpot Nikki Finke has to say. Actually, there's too much venom in here to give you a decent sampling. We'll just reprint the first two paragraphs in toto:

As you may or may not know by now, the LAT has finally freed its art and entertainment coverage (known as Calendarlive in the Times' inscrutable parlance) from the shackles of paid subscription. All citizens of the internets can now freely browse its resplendent offerings, such as this endlessly fascinating entry from a reporter's "web diary" (note: this is not a blog—it's impeccably spell-checked!) from Cannes: