Yeah, well, I don't think the advertising is helping, either.

The metal plate in Gawker's collective head is buzzing about Post weekend gossip monkey, Elisa Lipsky-Karasz, who's rumored to be leaving her weekend column in favor of the safe confines of Women's Wear Daily. We hear she's heading over to the Eye column, where she and Jacob Bernstein will play with lip gloss all day and decorate the Scoop column with pretty hearts and flowers.

Writing in the Observer, Ralph Gardner Jr. considers the tragic downside of so many famous people dying these days: the excessive real estate they consume on the obituary page:

We've been told that some folks at the Times were none too impressed with The Most Emailed Story Ever, Jenny Eight's treatise on dudes hanging out. (Don't you see? This is what she wants. It's a trap. She loves the attention, yearns for it. Don't give it to her, please. Please stop writing now. Stop. Please. Oh Lord, why can't we stop?)

Yesterday, Page Six penned a peppy item about The Onion surviving death-by-lawsuit after it ran a certain headline ("Dying Boy Gets Wish: To Pork Janet Jackson"). But what of the revenues at what Page Six terms a "thriving business"? A brief history of The Onion's on-the-record fortunes:

The Hollywoodland blog digs out its collection of "vintage" Premiere magazines (circa its 1987 launch, featuring Dragnet on the cover), which yields such time capsule delights as full-page ads for Ishtar (the go-to talk show monologue punchline of the late 80's) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, as well as a development report on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which was finally dragged onto movie screens by George Clooney three years ago. More fun than five minutes in the closet with the Virgin Connie Swail!

Sunny and warm, with a 30% chance of Ratzinger.

Sorting through the charges over whether author Michael Chabon unfairly makes shit up in one of his oft-delivered lectures, that lately rarest of media beasts surfaces: NYT reportage of an intra-McSweeney's feud. Says Dave Eggers of former staffer (and described serial fabricator) Paul Maliszewski,

After repeatedly getting bumped for marginally more important news stories (like, oh, the death of the Pope), pundit Ann Coulter finally makes the cover of Time this week. Drudge, ever-alert, smells foul play:

In her weekly dissection of the Times Book Review, Intern Alexis discovers midwestern commoners on the Letters page! And they're talking about pachyderm poo! No doubt crippled by the overwhelming sense of shame and guilt that comes from reading about elephant dung, Alexis cleans her conscience the only way she can: With a dab of Henry James and a dash of Bach. After the beloved jump, her highbrow review.

A Times UK interview with Matt Drudge has us truly appreciating the British sense of skewy humour:

If you're anything like us, you avoided taking advantage of any "New York City Cultural Events" this bright and sunny weekend. (Unless wandering around Economy Candy for munchies counts as a cultural event.) Specifically, we dodged the first two days of a certain week-long literary extravaganza, informally referred to as The PEN Festival of International Literature You Only Pretend to Have Read.

After reportedly blasting three "solid shots" during batting practice at the Newspaper Association of America's field trip to San Francisco's SBC Park, Cond cleanup hitter S.I. Newhouse Jr. spoke with E&P's Greg Mitchell about his prowess in the cage: "The 'clear' is great, but the 'cream' is shit" "I've played some baseball." Funny, he looks so much thinner on his rookie card.
Shots Heard 'Round NAA [Editor & Publisher]

The tortoise finally comes 'round:

If tsunami coverage served as the first dance for "citizen journalism" (fuck, did we really just use that phrase?), then last Friday marked the point in the party where things got a little out of hand. That day, photos of taken by a digicam-toting fan in the stands at Fenway Park hit the web, getting us up close and personal with Yankee Gary Sheffield as he sparred with a fan in the right-field bleachers.

After coming across yet another autism article in the Times (this time in the book reviews), we're genuinely wondering: which came first, the epidemic or its media?

After last week's much-ballyhooed return to Tina's raison d'etre, the royal marriage, last night's episode of Topic A left Henry the Intern feeling a little deflated. Perhaps it was the continued Hillary Clinton speculation that raped young Henry's soul; more likely, though, that it was the roundtable discussion of post-menopausal power streaks. His weekly report follows.

Speaking of inaccuracies, the Gawker Media Ethics Hotline in Pseudo-Journalism has received a flood of tips (okay, one) pointing to another Times writer who makes the occasional fuck-up: TV critic and walking Ivy League advertisement Alessandra Stanley. (At least we think we remember that she went to an Ivy League School. Yale or Harvard, maybe UCLA. Couldn't be bothered to Google it.)

So who the hell do these Entertainment Weekly dictators think they are? Democracy extends to celebrity babies, you know.

Today's Page Six has a nice little piece on Observer film critic Rex Reed, who famously offended just about everyone with his review of the Korean action flick Oldboy, in which he wrote, "What else can you expect from a nation weaned on kimchi, a mixture of raw garlic and cabbage buried underground until it rots, dug up from the grave and then served in earthenware pots?" P6 then goes on to list more internationally offensive comments from Reed, (barely) citing this piece from the Village Voice as their primary source.