Thanks to this week's sponsors, who help keep us in obnoxious softball tshirts. Want to help pick up our next post-game bar tab? Info here.

From the inbox, a reader longs for more:

There was apparently some important play going on here, but an intern brought Corona and we stopped watching.

No, seriously. We've been up since before 7 AM, wanting nothing more to post on this here web-log but, alas, our server ate its own small intestine and then crapped itself out. As such, we're just getting back online now.

Jesse: gotta say: i haven't watched a shuttle liftoff since, like, elementary school
Jessica: haha
Jesse: pretty cool
Jessica: when is it?
Jesse: just now
Jessica: oooh there it is
Jessica: cool
Jessica: so, so cool
Jesse: i'm feeling all proud to be an american, and whatnot
Jessica: i feel patriotic n shit
Jessica: hahahaha
Jesse: i should post this
Jessica: okay. indicate that our patriotism was simultaneous.
Jesse: i've always wanted to achieve simultaneous patriotism
Jessica: it's like we're in Kentucky.

So we're going to assume the fine folks at The Aristocrats did this on purpose:

• Another round of bombings is bad enough. Crappy media coverage makes it oh so much worse.
• Everyone knows about the speakeasy beneath La Esquina, but nobody knows if it's supposed to be a secret or not. One thing is certain: All this convoluted pre-drinks hoop-jumping is annoying.
• Anonyblogger JolieinNYC is outed, but not out. She says.
• And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true, says Laurel Touby. Especially if your dreams fixate on feathered boas.
• A dying publicist needs a liver. Preferably not one with cirrhosis, which, alas, rules out ours.
• Come on baby, light our fire. No, really. You firefighting stud in the calendar. Do it.
• Krucoff goes drinking with people he holds in contempt. And does so while reclining. You know, to make that night different from all others.
• NYT honcho Bill Keller reveals his penis envy.

A relieved thanks to this week's sponsors, who have protected us from subway bag checks by hiding our weed in one of those nifty fake cans of shaving cream. Interested in supporting our habits? More info here.

From our glittery bag of reader email:

You've probably noticed our recent media-softball obsession. So, too, have the good people of The Onion, who then went and challenged us to a game. There was lots of emailing back and forth, many schedules checked, and Wednesday, July 27, was settled upon as a date that worked for both the Onionians and Team Gawker Media.

This is the face of hard newsiness incarnate. Unknown outside the skeeve-infested circles of gossip-mongers, its name is Page Six, and it serves as the gossip column for the New York Post. (Incidentally, the Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who isn't even American.) Page Six, which eats only the kittens they choose not to drown, loves to set fire to your furniture while wearing last season's skeevy H&M. Page Six hates Live 8 and was thrilled to hear about what happened in Iraq this weekend. On their way to a vacation in North Korea, Page Six tried to kill a recently adopted Ethiopian baby. Word to Page Six: Watch your step, 'cause Brad Pitt ain't gonna have none of that.

"Gizmodo (a blog for the gadget-obsessed) and Gawker (a New York blog that covers celeb gossip, the publishing community, real estate, and other stimulation for water-cooler chit-chat) are driving serious traffic primarily on a word-of-mouth basis."
The Blogging Biz [Trend Central]

All about Gawker

Blogger Ken Layne discovers a poetry generator that takes words and phrases from websites. His result for Gawker:
Gawker stalker though I slammed the streets
where Loews 42nd St Bernards had just walked
over and husband, Harry Evans]. Also: said,
we have your afternoons with being cool.
[Ed. note� or so terribly sorry Wall Street: bearded and beautiful, She meant ,
she and see the title of
making impossible not thing AT the burning question,
I saw what people
Toby Young socialites mailing
list: [] Encounter with Dennis Miller
in the underground economy, euphoria circa 1993
When you corrections.]
�Anisa, 8 years old, P.
Poetry [KenLayne]

It's the Gawker version of a Super Bowl party: Tina 'n' tea. Or wine. Or whatever. Any restaurant or bar volunteering to host a Tina Brown talk show watching party tonight (or next week) gets a mention on Gawker. Someone should do it. Send to tips@gawker.com.

Gawker chosen as best of breed by the New York New Media Association. The site will be featured in NYNMA's Movers & Shakers series, as one of the organizations advancing the medium of online news.
NYNMA Events Calendar

At Gawker, two = trend. The NYT appears to have adopted the same rule for the Style section. Below is an article about the sudden rash of movies about publicistsrash meaning "Phone Booth" and "People I Know." "How did publicists become Hollywood's villains of choice?" the NYT asks, without a trace of irony. All publicists aren't bad, it points out. No, but if you're going to talk about publicists that aren't bad, don't reference uber-flack Pat Kinglsey. Kingsley's broken many a journalist over less-than-sychophantic interviews by, among other things, refusing to let them interview anyone else she representswhich would be half the entertainment industry.
Publicists, once again in the cross hairs [NYT]

Let me preface this by saying that we don't get a lot of hate mail. (Yes, I know. We're more surprised than you are.) And when we do get hate mail, I have a masochistic tendency to publish most of it.

Hellooooo, Austrailian people who are apparently visiting Gawker from The Age. Hope you like Nicky Hilton, Tina Brown, and all things New York. A clarification: we do not have pictures of Catherine Zeta Jones half-naked, pregnant, and smoking on the site. We never did. We linked to another site that had Catherine Zeta Jones half-naked, pregnant, and smoking, but the link doesn't work anymore. We don't know why the link doesn't work anymore, because it's not our site. So for the people emailing and asking, "Why did you take the images down?": the answer is, we never had them up.

Gawker intern/Black Table contributor Lindsay Robertson has now accumulated a healthy group of stalkers at Craig's List, thanks to her weekly Craig's List roundup. The people impersonating her are the creepiest. Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsay! Everyone wants to be Lindsay! Just as well, though. Lindsay may soon be giving up her Craig's List duties to pen an 800 word book proposal for a novel about a young gossip column intern who's consistently abused by her bossa bitchy editor from Alabama who demands that her martinis be mixed just so. Let the bidding war begin!
The week in Craig [Black Table]