Today, Daily News-boy Lloyd Grove trashes NY mag's Intelligencer column, disses Page Six, and calls Cindy Adams a plagiarist. We had assumed, in light of Monday's NY Mag gossip story, that the Lowdown columnist would lay low for a while — the story didn't make him look great (though neither did anyone else, really).

But! It's the beginning of the slow season, the months that columnists have to keep a legger in the Hamptons to find out who's badmouthing whom on Gin Lane and which fashion designer's house-warming parties are strewn with sexually-aggressive ecstasy-popping semi-hustlers. (Whoops, I strayed into blind-item-land there!) We're sure Lloyd's lone assistant, Hud Morgan, the super-preppy Robert Chambers of gossip, is already busting ass to keep Lloyd's boat afloat.

Perhaps with the fisticuffs-loving Ian Spiegelman removed from Page Six, and the Intelligencer column being de-snarked, Lloyd thinks he can take them down. But: gossip columns, just like Orwell's England, thrive only on perpetual war. If someone wins, what do we have left?
More servings of the Post, toasted [NYDN]