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A fish shape appeared on Paumanok on Friday morning, carried in on high tide. A dolphin: It had started from the sea and made its way into Brooklyn from without, working along the wood and concrete embankments toward the river head, and by mid-morning it was paused by one of Gowanus's empty lots, surfacing and plunging out of and in to the mucoid black. A gathering crowd of locals and police watched it from the shore; it was hyperventilating and bleeding from its fin. Biologists from the Riverhead Foundation arrived. The next high tide wouldn't be until 7 p.m.

This is why we can't have nice things anymore. Do you see that majestic beast? Well that's as close as you'll ever get to seeing a Javan rhino because now they're extinct (in Vietnam).

After the recent unexpected death of its namesake founder, the new owners of Don Hill's closed the downtown nightlife institution for good on Monday night. Developers are going to turn it into a condo. Welcome to the new downtown Manhattan!

R.I.P. to Chicago's Cabrini-Green, the single most notorious housing project in America. Not a good idea, after all.

And another weird New York institution bites the dust: The Off-Track Betting Corporation, the state-owned horse betting business, has finally closed after years of threatening to do so. Fifty parlors were shut down and 1,000 people were laid off.

Quadrangle Group, which was not long ago America's most prominent media-focused private equity firm, is folding (in its current form, at least). The reason for its downfall is the same man largely responsible for its success: Steven Rattner.

Today's sad news is that nine of the businesses on the Coney Island boardwalk lost their licenses, including Shoot the Freak, the game where anyone could shoot paintballs at a living human for $5. Life will never be the same.

The Jay Leno Show died today. It was five months old. Tonight, a half-dead zombie version of the show briefly rose from its deathbed to celebrate its own demise. This was as fun to watch as you might expect.

It is with heavy hand and heavy heart that we inform you today of the death of Miramax. The once-proud indie studio was 31 years old.

Has it come to this? If one thing seemed solid in media it was that the combination of Fox and Reality, say what you will about them, were the last sure thing for ratings gold.

Hearing that Gourmet Magazine has died is like learning about the end of Webster's Dictionary, the Washington Monument or Growing Pains re-runs; one less venerable pillar of civilization—even one ignored for years—leaves our world a little less solid.

So you think you can spot a gay in the wild? Oh really! Because according to the New York Post, male sexual ambiguity is rendering mere mortals incapable of such callous judgmental accuracy. What exactly is this world coming to?!

Conde Nast, Manhattan's most lavish magazine publisher, was once able to subsidize expensive and monumental magazine launches with newspaper profits. But now the last of its kind, Portfolio, is dead.

Pretty-boy cottage blog mogul David Hauslaib has shuttered his flagship gossip site, Jossip. It had been for sale since last March, but apparently no one wants to buy a blog in these worrisome times.

If the Beatrice Inn were to close forever, rather than just temporarily, what would we say at its funeral? Because we're feeling wistful this afternoon, we're going to attempt something of a eulogy.

First, they came for Zima, and we said nothing. Sparks, the poor hipster's cocaine substitute, is no more. The disgusting caffeinated malternative beverage was six years old.

If ever there was a grim picture of the current financial clusterfuck, it's the once artsy (Björk! sigur rós!), hip, and rich island nation wonderland of Iceland, which fell into cataclysmic economic failure earlier this month. And it happened pretty much overnight. Since the three major banks collapsed under crippling debt and a plummeting currency, job loss has been widespread—the architecture industry, for example, has seen some 75% of its work force laid off in the past few weeks. Now the seemingly peaceful population has devolved into an angry, violent mob, with a gay "troubadour" named Hordur Torfason leading the charge against the government.

Do you feel that tingly spark in the air today, especially as you near Times Square? It's because Total Request Live, MTV's long-running afterschool music video special is coming to an end after ten years, signing off on Sunday with a special big send-off bash. Yes, one of the last remaining programs on the cable net to still air videos (albeit at truncated lengths and often interrupted by shrieking teenagers) will be no more, ceding like everything else to the Date My Moms and Hills of the world. Ironic, because in some ways, actually, the top 10 videos of the day countdown show helped create the new MTV landscape that eventually came to usurp it. The draw of TRL was never really the actual videos. It was the spectacle view of dizzying Times Square, the live-ness, the celebrity appearances, the affable and comfortably hip hosts (Carson Daly! And, um, Jesse Camp! And that girl from One Tree Hill!) It was really about the lifestyle of liking music, the thrill of just being thrilled, the ecstasy and immediacy and bittersweet fever dances of being a kid and out of school and having stumbled upon this great big infinite thing called Personality (I like this song—I am rock! You like that video—you are pop!). That celebration of the culture of music, rather than the music itself, has spilled over into the network's current top hits, like The Hills. That particular reality dollop of non-fat Cool Whip expertly employs the hit songs of tomorrow to evoke, along with the swirling cameras, a soaring and sprawling range of feelings. Like music usually is in real life, music on MTV now serves as the illustrative background to the people dating and getting made and dancing and competing and existing in the fore. And we've TRL to blame/thank for that—for adding a bit of shape to the world as it's seen through the MTV lens. It said "here we are, set at on all sides by movies and television and pretty people and hormones, and here, in brief, is the soundtrack to accompany all of it. And you chose it." And those huge picture windows overlooking the crowds and lights and glitz, through which we could look out and others could look in! A glass case of emotion! !!! Click to view