A reader writes, "So Fisherspooner played in Seattle last night and sure enough I saw one skinny guy wearing red aviator glasses and a "I fucked Anna Wintour" tee shirt. I think it was homemade. It probably was. This is Seattle after all."

About [Vogue Editor] Anna Wintour's new assistant: "...She just got the job [yesterday]...She is from San Francisco, tall, thin, funky dressing with a good sense of style. (a real shocker there, huh?) No eating disorder to report.

· "2:45 PM THURSDAY - Anna Wintour zeta-jonesing on a McVeggie at the gaudy, fou-fou McDonald's on 42nd btw 8th & b'way wearing powder blue Old Navy summer dress and beaded Pearl River flip-flops. Pausing in front of Madame Tussaud's mistaken for mannequin by mid-western tourists. Poses for photos. Continues to AMC 25 where she catches matinee showing of Bringing Down The House. Refreshment stand clerk reassigned to soda machine after asking if she'd like butter on popcorn. Laughs (snickers?) inappropriately several times. Lose track of her as she sneaks into screening of What A Girl Wants."
· "Last nite- 04/24- at about 3am. Gore Vidal was in the bathroom at The Cock getting head from a 50-something Japanese guy Issey Miyaki. He flipped me off and then went back to degrading the man for his overly aggressive NYC real estate "trophy" purchases in the mid 80's. I know that it was Vidal because he used the word 'ignominious' whilst getting a blow job."

There has to be a game we can play with all the Anna-in-the-elevator sightings. C'mon! Help me out! Send suggestions to tips@gawker.com. This one was actually pretty good: "Old Anna sighting: My friend, who used to be a bookings editor at Conde Nast, ran into Anna in the elevator (of the old building on the east side)once. just before the doors closed on the two of them, a chunky older man jumped in. the man saw anna and gushed, 'oh my god, i love you!' then continued to drone on about how fabulous she was (while she stared straight ahead, unblinking behind her sunglasses) until the elevator stopped at his floor and he got off. then Anna turned to my friend and said: 'I detest small talk and I loathe lunatics.' True story."

"I am terribly amused by the note that your Conde Nast mole [Ed. noteActually, we have several Conde Nast moles.] sent in regarding his/her (perhaps I should just assume it's a her) Anna Wintour sighting. Despite her outsize persona, she is an employee of this company, and rides the elevators with the rest of the plebians. Were there a VIP elevator, I'm sure sightings of this elegant, bony creature would be fewer and further between, but there she is, when not in Europe viewing the collections or courting high society in Houston or whatever else it is that she does. She's bizarre, certainly, and people do love to hate her (and perhaps some of this is well-deserved) but personally I think the most objectionable editor in this building is Graydon Carter."

An applicant for the assistant's job, perhaps? "I ran into Anna Wintour yesterday morning on my way to work. After days of walking by the conde nast building at 9 am everymorning on 42nd street -with no sightings- I thought I might never get to see her. Not soyesterday I decided to walk 43rd street and low and behold... there she was. Promptly at nine in a chinese inspired prada spring 03 skirt with white manolos and silver leather trench coat entering on the other side of the building. She was walking very slow and looking all around her. I couldnt help but smile and stare. She's gorgeous, and looked very frightened of the street. Perhaps it's not that she's so frightening, it's that people hate her because of their own insecurities. She fascinates the hell out of me, and I respect her a great deal."

More from the Conde Nast elevator: "While I'll admit it did get me all a-flutter at the time, it did not quite occur to me that an uneventful elevator ride with Anna was Gawker worthy news, but I suppose, times being what they are... A week or two ago, stumbling into 4 X^2 (I swear, I didn't make that up, it was in the orientation video) about half past nine, my blurry vision suddenly snapped into focus on the pair of big, dark sunglasses on the small, immaculately dressed woman in the center of the elevator lobby. As if to solidify my fast jelling fears, she removed her glasses and said 'Hello, dah-ling' to a well dressed middle aged gentleman walking into the lobby behind me. Before I could beat a hasty retreat, the elevator light right next to us flashed green, and it was time to enter what I feared was the marble lined coffin of my career. Quickly, I remembed that a) my position is roughly 4,384 degrees of seperation from Ms. Wintour, org chart wise, b) my relatively decent overcoat would mask whatever other fasion faux pas I happened to be sporting, and c) I'm a guy and what the fuck am I doing being such a pussy?

Shameless but relevant self-promotion: I interviewed Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada (a roman a clef about Vogue editor Anna Wintour) on Monday for Salon. Lauren, on the book: "It's a beach read; this is not great literature. We all know that."
When personal assistants attack! [Salon]

A Condé Nast mole writes, "After X months with this company, I finally had my first Anna Wintour encounter. Sadly, this isn't much in the way of gossip, as I ran into her pretty much where one would expect to run into her - in the elevator bank in the lobby of 4 Times Square. I was getting off the elevator, she was getting on. We made brief eye contact, and I was a little frightened. Despite her small stature (and yeah, she's TINY), she really does have an imposing presence.

The Observer reports that Vogue's Aimee Cho sent out a mass email indicating that Anna Wintour was looking for a new assistant. "The magazine, she said, was looking for people 'who have not read The Devil Wears Prada'" (Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about her year at Vogue as Anna Wintour's assistant.) [Disclosure: I interviewed Lauren on Monday. The article will run tomorrow at Salon.com]
Off the record [Observer]

The Observer profiles Felix Tagliarinithe "grill guy" at the Condé Nast cafeteria who recently got moved to the sandwich station. Felix is something of a ladies' man and some speculate that his deposition may have more to do with jealous male staffers than a burger-related contretemps with (Vogue Editor) Anna Wintour. Or maybe he just wanted to learn how to make sandwiches.
Condé Nast's deposed king of the grill [Observer]

The Gothamist is starting a campaign against The Devil Wears Prada author and former Vogue employee, Lauren Weisberger. "Gothamist thinks that Weisberger is dumb as a brick for thinking that she'd have a byline right out of school. And, Christ, you can't wake up to get to work early and make a good impression in order to try and move higher in the pecking order? At a competitive, cutthroat company?" Our take is a slight variation on that theme: How naive do you have to be to sign up to work for [Vogue Editor] Anna Wintour, expecting that she's going to be nice to you? She's Anna Wintour, for god's sake! Of course she's going to abuse you! It's her job!
Gothamist hates Lauren Weisberger [Gothamist]

The Gothamist also reviewed Kate Betts' review. Their take: "Weisberger suffers from young-New-Yorker's-syndrome: thinking she's the first person to have a shitty boss."
Wintour of her discontent [Gothamist]

Kate Betts, the former Editor-in-Chief of Harper's Bazaar, reviews The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger's roman-a-clef about working at Vogue under editor Anna Wintour. Betts tears into Weisberger, criticizing her for the character's (read: Weisberger's) superiority complex: "Andrea makes no bones about the fashion business being beneath her, or that her true calling is not to be fetching tall lattes for Anna/Miranda but to be supplying high-minded prose for The New Yorker."

A friendly spy writes, "I live a half block from [Vogue Editor] Anna Wintour's sullivan st townhouse, and she's havin a partie. And not like the Gawker party where they buzz you up and you throw your coat on the floor. At anna's, there was a woman outside the front door in a really nice suit holding a list and a cell phone, two impossibly large bouncers standing between her, the street, and the front door to the townhouse, and a short line down the sidewalk."

As mentioned earlier, we've decided to change our corporate motto from "if you can't say anything nice about people, start your own weblog" to "everyone is happy, pretty, and smart in their own special way." I know the similarity is confusing, as the differences are quite subtle. On that note"Random Nice Things About People" by Gawker Editor, Liz Smith:
· David Gest and Liza Minelli: you say "dysfunctional, fucked-up relationship"; I say "highly-rated made-for-TV movie."
· Miramax chief, Harvey Weinstein: big cuddly ass-kicking teddy bear.
· Vogue Editor, Anna Wintour: Oh, to have her smooth freshly-botoxed skin!
· Catherine Zeta-Jones: How does she stuff her face with cake like that, and still manage to stay so thin? Amazing!
· Designer Zac "Perfect" Posen: the trust fund only enhances his obvious talent.
· Nicky and Paris Hilton: (Cat)walking and talking at the same time! How many other beautiful hotel-fortune heiresses can do that? Not many!

New York Magazine just turned 35, which means it's roughly five years away from running off with a leggy underage blonde and blaming it on an existential crisis and/or the price of GE when the trading floor last closed. As part of their "celebration," they've put together a list of "100 People Who Changed New York" that includes a few of our contemporary favorites and a few "classics":
· IVAN BOESKY, arrested Reagan-era arbitrageur. Had three phones in his car; still got caught. Quote: "Immoral is probably wrong...I prefer the word unethical." A cautionary tale.
· TINA BROWN, editor. Carp, carpTina's New Yorker doesn t look so bad these days.
· CALVIN KLEIN, designer, Latrell Sprewell interlocutor. Billboard pioneer made you look at the label. From Brooklyn.
· DONALD TRUMP, fortunate son, builder, tabloid headline. Trump this, Trump that. The name itself is onomatopoeia.
· HARVEY WEINSTEIN, neo-maverick film producer. No him, no power omelette at Bubby s
· ANNA WINTOUR, editor, Vogue. Bringing fashionable chill to the masses.
100 people who changed New York [NY Mag]

Thursday. 03.20.03. Thirteen hundred hours. I have successfully infiltrated the Conde Nast cafeteria. Over the course of the last few weeks, I have spent countless secondsentire minutes, evenin preparation for this mission. The careful transmission of multiple electronic mail messages to people on "the inside," the establishment of a plausible cover ("lunch"), and careful analysis of the enemy's behavioral patterns have paved the way for what will prove to be my most ambitious espionage operation yet.

[LookOnline]

Another reader: "This is a bit off-track from your Wintour story, but when I was working there as an intern at the end of 2001, I had actually seen shoes pointed toward the toilet in the women's room on the same floor as the cafeteriawhich explains how they're unnaturally so emaciated."