Mr. Black, the Noho basement bar for all your gay dance party needs, has a resident Ass. More specifically, the Ass is that of their cocktail waiter, whose buttocks flap freely in the humid night. Bare cheeks in a gay bar, big whoop. But a photoblog documenting the nightly activities of the Ass? Portraits of the Ass posing with drunken, scary clown-faced patrons? Regular Friday night coverage of the Ass reveling in its Ass-yness? Yes, it's certainly something we can get behind.

The Corco-devil (we really just love the sound of it and resist change) has been hard at work, it seems — and not just ensuring that no pleb will ever live in Manhattan or preparing for her new television projects. She's blogging about it, too. More disturbingly, she writes in the voice of an imaginary mouse and thus refers to herself in the third person: "Barbara (proprietress of said pink house), will be moving to a brand new office in West Chelsea next week." Oh, how adorable.

Wonderful news. A mere six months — nearly to the day — since we got him fired from Conde Nast, where he was a freelance market researcher, Gawker mascot Andrew Krucoff finally has a new job. He'll be the web content developer at the 92 Street Y, which means he'll be writing for the Y's blog and also working on web marketing efforts. Most important, though, it means we'll perhaps finally stop feeling guilty about this whole thing, and that maybe Krucoff's Mom won't hate us anymore.

Gay blogger Andy Towle (by which mean he runs a blog on gay topics, not that he's a blogger who happens to like boys) today answers a question that has plagued us all at one point or another: How do you possibly get the Chelsea boys to pay attention to you? Turn out it's easy: Ride an enormous white horse down Eighth Avenue. Duh.

Um, duh.

• Hearst mags get move-in dates for new tower, where the cafeteria will serve sushi five days a week. [NYP]
• Four Time Inc. mags will move their TOCs to the first page, sponsored by Philips Electronics. Finally, the cure magazines have been searching for. [WSJ]
• Housekeeping no longer so good for EIC Ellen Levine? [WWD]
• High-end book pubisher Rizzoli looks to enter U.S. magazine market with a title that's "Time Out meets Star magazine with N mero kind of fashion," whatever the hell that might mean. [FWD]
• Critics should stop worrying so much about the Times and focus more on the sins of local TV news, says Brian Montopoli. Coming soon from Public Eye: Is your weatherman really jolly?! [Public Eye/CBS]
• More Times blogs: Now covering state politics. (Oh, shit. Were we not supposed to be talking about the-paper-that-cannot-be-named anymore? Sorry.) [The Politicker/NYO]
• Elizabeth Spiers popularized the word "snarky" when she worked for Gawker. It's a testament to our precocity, then, to have been miraculously using it even before blogs existed. [Downtown Express]

Yesterday we reported that publisher Morgan Friedman had somewhat unceremoniously removed Michael "Malice" Krechmer* from his position as editor of Overheard in New York, the successful weblog that has spawned books and spin-offs. Today Friedman clarifies to us that he's the straight-up owner of the site, and explains why Malice-Krechmer was let go:

We were forwarded an odd email this morning from Morgan Friedman, publisher and co-owner of the incredibly successful Overheard in New York:

• Assuming Tom Cruise does eat placenta, he learned how to serve it courtesy of Vice. It's like Food & Wine for the flesh-eating hipster set, after all. [Viceland]
• How bad are things getting in the world of big-budget beauty pageants? Bad enough that Miss USA contestants are doing photo-ops Mars 2112. [Getty Images]
• The FreeJaredPaulStern blog, dedicated to saving the reporter from allegations of extortion, throws in the towel. Sometimes people just don't want to be helped. [FJPS]
• Another reason to fear bloggers. [CNN]
• Heeding the call of impatient burger lovers everywhere, Shake Shack gets its own webcam so that you can effectively time your visits for more efficient, heart-clogging consumption. [Gothamist]
• The legendary Algonquin Round Table gets the musical treatment; Dorothy Parker rolls over in her grave. [Reuters]
• We've no idea if this is legitimate, but downtown auteur Marc Ecko claims to have tagged Air Force One. Update: OK, not legitimate. [Still Free]
• Village Voice nightowl Tricia Romano comes clean about her swag, none of which strikes us as particularly enviable. [VV]
• Natasha Lyonne, pull your ass out of rehab and come pick up your shit. [CL]

There are many reasons for homelessness. Many are sad, some tragic, and a few eminently understandable. A there-but-for-the-grace-of- God woman appeared in night court last night; unable to afford her apartment after she lost her job, she'd been arrested and charged with trespassing for sleeping on a Gramercy Park roof.

Discovered while self-Technorati'ing:

Dude, they're still handing out blogger book deals?

The Times instituted a new tic last spring, explaining each time the paper granted a source anonymity why it had done so. Over the weekend, the investigative blog Muckraked looked back at the first three months of 2006 and tallied up the different reasons given for anonymity. (Caroline Miller got there first, undertaking a smiliar effort in the Observer last August, and we'd link to it if it were possible to be linked to.) Now, in theory, reporters should grant anonymity as a last resort, only when the information is otherwise unobtainable. That, in turn, means that they should pressure sources as much as possible to speak on the record; the only times it'd be reasonable to allow anonymity, under that theory, is when something real and serious — a job, one's wellbeing — is at stake.

Yesterday was ex-Politicker Ben Smith's first day at the Daily News. And already, it seems, he's making friends. From the personal blog of his fellow Newser, Derek Rose:

As the Observer Mobsters reported yesterday, next week's New York mag will prostrate itself before four "Brainy Young Things," the "youthful, erudite whippersnappers" who had recently taken over some of "America's oldest and most venerable magazines. They're James Bennet of The Atlantic, Franklin Foer of the New Republic, The Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, and Roger Hodge of Harper's. We got a quick preview of the text, and we admit we're intrigued, especially by a quote from Hodge:

Click to enlarge.

After two long, dry months of waiting, our thirst has been quenched: Gawker alum Elizabeth Spiers launches Dealbreaker, her Wall Street blog, today. The initial report? Morning roundups, amusing eBay finds, Scientology, a columnist named Muffie — the usual. It's expectedly witty in a financial sort of way (knowing little to nothing about finance, we're just assuming that "sort of way" exists).

Big & Sharp blogger Kyle du Ford is, inexplicably, profoundly saddened by the demise of Cargo. But he's found a silver lining:

We know it is not particularly cool for those of us in New York to care about what goes on across the Hudson River, unless perhaps it's happening within the city limits of Montclair. But if you'll forgive a Jersey native for a moment: Sharpe James dropped out of the Newark mayoral race less than an hour ago, and that's sort of amazing. Especially after his high-drama entry a week and a half ago, when he put on a tank top, a straw hat, and rode a police bike across Newark City Hall to deliver his petitions. It ends an era in Jersey's biggest city.

• Will Katie go to CBS? We continue to not really have any idea. [USAT]
• What did Bonnie Fuller learn from getting fired from Conde Nast? "Blatant disloyalty is never the smart course of action." Who knew? [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen thinks — hopes! — that the celebrity moment might finally be over. [NYM]
• Elizabeth Spiers is starting a blog about Wall Street. Also, she used to work here. [IWantMedia]
• Esquire has a funny spoof in its new issue written by — who else? — a Foer brother, in this case champion memorizer Joshua. [WP]
• Simon Dumenco isn't sure newspapers will survive, and he can't believe it took the Times until now to get rid of the printed stock tables. [Ad Age]
• Jim Surowiecki thinks newspapers will survive, and he can't believe it took them until now to get rid of printed stock tables. [NYer]
• WWD media reporter Jeff Bercovici breakfasts on spelt toast with almond butter and a home-brewed cappuccino. [Jossip]
• Syd Schanberg quit his job as the Village Voice's Press Clips columnist just after the New Times deal closed, feeling that the company was no longer interested in media criticism. Friday he won an award for his Voice media criticism. [VV]