• Yes, yes, yes, we know: A giant Popsicle melted in Union Square yesterday. Please stop emailing now. [Gothamist]
• After fighting a losing fight with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Upper East Side's famous Beekman Theater is closing Sunday. We're told it's featured in a film by Woody Allen, but we know nothing of his work. [The New York Opinion]
• A tip to customer-service folks: When you're going to fuck with someone, probably best not to make it a media macher who has worked at more publications than we read — and especially one who has a popular blog. [BuzzMachine]

• Apparently finding Jake Dobkin as irresistible as we do, David Bowie — yes, that David Bowie — shows up at Movable Hype. [Daily Refill]
• The Blottered Boys report on John Hodgman's Little Gray Book lecture on how to commit the perfect crime without reporting at all on how to commit the perfect crime. [Blottered]
• Seemingly skeevy and potentially pederastic young-adult novelist Bennett Madison seeks posse of high schoolers for "research" purposes. And, no, kids, he says he won't buy you beer. [Bennett, Thou Are Loosed]
• Didn't hear enough about Hello Deli owner and Letterman neighbor Rupert Gee in the '90s? Here's the moment you've been waiting for. [Gothamist]

FishbowlLA, apparently, was wondering about trend stories. Or, really, about the trends in the trend stories. Are they real? Where do they come from? And, especially, how do Times writers find out about them? Fishbowl, it seems, was particularly concerned by Zoe Wolff's piece in last Thursday's Gay Styles section, the front-pager on the allegedly new trend of pre-marriage couples therapy, based on "Erica, 30, a screenwriter in Manhattan," and her fianc . Fishbowl suspected that Wolff was merely writing about what was going on in her friends' lives.

To those of you who are used to seeing nuggets of your internet goodness regularly reprinted in Page Six or reinterpreted in New York mag, the following will come as no surprise. For the rest of you innocent waifs, however, it's time to realize that your trusted journalists rely on the most questionable of sources:

• A novel idea for improving cabs: Make the drivers run into each other less frequently. [Grubbykid.com]
• Items edited from Times's Sunday Styles gay-or-straight sidebar chart: favorite periodical, favorite blog, and favorite thing your ass. [TMFTML]
• How'd we not already catch the latest effort from the Krucoff Media Empire? Blottered is here. At least until he gives up on it. [Blottered]

• Entertainment Weekly launched a blog last week, snubbing Jeff Jarvis.
• People named Jason Mulgrew the hottest bachelor blogger last week, snubbing Ron Mwangaguhunga.

• New IFC Center promises free lunch to attendees after today's noon screening of Me and You and Everyone We Know. Runtime is 90 minutes, plus trailers, so you've still got a half-hour to sneak in. [The Reeler]
• Finally, a reason to read (or at least to accept the offer of) the Times's new Marketplace tabloid: Slim chance you might get a free Metrocard. [Manhattan Offender]
• Manhattan children should be beaten. Frequently. [Manda_Land]
• Even at test screenings for movie based on best-selling books — in this case, Everything Is Illuminated post-movie surveys ask if viewers would prefer to see the ending changed. [Depressed Reader of Depressing Books]

Because, like us, you probably have the attention span of an amphetamine-addled gnat, we just wanted to remind you that bus-riding actress Rosie O'Donnell is still blogging, and she's ready to take her james-joyce-as-e.e.-cummings prose to the always pressing issue of CNN sorta-anchor Aaron Brown:

• To some, apparently, the five-second rule applies even on the subway. [Tien Mao's Little Read Book]
• One could argue it's redundant to grammar-cop a neighborhood that is itself grievously misdefined, but, still, all those extra apostrophes in Coney Island really are unforgivable. [Banterist]
• When Alex Balk sets out to test his hypothesis, we want to be his research assistants. [TMFTML]
• David Patrick Columbia goes to Buckingham Palace, where he becomes likely the first person ever to describe Prince Charles as "looking impeccable." [New York Social Diary]

And thank God for that.

• Turns out even corporate lawyers have as much contempt for summer associates as the rest of us do. Especially when said summer associates are drunkenly jumping into the Hudson. [Opinionistas]
• Where we grew up, we would have called it UPenn. But if Murray Hill works for you as the real-world manifestation of JDate, go for it. [Mariana Keyes]
• Thank God for blogs. How else would we know when Bill Murray spanks a fan? [The Brazilian Muse]
• A once-powerful bloc starting its descent into orgy of mutual recrimination: Scooterists. [Atlantic & Bond via Curbed]

• The Rent Guidelines Board is holding hearings today and tomorrow on this year's proposed rent increases for stabilized apartments. Tenants, of course, will be there to protest the proposed hikes. Show up, tell a protester what you pay each month, watch him go into cardiac arrest, and then take over his lease. [Gothamist]
• Attention, Harper's: Canada is a big country, or at least so says one reader. [emdashes]
• Karen Finley: West Side Stadium rejection is payback to Bloomie for forcing the GOP convention on the city. Sounds fair to us. [HuffPost]
• Now The Corsair weighs in on the slapfest among Kurt Andersen, Radar, the lovely Phoebe Eaton, and — a little bit — us. If this gets any more incestuous, we'll be forced to move to West Virginia. [The Corsair]

• The Observer's Ben Smith, devastated, we're sure, that he wasn't invited to Emma Bloomberg's wedding, hacks into her wedding website instead. [Politicker]
• Tourist shot while shopping at Broadway and 29th — which calls attention to lack of good name for that neighborhood. [Gothamist]
• Clever wordplay or idle coincidence? Andrew Hearst reads the Times much too closely. [Panopticist]

Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis videocasts his flight from 30,000 feet: "I can take my webcam here and show you around the plane, I guess... That's the plane." It's the new media revolution, people.

Guess Amish in the City didn't quite help the economy like they had hoped.

Ah, the things that academics who are too bored for any more disc golf or Minesweeper will come up with. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released its "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond" study, which claims to help us come closer to understanding ... um ... well, we're not exactly sure. The study looked at 40 "influential" blogs and their impact on mainstream culture.

· A new study on web-logs finds 32 million people can be wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.[Business 2.0]
· What happens when a blog meets trucker hat? Sky falls, sharks jump, and Denton smiles. Some of us, however, struggle to hold back tears. [Adrants]
· Blogarajah Jeff Jarvis leaves Advance.net to change the world with About.com and the New York Times' TimesSelect team. Pony up the fifty bucks, and you can see how he does it. [Buzzmachine]

·Think you have an eating disorder? You probably do! So get over your anorexia, and train like a competive eater. [Black Table]
·What s a housing map? Don t know, but if it will knock $300 off the rent, we re listening. [omg]
· The blog-on-blog wildness at Standard Deviance is quoted in Time Magazine. Rejoice! There's hope for us all — or, like, the exact opposite. [Standard Deviance]

China has 1.3 billion people, but only one who's crazy enough to want to be the next...We'll let Wired News say it:

We bet you thought we'd totally ignore Sunday's Times story on Nick Denton's it's not a media empire media empire because we were afraid of biting the hand that signs our paychecks, didn't you? Well, you're wrong - Nick doesn't sign the paychecks: He has Lockhart personally deliver those rolls of quarters fresh from the bank. Also, we ignored the story mainly because it's the same thing you see all the time: Evil British business genius denies that he's making money on his evil British business. Our objection to the piece was more aesthetic than anything else: Please, art directors of the world, we're begging you, make this the last fucking article about blogging where the subjects sit around with their laptops, okay? Why not try something new and interesting? Something like Denton sitting in a chair with a big waxed moustache cackling wickedly as Lockhart offers scraps of stale bread to the assembled employees. You know, something that really tells the story. Thanking you in advance, AB