Our breath gets more and more bated and the countdown to Ellie continues, and, oh boy, is the tension rising. Big news today about the High-Stakes Ellies Pool. First, we've added five more eligible contestants, all of whom we obviously should have thought of initially: Kit Seelye, Julie Bosman, and David Carr from the Times, Sarah Ellison from the Journal, and HuffPost media editor Rachel Sklar. That's a total of 20 eligible contestants, and we'll do our best to hector as many as possible into participating.

Well, that was rude of us. Sure we're excited about our own Ellies pool. But we're equally that all sorts of offices around town are putting together their own pools, because of course everyone — everyone — has a raging case of Ellie fever. And so it seems only fair of us to provide for with an official entry form for your own Ellies pool. Change the deadline, if you'd like; eliminate certain categories, if you must. But we would appreciate if you'd keep the Official Gawker High-Stakes Ellies Pool tiebreaker:

Can you taste it in the air? Feel the excitement swirling around you? Oh, you know what it is, kids: The National Magazine Awards will be presented next Tuesday night, and New York has a bad case of Ellie fever. It's the biggest night of the year for the industry, and all around town mag stars are bursting with anticipation. They're picking up their borrowed jewelry from Harry Winston, they're getting final fittings on couture gowns from Armani, they're getting ready to face Joan and Melissa Rivers as they walk down that famous National Magazine Awards red carpet on their way into the show.

• Plan to sex up National Magazine Awards event includes performance by Wynton Marsalis, an award presentation by Anderson Cooper, and maybe — if we're really lucky — an award presentation by Heidi Klum. And for the big finish, ASME president Mark Whitaker, Newsweek's editor, will join Time's Jim Kelly for a choreographed performance of Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better. [NYP]
• Rolling Stone reality show moving along nicely and set to start taping in July. But there's bad news, too: "[C]ast members will be selected based largely on merit as opposed to, say, sex appeal and a penchant for sociopathic behavior," which sounds no fun at all. [WWD]
• Times reporters continue to write books, continue to be confused — to the union's chagrin — about the rules under which they are or are not allowed to write them. [NYO]
• Jessica Simpson, Ashlee Simpson, Britney Spears, and Tom Cruise moved the most mags in 2005. [MIN]
• Time Inc. reaches $4.5M settlement in subscription-renewal investigation. Now if they'd just do something about those fucking subscription-renewal cards. [Reuters]

Health-and-fitness people tend to be rah-rah enthusiastic sorts — folks like us prefer sloth, booze, and cynicism — and so it's not particularly surprising that Rodale CEO Steve Murphy sent a 10-paragraph, 800-word internal memo congratulating his staff on the company's eight finalists for this year's National Magazine Awards. Still, even so, the hyperbole is a bit, well, over the top:

• Nick Lemann has 5,000 words on Bill O'Reilly. Which we'll get around to reading soon. [NYer]
• David Carr thinks VF, underneath all its bullshit, is actually a pretty good mag. [NYT]
• And Jon Friedman thinks that all the other magazine editors are ganging up on poor David Remnick. [MW]
• We always thought Bill Beutel was kind of a little crazy, but that's probably because we only really watched him in his later years. He helped invent Eyewitness News, and he died Saturday. [NYT]
• Bloggers "are the new media darlings," and — shockingly — many hope to get paid gigs with traditional media. [Newsday]
• More breaking insights: An attractive grad student who is raped and murdered makes for great tabloid fodder. [Baltimore Sun]
• No Hachette mags were among the Ellie finalists. Again. [WWD]

God bless you, every one of you. "If anyone is familiar with this alleged Virginia Review and wants to provide a few grafs of description, we'd be much indebted," we begged of you earlier. "And we imagine not a few of our readers would be, too." And then, like the angels you are, you all jumped to attention and gave us our answer. Now we'll be able to enjoy the full Ellies experience. (One hopes the Times will launch a David Carr blog to cover the runup.) Herewith, an explanation of what the fuck The Virginia Quarterly Review is, fresh from the Gawker emailbag:

If you're anything like us, you were drinking and dancing till the wee hours last night, celebrating the announcement of this year's National Magazine Award finalists. Such excitement! Such drama! Such drug-addled nightmares of being stampeded by a herd of bronze elephants! In the sober light of morning, finally, there's a chance to ponder some of the great metaphysical questions raised by yesterday's announcement: