Two weeks ago Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni reviewed Kobe Club, the newest highly-contrived chowhouse from restaurateur/felon/Rocco DiSpirito co-star Jeffrey Chodorow. The Brunster did not find favor with the place, granting it zero stars and noting that "it presents too many insipid or insulting dishes at prices that draw blood from anyone without a trust fund or an expense account." Today Chodorow strikes back, taking out a full-page ad in the back of the Dining section (click to enlarge) that rambles on in crazy-person tiny type about how Bruni is out to get him and ends with this inevitable warning:

It's not just restaurateur Keith McNally who's upset with the Hotel Gansevoort and the giant billboard it erected. Neighborhood residents are getting into the act as well. After the jump, a few of the distinctly unkind comments left on the travel site Trip Advisor.

All complaints I have — and there are many — about urban pillowfighting boil down to the terminal cuteness of the whole affair. Laughing Squid has all the pics and links to last night's cushy conflagration at Justin Herman Plaza, including a video clip that shows a crowd of hipsters delicately bopping each other with barely any bloodlust. Dilettantes. We had more dangerous pillow fights in my parents' basement at the age of ten, and if anyone had called us a "flash mob," they would have gotten a mouthful of foam-packed dacron.

Google's sprawling, cheerfully dystopian campus at Mountain View may intimidate the first-time visitor. But there's no need to fear. The easy rule of thumb dictates that the most concentrated power centers gravitate toward the middle (where the engineers and their excellent cafeterias reside). But once you get past the first impressions, you'll need a little guidance. After the jump, enjoy our annotated map of 25 sights to take in across the entire Google campus before you die, and/or are killed by Google's very understanding but nevertheless lethal security forces. Dinosaurs! Pools! Massage parlors! Endless bowls of bisque! It's all here.

Well, not all of India, just those "sensitive" locations such as "laboratories, mines, military sites, space and atomic centres and residences of high-profile VVIPs." This is hardly new, as Google Earth has complied with requests to blur "military camps in Kosovo, the king's palace in the Dutch Utrecht, military sites in the UK, as well as IBM research centers in New York." Google's own offices remain visible in Google Earth, on both the East and West coasts, or in a hideous amalgam of the two.

Visitors to TV-hogging English celebu-chef Gordon Ramsay's restaurant in The London hotel on 54th Street yesterday found something missing from their New York Times—the Dining section.

Apparently, the biker from the Village People couldn't make the audition.

We've pondered its enduring appeal before but we think we've finally solved the mystery of Chelsea twatspot Marquee: It turns out to be Ground Zero for some of the most significant events of this young century. After the jump, the good people who flack for the club remind us why Marquee has made a lasting contribution to the city's - nay, the world's - social and cultural well-being. [Sic] rule in effect.

In a New York Times article about the city of Sao Paulo's decision to do away with outdoor advertising, our hearts leapt at the sentiment predicting this would make Sao Paulo "like New York without Times Square." Of course, the sentiment came from an ad man, complaining about "a diminishing of urban life" in ad-free city. Still, only 1 of 46 city councilors voted against the ad-killing measure:

A recent transplant to the city, Dashiell is eager to become a "real New Yorker," so he's asking other New Yorkers to help him discover all the classic New York City locations.

In a decidedly under-dressed clusterfuck in SoHo, Fondazione Prada honored Tom Sachs, the mixed-media artist who has bought the world such brilliant artistic juxtapositions like the Tiffany Value Meal and the Prada Toilette and his "eponymous" new book, aptly entitled, Tom Sachs. We sent Intern Heather and prolific shutterfly Nikola Tamindzic along to observe the ratio of self-important people to actually-important people. (Hint: the ratio was really, really high.) Take a gander at our gallery of alleged "beautiful people," and Nikola chronicles them further over at Ambrel. After the jump, Intern Heather attempts to explain her inadequacies.

The Assimilated Negro is the issuing authority for your own personal Ghetto Pass, helping you safely navigate among the people and places of browner territories.

Chip Conley of boutique hotelier Joie de Vivre likes to use specific magazines as inspirations for his hotels. After he's picked a magazine, he and his staff then come up with five adjectives that describe the mag, and by extension the hotel concept. For example, the buzzwords associated with a hotel ostensibly inspired by National Geographic Traveler were "enchanting, international, cheerful, bohemian, eclectic." Another is equal parts Giant Robot and Lucky: "inventive, warm, optimistic, practical, quirky." Yet another property takes Wired as its muse, though your guess is as good as ours as to their keywords. Saddest of all, though, is San Francisco's Phoenix Hotel:

Are you worth a damn? Really? Well then, how about half a damn? We grade on the curve here at Gawker Media, and filial urban travel site Gridskipper is no exception. Half a damn is comfortably passing in our book, and it's also the approximate world exchange value of an assistant editor. That's what Gridskipper desires, so if you know how to write, how to blog, how to live in the city, and how to hide in natural camouflage when G-skip editor Joshua Stein goes into one of his homicidal rage benders, this is the opportunity of your soon-to-be-attenuated lifetime. Full description here, or pitch yourself directly to jobs@gridskipper.com. And for God's sake no resumes, even if rendered in the style of Vayner.

Ever since the Google/YouTube buyout was at its rumor stages, Mark Cuban wouldn't shut up about how it was going to be a legal land mine, and while we have yet to see a lawsuit against Google, he has been kinda right as takedown requests are happening more frequently than pre-buyout.

Avuncular New York Times business travel columnist Joe Sharkey happened to be aboard the 13-passenger Embraer Legacy 600 jet involved in the mid-air collision near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Everyone aboard Sharkey's jet survived, while the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 were not so lucky. Sharkey was undertaking a freelance gig about private jet travel at the time, and ended up instead with a story that catapulted him from the mordant depths of the travel section all the way to the NYT front page. Contains very mild mortality humor.

^{LTB Media honcho James Truman, his billionairess boss Louise MacBain, Culture + Travel EIC Michael Boodro, and LTB marketing mandarin Lawrence Kaplan.}

Our wanderlusting brother Gridskipper has been tirelessly running his "Most [Whatever] City" polls (if you recall, you dumped champagne on your head on Monday, when New York was declared the World's Sexiest City in a NSFW showdown); now, via a nomination process, New York is up against Detroit for the title of Most Masculine City. Really, the title should probably go to Detroit — if you've been there, you know what we're talking about. But because we are on a constant quest to rationalize a lifestyle in which $1500/month gets you a 100-square-foot studio apartment and a crosstown cab takes 7 hours of your time, we must win.

As if claiming the #1(+19) spot in a rundown of the brainiest American cities weren't enough to assert New York's overpricedwhelming dominance as the best fucking city ever, our well-traveled brother Gridskipper has just closed the polls on their World's Sexiest City contest. New York comes in first with 44.2% of the vote, knocking reigning champ Rio de Janeiro back from whence it came. For the record, we're confident in the accuracy of these results and believe that New York truly is more sexy than a hedonistic city where assfucking is de rigeur. Gridskipper's well-balanced voters are educated, unbiased and worldly individuals — and not, say, a bunch of New Yorkers trying to convince themselves that living here is worth the bullshit.

In the second annual World's Sexiest Cities poll over at Gridskipper, our fair metropolis of New York is nominated in the categories of World's Most Lesbian-Friendly City, World's Most Fetish-Friendly City, and the capper of World's Sexiest City. Plus, we're defending last year's title of World's Most Masculine City. How can New York contain all these multitudes? Apparently we can't, as we're currently losing all races. C'mon — Detroit? Seattle? Cannot stand. Go take a look and vote your conscience.