Dara Lehon, columnist for The Villager, is fast becoming our favorite Lower East Side nutjob. There are cars on Houston Street! They honk! And the exhaust is killing her ferns! The street signs are too big! The kids today eat brunch too late! People smoke outside!

Steve Stanzak, everyone's favorite homeless NYU student, hits the big time today. Profiled in the NYT, the student who spent most of the year sleeping in the Bobst library (yet somehow never felt compelled to jump to his death) has now been granted a dorm room. (Don't start lining up outside NYU for free housing, real homeless people. You aren't cute and you don't get good grades. Go back to your Washington Square park bench.)

In light of the taxi fare increase, New York mag crunches the numbers on popular routes — but fails to properly identify the potential traveler:

The Trump and his Melanoma are the dynamic dyad that show us all what love is really about. We are merely pretenders to their jewel-encrusted throne of romance. Food enthusiast Laurie Woolever takes us on a flashback tour of their love:

New York City's getting fun again! Best piece of evidence so far: A thong-clad trannie and her teen boytoy holed up in a tree yesterday in Central Park, throwing anything —branches, Pepsi bottles — that they could find at those below. Soon everyone will be hiding naked in trees and making demands. So go home, tourists, because our trannies will kick your ass. They'll ruin the 2012 Olympics too — this is your warning shot across the bough! (Har! Beat that stupid pun, tabloids!)
Gay lovers go out on limb [NYDN]
Naked men climb Central Park tree in protest [Newsday]
Park Sex Duo Gets Cops Up Tree [NYP]

Lower East Side blogger and gentrifier Lockhart Steele has consolidated all sorts of LES hipster blogs in one convenient Kinja digest. Wow, now you can get all the news on Uggs-sightings and Schiller's Liquor Bar debauchery in one convenient place. It's just amazing, all this crucial information the interweb delivers.
LES Hipsters [Kinja]
Kinja Update [Lockhart Steele]

According to Tricia Romano's column in today's Voice, the City shot itself in the foot by shutting down nightclub Avalon (formerly the Limelight) last week:

We're pleased to present a quite amazing bit of research on Manhattan drinking and skankifying, with numbers crunched by our in-house statistician Andrew Krucoff. Andrew's report:

The Times checks in on SoHo today and discovers that it's become a hellacious open-air mall:

How do you know the party is over? A reader applies one very handy test: "You no longer need to cover Spice Market. Lauren Ezersky was there tonight. It's done." In these complicated time, the yonking girl from Yonkers become Behind the Velvet Ropes hostess and Paper correspondent may actually be the one true signpost of shark-jumping.
Fashion Insider: Lauren Ezersky [Look Online]

Photoblogger Michael Cosentino went for a nice stroll in Central Park on Easter Sunday. Egg hunts! Easter Baskets! And, you know, some mounted cops pinning bloody people down on the grass. Aww, sweet.
Central Park Brawl Results in Arrests [Meccapixel]

In today's New York mag, Hal Rubenstein reviews some restaurant we haven't heard about yet: I think it's called "Spice Market," run by some chef named... Jean-Georges something or other? We wish this young ambitious chef much success with his remarkably under-publicized project.
Market Savvy [NYM]

Herbert Muschamp, NYT architecture critic, took the hugest crap in the Times yesterday while thinking about Miuccia Prada. According to Muschamp, Miuccia Prada is a genius because she spends millions to exhibit the work of artists who already show regularly at the most well-financed galleries and popular museums in the world. Right? SO edgy, wow.

For all our maitre d' friends here on the isla bonita of Manhattan, a few photos of Frank Bruni, the NYT's new restaurant critic. No one likes to be surprised by a food critic, right?

A different version of the Josh Homme Avenue A barfight story, in which, shockingly enough, Ryan Adams is spotted at a bar in Alphabet City:

Everyone thought I was crazy yesterday when I said the NYT had finally chosen a new restaurant critic. Well, who's crazy now? From yesterday's online chat with the Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema:

In today's Times, interim restaurant critic and currently most-hated New Yorker Amanda Hesser makes fun of the waiters at Compass but accepts a free bribe of champagne from the staff anyway:

Table 50 — which I'm told is the "subterranean downtown something-something blah blah hotspot" of choice for people who like such things — opened last night. Here's to the crashers who cough up this early report:

Is a guest or employee at West Chelsea nightclub Marquee making money the old-fashioned way — by stealing it out of coatcheck? Says a Marquee partygoer:

To accompany the rumors we're hearing today that interim NYT restaurant critic Amanda Hesser is on her way out — of a job, not to another 1200-dollar meal — do enjoy this very real interview with Ms. Hesser herself. As with everything on Gawker today, I must remind you that this may or may not be, well... true.