Conrad Black, the funnest of the Canadian-born British press lords, is gearing up for his appeal on his conviction for fraud by taking down William F. Buckley Jr. and Henry Kissinger, two pals who stabbed him in the back. (The backstabbing only comes into play, of course, if you believe as Black does: That he is completely innocent. You, or a jury, certainly may not feel the same!) Buckley had written a letter to the judge to help reduce sentencing—but then pretty much retracted (or at least undermined it) over at the National Review. Kissinger, though, went around town proclaiming that Black was guilty "of something," and today Black writes the best takedown of him ever.

Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week, we hear about the quietly-revamped movie pages: "Web sites need to be reference sources. So every actor, director, cinematographer, gaffer — and every film — has its own reference page, with encyclopedic and reliable data supplied by our terrific colleagues at Baseline Studio Systems. Thanks to Baseline, Our movie database now has over 900,000 people and 200,000 movie titles. Like IMDB, except that it's true. Want to know who mixed the sound for Titanic? No problem. Did Bosley Crowther like the 1962 version of Billy Budd? Easy to find out. Do you like trailers? You could lose yourself here for days. 'All in all,' says Ariel Kaminer, 'I really do think it stands as the best movie site in America — and that's a title with a LOT of competition.' Anybody want to argue?"

New York Times restaurant critic (and totally self-appointed head language bitch on campus of us all!) Frank Bruni so rightly rails against the "semantic pox" of restaurantspeak today. Examples: The use of the first person singular ("How are we enjoying the quail?"); the overusage of "enjoy" ("How are we enjoying the quail?"); and pleonastic phrases such as "Pardon my reach." [NYT]

Slate's Ron Rosenbaum takes the words right out of our collective mouth with his reaction today to the rollover trick GQ's editor Jim Nelson performed for Team Clinton last week: "Any editor with a backbone would say, 'Thank you, your crude effort to kill this story will be included in the story. Goodbye.' Instead, the editor killed the story. Profiles in courage!" [Slate]

Jory, a general in the army of our supergay IT warriors, reports the following altercation with New York's favorite LOLgaypublicist Kristian Laliberte this weekend.

Recently Village Voice editor Tony Ortega was pitched a relationship/dating/sex column by someone who'd pitched him when he was an editor at one of New Times' papers in Florida and had received an encouraging response. And this writer probably thought that since one sex column at the Voice is about cybersex (what is this, 1999?) and the other is the syndicated column Savage Love , it might be good to get a local lady up in that piece—especially since the Lusty Lady column had been so unceremoniously canned by Ortega's predecessor David Blum. But Ortega wasn't interested. And he sent her back a truly snippy rejection note—and in it, we discover the conditions under which he might shoot himself!

Longtime journo and gay historian Charles Kaiser slaps hack Michael Wolff over Wolff's forthcoming hacky Rupert Murdoch bio, to be based on Wolff's hacky Murdoch profile in Vanity Fair: "Why write a love letter to the world's most amoral publisher at magazine length, when you can do the same thing at book length—and make even more money? After all, as even Wolff had the decency to acknowledge, Rupert has already put one member of the Wolff family on the News Corp. payroll." [Romenesko letters]

Julie Fredrickson, the young lady who founded the fashion blog Coutorture after learning via a Glamour internship that fashion ladies are bitches, has discovered another hard truth about that world: Sometimes, it's a tough place to be the new kid on the block. In a post today, she takes issue with the fact that reporters from large, deep-pocketed news organizations paid for their tickets to the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards ceremony on Monday—even though they would've been comped anyway—while bloggers like herself, who 'couldn't afford' to buy a ticket, were shut out. It's not fair! What is interesting, though, is the email explaining the situation that Julie received from publicist Bonnie Morrison (pictured). As documents of sheer snotty bitchery go, it belongs in a hall of fame alongside... umm... Socrates'rebuke of Alcibiades in the Symposium!