Dear Timesperson: Do you feel a little meh? Slightly gassy? A bit eggy? It may be your work diet! The New York Times cafeteria menu, we notice, features four kind of quiche four out of five days. Sure there's other choices, but that's a heckuva lot of quiche and perhaps too much. Only on Friday does the quiche station become pizza party central, but that pizza? It's more laden with dairy than Maggie Gyllenhaal! "Roasted peppers and goat cheese pizza?" What's a lactose-intolerant reporter to do? Also, at the "Chef's Table," the only thing listed for the whole week is Scallops with Cream and Basil—prepared, it seems, by the Times Food section. Times are tight, we know, but that's so degrading and plus, who wants to see restaurant critic Frank Bruni in a hairnet ?

Vivian Schiller General Manager, NYTimes.com: I just want to say one word to you—just one word.
Jon Friedman, Tool Reporter: Yes ma'am.
Vivian Schiller: Are you listening?
Jon Friedman: Yes I am.
Vivian Schiller: 'Slideshows.'
Jon Friedman: Exactly how do you mean?
Vivian Schiller: There's a great future in slideshows. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Jon Friedman: Yes I will.
Vivian Schiller: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.

Why, in this age of lightning-fast publishing, do members of prestigious national publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal still agree to embargoes? Microsoft, it seems, has placed an embargo on its new Zune models, but Gizmodo already has photos, and the Silicon Alley Insider, too, has already scooped its much-larger business-news rivals, with reports that Microsoft will introduce new Zunes with flash-memory storage, competing with Apple's iPod Nano line. Jay Greene from BusinessWeek, Jeff Leeds, music reporter at the Times, and Nick Wingfield of the Journal, we hear, were among the reporters scribbling away at the Microsoft launch event in the Seattle area today. And what did they get in exchange for agreeing to sit on the news?

Brad Stone of the New York Times has picked up, belatedly, that the Industry Standard, the fast-falling standard-bearer magazine of the dotcom boom, will be reborn as an online-only publication. A source tells us that IDG, the publisher of the new Standard, had pegged a relaunch date in less than a week. One small problem: As Stone points out, IDG has yet to hire an editor-in-chief. In fact, we hear that the initial plan for the website didn't even include a top editor. [Bits]

A correction in today's New York Times addressed their juxtaposition, either accidentally or idiotically, of a photo of a Philadelphia Inquirer and Philly Daily News delivery truck with a business piece on why declining circulation isn't always a bad thing. "Neither The Inquirer nor The Daily News was mentioned in the article, and the photograph was an inappropriate illustration for it." Daily News circ was down 2.3% this year.

Correction of the day, from the Times coverage of the Isiah Thomas sexual harassment verdict: "An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a 2005 sexual encounter between Stephon Marbury of the Knicks and a team intern. Marbury testified that it took place in his truck, not in the trunk of his car." [NYT]

The new editor at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, has gotten a little IPO-crazy in these heady days of Bubble 2.0. The best guess we've seen on a Huffington Post valuation is $60 million which, for a media company, is a drop in the bucket. We can't remember a tech or media company going public with a valuation anything like that. Huffington Post is the most unlikely IPO candidate since Wired in 1996 — and Wired had substantially more revenues and a real magazine business. Maybe we were onto something with the whole cheese thing. More likely? An acquisition.

Trend story queen Jenny 8. Lee joins her Hunter College High School chum Sewell Chan on the Times City Room blog. God they must be sick of each other—first high school, then Harvard, then the Times? Their fellow schoolboy Nick Confessore had better stick tight to his Albany beat, else he gets shuffled over too and is also forced to reenact high school again. Except this time as a blogger. Heh. [NYO]

You may have seen an article in this weekend's Times Sunday Styles section concerning frustrated office workers yearning for pinprick shafts of fame who achieve those tiny morsels of celebrity by offering tiny nuggets of wit on popular weblogs. That's right: The age of the commenter has arrived! Using a tortured analogy to Elton John's "Rocket Man," the article, absolutely dripping with derision, examines the psychology of why someone might extend so much effort for such a meager payoff: They're too lame to start their own blogs!

"A picture with a report last Sunday about the marriage of Dr. Haydée Brown and Kenneth Madrigal was published in error. It showed Brooke Brown and David Fapohunda, whose marriage is the subject of report today on Page 20. A picture of Dr. Brown and Mr. Madrigal appears online at nytimes.com/weddings." To be fair to the Times, this is an easy mistake to make, since both brides are, uh, named Brown. [NYT]

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.

This weekend's New York Times magazine features a fashion shoot of Wesleyan students! It is amazing. A correspondent confesses: "I'm an alumna of what you call the most annoying liberal arts school in America, and I have to completely agree with you that Wesleyan is beyond ridiculous. I saw this and kind of totally like, shed a tear.

From the mailbag: "Bono is at the New York Times for a publisher's luncheon (?) He says he wants to see the Politics Desk, so he might be down on the third floor soon."

Reaffirming Gawker's claim that the New York Times is just a fancy blog, the paper experienced a three-hour-long network outage Wednesday that screwed up the publishing schedule for the Thursday edition. It could be worse: They could be stuck using Google's Blogger, which — along with YouTube — is the worst offender for downtime among Alexa's top-20 sites. [Gawker]

"Yesterday we experienced a network failure for three plus hours, resulting in loss of phones, email and critical network-dependent systems, including those necessary to produce the news and advertising content for today's newspaper," says the in-house New York Times memo this morning on their tech failures. But the troupers pulled through and made a paper! " We delivered to distribution centers and retail outlets at normal to slightly late arrival times."

Wow, the state of tech things at the New York Times has actually deteriorated. Now the main switchboard number doesn't answer. That is really not what you want in your new multimillion dollar headquarters.

Everyone at the New York Times is either going nuts or actually, you know, editing on actual pieces of paper. Their in-house network has been down, and their phone system crashed earlier. But good news! This afternoon, the CEO of Nortel came in to offer his personal assurances that their massive tech troubles had their undivided attention. Well la-di-dah!

Says Times cheerleader: "TimesSelect did work, however, in the long haul, just the growth of advertising revenue versus the kind of single-digit growth that we would find in subscription revenue is going to keep us in business longer so that we can keep hiring more reporters and keep covering news of the world." Why can't execs ever say "Wow, that just didn't pan out"? [On the Media, via]

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.

Gawker has been referring to The New York Times as just a fancy blog for some time. But now the Times is really living up to the moniker. The newspaper has begun promoting its Bits technology blog with brief blurbs in the printed version. It's hardly original — the San Francisco Chronicle has been doing exactly that for a while now. But it means that blunt, off-the-cuff, first-person blog highlights are now appearing alongside the stodgy, rule-ridden prose of the eminent paper's traditional news articles.