Remember when your Mom would go into your room each morning to wake you for school? Well those days are gone, now that parents are so busy Facebooking that they have to text message their kids to wake them up.

Well here's a bright ray of sunshine for the struggling newspaper industry: the Seattle Times, thought to be on the verge of collapse earlier in the year, is suddenly turning a profit again.

If marriage is an institution, Phyllis Nefler is the McMurphy to the Nurse Ratchet of the Sunday NYT Weddings & Celebrations, editor Robert Woletz. Contained herein: deodorant, Seinfeld, cults, MENSA, and wonderful/bad vagina jokes. On bended knee, Altarcations is back.

Allen Salkin - the Seymour Hersh of the Styles section - files this weekend on a group of media writers in New York who're meeting in an Murray Hill (?!) penthouse. Old school, but the rub? No twittering, blogging, oversharing.

• David Chang's empire is about to get bigger. The Times confirms the rumor that the man behind Momofuku plans to open a French-Vietnamese spot in the former Town space in the Chambers Hotel sometime this fall. [NYT, TFB]
• The beer garden at Standard Hotel is now open. [UrbanDaddy]
• Andrew Carmellini is perfectly happy that Locanda Verde got two stars from the Times recently: "[T]he reviews have been exactly what we wanted." [W]
• Le Cirque founder Sirio Maccioni's favorite person this week? That would probably be the president of the Philippines, Maria Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who showed up with her entourage and dropped $20,000 on dinner. [P6]

This is sort of unfortunate, but not really. A federal appeals court today decided the news media will not be permitted access to the wiretaps that were used to bust Emperors Club VIP, the escort agency that employed Ms. Ashley Dupre and brought Eliot Spitzer's political career to a messy end last March.

• The New York Times Co. is now publicly shopping the Boston Globe. Meanwhile, the list of potential acquirers is getting longer: The firm that bought the San Diego Union-Tribune is now a possible buyer. [AP, NYT]
• Related: The Globe is going to start charging to access its Web site. [E&P]
• News Corp. and GE were hoping to "ratchet down the rhetoric" when they ironed out a peace pact between MSNBC and Fox News recently. Keith Olbermann didn't abide by it, of course. (And Bill O'Reilly returned the compliment.) But Olbermann is still pretending it never happened. [WP, HP]
• It seems one embarrassment this week wasn't quite enough for Olbermann. Because he's resorting to shameless (and familiar) excuses to try and explain away the Richard Wolffe conflict-of-interest fiasco. [Gawker]
• Profits at CBS dropped by 96 percent in the second quarter. [WSJ]
• Why did Twitter go down yesterday? Blame the Russians. [NYT]

Ben Stein's TV ads for a scuzzy "free" credit product have finally caught up to him: The New York Times has fired Stein as a Sunday business columnist for violating ethics guidelines.

Sam Sifton is trying to stay undercover, as the New York Times food critic, despite the invention of internet photo-sharing. Fat chance. Precisely!

In a move sure to inspire more film-geek loin-warming than Monica Bellucci, Disney has fired the unbelievably horrible Ben Lyons, who pronounced I Am Legend "one of the greatest movies ever made," and Ben Mankiewicz, as At the Movies co-hosts.

• Sam Sifton, the Times' new restaurant critic, answers a couple of questions about his new gig over on Diner's Journal. Meanwhile, Grub Street and The Feedbag sound off on how food criticism has changed over the past few years.
• The 24 stars that Frank Bruni reclaimed during his five-year tenure. [Eater]
• Douglas Rodriguez has parted ways with Nuela, which opens this fall. [NYT]
• Gabriel Stulman's new spot, Joseph Leonard, opens this eve. [Eater]
• The critics: In his third-to-last review, Frank Bruni downgrades Danny Meyer's Union Square Cafe from three stars to two; the Daily News' Danyelle Freeman is more impressed with the drinks at Hotel Griffou than she is with the food; TONY's Jay Cheshes gives SHO Shaun Hergatt three out of five stars; the Post's Steve Cuozzo tears Harbour apart; and Bloomberg's Ryan Sutton heads out to Nick & Toni's and decides the best thing about it "is the parking lot."

Despite a careful scrubbing of the New York Times' website, photos of the paper's new restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, are all over the Internet. The man needs a way to visit restaurants undetected, stat.

The New York Times has picked Frank Bruni's successor as holder of the NYT's Sweetest Job: Sam Sifton, currently the paper's culture editor. No successor's been picked for Sifton yet. The full staff memo is below.

The New York Times has finally picked someone to replace Frank Bruni as the newspaper's restaurant critic. Sam Sifton, the Times' culture editor and a former editor of the Dining section, will take over the job in October. In the meantime, he'll spend the next few months recuperating from the extensive plastic surgery that will be required to totally change his appearance, thus rendering the many photos of him on the Internet totally obsolete. [NYO]

Hey remember Jay Leno? He's back! Well, not totally back, but his new 10pm show starts in six weeks and NBC is about to barrage us all with non-stop Leno advertisements, so, he's back. Seriously, he's going to be everywhere!

• Funny People debuted at No. 1 at the box office this weekend, although it was still the worst opening for an Adam Sandler movie in five years. [Reuters]
• Mort Zuckerman is selling shares of his real estate company to pump $50 million into the Daily News to pay for new printing presses. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs has become a PR nightmare for CNN. Presumably the fact that Media Matters is airing an anti-Dobbs commercial won't help matters. [AP, HP]
• Is the peace pact between Olbermann and O'Reilly a sham? [TDB]
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's board of directors. [BN]

Frank Bruni steps down the New York Times' restaurant critic in a couple of weeks, and his memoir, Born Round, debuts on bookstore shelves on August 20. So it was only a matter of time before Bruni finally unmasked himself and showed to the world the face that has been taped to kitchen walls for close to five years now.

Catherine Mathis, the New York Times Co's chief PR person, is leaving the company. Her next job is bound to be easier. The full staff memo and a slight appreciation, below.

It only took New York Times official reasonable conservative columnist Ross Douthat three months to turn in his first completely dishonest paint-by-numbers Republican hack op-ed. Did you know that red states rule, and blue states drool?

Recently Tina Brown eulogized party-planner Robert Isabell, fondly recalling her decadent Talk launch party he organized in 1999, a party she modestly labeled, "the last social celebration of the pre-9/11 celebrity decade." Now David Carr's offering a sad remembrance.