"Why wouldn't we do the show again?" Simon recently told New York magazine. "I mean, it's a total success. [Nine years ago] we were sitting around on our fourth or fifth date, at the Blue Water Grill, and Alex was telling me that she wants to be a famous actress and I'm sitting there going, 'Darling, if you were a famous actress, we wouldn't be sitting here on the sidewalk having dinner.' " Haha. Um. Sigh.

Simon, ever the ridiculous idiot, later elaborates:

It made social climbing out to be much more important to us than it is. I've always loved to study people. I mean, for example, Jill's from Long Island, and boy, that shows. You can see these sorts of people from areas outside Sydney and London as well. As for us, well, I use the Dickensian phrase: Who doesn't want to improve their station in life? Everyone does.

...'Darling, if you were a famous actress, we wouldn't be sitting here on the sidewalk having dinner.' "

Alex: "And then I said, 'Oh, yes, we would. It's just that there would be ten people taking our picture.' "

Simon: "And now we have that."

"She was really one of the first, if not the very first, Internet blog stars," said Dan Goodman, the president of digital media for Media Rights Capital. "She has been entertaining people in the digital space since there were people to entertain there."

Ah yes, who can forget late 2004: the dawn of blogging. Or maybe just the first time ladies blogged. Blogged in a way that allowed users to see how pretty they were. It was a revolution! So we're sure Congond's new venture, "Sometimes Daily," will be a staggering success. Because it's not at all like there's been a glut of unwatched web video projects since she left the game in 2006 or anything!

The lesson here, of course: internet fame is not transferable to other media. Until Julia Allison's tv show launches.

After Forays With ABC and HBO, a Video Blogger Returns to Video Blogging [NYT]

"

Saw Axl Rose today outside of the Muse hotel on 46 St b/w 6th and 7th in NYC. I was crossing the street staring right at him. I had no clue it was him. He was staring at me as I was crossing the street walking toward him with this "I can't believe you are about my age (or younger) and don't know who the f*** I am!" kind of look. Then, 10 minutes later, on my return, in front of that same hotel I over heard this "security/driver guy" explaining to two young girls that yes, they did in fact see Slash. It was at this moment that I realized I saw Axl.

Send your sightings to stalker@gawker.com for our handy dandy map.

I just saw Speidi outside the Sony building on Madison and 55th. They had clearly tipped off the dozen + paparazzi to their own arrival as the photogs usually are not hanging around in midtown. Spencer was wearing a suit in a desperate attempt to blend in with the other productive members of society but Heidi was wearing a purple minidress, aqua heels, and leather jacket channeling Julia Robert in Pretty Woman, pre-makeover.

Send your Manhattan sightings to stalker@gawker.com and include the a/s/l time/date/loc so we can map it.

First, it must be acknowledged that Clooney is a smart man. He's not a grown-up version of Ashton Kutcher, an airheaded frat boy pulling practical jokes that a team of writers dreamed up. Clooney may be a frat boy type and a practical joker, but he knows exactly what he's doing. He has a very solid reason for every career-related move that he makes; look at the crafty, political way he chooses his movies. Except that new one about the old-timey football thing—who knows what that's all about.

The point is, Clooney sees the big picture. Recall his response to the original unveiling of the "Gawker Stalker" map. While lots of celebrities moaned about the intrusion into their privacy and imagined ridiculous implications for their personal safety, Clooney actually had a plan: he told a bunch of entertainment publicists to flood the site with false tips, thereby rendering it useless. It turned out that the Stalker maps are hardly a threat to anyone, and the flood of outrageous fake tips that Clooney inspired eventually disappeared. But he did prove that he was thinking about how to fight back against the celebrity-industrial complex, and even came up with an effective strategy—more than you can say for Brad Pitt, whose decision to fire his publicist will (prediction!) fail to magically allow him to disappear from the eyes of the media.

The problem is that Clooney is a CORNERSTONE of that very same complex. A man who ambitiously rose from a bit part of "The Facts Of Life" to a place in the pantheon of outrageously famous movie stars is hardly a credible spokesman for the cause of anti-publicity. On top of that, the press that Clooney gets is, by celebrity standards, pretty positive. It's impossible to argue that the very same paparazzi and tabloid media that he deplores have not, on balance, been a boon to his career.

And look at it from the poor, poor entertainment reporter's perspective: without some effort at critical coverage, they are bound to feel like nothing more than tools of the equally powerful movie marketing machine. Sure, staking out every nightclub, restaurant, and dwelling place of a celebrity is not really hard-hitting, or even socially redeeming, reporting. But Clooney, whose father was himself a newsman, should understand that it's all part of the package of being a star—a deal that he surely enjoys.

The actor would doubtless say that he supports real journalism, which is all well and good. So do we! But Americans have an unfortunate taste for the minutiae of the lives of their big screen heroes. So perhaps some sort of bargain can be struck. The tabloids can promise to take Clooney's earnest projects seriously, and in return, he can throw them a bone by accepting that his social life will always appear in the gossip pages and on the blogs, until he chooses to retire into obscurity. Besides, even if he were to enlist each and every one of his celebrity friends in his cause of punking the media, it would never work—that story in and of itself would be covered to death, resulting in a level of scrutiny that's equal to the one that the Hollywood types already receive.

So let's all just get along, in the words of famous celebrity Rodney King. Except, of course, for those pranks on the paparazzi. Go right ahead with that. Nobody can stand those guys, anyhow.

After digging through the refrigerator for sodas, one of the girls pointed to a shiny copy of Us in the rack with Lauren Conrad's silly face staring vaguely at nothing and said, "I really want to buy that but I don't have enough money." Case closed, suckas!

Clooney, not a man of inaction, especially in a moment of crisis like this, stands on my dining-room table, unscrews a panel in the ceiling and, finding nothing, makes me go outside and carry a huge ladder with him up two flights to my garage upstairs—where he climbs into an area I've never dared go, crawling along the beams with a screwdriver between his teeth. Finding nothing, he climbs down, knocks the dirt off his jeans, blows the dust out of his nose, rinses his hands and returns to the table. The shriek starts again, and Clooney thinks for a few seconds, ducks down and yanks the carbon monoxide detector out of the outlet. "Either it needs a battery," he says, "or we have six seconds to live."

One person Clooney will mess with—the thing he keeps coming back to the more we drink—is what a massive loser Bill O'Reilly is. It's an irrational feud because every time O'Reilly gets to be as important as Clooney, O'Reilly comes out way ahead. But Clooney can't help himself. He keeps talking about O'Reilly, and the little traps he's set for him and how thrilled he is when he falls into them. It's as if Clooney loves O'Reilly because he gives him permission to be an irrational 8-year-old. Maybe that's why anyone loves O'Reilly. [Time]

Ledger was born in Australia, achieved some degree of teenaged fame on Australian TV, and decamped for America where he quickly became a likable heartthrob in movies destined to be camp favorites (10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale probably share nothing in common but stars and fates as nostalgia fodder). His turn as Mel Gibson's son in The Patriot earned him a GQ cover. Then he got serious.

He became both a gay icon and an acclaimed thespian with his role as Ennis del Mar in Brokeback Mountain—and in addition to the Academy Award nomination, people were suddenly bestowing upon him the dangerous mantle of "young Brando."

And while he attacked his share of paparazzi, as all young guns must, Ledger became a New York icon not through phone-throwing and cop-slugging but through embodying a certain mid-2000s trend of quiet Brooklyn cohabitation.

In Brooklyn, with fiancee Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger became a Hollywood actor that the more sensitive among us could love, or at least tolerate. Why? Well, he lived in Brooklyn, wasn't afraid to kiss a dude in Brokeback Mountain, and showed us all that achieving (temporary, at least) domestic happiness was indeed possible. He and Williams went to community meetings to protest the Atlantic Yards development, hung out in the same places the rest of the parents in their neighborhood, took their kid to Prospect Park, and just generally behaved like normal people.

But the relationship ended. Ledger moved into Manhattan and began partying and making the columns in the proper young movie star fashion.

In a November piece in the New York Times (tracked down by commenter TedSez), Ledger, in the midst of playing a criminal psychopath in a perhaps unhealthily Method fashion, admitted to being distressed. He popped Ambien.

And then, some months later, he died, surrounded by pills, in an apartment belonging, according to early reports, to an Olsen twin.

He leaves behind a surprisingly short and almost as surprisingly consistent filmography. And he's survived by a two-year-old daughter, Matilda Rose.

Bonus Nick Denton IM Wisdom:

Denton: (bit like Diana and her paparazzi baggage train)
Denton: she used to give them good pics, and probably tip them off
Denton: and then they killed her
Denton: sort of

After all, there are plenty of things he could to that would change his trajectory! For example, he could quit blogging. He could quit dating Julia Allison. He could quit blogging about dating Julia Allison. Those are three things!

But doing all those things is just part and parcel of Jakob continuing to be his terrible self. So he probably will continue snowballing! Or maybe not. We talked about this a lot over here. One of us thought this: "Jakob has *NO IDEA* what he's talking about. Once he hits 30, he'll notice all the missing seats in the front row of fame, conspicuously not occupied by all his fameball cohorts."

Jakob's having a moment, a moment he'll be unable to sustain for much longer unless he takes things to the next level by, say, dumping Julia for Heidi Montag and marrying her on live TV.

But whatever. He'll probably still be rich, though. And maybe he'll make yet more money off this whole "fameball" concept. It's at least as punchy as "The Long Tail" or "The Tipping Point," right?