• Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart decided to opt out of going to The Box for their New York New Moon premiere after-party, instead opting to go to Avenue, where they could sit around, drink vodka, drink beer, get trashed, leave, go home, and do it. Robert Pattinson's psychotic, obsessive stalkerfans, are you listening? Tune your teenage to mid-30s adult ears to this: Rather than hang out with Kellan Lutz and the rest of their cast, you know what they're doing? They're going home and doing it. Now, I know, I know, you all think Kristen Stewart is the most evil thing in the universe and that she should die a fiery death while Rob realizes who the real lady of his life needs to be: you. You should probably get used to the fact that (A) this will never happen because you're not movie-star good looking and she is, (B) the love you do find will be some kind of settlement, (C) and they will probably work in middle management, and (D) they will not be a blood-sucking vampire, they will just suck at your will to live. So! While Robert Pattinson enjoys ditching his Twilight castmates for getting drunk and doing it with Kristen Stewart, you're getting prepared for life! #NotAfraidToBeServicey. Psychos. [Page Six]
  
  
• Okay, Boris and Natasha-esque Rush and Molloy, you done did good on this one! Today the Daily News gossip duo focus their moose-and-squirrel sights on Christie Brinkley's fourth divorce, from Peter Cook, which ex-husband Billy Joel is being a mensch about and stepping up to her defense for. Unfortunately, this is being countered by a former Brinkley maid, Alzirene Vianna, stepping out and giving details for. This shit is too crazy. Highlights: Christie never encouraged her daughter to call her dad, Billy. Christie told her then 8 year-old daughter that she basically needed to stop fucking up her relationship with Kristie's new mans. Christie used to kick doors when she was locked out of rooms by her husbands. Christie was a pillhead. Christie used to throw stuff at husbands leaving in cars from inside their house, via window. Basically: Christie Brinkley is insane, and on her fourth divorce because of it. [NYDN]
  
  
• NICE. While every guy in the club the other night after the Victoria's Secret fashion show was clamoring to get a spot next to some of the hotness, Jay-Z gave explicit instructions to keep him away from them because he didn't want to piss off Beyonce. The man's got respect for his lady, yo. If I were with Beyonce, I would, too. Jay-Z's gonna be the one guy not to fuck his good thing up. Nice. Alternate Take/Conspiracy Theory: Jay-Z worked very hard to stay away from models at the Victoria's Secret show to get his publicist to plant an item that could be corroborated with other accounts and placed in Page Six so Beyonce would let him off the short leash he's on to go kick it with models. Yeah, but again, the problem with this theory is that Jay-Z's married Beyonce. [Page Six]
  
  
• Best random fact of the day: Andre Leon Talley wears size 16 shoes. Yes, they are bespoke. [Page Six]
  
  
• OH COME ON Page Six. Today's front story is such boring bullshit (they put Patz and K-Stew in the second spot). They open up with this awesome lede about how, wait, just, read this: "They say practice makes perfect. When Mark Consuelos tried out for a permanent role on the ABC soap "All My Children," his behind-closed-doors rehearsals with future wife Kelly Ripa paid off big." So you're thinkin, oh, man, maybe they had some kind of secret closet conspiracy sex or something, awesome, Evil Kelly Ripa is the shit, except, not. Nope. It's just the story about how their rehearsal scenes for soaps were better than everyone else's because they'd done did it before. Like, sex. Except I guess sex in Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos' world involves lots of bare-manchest making out, heavy breathing, and speaking in expository plot points between breaths. Oh, and the people holding the rehearsals didn't know. This is top story material? Really? Related: Soap Operas make you stupider. Anything that Gossip Girl can make look functionally braindead is, on some level, an impressive feat. [Page Six]
  
  
• Richie Akiva, the guy who owns Butter and 1OAK, which are big clubby clubs that famous people go to, is having a big Thanksgiving celebration at Butter for all the clubby club people who stay in town to go eat and drink at because their families hate them because they're club rats. Kidding! No, but really, I hope they stuff their turkey with ketamine. I'd stick around for that. [Page Six]
  
  
• Diddy threw a $3M birthday party at The Plaza. There were lion-tamers and fire-breathers and clowns and magicians and probably a few druglords or two. JK, you guys. There were no lion-tamers. But there were lots of people and, oh wait, what's this? Security was tight and even Tyrese Gibson and "Twilight's" Kellan Lutz had to talk their way into the VIP area. Is it just me or is Tyrese talking his way into more and more security areas these days? Anyway. I hope Diddy got all the cheesecake he wanted for his birthday. [Page Six]
  
  
• Cross-dressing perv Marv Albert and Fiddy Cent did or did not have some kind of run-in on the Kimmel show. What? I don't know. How the hell does a rumor start about Marv Albert getting into a fight with Fiddy Cent's entourage? There are at least 21 questions about this kind of thing, none of the answers do I give a shit about knowing. [NYDN]
  
  
• Oprah announced that she's leaving The (Talk Show) Game, and now her best friend Gayle King is gonna try to steal the crown. Don't forget to kiss the ring, Gayle. [Page Six]
  
  
• Olympic swimmers! They're just like us. They like to smoke weed and sometimes mess up their taxes. Whoops! Michael Phelps, dude, face outta the bong for one sec. Take it to H&R Block, you know? [TMZ]
  
  
• Tyson Beckford drove his motorcycle in circles and then went home. [Page Six]
  
  
• Apparently, it's 1995, because TMZ is making OJ jokes again. [TMZ]

Okay, so, techinical problems aside, we're all feeling much better today! And also, I'm so excited for the next item, I can't even, well, just, okay. Hang in there for one moment. Some things are just too good for the gossip roundup, you know? YOU KNOW. Also, big ups to Jay-Z for being good to Beyonce! Sometimes, people do good things and don't go rub up on models and make a point of it, whether it's because he wants Beyonce to know explicitly or not, right? Right. Here's a good cover of Beyonce's "Halo," let's get this Sunday started.

[Photo via Bauer-Griffin]

Not exactly all of them, but a whole bunch. It was like watching our nightmares come true on Live with Regis and Kelly. Daytime's dizzy duo do a bunch of really ornate and totally uninspired costumes for Halloween every year. Because it's 2009, they chose the Gosselins, The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Lady Gaga (with a Susan Boyle). If that wasn't bad enough, their producer, Michael Gelman, made a guest appearance as Balloon Boy. Yes, all of those were on the list. For people who are going to put a ton of time, money, and effort into the execution of their costumes—and these are professional-grade turkeys—why not spend a little bit longer on the concepts and make that Mad Men John Deere lawnmower incident come to life?

The only acceptable exception to our list would have been if sometimes guest host Anderson Cooper showed up dressed as his favorite Real Housewife, NeNe Leakes. Now that is a frightening bit of unoriginality that we can endorse!

As I would imagine her father might say, let's just cut to the bullshit and get to the point. Ivanka Trump is getting married to Jared Kushner like, right now. Depending on when you read this they might literally be clasping hands under the chuppah at this very moment. That's not even the beautiful sun you see shining out there today — it's just the reflected wattage from the two real estate scions, "lit from within by wealth and privilege".

But for all that wealth and privilege, the Times wedding announcement is kind of a hot mess! On the one hand, it's got the primo spot in print: upper left hand column, adjacent to the featured "Vows" article about a zaftig production lady who had to spend her special day with, of all people, Kelly Ripa. But there are numerous oddities. In contrast to the standard listing of names in the announcement headline, we get a complete sentence: "Ivanka Trump Weds Jared Kushner". Which is fine, (and maybe more SEO-friendly?) except the layout appears like this in print:

       Ivanka Trump
Weds Jared Kushner

So that for a moment I thought he had some secret first name and wasn't just Jared Kushner but was W. Jared Kushner. And I'm sorry but people who do the first initial thing always kind of creep me out! So that caught me off guard. Moving on, great picture (the Post has the full one; I like her outfit) but they totally didn't "arrange themselves with their eyebrows on exactly the same level and with their heads fairly close together".

Who wrote this announcement? No, I'm seriously wondering, because we need to discuss the context and grammatical decisions behind each and every sentence. First, we get a full E! Where Are They Now episode about mama Ivana, who "founded two companies in New York: Ivana Inc., which handles her speaking engagements, books and other commercial ventures; and Ivana Haute Couture, which sells jewelry, perfumes and cosmetics on television". But in contrast, information about The Donald is extremely glancing, solely relegated to the nonrestrictive clause "her father's real estate company" in a sentence about Ivanka.

Probably not surprising. But Donald gets off easy in comparison to Charles Kushner:

"The bridegroom's father, who is a founder of his family's real estate business, stepped down as the company's chairman in 2004, owing to his legal problems, and has since resumed his title."

WHAT. I get that they've already namedropped the name of the family empire earlier in the paragraph (in addition to being the publisher of the New York Observer, Jared is, casually, "a principal in the Kushner Companies") but that sentence! So catty, structured as it is so that the whole "stepping down" is the primary active verb; the meat of the sentence. Me-ouch. Given the close relationship between father and son, the language is all the more puzzling.

[Photo via New York Magazine]

I like Jared and Ivanka. They're both such pretty princesses, and say what you will about the evils of nepotism: at least they keep themselves busy. Ivanka's Twitter feed has also won me over. Just this morning she went on a hike (I really, really would love it if she subscribed to Peggy Noonan's definition of "hike", btw) and her crowdsourcing call to arms about possible wedding song selections yielded a treasure trove of suggestions, including this, which: yes.

Jesus, other people got married this weekend too, you know. Like the aforementioned Lori Schulweis, a production coordinator for the Regis and Kelly show who had the distinct fortune of having her meager love life and her weight discussed live on air all the time. That is not something that ever ends well. Finally, even the poor woman's 97-year old grandmother was like "um, have you tried match.com, dear?" Ultimately she found David Buder, who didn't mind it on their first date when she "was pulling out a picture of her dog" and "somehow the bar stool she was on tipped".

But more importantly: how annoying would it be to have Kelly Ripa as a guest at your wedding?

Here we have Madeleine Resnick and Jeffrey Novich, two lovers brought together by their love of higher education — she is the membership coordinator at the Penn Club, he a private SAT tutor — and questionably named startups:

"The bride's mother is a public relations consultant there, and is a founder of BigOoga.com, a networking site for entrepreneurs. The bride's stepfather is a financial analyst at Northern Trust Bank in Chicago.

The bridegroom, 29, is a private SAT, math, and physics totor for Bespoke Education in New York. He is also the founder of VocabSushi.com, which helps students learn vocabulary using sentences from news articles."

Good god I hate the Internet.

Elsewhere this weekend, some frightened groom has to contend with a father-in-law who was a top State Department official in Caracas, Venezuela and Chiang Mai, Thailand (oh yeah, Jack can talk Thai REAL well); this picture looks photoshopped, right? and multiple couples met at the nation's most important singles bar: Harvard.

In fact, one early-blooming power couple met even before they made their way to Cambridge! Shane Wilson and Jessica Manners — OMG yes "Ms. Manners", and you're goddamn right she's keeping that name — met when they attended one of those high school nerd camps (oh, don't roll your eyes, you know you all went to CTY at Johns Hopkins too, geeks!) to study topics like "the future of New Jersey" and, apparently, "how to talk to the opposite sex".

In the wake of the Thrillist/Jetblue (TM) World's Most Boring Scandal of 2009, I should make a full disclosure: I am not a fully objective party, having once shared a delightful brunch with Jessica and Shane that was marred only by their blatant disinterest in firing up a game of Taboo. What was up with that, guys?

And so normally I steer clear of the featured video interviews with One Lucky Couple on the Times website, because they're just a little too Christopher Guest-y for me to accept that they're real, but I made an exception in this case. And the 2ish minute mark aside — "we both got in early so ... that worked out" — this was pretty touching! As one friend put it, when you know the people involved, "it's like Altarcations, but all of the ha's are awwww's."

And really, when the groom brags to the national newspaper of record that his bride's "nose is very squishy", you kind of have to awwww. Because that, folks, is true dorky beautiful love.

[Ed. Even I emailed Phyllis the following editorial directive earlier this morning: "SQUISHY NOSES!!!11!" Of course, she was already on this. Also, even though they're not being scored: she's keeping her last name, -2, but it's "Manners," so +4. Amirite?]

This week's matchup:

Heather Elliot and Stuart Rachels

• The bride graduated from Duke, received a Master of Philosophy from Yale, and earned a law degree at Berkeley: +5
• The groom graduated summa cum laude from Emory, was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and earned a PhD at Syracuse: +5
• The bride was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's law clerk: +1
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not have any part in officiating the wedding: -1
• "In 1981, at age 11, Mr. Rachels became the youngest American chess master, a record he held until 1994": +2
• The couple are both professors: +3
• At the University of Alabama: -1
• The bride's mother had the same job as Rene Russo in Outbreak: +1

TOTAL: 15

Lindsay Levkoff, Jeffrey Lynn

• The bride graduated summa cum laude from Tennessee, earned a master's at Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, and tacked on a Harvard MBA: +7
• The groom has a law degree from Oxford with an MBA on the way, graduated magna cum laude from Penn, and also went to law school at UVA: +9
• The groom's mother is chairwoman emeritus of the Arizona Theatre Company and his dad is on the board of trustees of the Heard Museum in Phoenix: +2
• "Ms Levkoff and Mr. Lynn may be among the few couples who can say that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played Cupid for them.": +1985

TOTAL: Hubba bloody hubba.

Cohen, the senior vice president of original programming and development at the channel beloved of gays and their hags, started inserting his pretty little face on the tube by hosting the reunion shows of various incarnations of the Real Housewives franchise. Their high ratings naturally lead him to believe that he was the reason viewers were tuning in and decided to give us a weekly dose of wankery on Watch What Happens Live, where he interviews celebrities (about himself) and Bravo mainstays (about how much they love him). It's horrible and we can't stop watching.

Last week featured the sharpened-pencil face of "real" housewife of New Jersey Danielle Staub, finally shedding light on the horrible thing she did to fellow housewife Dina Manzo that made sister Caroline cry on the recent reunion show. We also got a booty call with Andy's close personal friend Sarah Jessica Parker. He asks her questions about the Sex and the City episodes he guest-starred in, and she rightfully doesn't remember. Don't worry Andy, we'll kiss your bruised ego and make it all better.

Our favorite bit is when he says he's going to send SJP some fried chicken so that she can put it in the blender and feed it to her newborn twins. That, right there, is why Florida won't let gays adopt children.

What we love is that everything about him and his show is as obvious as Michael Kors' fake tan. This Thursday he has on his friends Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos and designer Isaac Mizrahi, who is cashing his Bravo paycheck when he's not making $10 frocks for Target. So, yet again the show will be all about Andy and his network.

And that's with us. We haven't haven't seen such boldfaced buffoonery on television since Britney and Kevin: Chaotic and look how well that turned out!

More Americans would choose to share a vacation rental home with talk show host Kelly Ripa (26%) than would with the Obamas (19%), the Jolie-Pitt family (16%), Oprah Winfrey (16%), Jon Stewart (13%) or Stephen Colbert (10%), according to a new survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs on behalf of Home Away.

Yes. Kelly Ripa, #1. We can only hope that this represents some half-formed expression of sexual desire by a disproportionate sampling of straight American males, rather than a true awe for the perky one's societal contributions. Furthermore:

When dining on vacation, Americans are most likely to choose Rachel Ray (32%) to be their celebrity chef, followed closely by Paula Deen (27%). Fewer would like to have Wolfgang Puck (15%), Gordon Ramsay (13%), Masaharu Morimoto (6%) or Tom Colicchio (6%) cook for them.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Jokes are useless.
[Ipsos via Adfreak. Pic via]

Sometimes it's much more firm to watch the Late Show host squirm and make half-hearted self-deprecating jokes than to watch him go on a hilarious tear against someone. (If you're impatient, skip about two minutes in.)

Up top, a slurring (drunk on a Friday morn?) Kelly Ripa tries to tell guest host Nick Lachey a story about her kids not knowing where Cairo is, only to discover that he has no idea where it is either.

Bob Saget will never miss an opportunity to remind us that he's a really dirty, filthy guy!

And Fred Armisen braves The View ladies, doing his Behar shtick from SNL.

Dawn Simorangkir, who operates the Boudoir Queen label, filed suit against Love on Thursday for "menacing and disturbing" statements she says Love made on Twitter and MySpace, seeking unspecified damages. Besides libel, the charges include invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract, and intentional interference with Simorangkir's business.

From the looks of Love's blog posts about Simorangkir, it looks like this was a love-hate relationship. Love called her a "genius" in November for her work on Etsy, an online handicrafts site. And then MySpace user Boudoir Queen gave Love "kudos" after she praised a design with "fucking ankle cuffs with fringe" as being "HOT" in December.

Things quickly soured. In January, Love posted a rambling entry on MySpace which said Simorangkir was charging "crazy money." And then Love accused her of theft on Twitter:

wwd. someone who will NEVER grace your pages the felonious Dawn/Boudoir Queen witnessed stealing 2 MASSIVE army bags out of the chat at 4am

After the news broke today, Love went on a crazy Twitter rampage and accused "Lohan and Kelly" — Lindsay Lohan and Kelly Ripa? — of stealing ADD drugs from her at a past Coachella music festival. (Love has feuded with Ripa before.)

Add to this debacle the litigious comments from reality-TV harlot Kim Kardashian, and Love looks to be in a whole heap of tweet trouble!

All we can say is: Keep up the tweets, Courtney! Things were so lonely when you swore off blogging last year.

(Photo by Getty Images)

Love's first salvo came last night and was entitled, "peta etc whose that girl with the big boobies?/RICO statutes." As one could no doubt infer from the title's ingenious blending of high and low culture, the entry was principally concerned with extending Love's feud with the Kardashian family, as well as examining the identity thieves who have embezzled from her. There are also segments like this:

my mortgage fraud strikes me as not only New York NJ GA TX and PA and CT problems, its very very much a California problem, weve got 27 legitimate Cobains in the USA and no "Kobanes"Kobains" o otherwise, yet i have over 9800 deeds , and theyre all the tip of the iceberg because my mac is so hacked when i get a piece of data it changes so now curtiss leeorthmann is KELLY RIPA
Kelly r IPA
IPA KELLY CONSUELAS IPPA
Ripa Kelly w
kelly-rippa
to a computer like at experian that "-" is a z or an r, its a etter, so Curtiss is Kelly Ipa Ripa i didnt take her for a soho gal 16 spring? 76 crosby? endless arkansas properties?

As best we can tell by running this through our Courtney Love Translator (which has begun to raise a feeble white flag, and yet we press on), Love's legal troubles inspired her to go on a real estate feedback loop, where she researched the real estate holdings of one Ms. Kelly Ripa. We'll take her word on "16 spring" and the "endless arkansas properties," but a Google search reveals that Ripa does reside at "16 spring" (along with Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton!). We would suggest that Ripa immediately confer with her doorman in case a dessicated singer should show up in flapper rags at 3am, ready to watch True Blood and bash Madonna.

Then, this morning, Love's "Myspace Administrator" posted another blog entry announcing a delay of her upcoming album, which apparently was due to be released online today. The culprits? Ghosts and hip-hop artists!

The Studio that Courtney and her band were using to record had some paranormal technical issues and had to be moved from one studio to another studio right around the holidays due to some technical sound issues that everyone, including Beinhorn who is a master and a genius was not happy with. Courtney and crew could not hear between guitars. Sound and vocal mixings have to be completed still to perfection.
if Courtney had it her way she would have it the studios sound checked first but it was originally use as a hip hop rap studio so the acoustics were all fucked up.

The Artwork is pretty much done..Courtney has 30 million dollars in sponsorships,
from a prominent feminine hygiene/menstrual company and a prominent tequila company ??? and Courtney doesn't even understand that part!

Nor do we, "Courtney Love's Myspace Administrator." Nevertheless, we eagerly anticipate the release of Love's next album, Jose Cuervo Presents: Kotex.

• peta etc whose that girl with the big boobies?/RICO statutes [Myspace]

• Nobody’s Daughter [Myspace]

To be fair, Kidman (made up to look like an insane cross between a pilgrim and the Baroness from The Sound of Music) attempted to be diplomatic about the appearance, but Regis refused to have it, placing the blame for the encounter squarely on Letterman. Careful, Regis — a war with Dave is one that few walk away from as the victor. Just look what happened to John McCain! [Live with Regis and Kelly]

[via Huffington Post]

In what is easily the tensest minute of television since the Man in the Members Only Jacket rose from his seat and disappeared into the Haltson's restroom to void his bladder, motormouthed premium-cable Hollywood agent Jeremy Piven faced off this morning against sinewy Regis Philbin sidekick Kelly Ripa in a test of strength. Promising to double the number of push-ups banged out by Ripa, Piven dropped to the floor alongside his foe, ready to prove to the world that he will not be emasculated by ninety pounds of morning show host.

The result will amaze you.

Or not. We're pretty sure you know where this is going.

• Friday: Jeremy Piven [Live With Regis and Kelly]

Before this binge, for instance, I almost never turned on the computer during daytime except in times of major horniness. As it happened, on the day I first received a call about this job, it was about 4 p.m. when I put down the phone, fired up the laptop and headed over to Gawker. I was not yet equipped with an RSS reader, so for the next several hours I dipped in and out while I went about other business. My strongest reaction that first afternoon was, "Who are these people and why are they shouting at me?"

It was mid-March. The first shouting I read came on a post about Anna Nicole Smith. The post was so emphatic that a reader said, "Well, I guess there's no need to do the paternity test. Let's just declare Stern the father." This is analysis, I thought, and remembered a favorite saying of the day that had once been posted on the newsstand where I buy fetish magazines: "It doesn't have to be hard and veiny to still be a dick."

Next up was a post from Doree Shafrir. Shafrir wasn't exactly yelling at me, but the porn stand quote came to mind again. My reading was interrupted by a phone call (the fucking escort canceled again), and when I returned to the living room, two more heads were hollering. It was Balk and Emily Gould mixing it up about Dana Vachon. Back and forth they argued, with increasing vehemence and loathing. It was incredibly pointless, and only amused the sales team at Riverhead, who were no doubt thrilled for the publicity.

I was close to concluding that my sensibility was too far removed from that of Gawker for me to represent its audience, but I hung in there, as I had been asked to do, and kept reading. I learned more than a thing or two from analysts and editors like Choire Sicha, whose New Yorker piece was, until yesterday's madness about Portfolio, the longest thing ever to be posted to Gawker. I got several good laughs a day, most days, from the photo captions. When I wanted my gossip straight up, I could go, most days, to the Gossip Roundup.

Still, that first impression has remained. In the past two months, I have read a lot of yelling, from some but not all of the editors—that Joshua David Stein is unfailingly demure when away from the bowling lanes—from some but not all of the commenters, and always from Balk. The yelling editors sound manic. The yelling commenters sound angry. None of the yellers sounds to me as if he is reacting authentically to something he cares about. Asked to confirm this impression, Balk admitted that it was indeed the case. "Two months on this job and you learn not to care about anything, particularly self-respect."

Maybe the vast majority of Gawker's readers enjoy this ramped-up, in-your-face, I'm-the-show approach to New York media and gossip. Maybe it is not my business as an ombudsman to object to the hollering just because it doesn't suit me. I hope your responses to this column will let me know how far off or close to the mark I am about this, and I will take note, especially about hollered highlights, because after all, it does no serious harm. Neither does hollering about "what dead Playboy centerfold you'd stick it to."

There is harm, though, when the loud, cocksure approach is applied to certain off-the-blog issues. Take Danniellynn's disputed paternity. In mid-March, when they were burying the pill-popping model, a tip suggested that Smith's daughter's father was actually Smith's son. Lab tests would be conducted within a few days' time, but suspending judgment till the evidence is in does not suit the formats of Gawker blogs, which require judgment to be passed on 54 or more topics a day. The bloggers need material, so Danniellynn's incestuous origin was rushed straight to judgment within hours of the first sketchy e-mail.

The child was not only presumed to be the product of the most sickening potential coupling in 2007, she was immediately declared to be so. The editors hedged their bet by calling the rumor "ridiculous" but quickly added that the source seemed credible. I suspect most readers quickly forgot the "ridiculous."

When lab tests named Larry Birkhead the father last week, I did not hear any apologies. It is, in my opinion, Anna Nicole Smith's misfortune to have become a running Gawker story line (also that whole dying thing), which too often means a designated caricature who—like Atoosa Rubenstein or Dave Zinczenko or the socialite of the day—is considered open game for character assassination. I am as skeptical as anyone about what Zinczenko has to say about his oral sex skills but I still cringe every time I see his name next to the words "subpar oral sex provider." Mostly because of the image it puts in my head.

It's not fair or realistic to ask on-Internet opinionators to be as informed or measured in their off-the-cuff responses to breaking news, often indistinguishable from breaking rumor, as a magazine writer can be on his longer leash. But I think it is fair to ask a greater degree of humility and suspended judgment than is often seen on Gawker. And I think it is fair to ask Managing Editor Choire Sicha to encourage less ill-informed vehemence. "Good idea," responded Sicha via e-mail. "Also, go fuck yourself! Fuck yourself hard! Have a great day!"

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Besides, my subjective impression is that the over-the-top shouted certainty of opinion has toned down a bit since I began my binge-reading in mid-March. Maybe the lead-up to a celebrity paternity test is the peak of the yelling season. Or maybe I have just gotten used to it. I hope not.

One reassuring sign: After the Duke lacrosse rape case unraveled, the editors did not say anything about it except to mock one of the young men whose life has been by both an overzealous prosecutor and a media rush to judgment. They did mock him, however, on a real-estate related matter. They seemed to realize that one can viciously malign a victim without shouting.

As I gather first impressions, I needed that lesson, too. But that's a subject for another column. —Byron "Dan" Worthington III

Byron "Dan" Worthington III is Gawker's ombudsman and a noted crank with a lot of free time on his hands. He will write a sporadic column responding to the reader complaints that the editors usually send right to the trash file. This is his first column, which is to say, probably his fifth. He can be reached at tips@gawker.com. Please use the word "Ombudsman" in the subject line or the e-mail will probably be deleted by anxious editors before he can read it.

Related: Too much shouting obscures the message [ESPN]
Previously: Spit It The Hell Out Already