You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht

Holy crap. I had to look outside to see if a cloudburst of blood and toads was falling from the skies--the "editors" of Gawker actually admitted that maybe letting defrocked gossip columnist Jared Paul Stern take the reins for the weekend wasn't such a good idea.

Anyhow, as I've obliquely alluded to before, JPS and I share alma mater. (It's funny, re-reading that old post, it makes me wonder about something: Hypothetically, if Mercedes loaned you one of their new models for the weekend--out of the generous and altruistic spirit emblematic of the automotive industry, I'm sure, and not, say, for the purposes of getting a little love in your column--I wonder if they'd expect to get it back in one piece. Just asking.)

A lot of Gawker readers expressed shock and dismay at JPS's misogynist jabs at some models, but mostly they were appalled at the mediocrity of his writing. For those of us who remember reading his gossip column in the college paper--before the advent of editors--lemme assure you that these are his true, folksy cadences. On a couple occasions at school, some people accused him of plagiarism, but honestly: that style...it's quite inimitable. (Besides which, who would cop to being the real author anyhow? You'd have better luck getting Salinger out of hiding.)

JPS was dancing as fast as he could this weekend, trying to delete and edit the nastiest of the nasty comments, some of which implied that he was bisexual while in college. This is libel, plain and simple! Although there was a certain Secret History-meets-Metropolitan effeteness to his social circle, and although some people might have said that JPS didn't like girls very much (and I don't mean that in the Montgomery Clift way), he most definitely fucked them.

Anyhow, this weekend's experiment teaches us a couple things: 1) that unless you're Don Rickles, playing the Unabashed Asshole card has diminishing returns; 2) that Gawker has learned that not all publicity is good publicity and 3) that some people don't forget certain blind items in the college newspaper gossip column.

Funnily enough, this weekend the Times travel section features North Bennington in its "36 Hours in..." column. What a waste of ink. Frankly, the only two reasons I can think of to spend 36 hours in North B are if your postbac boyfriend got a QP of mushrooms or you're recuperating from a partial-birth abortion at the medical center.