I’ll admit straightaway that my take on Tim Burton’s show at MoMa is biased for two reasons. One was the crowd. I’ve been regularly attending the museum’s openings a couple years now, but have never seen the rank-and-file turn out like they did on Wednesday night. There were 20 times as many people as there were for say, Monet’s Water Lilies, and the long wait in a blue-lit corridor (which doubled as some hideous fiend’s esophagus) eventually lulled me into thinking I was waiting for something far more Space Mountain than museum exhibition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- I like Space Mountain -- but after all the jostling with strangers, I expected an exhilarating ride.

Okay, here's what happened: one of the three night editors at Gawker, Ravi Somaiya, went live around 7am with a post of a leaked, uh, memo from Meatpacking District restaurant owner Vadim Ponorovsky, to Paradou's staff, berating them for not collecting guests' email addresses for the Paradou's online mailer. Sample sentence: "You sit there bitching about how you make no money, remember its because youre fucking lazy motherfuckers. YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!!!!! ALL OF YOU, INCLUDING THE HOSTS!!!!" The post broke 10,000 hits, the rage of the masses ensued. Ponorovsky maybe tried to sneak into Gawker's comments to defend his actions. We contacted Ponorovsky for quote. So did Daniel at Grub Street, and Amanda at Eater. Both posts are worth reading. And here's what he told me.

Today's title paraphrases the Thin White Duke as word comes from a strange source that Rebel nightclub may be changing hands. I was asked to be involved with the renovation, so it just might be true. If so it will mark the end of an error and quite possibly the beginning of a new one. As a rock mecca back in the day, the space had a mediocre run as Downtime. I went to a few goth nights there cause they're always great fun for 15 or 20 minutes. I might have caught a long-forgotten band fronted by one of my waitrons as well. Downtime/Rebel was/is located on a "seam" block smack dab in the middle of the city at 30th Street and 8th Avenue. Although not far from anything and real easy to get to, the location was just never sexy. It always felt like I was in Jersey -- or worse, Philadelphia.

Check out this flight simulation of US Airways Flight 1549, the plane that landed safely in New York's Hudson River by by super-cool-under-pressure Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger. The audio is from the actual flight and subsequent crash landing into the Hudson, and the whole thing feels very realistic with the alternating audio from Sully and the air traffic controllers. It's OK to enjoy it! No one got hurt too bad!

● Mermaid Oyster Bar (Greenwich Village) - Mix-n-match aphrodisiacs at this beachy slip. Sixteen varietals, including the elusive Hood Canal.
● OBAO Noodles & Grill (Midtown East) - Noodle colony of Michael Bao Huynh's budget Asian empire: pad see iew hearts green mango kimchi.

An unassuming tourist type at an unassuming football bar tells me this: "New York restaurants are crazy! There's a club in every basement!" I nod my head. He means RdV, the bass-thumping club below Bagatelle. "No," says the unassuming tourist, "We were in some East Village pizza restaurant or something!" Jesus, it can be tough keeping up with the NYC Jones. There seems to be tons of hidden gems that try to stay away from the people like me who can write about them, Twitter about them, Facebook about them, and ultimately ruin them. Some things are worth keeping a secret, but when the party is in the basement of Coffee Shop or some media lunch spot that regularly gets off on decent press, it's easy to broadcast. Some other things will remain a mystery, until I can fully understand if it's an actual basement party or simply a couple of bus boys getting high between shifts.

The thing about being a beauty junkie is that you're allowed to be a novice. It's not about turning into a highlight-obsessed Bergdorf Blonde or investing your 401K in indulgent anti-aging treatments. Personally, I think it means actively exploring what you like and what makes you feel good, being scrappy about saving dough, and basically making that whole commercial beauty enterprise work for you. But then again, I'm a novice. I happen to be a lucky junkie and can get my fix of the next big beauty obsession thanks to the nature of my job; but I never obsess or buy into every promised-land product that comes my way. To be honest, homemade scrubs and a 10-minute morning routine puts me in the "low maintenance" bracket. Except when it comes to one thing: eyebrows. I am diligently obsessed and frequently frustrated with my eyebrows, though for some reason I have never fronted the time or money to see an actual professional brow-shaper. Until I found Sue Ellen Gifford at the Pierre Michel Salon, that is.

Any trip down the memory lane of nightclubs must pass by the Mudd Club. It opened in October 1978 and was the best joint in town -- some say the best ever. When it closed in 1983, it had morphed from the chicest of places to a punk/hipster haven. Any visit to the Mudd, even as a memory, must go through a door manned by Richard Boch. Mudd was located below Canal at the end of an alley at 77 White Street. At the time it was unimaginable that people could live down there, as it was a domain of rats and bag people with frequent visits from the new culture of graffiti artists. The music was rock and roll, and the crowds were punks and rock stars and rock stars who were punks, plus an uptown crowd slumming for flesh or drugs. Movie stars came through with their apricot scarves and that rarest of commodities: cash. It was a time before we thought of AIDS, and only Betty Ford went to rehab. Orgies and drugs in tenement squats were a common end to an evening on the town. There were few designer labels, save for Trash & Vaudeville or Natasha or Levi’s. But everybody wanted to get into the Mudd Club.

If you happened upon La Guardia airport today and you happen to be wandering close to the eateries around noon -- perhaps waiting for glitch-related delays to resolve -- you may walk into a guzzling, chomping, and hopefully not puking contest to determine who can eat the most pizza. Famous Famiglia is providing the pies, and La Guardia airport is providing the contestants, namely eight of their employees. The poor suckers that have been roped into this cheese-and-sauce feast will have exactly six minutes to hork down as much pizza as they can cram into their gullets.

Designers have been rolling out lower-priced lines left and right in recent seasons as a result of varying factors (competition and the recession for starters). Now comes news that the latest household name within the industry to launch a diffusion line is none other than native New Yorker Zac Posen. He joins a roster of high-fashion designers with shiny new diffusion lines that already includes the likes of Doo-Ri Chung, Thakoon Panichgul, Richard Chai, and even recent Swiss Textile Design Award winner Alexander Wang.