Sad news out of Pittsburgh: A judge has denied Gary Guy Matthews’ request to legally change his name to Boomer the Dog, on the grounds that the change might result in “confusion in the marketplace.” The Allegheny County furry reacted to the rejection philosophically, saying, “Doggone it, well I wasn’t too confident about it going through at this stage, just from the vibe that I was getting in the courtroom. Right now I’m not sure what I’m going to do next, I’ll just have to look into it. All I know is that I’ve been trying to realize my identity for a long time, like many people have I guess.”

Good for you, sir. You will always be Boomer to us.

by Lizzie Skurnick

1. I
2. J
3. L
4. P
5. O
6. Q
7. B
8. D
9. R
10. A
11. G
12. C
13. S
14. T
15. H
16. U
17. V
18. N
19. F
20. E
21. Y
22. M
23. X
24. K
25. Z
26. W

Lizzie Skurnick is the author of Shelf Discovery, a memoir of teen reading. She lives in Jersey City.

“You don’t do something like that without provocation — believe me.”
 — A woman claiming to be the grandmother of James “Jane Lane” Leahy, who is accused of chomping down on the ear of a fellow clubgoer during the wee hours of Monday morning at the midtown lounge Highbar. I look forward to what could have provoked this attack — the attackee claims that Leahy started things with a glassing, but surely he’s plotting to claim that there was something else afoot. Was the kitchen closed? Did Leahy feel like he needed an extra-special ingredient in order to justify the price of one more $16 cocktail? Or is nightlife at those sorts of expensive places just endemic to the kind of rage that has to be bottled up until your teeth are on someone’s earlobe and you just… can’t… stop yourself…

You absolutely must listen to this recent concert by Hallogallo 2010-Michael Rother, Steve Shelley, and Aaron Mullan, playing the music of Neu!-right now. If you’re at work go buy some headphones or something, but do what you have to do. I am not accepting any excuses on this one.

Back in May and June, people were asking me what I thought of the Mets’ then-hot performance. “Wait until after the All-Star break,” I would say, burned by attendance at the season-closing games in 2007 and 2008 and various other instances of stupidly getting my hopes up. (In baseball and in life, man.) Well, not to say that I was right, but I was kind of right. Or, as the person updating the Mets-centric Twitter account for local sports yakker WFAN put it, “Frankie [Rodriguez] in police custody [for assaulting his father-in-law], tarp on the field, raining [sic] coming down, Joe and Evan yelling in the booth. Another morning in paradise.” Yep, that about sums it up. And he didn’t even need to mention the team’s 8–18 record since the break! At least this will be great for the lines at Shake Shack? [Pic via]

“This summer, a new David Mitchell novel and a new Gary Shteyngart novel will arrive on shelves, both of which I will rush out to purchase. A new Andrea Levy, new Tom McCarthy (Remainder-!!!), new Jennifer Egan. Six billion terrific ‘debut’ novels will appear, I’m sure, in a year when many terrific novels have already been published. And then there’s Franzen. Franzen. For years, publishing executives have stage-whispered over lunch, “When will Franzen return to rezap our cojones?’

I am ridiculously lucky and deliriously happy to be so seriously fucked.”
-Rosecrans Baldwin’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, is now available for purchase. So you should probably do that.

5. Don’t worry so much!

4. Oh, except in this case, yes, you can tell them to fuck off right to their faces right now!

3. No, you should take your revenge months from now, when they’ve forgotten all about it.

2. Save the good first sentence from the first paragraph and cut the rest of it and stick that sentence in the second paragraph.

1. Don’t undermine your negotiating position.

Choire Sicha is off the Internet today.

by Nate Freeman

The line at Grimaldi’s yesterday afternoon stretched halfway down the waterfront Dumbo block, as it does most days-the pizza place has developed a reputation, through TV spots and gushing travel book write-ups, for being “the best.” But the pie-seeking clientele may not linger on that Brooklyn sidewalk for long: tomorrow, the landlord will walk into the state supreme court and ask for the eviction of the institution, possibly forcing Grimaldi’s to move from its flagship locale.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Darryl Vernon, the lawyer seeking to kick the restaurant from its current digs, claims Grimaldi’s owner Frank Ciolli owes the landlord $40,000 in rent, as well as $12,250 in property taxes and district charges.

How will this affect the kneading and saucing that’s gone down here since 1941? I stopped by to find out, and walked in past the “NO SLICES” sign, dodging the waiters in matching black tee shirts. Gina Peluso was working the cash register. Shop manager Peluso has run a tight ship here since her father Frank bought the place from Patsy Grimaldi in 1998.

She claimed to be unfazed by the news. “We’re not going to have to move, it’s already being handled,” she said as she yelled take out orders to the kitchen staff. Waiters would come and reach around her shoulder to scoop up a cup of Parmesan.

If the worst-case scenario were to come about, she said, Grimaldi’s would take its talents to another part of town. “By the time we’d get evicted we’d have another place.”

What about the famous coal-burning oven you have back there?

“We’d have a new oven,” Peluso said and shut the register, smiling at the woman as she hands over her change. “We’ll see.”

Outside, the line had picked up more length, and the Grimaldi’s employee burdened with working the door told me I was on the late side-the TV crews were here in the morning. I asked for his name.

“Max,” he said.

Last name?

“You sure you want it? It’s really long-it’s Polish.”

His name is Max Sluszkiewicz.

He went on to explain that the publicity-and the possibility of relocation-didn’t exactly send the Brooklyn born-and-bred sprinting toward the Hudson. “We didn’t have any regulars customers, all tourists,” he said.

Max was not lying! Moments later a man with a voice slathered in a European accent asked me if he could “have a booking for the pizza.” The first people I approached in line had trouble understanding me, and in broken English they revealed themselves to be Gaelle and Mary. They’re on holiday from France! Jim Joyce was from Long Beach, which is close, yet this was still his family’s first Grimaldi’s experience. Carol Johnson from Haywood, California was another first-timer, but said it would be a “shame” if it had to move.

“My son said we have to go. You saw it on TV or something?”

She turned to the short kid standing to her side.

“The best places to chow down!” he exclaimed. (Could he mean this Travel Channel show?)

Then a thin-haired graying man leaving Grimaldi’s spotted my notebook and called out to me.

“I’m shocked that they’re closing,” he said, making his way down Old Fulton Street. “What, they not paying their taxes or something? Well, if so, then they should close. Get that down!”

Consider it done.

Cash Money Records owner Bryan “Baby” Williams has just bought a new car. It’s called a Bugatti Veyron and it is the most expensive care available for sale in the whole world. To celebrate, Baby, who is not known for his modesty, put on an outfit that matches the car’s color (red) and made a video for people who have much, much less money than he does to watch. The car can go 260 miles per hour, which is way above the speed limit in Louisiana, and it cost $2.5 million. Which sounds like a lot, but then sounds like a little less when you consider than the yearly maintenance will cost $300,000.

“[A]ccording to the Congressional Management Foundation, the House of Representatives got 99,053,399 messages via the Internet in 2004. That’s 227,708.9 messages per member of Congress. If a member took an average of 30 seconds to thoughtfully read each email they received in 2004, it’d take them 79 days solely to read their mail from the Internet. For a member of the Senate it’s worse: 288 straight 24-hour days worth of constituent communications at 30 seconds a piece. Most people don’t spend that many hours awake in a year.”
 — In which Math helps persuade us into believing even more firmly that online petitions don’t really do much in the way of swaying legislators’ opinions. (I would hazard a guess to say that you could swap out “legislators” with “executives at the TV network that canceled your favorite show” in the previous sentence, although the math might be a bit different.) The important thing? Those petitions are pretty effective for the organizations that create them, as far as harvesting e-mail addresses and being able to have trumped-up “follower” numbers and, of course, serving as a gateway to hitting said addresses’ owners up for donations! So the loser is, once again, your inbox. [Via]