· New York magazine is trying to beat the New York Times with it's delayed trend reportage. First up is the tired (and contrived) battle between Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer and Today's Katie Couric. We get it: GMA is gaining, Katie is still rich. And of course there's Kurt Andersen's late-to-the-game (though actually entirely entertaining) spin on Maer Roshan's Radar magazine, plump with Spy rip-off notations .. though he should know. Oh, the sometimes-enviable editorial calendar of a weekly.

· It wasn't another Bruce Willis groped Lindsay Lohan story, so we didn't care too much. But the fact that just-arrested-for-groping Christian Slater is on Broadway in The Glass Menagerie breaks out hearts. He's single-handedly killing the arts!

· CNBC chair Pamela Thomas-Graham is causing headaches for her GE bosses after joining the board of Idenix Pharmaceuticals. How ever will the biz channel cover the drug industry with such a conflict of interest? The same way it covers publicly traded companies with their bulging stock portfolios.

· ESPN has lined up its first ombudsman: Washington Post sports editor George Solomon. The 18-month term requires a whole once-a-month critique column on ESPN.com from Solomon - "linked from the front page" ! - though he'll keep a Sunday column going at WaPo.

· Ivana Trump is taking on her ex-husband The Donald in Las Vegas, stamping her name on a new 73-story condo tower, dubbed the tallest residential tower in Sin City.

· D-lister Kathy Griffin allegedly tried to extort $250k from her eye doc, Dr. Robert Maloney, who supposedly botched her LASIK surgery. She threatened to go to the media if he didn't pay up, but he's on the offensive in the media assault with letters of recommendation from Cindy Crawford and Kenny G.

· The Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz resumes his game of masthead hopscotch, returning to the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix as its media critic after leaving that same post for Boston magazine and then, uh, the Boston Globe.

· Winner of this week's Public Fellatio Award is Ice-T, who's said to have received full under-the-table service at NA from wife Nicole Coco Austin and an unnamed brunette. Ice-T's manager Jorge Hinojosa, who initially said "That's fucking hot," has since recanted his enthusiasm with heart-felt denials.