Gawker

We sort of miss the pre-Kuczynski days of facial work shame. PR exec Amy Krakow admits in the Times today that she spends an "astounding sum" of money on youthiness-maintenance treatments, including sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, plastic surgery on her "face and torso," hair straightening and Botox injections. So she's a Manhattan lady of a certain age, basically. (Yuck.) Gosh, where'd she get all that money, anyway? Anyhoo! It's a thousand bucks a week, says the Times, for a lady to keep herself pretty from the nails to the hairline—regimens that also take ten hours a week. "I can think of a couple of people where $3,500 a month might be low," says one lady. Yeah, but they look really not haggy or stretched at all.

Beauty Regimens Reach For The Gold Standard [NYT]

Rod Townsend (our commenter Momo), sometimes receives telephone calls from The Past, a mysterious entity that remembers where things used to be in New York before Starbucks and Whole Foods came to town.

"Hello?"

"I'm so hot and sticky, confetticrotch. I must smell like Jeff Stryker's trashcan."

"Ah, so the weather's as humid for The Past as it is for us. It's really been atrocious."

"The weather? Not really. I think it's maybe going to be 75 at most today. I'm not too sure. Willard Scott was babbling about birthdays as I got home, and I couldn't bear to wait for the forecast."

"So why so hot and sticky?"

"S.E.X., baby. I've been at The Jewel Theatre."

When New York and Rolling Stone writer Vanessa Grigoriadis got a boyfriend and went west a few years back, everyone despaired. People were really downright sniffy about it, as they should be. But everyone figured, well, she always did do a lot of yoga, and without that veneer of irony. Maybe some time on the non-smoking coast would do her good! And for the most part it seems like California treated her well. She didn't have that breakdown that looms before us all in the late early 30s. Yet. But you know what happened? Her hot boyfriend got fat. And he didn't care. And then last year she married him anyway. Of course it took the homo publicist in her boyfriend's office to set things right: "'Your boyfriend is getting fat,' he hissed." But any New York homosexual would have headed the fatness off at the pass months or even years earlier. Even the gays are lazily hissy in L.A.

My Fat Fiance [Women's Health] [Photo: Edon Gottlieb]