Campari Feld, just back from covering this year’s Westminster Dog Show, has provided a detailed dispatch of the 3rd Annual Black Tie & Tails gala (as told to his mom, Karen Feld) to The Alexandria Times. Some doggone good tidbits:

Alexandria Rep. Jim Moran — who co-sponsored a bill barring dog fur imports from China — and two-month-old Little Lulu stopped to chat. “She’s named after my wife and loves to snuggle,” said Moran. “She sleeps on a pillow between us.” Moran added cautiously, “We waited until we had been married a year to get her.” This evening was for and about dogs but Moran did comment on the Democrats’ control of the congress: “At least people in Northern Virginia will know we’re not crazy and that our priorities – envisioning diplomacy and investing in education – are different from those of the White House.”

The highlight of my evening was meeting pet psychic Diane Roadcap of Springfield. She actually knew what I was thinking. She talked to me and translated symbols that I gave her. I told her that “I have my mom wrapped around my paw, and I feel like a little celebrity.” Roadcap told my mom that I was showing her “ribbons.” She said that I come from a line of champions. She’s right, but I wondered how she knew that. She told me that my purpose in life is to be a “healer, and I should be doing some kind of therapy work.” She also told my mom that I showed her “airplanes,” which she interpreted as a fondness for travel. I am a well-traveled guy since I accompany my mom all the time.

No word on how much the pampered pooch gets paid for his insights, but hopefully it’s more than those kids at Yeas & Nays. He’s a better writer!

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Does anybody listen? The same gang of suspects from yesterday made similar and — in a true fait accompli — some grand spankin’ new boo-boos today:

Patrick Gavin, of FishbowldDC, inexplicably continues to repeatedly link to an old New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens (an incredible FIVE more times!). Why don’t you just go drinking with Hitchens, Gavin, and write your own silly story? Meanwhile, Inky posts a whopping ONE time today (thus far).

 DC Bachelor waxes poetic AGAIN about his long past trip to Spain — after already posting several journal entries weeks ago re: his misadventures. This time, however, he attempts to up the ante by posting pictures of a little girl chasing pigeons, rather than ones of 19-year-olds that he’d like to — wait, wait, what’s his slogan? Oh yeah, “pump and dump.”
 

Kathryn pens another lengthy, boring item, this time about her realization that she’s “famous” for being a blogger — amongst her family and friends. It’s yet another formulaic post with the same old set-up, fluffy middle and not-so-inspiring conclusion that we’ve seen many a day before. She’s got every right to do it, mind you, but c’mon: do something new, or just give up, like a couple of well-placed sources indicate you’re considering.

 
 
Gavin makes the list again today by failing to post a single entry between 2:47 p.m. and right now (~8:15 p.m.). Inky is supposed to pick up the slack in such situations, of course, but after that anonymous entity bashed the political leanings of the Examiner’s opinion page (where Gavin toils as a gossip columnist) at 2:55, he or she got all tuckered out and was finished for the day, it seems. Poor thing.
 

Wonkette’s Alex Pareene trots out one of his bosses, Lockhart Steele, to dispute BHR’s claim yesterday that the “site’s numbers still stagnant.” Steele notes to us that “Wonkette just finished its highest-traffic month in history.” That’s true, but comparatively, based on rankings against other gossip sites, the site has slipped dramatically during Pareene’s reign, failing to keep pace. In other words: stagnant.

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What were we thinking in actually analyzing a whole Yeas and Nays column earlier today? Even Jessica Cutler doesn’t have time for the rag:

Last week, I was asked to rank the attractiveness of this year’s Congressional challengers for the Washington DC Examiner, but I didn’t have the time to look at any of the photos because I was busy moving. So I told Jeff [Dufour], “none of them are hot anyway,” but I didn’t mean it. I was just making excuses for my laziness.

We shall never make this mistake again. And we’re gonna get a helluva lot lazier, too.

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Let’s use the Examiner’s Yeas & Nays column today to dissect a gossip column, shall we:

Item 1:  ”Senate candidates: The cream of the crop”: In which Patrick Gavin and Jeff Dufour ask readers to rank the hotness of Senatorial candidates on the Examiner Web site (They did the same thing yesterday with House candidates). We’ve seen this before. It’s called Gavin’s annual “Hottest Media Types” contest that he does for FishbowlDC at the height of the dog days of summer. It’s boring when journos are the main course and equally so when politicos get the attention. The columnists even quote a non-amused Jessica Cutler for the item (which has never been done before), saying, “Besides, none of them are hot anyway.” Radical!

Gossip value:  

Item 2: “Figurine fetches big dough on eBay”: An item focused on the selling of a Mark Foley figurine with trousers around its ankles. Yes, no new gossip about the real Mark Foley — let’s leave that to the news department, right? Instead, let’s write about figurines of him. Like Wonkette already did the day before. 

Gossip value:

Item 3: “Shell Oil honcho denies price-fixing on his watch”: Short piece on John Hofmeister speech at the National Press Club on Monday, in which he denied suggestions that oil prices have dropped “to improve the Republicans’ lot in November.” Might there have been time after the talk for the fellas to really grill him on the issue? Sure, but instead they focus on the question, ‘”In 15 years … what kind of gas will fuel your car?”‘ Fart gas, perhaps, because this is stinky.

Gossip value:

Item 4: “Will Redbirds help Dems convert red states to blue ones?”: The Cardinals versus the Tigers spawns a rather lengthy item (comparatively) on the old legend of the World Series as a predictor of midterm election winners. However, the legend hasn’t even always proven true, as the boys point out. We predict this isn’t gossip.

Gossip value:

Item 5: “Media mix”: In which the kiddos e-mailed Spencer Abraham, a former Senator from Michigan, last week for God-only-knows what reason. Maybe they prodded him to give some pithy one-liners, as DCist’s Sommer Mathis has revealed Gavin instructed her to do when being quoted for the paper? Didn’t work, if so. Sample: Q: “What are you listening to on your iPod right now?” A: “The Beach Boys.” Yawn.

Gossip value:

Item 6: “Speakeasy”: They actually turn to an editorial in The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla. in order to achieve the one funny quote in today’s column: “Katherine Harris’s bid for the U.S. Senate bears more resemblance to a Monty Python skit than a campaign for high public office.” Yes, a Washington newspaper that’s trying to compete with WaPo turns to a tiny circ Florida paper for humor, instead of gathering some fresh, fun material itself. Shame. Pure shame.

Gossip value:

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• John Spencer, GOP challenger of Hillary Clinton, told the New York Daily News that she used to be quite ugly, speculating that she’s had “millions of dollars” in plastic surgery. “You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew,” the paper quoted him yesterday as saying.
• Mount Vernon has unquestionably had a facelift.
• Tenants at the Watergate say it had become rundown, tired-looking and in need of Botox. 
• President Bush decides to revisit the ugliness that was Vietnam. Why?
• Middle-aged people are fat; should walk more, study says.
• Barrack Obama is a handsome young black man, reports Newsday. 
• Humane Society says Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich doesn’t think black bears are cute — may even want them dead.
• Idaho has a red rash that’s turning bluish.
• The New York Times thinks TIME’s Andrew Sullivan looks like a giant dick.
• Examiner’s Yeas & Nays asked a panel of experts to winnow “down a list of 20-odd candidates to three men and three women who they think would have instant star power and sex appeal from the moment they landed at Reagan to take the oath.” Hillary did not make the cut.

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From Sommer Mathis’ October 5, 2006 blog post:  

Today my first ‘witty quip’ appeared in the Examiner’s Yeas and Neas (sic) Column, which I’ll be contributing to from time to time. Basically Patrick Gavin sends out a single question and you’re supposed to send back a funny one-liner. I clearly failed to achieve comedy in this first outing, but perhaps you can at least get a laugh out of my being lumped in with Norm Ornstein and Alexander Dryer.

Um, Gavin, your commenters are “supposed” to send back funny one-liners? Can’t they simply be witty without the prodding? Where are the ethics in this crazy world of gossip? 

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The anonymous FishbowldDC gossip (we demand a revelation soon, and if he turns out to really be John from Days of Our Lives, rather than Roman, as we suspect, we’re going to simply lose our minds) has now taken to hailing Patrick Gavin’s Examiner column:

Yeas and Nays reported yesterday on a shindig with members of the State Department and Meet the Press. The gathering was hosted by “Meet the Press” producer Betsy Fischer and State Department official Dina Powell, and was attended by the likes of Tim Russert, Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing.

With any luck, this will start a trend. Perhaps next week George Stephanopoulos will host officials from the Defense Department. Or maybe Face the Nation will throw a party for the Department of Justice. Those guys could probably use a little relaxation, don’cha think?

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We’ve grown so tired of gabbing on about male gossip columnists, including Lloyd Grove, Paul Bedard and the Examiner newbies, that we decided to cure our Cocktober blues with –what else — a visit with Karen Feld.  Yes, she and her pup Campari are the only souls that we can always count on to make us smile as the weather turns to pumpkins.

And thank goodness we did. Always on the hunt for good gossip, Feld recently caught up with Joan Rivers who told her all about her new BRAVO show modeled after Barbara Walters’ The View — that will star all gay men (and Rivers, too).

“Our show, called ‘Straight Talk,’ will be me and four wonderful, wonderful, wonderful gay men—I went through (I swear) 5,000 to find them—plus former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who’ll be coming on as our special correspondent for politics and current events,” the QVC queen recently wrote on her blog. ”He’s adorable, funny, and at a real crossroads in his life.”

Rivers explained to Feld that McGreevey is the first she signed on to do the program, and her people consider it to be a “real coup.” No word yet on what Mrs. McGreevey thinks.

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Update, 12:30 p.m.: Gavin’s still trying to make sense of Grove’s op-ed. Ha. Patty, we thought you were so confident that Grove would return to DC. (Until Big Head Rob got the scoop that you couldn’t, straight from the source.)  

***

9:42 a.m. entry: Laughed our asses off when we read Patrick Gavin’s triumphant link to Lloyd Grove’s LA Times Sunday opinion piece on being a gossip columnist. Wrote Grove:

The most satisfying gossip column offers a dollop of drama, conflict and misbehavior, along with a dash of hypocrisy and humor. It views this complicated world through the prism of personality – and makes things, if temporarily, accessible and comprehensible…

We think it might be called ironic, or something, that the so-called “gossip” site FishbowlDC – mainly a site that links to other sites and one that tends to break no real gossip — would even dare to bring attention to Grove’s very true words.

Gavin himself performs somewhat better at being a gossip with his the help of his colleague, Jeff Dufour, at the Examiner’s Yeas and Nays, but why doesn’t any of that ethic wear off on the Mediabistro fishstick enerterprise? Where’s the fuckin’ beef?

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A keen-eyed reader has pointed out that Express’ Mike Grass provided a pictorial of him cooking spinach this week (don’t ask), but he must have forgotten that he attended a rival daily rag’s party just days ago. In the pic, a bottle of Examiner’s Yeas and Nays wine — vintage cheap — can can clearly be seen. The drink was offered as schwag at the column’s big launch event last week. Isn’t this kind of cross-promotion Express-ly illegal?

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