profoundly ethereal topics appeared and in the most crystalline style (cough, cough), I had to swat at guardians of standards who looked down their noses at the bits of *dastardly* gossip on political topics I would post from Liz SMITH, Page Six, and The-Oldest-Person-Named-"Cindy" (ADAMS). By the bye, all of those halcyon ethereal topics were embedded with threads about cute animals, thread titles entirely consisting of "WTF" and the ever present personal privileges of non-compliance with GD's guidelines.

The fronts of attack to defend against were that the NYP is a MURDOCH property and that *GOSSIP* is an execrable low brow medium UNWORTHY of us.

I ended up with the NYP gossip gang starting from when they were on some show (can't even remember it) on the E! network. Liz SMITH often said she was the token Lib in the MURDOCH machine. Cindy was (and is) undeniably a horrible wingnut, but as I used to defend, she swims in the cocktail circuit privy to both sides, hanging out both with the PATAKIs *and* Teresa Heinz KERRY.

********But above all, I defended the *dastardly* gossip thing with the definition of it, which contains NO/zero/zilch intimation of its being NOT true. And that the kind of political gossip I was posting was frequently the NEWS in "respectable" venues days/weeks/months later. Plus it was a niche here aggregating onto the main torrent of subjects. And even the wingnut Cindy didn't take marching orders from the Colonel Who-zit running the paper.

Anyway, I stopped both the Liz and Cindy years ago, still peek at Page Six daily. Liz was who SINATRA threw two dollars at and called her something.