Oh Gooooooooood. Is it just us, or is today going by excruciatingly slowly? Normally we feel like time goes too fast, since with every second that passes we get closer to the senior center (or at least the Thai plastic-surgery clinic). But today is just agony. Not just because it's the first "real" day back at work but because tonight, at last, the long dry spell between episodes of Gossip Girl comes to an end.

To recap: The last episode was a rich, moving, lyrical vignette that explored the meanings of life and death and family and love and friendship and fantastic fucking hair that ended in a question, the answer to which we could only speculate on.

As if we could be any more excited about tonight's episode, there's more stunning news.

Lawyer Bruce Blakeman, who is a member of the Port Authority Board of Commissioners, has announced that he won't run for mayor this year against Michael Bloomberg. Blakeman, who had previously announced his Republican candidacy, issued a statement today:

I believe there is no one better qualified to see New York through these tough times than Michael Bloomberg. I have always maintained that, based on his record of achievement, his commitment to the people who live here, and his fierce protection of New York’s quality of life, I would never stand to oppose him. With his decision to seek reelection my decision to withdraw from this contest was an easy one.

Man, these have been a rough couple of years for Blakeman — not only did Bloomberg crush his mayoral ambitions in late 2008, in late 2007 his wife, Nancy Shevell, left him for ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. Ouch.

Arianna Huffington and company thought that if they floated the idea that the site was worth $200 million back in the news-heavy spring, nobody would notice. But they didn't count on calculator-wielding Simon Dumenco, who looked at the site's competitors and promptly declared Lady Huff "cracked out." But that doesn't mean it won't be worth that much someday. "Maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate," he writes. "For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them ... as for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil." [Ad Age]

Best item this morning? Lourdes Leon, beautiful, maxi-eyebrowed daughter of Madonna and Carlos, is going to the city's Professional Children's School, which has alums like Sarah Jessica Parker and Scarlett Johansson. That requisite crack about Lourdes learning to act, which her mom never did? We were on it, people, but the News already made it. Moving on, Lindsay Lohan and her friends threw money in the air when Fat Joe's "Make It Rain" came on at Pink Elephant in Chelsea. Katie Holmes is getting so skinny that people gasped when she walked onstage recently in All My Sons, and at JoJo, she ordered only a salad and some vegetables, so it's time for us to worry and to urge her to balance high-fiber foods with protein and perhaps even larger portions. Katie Lee Joel loves to stay home in sweatpants and make the whole house smell like the pot roast she's cooking for Billy, thereby making Donna Reed look empowered.

Julia Fenwick became close with "lovely uncle Bernie" and his niece Shana in the eight years she worked as the office manager of the Madoff Securities London office. But in the wake of her old boss's confession he was running a giant Ponzi scheme, their friendship has, it seems, unraveled: Not only did Berns neglect to pay her any severance with other people's money, not one person from America has even called to find out how she's doing (she's pregnant, poor, and pissed off, thank you very much). So Julia did the only thing she could: She sold the family down the river by giving a long, detailed interview to Britain's Daily Mail, one that presents as clear a picture of Madoff's personal spending habits as we've seen so far. After the jump, we break down how he spent his ill-gotten gains.

You know what ticks us off sometimes? When our good friends over at Gawker try to make a story out of something just because they think it's true. Take their coverage of a trumped-up "affair" of sorts between Caroline Kennedy and Times owner Arthur Sulzberger (yeah, the paper's been so swell to her, guys). This week, the issue getting our goat is the Website's treatment of the death of Jett Travolta. The son of John Travolta and Kelly Preston, who some reports say was autistic but the family said suffered from Kawasaki syndrome, died after a seizure knocked him to the floor in a bathroom in the Bahamas, where the family was vacationing. Since the death, Gawker has speculated on whether his male nanny was Travolta's gay lover and therefore underqualified (when it turned out that the nanny was married to a woman, one of the child's other nannies, writer Owen Thomas only said the "mystery deepened").

In September 2007, when I was making $30,000 a year as a reporter at the New York Post, I found myself doing 90 mph in a $412,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe. I didn't want to go too fast — I'm not the gutsiest driver — but the PR rep in the passenger seat goaded me on. As I slowed to cruise through Times Square, pedestrians started taking pictures. “They think you’re an heiress,” the car rep said.

A month later the Dow hit its high, 14,164.53. Wealth was a news event. It seemed important not only to cover the lives of the rich and famous, but to get as close as possible to living that lifestyle. Over the past four years, a class of New York City reporters embedded at the front lines of excess has written about the “most expensive” in just about every product line, from omelettes to prom nights. But today, our frivolous lives of pretend luxury have seemingly come to an end.