Check out Gawker — a very cool new blog, devoted to chatty, catty gossip about Manhattan! I love this stuff … more proof of the interesting small publishing-biz possibilities that flow out of blogging. They find tons of excellent tidbits of New York life, such as this bit from the New York Observer:

Drunken Shopping
The gift shop at the Times Square W has developed an ingenious new retail strategy: ensure that your shoppers are drunk when they enter the store by putting it next to the bar. Then allow—even encourage—your customers to continue downing cocktails once inside, as the inhibition leads to promiscuous AmEx Centurion Card use. Most of the customers are male and tend to buy things for women—the ones they’re dating, the ones they’re sleeping with, the cocktail waitresses, the sales associates. Anyone, really. But women do it, too. “We have a Fabien Baron snowboard,” says sales associate Caitlin Sheehan, “and a drunk woman came stumbling out of the bathroom one night and asked if it’s a belt—and it’s so totally not.”

(This item courtesy Boing Boing!)