Esther Zuckerman

​You could hear the blaring of car and air horns from two blocks away as Verizon employees continued their strike for a third day on 13th Street and Second Avenue, after the company and workers failed to come to terms on a contract early Sunday morning. The East Village's reception of the strikers has been positive so far, strikers told us early this afternoon: the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary has allowed them to use their bathrooms, stores have given out water and chief union steward Dominic Renda said two food businesses have stopped delivering to the people working inside the building who crossed the picket line.

"Yeah, the people here have been great to us," he said. "The Village has been traditionally left wing, but I've been surprised how we haven't gotten a single person berating us or criticizing us."

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Esther Zuckerman

​A war has been waged in the stroller-filled streets of the Upper West Side. The players: the Blue Donkey Bar and resident Tim Tomlinson. For now it looks like Tomlinson has won. A sign posted on the window of the recently shuttered bar on Amsterdam Avenue pinpointed the West 84th Street resident Tomlinson for its demise.

The bar was shut down by the police Wednesday, and on Friday owners struck a deal with the police that if they ceased business on their own accord, the charges against them would be dropped, owner Jim Goldsmith told us.

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​"Spewing racism in public since 1974," reads the bio for a new Twitter account based on New Republic editor Marty Peretz. The account is carefully marked "parody," doubtlessly in an attempt not to be deleted, and started about three hours ago with this inaugural message: "My twitter was born today, but my racism was born decades ago." In the hours since, the Peretz parody has picked up a few followers, most notably MJ Rosenberg of Media Matters, and taken a first-person whirlwind tour through Peretz's fraught history with people of color, especially Muslims. The thing is, so far it's almost all verifiable quotes (some sourced!), which makes it more aggregation than parody. Could this latest push against Peretz be one that finally sticks?

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​Yesterday we wrote about Kanye West's new Twitter. As Zach points out in SOTC's Week in Review, it's now been joined by the Budget Kanye West account (@budgetkanyewest). Budget Kanye tweets about deals he finds at Wal-Mart and reminds us that kitchen shears are a ripoff if you already have scissors. His location is Forever 21, and his website is priceline.com.

Herewith, a tweet-off between the lavish Kanye and his thrifty cousin:

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​Last night, we reported on a video made by The A-Team director Joe Carnahan in which he trashes on notorious Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger Nikki Finke, calling her a "fuckin' moron." Charming! Finke responded in kind this morning by noting "poor" Joe Carnahan "who's now officially unhireable as a director." It looks like some of Carnahan's supporters/fans/scared assistants went into Finke's comments to defend him. Fun times! [FK]

​There are the wars man wages, there are the wars man fights, and then there are the wars that happen in our everyday lives that truly demonstrate the complete lack of necessity for war to exist, period. This is of course best exhibited in a place like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the embarrassing day-to-day wars of the citizenry are waged embarrassingly.

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​Do you know what a TechCrunch is? No? Well then: it's a site run by a guy out of San Fransisco for San Fransisco tech geeks, and unless you work for FourSquare or you're a venture capitalist with a few hundred thousand to peel off, don't worry too much about it. All you need to know is that TechCrunch is run by a wacky guy named Michael Arrington, who's very influential among the aforementioned people and also people who get worked up about iPhone apps.

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​The list of Cablevision owner James Dolan's enemies is ever expanding: there are long-suffering, abused employees, any and all reporters, especially his own sports reporters, and extra-especially bloggers. And though the Voice -- Runnin' Scared in particular -- has had its disagreements with Mr. Dolan in the recent past, nothing compares to the special Dolan-aimed ire held by not only New York Knicks fans, but basketball fans in general.

And the most well-respected basketball fan (if not all-around sports fan) in the world these days is doubtlessly ESPN's Bill Simmons. Surprise -- he has harsh words for Dolan, too:

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​The Internet has been especially testy as of late! Of course, it always is, but just in the last month or so:

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Howdy, pardner.

​History buffs, look out!

NPR reports that 36 pages of handwritten, yellowed documents -- held together with rudimentary Scotch tape -- recording the legendary 1881 shootout between the Earp brothers and a band of cattle rustlers in Tombstone, Arizona, have been found.

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