​In New York City, getting your kids into the "right" preschools is notoriously hard. Fancy people put their toddlers in lotteries to get into very expensive pre-K's, where parents might pay upwards of $30,000 for their kids to fingerpaint in the right school.

The Times has an interesting account today from a brownstone Brooklyn mother who took an entirely different tack and started her own preschool co-op with other parents. Apparently the city has more of these often-illegal arrangements than you'd think, though the article doesn't give a clear sense of how many:

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American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, who is only the second most annoying novelist on Twitter, doesn't mince words. He's generally full of Very Definitive Opinions about movies, TV, and other culture stuff, and last night he cottoned onto a new subject: bullying.

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Contentious, isn't it, in the age of "It Gets Better"?

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​Remember being a little kid, and Halloween was so awesome? (It's still awesome in a different way, or actually kind of terrible. Alcohol changes everything.) You would wear your little costume to school and maybe there would be a parade down the block and in class you would eat orange cupcakes and do Halloween-themed word scrambles or whatever.

This is no longer the case for the little kids of Springfield, New Jersey, since their schools superintendent banned them from wearing costumes to school on Halloween. Sad face.

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​Two interns are suing Fox Searchlight because as interns, they had to perform intern-like duties on the set of Black Swan. The poor dears had to do things like "preparing coffee for the production office, ensuring that the coffee pot was full, taking and distributing lunch orders for the production staff, taking out the trash and cleaning the office" -- otherwise known as "things that interns do" (except at the Voice, where our interns do real things, for what it's worth). Alex Footman, a 2009 Wesleyan graduate, and a bizarrely old (42) accounting intern named Eric Glatt are co-plaintiffs in a suit claiming that Fox Searchlight violated minimum wage and overtime laws. This certainly won't help their burgeoning film industry careers.

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​Sometimes it's fun to go to the UrbanBaby "Talk" boards and see how the other half lives. The problems of the UrbanBaby moms are so, so different from our problems that it's actually really interesting! We just found this gem from last week (FYI, DH means "darling husband" in UrbanBaby-ese):

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​There are two big developments in the lives of New York City teenagers this week. Number one is that the Post has exposed a third of them as underage drinkers, especially in Staten Island; the second is that the New York Times has introduced a column just for them, or rather about them. It's "a monthly column that will explore the social lives of teens and adolescents." Brace yourselves. More >>

​Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie have been living together for 40 years. And now, an online petition demanding that Sesame Street allow Bert and Ernie to wed is circulating. As of this posting it has almost 4,500 signatures. "Let us teach tolerance of those that are different," the petition's description reads. "Let Sesame Street and PBS Kids be a big part in saving many worthy lives." Admirable intentions, but are Bert and Ernie even gay? And even if they are, why should two puppets on a kids' show get married?

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Michael appearing in "The Andover Song"

​Today, a rap song from Massachusetts prep school Philips Andover hit the Internet with a bang. Was it real? Was it supposed to be a joke? Why weren't these talented young rappers invited to our president's hip-hop barbeque? Seeking answers to these pressing summer Friday questions, we tracked down the creator of "The Andover Song," a friendly just-graduated Andover senior named Michael Kontaxis.

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via Maria Gorshin/West Side Rag

​That is a little kid's tricycle on 59th Street and 1st Avenue. It is obviously a thing of great value and distinction, an objet d'art if you will, and as such it merits being locked to a bike rack. Because people want to steal tricycles, because they're special things. And children are special. Yes, every individual child is special, particularly your child. Your child is the most special child in New York, and his/her tricycle is the most special tricycle in New York, and you have to be incredibly careful to lock it up, otherwise the hunk of plastic will surely be gone within minutes.

[West Side Rag]

[@_rosiegray]

Esther Zuckerman

Henry Creech takes "The Heat" on its maiden voyage.

​In what could have easily been transformed into an episode of Kids Say The Dardnest Things, 16 Brooklyn schoolchildren gathered at Hudson River Park by 26th Street this morning to sets boats they had made themselves to sail.

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