Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

John Tierney’s New York Times columns are filled with willfully obtuse justifications for selfish behavior, not to mention lots of cherry-picked data. But until last week his columns were fun to read online, because the photo that accompanied them was so hilarious. Here’s the photo, which must have been taken a few years ago during Tierney’s tenure as dean of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College:

The hand-stapled-to-chin pose: so sexy. It turns out that this guy also loves to pose that way, which should tell you something about Tierney.

Alas, the above picture has apparently been abandoned in favor of this perfectly normal one, which accompanied the online version of Tierney’s Times column yesterday:

Perhaps Tierney finally realized that he’s not much of a thinker after all.

I had no idea how bad things had gotten for Judith Miller until I saw the Ethicist column in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine. When is the Times finally going to rein in this crazy woman?

(Here’s a link to this week’s Ethicist column.)

Erstwhile New York Times rock critic Neil Strauss appeared on The View last week to promote his new book, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The book, published by Judith Regan, no less, chronicles the two years he spent picking the brains of dudes like these so he could learn how to get into the pants of chicks like these. He became very, very good at it. He originally wrote about these experiences in a January 2004 article in the Styles section of The New York Times.

Here’s the footage of Strauss’s seven-minute kaffeeklatsch with the ladies of The View. Alas, Barbara Walters was not on the panel that day.

Check out this totally gratuitous and inexplicable pop-culture reference buried in a mostly sober article by Melanie Warner in today’s New York Times. The article is about one Rick Berman, an amoral jackass who propagandizes for food-industry interests through a well-funded front group.

About a third of the way into the piece, Warner refers to Michael Jacobson, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as “a tenacious Ph.D. in microbiology.” I’m sure Jacobson is both tenacious and a Ph.D., but it seems likely that the two-word phrase is a punning reference to a certain Jack Black side project. It’s possible that the reference is to the traditional meaning of the phrase, but that’s not as amusing to contemplate. Regardless, the phrase is clearly a pun, and it’s totally gratuitous. What the hell is that pun doing in there? Is Melanie Warner a Jack Black fan? Was the pun inserted by a rogue D-ciple on the Times copy desk? When did the paper start allowing Entertainment Weekly-style wordplay into news copy?

For a feature package on the tabloidization of many broadsheet newspapers, Poynter Online runs an illustration showing what The New York Times might look like if it shifted to a tabloid format: