A City Section grows in Brooklyn: This week's City Section is all-Brooklyn all the time as it celebrates that borough of awakening, transformation, gentle inertia and whimsical names for little girls and musicals. Hmm, those lil' girls are cute. Brooklyn is a pretty name. We're glad their parents didn't go with "Bushwick." (NB I contribute to the City Section, even though I haven't been to Brooklyn in ages.)

Somebody told me you had a boyfriend who looked like a girlfriend that I had in February of last year: Apparently it's getting harder to tell the gays from the straights when they're getting their nails done at Bliss or slamming shooters on the bar at strip clubs. This is news? New Yorkers think so; MEL has never been so confused about its sexuality (except maybe when it wondered if it smelled gay). p.s. Adam Brody is so not gay. Neither is Tom Cruise. Leave him and Katie alone! Their love is real, dammit. This is a shameless bid for web traffic. Brangelina.*

Come back to the five and dime, Bill Frist, Bill Frist: Oh, our salad days, when we were green in judgment, and ate salad. How David Brooks longs for them, those days when a man could break off his engagement and sally forth into a life of diagnostic initiative, if not impunity. The Bill Frist of yesteryear does sound like a good guy. I guess all we can do is be guided by what we liked about ourselves in the past and use it to become someone we'd like in the future. I think I'll leave my annoying three-year-old habit of licking people's faces and yelling "slurpie dog!" behind me, though.

Nicholas Kristof, you're awesome. You wring every last bit of possible good out of your platform, and that is a very, very good thing. Congratulations on your role in helping to free Mukhtaran Bibi, and for all the change you help to effect. Seriously, it's inspiring. If I meet you I might be tempted to waive the "no slurpie dog" rule.

*As an interesting corollory to this story, my headline for this item was suggested to me by Track 2 of the mixed CD culled this weekend from my gay friend Dave's iTunes. Also on the mix: "Just Like Jesse James" by Cher, "Rock Me Like A Hurricane" by The Scorpions, "Smalltown Boy" by Bronski Beat, "Laid" by James (which is to "La Bamba" as "My Sweet Lord" was to "He's So Fine" - have a listen, you'll see), "Love Vigilantes" by New Order and "Goodbye Seventies" by Yaz. Which, I think, is the musical counterpart to this article.