Look, I know that change and turnover are an inexorable part of New York City, but my sadness about Joe Jr.’s isn’t just based on sentimentality. This place serves good diner food—homemade soups, terrific omelettes with corned-beef hash, fountain lemonade, and burgers that realize beautifully that specific diner-burger idiom—AND it is thriving, not a tired old joint wanting for customers and vitality.

So I sent out an APB to bloggers I knew would care—Josh Ozersky of The Feedbag, Ed Levine of Serious Eats, and Jeremiah Moss of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York—and they all posted my sad entreaty to help save the place. (Josh mischievously identified me as “Bob Cratchit.”) Also picking up my words were Eater and New York magazine’s Grub Street blog, though the latter curiously quoted someone named “David Camp.” Thanks, blogging community! I really do appreciate it.

Alas, per further reporting from Grub Street, it looks like the place is finished. The Hondros family, which owns Joe Jr.’s, sounds resigned to their fate, and the petition movement was started by crestfallen customers, not the Hondroses. I beseech all the landlords with empty storefronts in the Village to be sympathetic, and I beseech some young would-be restaurateur to start a new institution that will serve our neighborhood as well, and as unpretentiously, as Joe Jr.’s has.*

* BONUS: Please see this touching appreciation from The Villager’s Ed Gold of Louie, né Elias Vassilakis, the beloved Joe Jr.’s counterman who died abruptly in 2004. Louie’s was the first death I had to explain to my kids in that life-lesson, death-of-Mr. Hooper-on-Sesame Street sort of way.

UPDATE: The New York Times has filed a report that carries a faint whiff of hope for a stay of execution.

Evidently, Lucas is playing both Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Tim Burton’s movie of Alice in Wonderland. Not a stretch.

Yet I feel for these callow twerps, for I was once one of them, only worse. In the summer of 1985, I worked as a canvasser for the New Jersey branch of PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), a consumer and environmental lobby founded by Ralph Nader. Not only did I actively knock on doors in the suburbs rather than just pester urban pedestrians; I asked people for money. And what’s stranger still is, a fair number of them wrote out checks to NJ-PIRG on the spot.

I still can’t believe I did this. It’s not only against my inherent nature even to leave the house (let alone appear on the doorstep of a stranger’s); I also have doubts about the very effectiveness of this sort of street-level twerp deployment, even if I believe in the causes themselves.

Yet when I look at what’s happening in Iran, where two thirds of the population is under the age of 35, I’m reminded that youthful activism can be a powerful, wondrous thing. (As opposed to, say, this.) With lives on the line and freedom at stake, young Iran has no time to indulge in twerpitude.

This event is already sold out, so I don’t even know why I’m posting about it, except that I’m just tickled to serve on the same panel as my favorite living food person, chef/author/instructor/TV host/loverman Jacques Pépin. Me and Pépin—it’s like an air-guitar enthusiast sharing a stage with Jimi Hendrix.

So I was delighted to see that this week, the Times felt compelled to describe Duff McKagan, the former bassman of Guns N’ Roses and current bassist of Velvet Revolver, as “musician and songwriter Michael McKagan, known as Duff.” You seldom see the Times go to such dorky lengths anymore. Back in 1987, for example, the Times was dutiful in describing U2’s lead vocalist as “Paul Hewson, who goes by the name Bono Vox,” referring to the singer later in the same article as “Mr. Vox.” Today, Bono is a regular contributor to the Times’s Op-Ed page, under the byline... Bono.

Perhaps this week’s retro-Times nose-holding approach to McKagan’s nickname is attributable to the fact that he was the subject of an article in the Business section—namely, the weekly “Frequent Flier” column, in which regular business travelers share their tales of airport zen and woe. McKagan is a businessman of sorts, so it must be pointed out that “Duff” is just a handle, a tool of his trade.

Regardless, no one, in print or otherwise, ever refers to Duff McKagan as Michael McKagan. In over twenty years in the public eye, he has been Duff. Writing him up as Michael McKagan is tantamount to describing Jay Leno as “the comedian and television host James Douglas Muir Leno, known as Jay.” It’s absurd, and endearingly Times-ian.

And yet... I have some “authorly” events coming up that involve not only free wine and free food, but lively co-presenters who will engage you and keep things moving clippety-clop.

The first, on Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m., is a talk at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena about wine, wine fetishism, and wine snobbery, the occasion being the publication of the paperpack edition of Benjamin Wallace’s fine nonfiction oeno-caper The Billionaire’s Vinegar. The bookchatters will be Mr. Wallace, Slate’s gonzo wine columnist Mike Steinberger, my Wine Snob’s Dictionary co-author David Lynch, and me.

The second event is a real corker: On Friday, June 12, at 8 p.m., at New York City’s Astor Center, the Southern Foodways Alliance, overseen by the affable and mischievous Mississippian foodthropologist John T. Edge, will sponsor a discussion of the life and legacy of Craig Claiborne, the Mississippi-born cookbook author and former food editor of the New York Times, and, in my opinion, the most underappreciated of America’s 20th-century food figures. (He’s a major character in my book The United States of Arugula.) Pete Wells, current editor of the Times’s Dining section, will moderate, and the yammerers will be the great Jacques Pépin (who knew Claiborne well) and me. M. Pépin is a kind man, my favorite TV chef, and the possessor of the most suspiciously undiluted French accent I’ve ever heard, considering he’s lived in this country for 50 years.

John T. Edge is flying up some chefs from Mississippi to “represent” with Southern snacks at the Astor Center. This event is free but requires a reservation and will get booked up quickly. More info is here, or you can simply RSVP by June 5 to sfaevents@olemiss.edu

On top of that, heaven help me, I’m now on Twitter as @MrKamp. I suspect I will be doing more of my “funny” material on Twitter, as opposed to my ponderous 7,000-word chin-strokers.

If you’ve found me via the microposts, you might like the Snob’s Dictionary books.

Anyone in America who is unemployed and inclined to share a little of his or her story is welcome to fill out our simple Breadline Questionnaire. Even in this early phase, we’ve had respondents from Hawaii, Oregon, Georgia, and Minnesota–not just from our home base in solipsistic NYC.

We also intend to put up original artwork, photography, and music that’s reflective of the times. We want the Breadline to function as a sort of online quasi-WPA project, if that ain’t putting it too cute.

I’ll admit to being fascinated by famous recluses–most of whom, I believe, are sincere in their desire to withdraw from public life rather than pranksterishly self-conscious about cultivating a mystique. In 2002, the writer Tim Willis doorstepped Syd Barrett in Cambridge, England. He found the former Pink Floyd leader standing before him in nothing but “a small, tight pair of bright blue Y-fronts” (scant blue undergarments being, evidently, a recluse hallmark) and unwilling to talk, yet settled into a simple life of painting and gardening. It’s my suspicion that the mentally fragile Barrett wouldn’t have made it to 60 (he died three years ago) had he remained an active rock musician; reclusiveness extended his life.

Still, for all my pursuit of interviews with reclusive figures, I could never bring myself to doorstep one; it just seems too violative. (This is one of the reasons I don’t consider myself a real journalist but merely a “writer.”) The one time I’ve actually landed an interview with a serious recluse–he being Sly Stone–it took an agonizing ten-year process to get face-to-face with the man. And, it must be said, my zeal derived more from my adoration of Stone’s music than from the scoopy thrill of bagging big game. (I’ve never had any desire to interview Salinger because his work doesn’t interest me.)

Though, hey, I’ll cop to getting a kick out of the fact that this photo exists.

Several arduous years later, Matt is on a glorious victory lap with the finished film, Valentino: The Last Emperor, which, as of this week, is the highest-grossing documentary of 2009. Even if I was not Matt’s friend, I would tell you this is a fantastic movie; you needn’t be a fashion person, a perma-tanned Italian, a woman, a pug owner, or a homosexual to fall for it. It’s just a fun, fizzy plunge into a great milieu, plus it has unforeseen heart.

Valentino: The Last Emperor is playing in limited release in a bunch of theaters nationally, with Matt himself introducing the film and taking questions in New York, Chicago, L.A., and quite possibly other cities over the next few weeks. Visit the movie’s Web site to get the details.