NY Mag spent 55 minutes with ?uestlove and deemed him a "a soft, Pooh-like pile of a person." Aww. That's a compliment, right? We, too, have 55 minutes of The Roots, but actual video.

Whoops. The Twitter account we thought Jesse Watters was taunting us from is fake. We would have called Watters to confirm it was his, but he won't talk to us. We'll apologize in person soon.

In the long and storied history of the universe nothing has come so far, overcome so much, as Black. Some have theorized that in the beginning there was only Blackness. Here's the thinking on that.

White-hot (hot-white?) rhythmic-rhymer of words Asher Roth released his album this week. I got Tom Breihan (Pitchfork), Touré (The Daily Beast), and Byron Crawford (XXL) to cut through the obligatory talking points.

Waddup, homedogs and homebidges. We're strapping in for another gritty-urban afternoon with your host with the most, T.A.N. .This weekend: The Roots, Asher Roth discourse, and poignant photos from Spanish Harlem. Maybe more!

Oklahoma Republicans have scuttled an effort to adopt the Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize??" as the state's official rock song, but the governor intervened to save the measure. Because nothing important happens in Oklahoma.

Barack Obama's been catching flack for getting intimate and flirty with Hugo Chavez at some summit this week. But Republican presidents loved their communist "key parties" even more.

This, reportedly from a "European trade publication circa 1998," may be the single most unintentionally terrible ad ever produced. At least in the last 11 28 years. Click to enlarge. [via Fishbowl LA]

Jesse Watters, Bill O'Reilly's ambush artist, has sworn off ambushing. Oh, he still plans to stalk his boss' enemies in a hollow charade of getting answers, but that word — "ambush" — sounds so tawdry.

Larry Page, the dorkier half of Google's founding duo, has mastered at least one basic human function: His wife, former model and Stanford bioinformatics Ph.D. Lucy Southworth, is pregnant.

[English folks walk by an advertisement in London, as the British economy tanks and no one goes shopping anymore; image via AP]

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Boy. It is going to be a really nice weekend, right? For a couple minutes until it's GROSS and HUMID as usual anyway. Hey, what happened this week?

Oh, hello. You wanted to see a picture of disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich standing in a fake forest with Heidi and Spencer from The Hills, right? Oh good, because we have one.

This week, Jim Berhle's Kartoon Kats review "The Awl," and a pirate expresses his desire to have sexual relations with Derek Jeter.

So this guy in Staten Island is going to prison for six years because he sold a satellite TV package of Arab news stations that included Al Manar, which is Hezbollah's TERROR CHANNEL.

This is the media life on Twitter: Readers daring to call on the phone, bloggers taking each other out to lunch, and blowhard predictions made about blowhard predictions! Today's Twitterati:

Famous actor Kevin Spacey is going to prison! To... interview criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff. For an upcoming film. A film that sounds just weird.

Just last week, Hachette cut pay across the board and increased work hours. Today employees got the memo below, telling them that "certain functions" in IT and finance are going to be outsourced by the end of the year. We also got a tip that Hachette is notifying freelancers that it's cutting their rates—by 3% in one case, although it may vary.