[Kate Moss leaving the Ivy Club in London; image via Splash]

More troubling news on the job front: The Labor Department reports that first-time requests for unemployment benefits jumped to 667,000 last week, which represents a 26-year high. [AP]

Today we have an unwitting star of a sex tape, a rocker and/or roller who threatened someone with a right bottling, a guy who's just a gigolo, and a terrible cocaine story involving children.

It's Thursday—the day when the New York Times Style section constructs tenuous trend stories designed to infuriate us about largely illusory issues! Woo hoo! Today's trend: crazy parents turn their kids into health food zombies!

Author and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff has been inescapable on the airwaves in recent days, ripping the Post, News Corp. and its chairman Rupert Murdoch to shreds for the Post's tasteless cartoon last week. Of course, Wolff has good reason to seek out the attention. His biography on Murdoch, which was published in December, has been a stunning failure: According to Bookscan, which tracks roughly 75% of the books sold in the U.S., The Man Who Owns the News has sold just over 15,000 copies since it was published in December, a far cry from what publisher Doubleday was expecting given he reportedly took home a $1 million advance and Doubleday indicated it would "start off" with a 100,000 print run. But while it's no surprise to see Wolff carry on about News Corp. (and his other pet obsession, the New York Times), it is a bit surprising to see Wolff invoking ethics and morals. Why, you ask? Perhaps because it's always a bit difficult to take an ethics lesson from a married man who carried on an affair with a woman nearly three decades his junior who also happened to be an intern at the magazine he writes for.

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis will be sitting down with investigators from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office today as part of the probe into the $3.6 billion in bonuses that Merrill Lynch paid out just days before it was acquired by BofA. Lewis didn't indicate what time he was scheduled to give his deposition, although in typical Lewisian fashion, he made it sound like something he was thrilled to be doing: "I look forward to the chance to speak candidly and forthrightly and honestly and tell the story." But he may be in for a rude awakening when he turns up at Cuomo's offices today.

So many unanswered questions: How will Octo-Mom buy the mansion she's picked out? What kind of jokes did Clint Eastwood tell about "Jose?" Where in Warren Beatty's house will Lindsay Lohan live?

• Financier J. Christopher Flowers is putting his Upper East Side townhouse—known as the Harkness Mansion—on the market. It's "quietly being offered" for $49.95 million, which is a few million bucks less than what Flowers paid for the 50-foot-wide townhouse when he bought it from Jacqui Safra and Jean Doumanian in 2006. [NYO]
• Former Revlon CEO Jack Stahl has paid $8 million for a 21st-floor apartment at 255 East 74th Street. [Cityfile]
• Equinox founder Danny Errico and his wife Vera have sold their six bedroom, oceanfront mansion at 71 Shipwreck Drive in Amagansett for $11.895 million. [NYP]
• Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson may be trying to back out of a deal to buy a three-bedroom penthouse at 200 East 66th Street. [NYP]

Erykah Badu turns 38 today. Billionaire philanthropist and political powerbroker Ron Lauder is 65. Right-wing commentator Bob Novak is turning 78. Town & Country editor-in-chief Pamela Fiori is 65. WABC anchorman Bill Ritter is 59. Virginia Governor Tim Kaine is 51. Stylist Mark Garrison is 58. Ally Hilfiger, the "designer" and daughter of Tommy, is turning 24. And Michael Bolton turns 56 today.

Self-promoting cad Neal Boulton's editorship of gay magazine Genre is a touchy subject. But you can stop asking how much he likes men, because Boulton's on to bigger, more "pansexual" things.

• Citigroup is close to a pact to boost the government's stake in the failing bank to as much as 40%; Vikram Pandit's job, however, should be safe. [WSJ, NYP]
• More on what the Obama administration is hoping to find out when it begins conducting the "stress tests" to see how banks hold up during a crisis. [WSJ]
• RBS has reported the biggest loss ($34.3 billion) in British history. [Reuters]
• Bank of America is considering a sale of First Republic Bank [WSJ]
• UBS has named Oswald Grübel as the company's new CEO. [FT]
• JPMorgan Chase will have eliminated a total of 12,000 jobs by the time it folds in the operations of Washington Mutual. [AP]
• Yet another massive financial fraud uncovered: Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh have been implicated in a $667 million scheme. [NYT]

Ben Stiller reportedly flipped out over his Oscar script the day before this year's show. But the Joaquin Phoenix impersonation he came up with as a replacement was hardly original.

• Is Madonna's relationship with Jesus Luz purely platonic? The two are "quite close and cuddly, but not exactly romantic," and Jesus was spotted at a Kabbalah service "playing around more with Rocco than paying attention to Madonna," which can't be a good sign. [E!]
• Did marrying Tom Cruise ruin Katie Holmes' chances of ever having a movie career? Is Tom's sister secretly handling his PR even though she pretends to just be his assistant? So many questions! [Fox 411, P6]
• Amy Winehouse's estranged husband Blake Fielder-Civil was released from jail yesterday. [The Sun]
• Martha Stewart's old friend Sam Waksal is now out of a halfway house and "ready to get back to work trying to find a cure for cancer." [NYDN]

No more excuses, blocked novelists: A shrink convinced nervous London lawyer Joseph O'Neill to follow his novel-writing dream. Ten years on, he took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

"Demand for fake testicles for neutered pets, including dogs and cats, is also holding up during the recession. Southern California is the biggest market for Kansas City, Missouri-based Neuticles, said Gregg Miller, the company's founder. Its most expensive prosthetic testicles, for large dogs, cost $1,299. 'You would assume that with people losing their homes and jobs, the last thing on their mind is buying a pair of fake testicles for their pets,' Miller said. 'Folks in California love their pets and are trendsetters. They'd do anything for them, no matter what the economy is doing.'" [Bloomberg]

Jack McBrayer's self-deprecating jokes about his voice double Bobby Jindal came during a test run of Jimmy Fallon's Late Night. Test run for SNL is more like it.

HarperCollins is paying Nick Douglas a five-figure sum for Twitter Wit, a book of the Gawker alum's favorite Twitter posts. Is getting paid for aggregating other people's "tweets" as lazy as it sounds?

"Once every hundred years, media changes," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in 2007, predicting a sea change in online advertising. The reality: His social network is leading the way in online scams.

What happened to Darryl Siry, the Tesla Motors marketing chief who left the electric-car startup abruptly last December? He's turned up as a cleantech analyst. And we've learned the real reason why he left.

Oh, hey, look: Flailing NBC executive Ben Silverman just bought a reality TV project from Jerry Seinfeld, marking the 1990s comedian as the ultimate trailing indicator of desperation and creative bankruptcy.