• Is Jennifer Lopez getting ready to say goodbye to Marc Anthony? She neglected to wear her wedding ring to a premiere last week, which obviously means her marriage is now "at a breaking point." [Us, The Sun]
• Jeremy Piven is heading home. Just two months after arriving on Broadway (and after showing up late to performances and skipping matinees), he says he now plans to return to LA because he's suffering from some sort of "mysterious mercury ailment." [NYP]
• Good news for anyone going to the inauguration: Alec Baldwin says he plans to stay home and watch it on TV. [MSNBC]

Fox News' Roger Friedman has made an annual holiday tradition of probing Will Smith's tax returns. And Smith traditionally insists he's not a Scientologist, despite showering the cult with money. Especially this year.

• The Journal is reporting that GM and Chrysler have resumed merger talks, although both companies have denied it. Chrysler has, however, said that it plans to shut down production for a month. [WSJ, Bloomberg, DB]
• Morgan Stanley employees will see bonuses drop by half this year. [NYP]
• Partners at Goldman Sachs may see bonuses fall by 80 percent. [FT]
• Mary Schapiro will head up the SEC in the Obama administration. [MW]
• More on the efforts to expose Bernie Madoff many years earlier, concerns that were brought to the SEC and ignored. [WSJ]
• Real estate execs in NYC have been particularly hard hit by Madoff. [NYT]
• What to do if you lost a fortune to Bernie Madoff? Sue someone. [FT, NYP]

How is it Joy Behar has escaped our attention as a masterful interviewer for so long? Subbing on Larry King Live last night, she had her way with a prickly, pushy Alec Baldwin.

First he booked an anti-gay pastor for the inauguration, and now the president-elect is expected to shut openly gay candidates out of the two cabinet seats they had a shot at.

Oh, hey you guys, anyone know of a good apartment for Frances Cobain? She's thinking downtown, a room for her mom, maybe an office. No more than $7 million, though. Eight, tops.

Freelancers: Is MTV slow paying your recent invoices? Because one tipster tells us the Viacom subsidiary followed hundreds of layoffs with a policy to freeze outgoing payments October through January.

A few things to keep in mind if you're thinking of sending Chinese food to the most hated man in New York after curfew. If you call China Fun on 64th and Second and ask them if it's possible to dictate a message and have it included with the order, you should expect the woman on the other end of the phone to be a bit baffled by the request and put you on hold so she can ask her manager. (They'll do it. Just explain that you're sending the food to a sick friend. We snidely included the biblical saying "This too shall pass," but you can probably come up with something better.) Don't know what Bernie likes to eat? Neither did we, but since it's been reported he's fond of steak from the Palm, we went with the shredded beef in garlic sauce. (He is kosher, though, so you probably want to steer clear of any pork dishes.) The big challenge, we soon learned, isn't getting the Chinese food to Bernie's building. It's making it past the doorman.

People keep trying and utterly failing to draw some kind of significant tie between the president-elect and disgraced Illinoid Gov. Rod Blagojevich. But is anyone listening to Google Images? CONNECT THE DOTS.

Season's greetings, Gawkerites. If you're in a gift-of-gab-giving mood, you've come to the right place. Why not don some gay apparel and join us in a group live blog of Top Chef?

Prospective senator Caroline Kennedy is "close friends" (ahem) with Times honcho Arthur Sulzberger, and has maybe been feeding the paper scoops, but apparently some Times writers are now trying to publish damaging dirt. Awkward!

· Our German's rusty, but did that zookeeper just say, "Hippopotamus calf meat is incredibly tender, and can be enjoyed with both reds and whites. What a delicious Christmas dinner awaits us this year!?"

It's been over thirty years since a contestant on The Price is Right guessed the exact price of their Showcase Showdown. So why was Drew Carey's so unenthused when it happened yesterday?

· There is only One: Metallica magnetizes the Forum with death.

Recessionary times should be glory days for LinkedIn, as people furiously network on the business-contacts website for scraps of work. But instead, it's LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye who finds himself out of a job.

While we've already long forgotten Righteous Kill—and the onerous sins of its one-sheet—England is only now becoming acquainted with its Pacino/DeNiro double-bed-shitting pleasures. It can't even seem to get an in-your-face tagline right.

Sad! Crazy-coiffed, fabulously scandalous Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich will not appoint anyone to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat, according to his fun-loving lawyer, Ed Genson. Why? Because Democrats are mean.

With the premiere of his new film Seven Pounds just around the corner, Will Smith should be ostentatiously fake-laughing all the way to the bank. So why isn't he?

Unlikely, save for one determined Atlanta fan with a taste for hip-hop cartoons. Superdeluxe's staff was laid off in May, but it took the Time Warner subsidiary seven months to move a small portion of its video library over to AdultSwim.com and shut the site down.

Kristin Chenoweth pops up twice on WTK tonight. First, she keeps a brave face as Olive the waitress in the continuing Pushing Daisies viking funeral, and then as herself, crooning Christmas songs in Washington.