Happy Holidays from Viacom, the home of hundreds of holiday layoffs! Employees, please observe these piddling, needless rules as you slave away in our caverns on Christmas. MEMO AHEAD:

Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts shopping at the Whole Foods on East Houston ... Matthew Broderick walking with son James down Seventh Avenue ... Isaac Mizrahi strolling down Sixth Avenue last night with his boyfriend Arnold ... Carl Bernstein walking with wife Christine Kuehbeck and her giant umbrella ... Katie Holmes talking on her cell phone outside her apartment building ... and Brooke Shields walking downtown.

Alert style

What would you do for some free cell phone porn? Stand on one foot? Lick the pavement? Ha, Playboy is willing to work with you on this! Now, what would you do if it wasn't exactly porn, but a reality show webisode thing? You'd participate in a convoluted cell phone-based marketing scheme, wouldn't you. There's babes involved!

Zounds and ods bodkins y'all, Gossip Girl spin-off news to drop in T-minus now. There have been rattly little whispers circling through TV land about some sort of new offshoot project for the teen soap, and people were all up ins the Speculation Department's secret files trying to find the answers. Most people thought it would be for young Jennifricka, following her to boarding school like that The It Girl book series. But no! Instead the new spin-off will focus on our most useless and wrinkly demographic, old people! Horrible, horrible old people which I will never become (I've my Goldie Hawn wig and Isabella Rossellini to thank for that.) Read more by clicking —>

The Golden Globes will be decided by 83 well-fed junketeers of the HFPA who are idiots. So, why not vote in the Gawker Golden Globe Poll before you start throwing things at your TV?

Let's take a moment to share Plum Sykes' pain, shall we? According to the Independent, the Bergdorf Blondes author and social fixture is now finding that her "efforts to crack the potentially lucrative American TV market are in danger of falling victim to the credit crunch." Earlier this year Sykes landed a deal with NBC to pen a sitcom about "female tycoons" called Mogulettes, which was described in the press as "Sex In the City-like." (Apparently that's a good thing.) But now, just as she puts the finishing touches on the script for the pilot, she's discovered that the show's prospects aren't looking too bright. "These are very difficult times at the moment with the credit crunch," she says. "No one has any money for anything, so we'll just have to wait and see what happens. It's a really terrible time." We're sure things will turn around soon enough. After all, she goes on to say she's looking to Tamara Mellon and Ivanka Trump for career inspiration. How could she possibly go wrong?

Barack Obama has chosen a two-term EPA head, an experimental physicist known for LASER experiments, and some woman from New Jersey to fix the environment.

Oh happy day, awards season has really started! The Golden Globe awards nominations have been announced, sending some hopes soaring and others to dash themselves on the rocks and die a quick death.

You can only trust about 18 percent of the things you read in the National Enquirer. (We haven't done the math or anything; we're just throwing out a random number.) So we'll take the news today that one of Martha Stewart's family members is planning to write an "explosive" tell-all about the domestic diva with a grain of salt. But there's no harm in fantasizing, is there? The Enquirer claims the book will include details about Martha's "boozing, eating and crying binges" and the "special lady friend" she met in prison. And it will also reveal dirt on Martha's long list of enemies, including Rachael Ray and Donald Trump.

The rumor we heard yesterday has been confirmed: Time Canada, which has been around more than 65 years, is folding at the end of the year. [Masthead Online]

Today is Emily Brill's birthday! Take a moment, if you would, to reflect back on what the young media heiress has accomplished in this past year: inspired by a mean Gawker post, she founded her very own blog, triumphed over disease, traveled to distant lands, posed provocatively, wore her pearl necklace, stood resolutely with Sarah Palin, and finally became the Ultimate Narrator. Quite a time. She's celebrating today by going to FAO Schwarz to "pick out two animals," then maybe going to a blowjob party. Click through for one more fun picture of Emily in devilish party mode. We salute you, Ms. Brill:

No looming strike will slow down this year's Golden Globe Awards, nominations for which were announced this morning with a few mildly head-cramping surprises.

Today we have an actress who thinks she's skinnier than she is, a (yawn) secretly gay TV guy, two Hollywood rich guys into skiing with younger ladies, a secret stalker, and a secret mama.

Laid off recently? Still mourning the loss of a paycheck and the perks you'd grown accustomed to, like car service, gym memberships, and free meals? Here's one thing you can now save money on: razors! "Unemployment beards" are all the rage right now, reports the Wall Street Journal, which says more and more unemployed execs are growing their facial hair while they "take stock" of their lives. Given all his problems as of late (and more bad news yesterday), this does have us concerned about Harvey Weinstein's scruffy look. Planning ahead, perhaps?

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones isn't letting the crappy economy stop him from going all-out this holiday season. This past weekend Jones unveiled his annual Christmas display outside his Greenwich mansion, which features 15,000 lights syncronized to a four-minute looping soundtrack. (If you pull up near the house, you can listen to the music by tuning your radio to 90.5 FM.) The display will be open to the public from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. through Dec. 20. And if you're one of the people who invested in Jones' fund and you've since been notified that Jones is no longer permitting clients to withdraw their cash? Well, you can always walk up to the front door and try asking in person! [Greenwich Time via Dealbreaker]

Sites like Myspace and Facebook, which are technically called "social networking" sites but are better known as "Lisa is...OMG are you watching The Hills right now? Craziness" ego-projection mechanisms for creating alternate realities, are suffering just like everyone else during this recession. Not traffic-wise; humans' desire to keep the outside world appraised of their moment-to-moment "status" only continues to increase. But money-wise, things are not looking quite so wildly engrossing:

Annie Leibovitz sat down with CNN yesterday for an extended interview to promote her new book. The whole Miley Cyrus scandal from this past spring didn't come up—just an oversight on the reporter's part, we're sure!—but Annie did address one of her other high-profile run-ins, the shoot in 2007 with the Queen of England when she got into hot water for daring to ask Her Majesty to remove her crown. Video of Annie's meandering explanation is above.

We should start off by saying that Lauren Bush is our favorite member of the Bush family. In fact, sometimes we forget that her uncle is the President, and what could be a greater compliment than that? She even deserves credit for dating David Lauren. Hooking up with a billionaire heir is rarely a commendable act, but since her relationship with Ralph's son is clearly a source of angst for the rest of the Bush clan—possibly because he's a decade older, Jewish, leans Democratic, or all three—it works in her favor. So it's with love and respect that we share the one thing about Lauren that we're decidedly less impressed with: Those burlap FEED bags she's been shlepping to every event she's attended for more than a year now.

• Natasha Lyonne has sold her penthouse studio in the Gramercy Towers on East 16th Street for $440,000. The once-troubled actress is now renting in the East Village. [NYP]
• The owners of two 15 CPW condos who listed their ninth-floor apartments as part of a package deal for $21.5 million back in August, have lowered prices for a second time. You can now buy the combo deal for $18.495 million. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
• Alan Alda and his wife Arlene have paid $3 million for a two-bedroom, 51st-floor apartment at the Millennium Tower on West 67th Street, the same building where they purchased two adjoining apartments in 2000 for $4.9 million. [NYP]