Liev Schreiber carrying son Alexander on his back in NoHo ... Sean Lennon taking a walk ... Agyness Deyn carrying two cups of coffee in the East Village ... Andy Dick arriving at JFK ... Naomi Campbell smiling for photographers ... Natasha Bedingfield getting into a limo outside her hotel ... Jennifer Connelly and Anderson Cooper outside the David Letterman show ... Katie Holmes walking with a bodyguard outside her Village apartment building ... and David Duchovny and Tea Leoni attending a Knicks game with their kids.

It's really too bad that Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain decided to back down on his request for a $10 million bonus. If he'd stood his ground, just think of how much mileage cable news hosts would have gotten out of the story in the coming days. To your left, Campbell Brown's thoughts on the subject from last night: "Is it me or is this guy nuts?"

[Bobby Trendy, who was born and named on Opposite Day, showing his plumage in WeHo; image via Splash]

Yesterday you guys determined that the musical power couple on their way to divorce was either Gwen and Gavin or Mariah and Nick. You know, Gwen from Sales who sings at church, and Mariah Carmichael, that wedding singer. You know Mariah, she lives on Elm, near the park? Anyway, today we have a comedy actor who lies about charity work, an actress playing the field, a TV fellow about to be axed (old, but updated!), and another drug addict.

We talk about the ongoing death of the newspaper medium a lot around here, because we are evil bloggers who hate the paper industry and, furthermore, are personally responsible for every beat reporter laid off in the past five years, because their CEOs decided to cut their jobs after reading about how bad their industry is here, on the blogs. Well, at least we have numbers on our side—the side of darkness and unemployment. How bad is the outlook for newspapers in 2009? How about epically, historically, never-seen-before bad? Is that bad enough? Because that's how bad it is:

As if it wasn't annoying enough that you have hang your head in shame every time a cold sore appears on your lip: According to a new study, the herpes simplex virus is a possible cause of Alzheimer's, too. But at least Katie Holmes will one day have a great excuse for forgetting about those years she spent as Mrs. Tom Cruise. [NYDN]

Tommy Hilfiger was supposed to marry Dee Ocleppo this past August on the island of Mustique. He'd purchased her a gigantic ring a few months earlier. A fabulous, star-studded party was thrown to celebrate the engagement. And the romance was in "full bloom," according to friends of the couple. But at the very last minute, just days before the wedding was scheduled to take place, it was abruptly called off amid rumors that Hilfiger and Ocleppo couldn't come to terms on a pre-nup agreement. The profile of Hillfiger in T over the weekend hardly dispels the idea that it wasn't exactly love that brought the couple together in St. Tropez in 2005:

It used to be "live fast, die young, and have a beautiful corpse." But now you can dispense with the first two and keep the third thanks to the skillful work of morticians, who are increasingly being asked to perform cosmetic enhancements on corpses. God forbid your loved ones' final memory is of bags, lines and wrinkles! "We'll inject tissue fillers into the lips, the nose, the cheeks, above the eyebrows, the chin, and the hands," promises funeral home owner John Vigliante. "It's the same concept as Botox and dermal filler." But if someone has maintained the illusion in life that her perky double-Ds are nature's own creation, then come time for cremation, the jig is up. According to an LA crematorium manager: "Silicone implants will explode. They're like little bombs."

♦ Theater producer Rocco Landesman and his wife Deborah have sold their penthouse at 240 Riverside Boulevard (otherwise known as The Heritage at Trump Place) for $10.5 million. The couple picked up the three-bedroom apartment with jacuzzi for $4.233 million back in 2006. [Cityfile]
♦ Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner, who purchased a West Village apartment for $4.1 million two months ago, appears to be giving up on plans to build a home on the East End: He's sold a 2.5-acre plot in Amagansett for $7.5 million. [Newsday]
♦ The duplex at 155 Perry Street that Josh Groban was spotted touring recently has undergone a price cut. It's now listed at $3.5 million, down from $3.85 million. [Curbed, Core]

Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman is turning 46 today. Her former castmate, Jesse Metcalfe, is celebrating his 30th. Comedian Mario Cantone is 49. Violinist Joshua Bell is 41. John Malkovich is turning 55. Dame Judi Dench is 74. It's Tom Daschle's 61st birthday. Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran is turning 49. Architect Steven Holl is 61. Singer Imogen Heap is turning 31. Donny Osmond is 51. American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi is turning 38. And Kirk Douglas turns 92 today.

♦ Either Mariah Carey is pregnant or she's determined to do whatever it takes to stay in the spotlight. The diva was spotted looking "ebullient" on her way out of an OB/GYN's office in LA, where she was greeted by a cheering entourage and seen clutching "what looked like a sonogram." [P6, Mirror]
♦ Kate Moss skipped champagne and wore a loose dress to a Vogue event in China, which means she must be pregnant, too. [The Sun]
♦ In an upcoming issue of O, Oprah says she's "fallen off the wagon" and now weighs 200 lbs. But she blames it on her "out-of-balance thyroid," which gave her "a fear of working out." [AP]
♦ Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich watching soccer at Nevada Smith's in the East Village with girlfriend Dasha Zhukova? We can hardly believe it. [P6]
♦ Steve Schwarzman insisting on remaining centerstage at yesterday's Vanity Fair photo shoot? That sounds likely. [P6]

• Kate Moss and her boyfriend may be welcoming a child into their continuous boxing match/family.

"Winfrey is aware of the health risks, inviting both [personal trainer Bob] Greene and Dr. Mehmet Oz to her show during the first week of January, along with spirituality experts, sex therapists and financial expert Suze Orman." [AP, WWD] (Click cover for larger version.)

♦ The events of the past few months signal that "there is no more Wall Street," according to Ace Greenberg, the former chief of Bear Stearns. [Bloomberg]
♦ Hedge funds dropped another 2.7 percent last month. [WSJ]
♦ Morgan Stanley's new bonus plan has a "claw-back" provision. [NYT]
♦ The hedge fund Copper River Management has closed its doors. [WSJ]
♦ Cowen Group has rejected an unsolicited takeover offer. [MW]
♦ In corporate layoff news, Sony plans to cut 8,000 full-time workers and the same number of part-timers. Other companies cutting back today: Wyndham Worldwide and Danaher Corp. [Bloomberg, CNN]
♦ Citi may be keeping its high-priced sponsorship of the new Mets stadium, but a holiday toy-train exhibit wasn't quite as lucky. [Bloomberg]

Gloria Vanderbilt's youngest son has been using his mother as a foil since he appeared on the Tonight Show with her at age three. Anderson Cooper more recently brought his mother onto CNN to passive-aggressively scold him on Mother's Day and to provide the silver fox some sensible, embarrassing advice on the occasion of his 40th birthday. So when Cooper recently declined to invite his mother on a holiday trip to Egypt — "No! I wasn't going to take my mom," he told a befuddled David Letterman — she was ruthless in her revenge. You might not acknowledge that's what's going on, Anderson, but it's plain as day to the rest of us. (We're speaking of the revenge, of course.) Video after the jump

An alderman in Milwaukee, a town not famous for sobriety, compared the local Chuck E. Cheese to "something out of a Quentin Tarantino film... there is alcohol and pistols being brandished." In Brookfield, Wisconsin, the children's pizzeria-plus-creepy-robot-theater gets far more police activity than a nearby biker bar, including a 40-person riot earlier this year. One participant in a 10-person brawl in Toledo's Chuck E. Cheese actually detached a velvet rope and started swinging the brass end at people. Intrigued? Good, because the Wall Street Journal is dying to tell you why you should watch your back inside the animatronic dystopia.

Expectations were low for Jimmy Fallon's first "Webisode," and the former Saturday Night Live giggler sure met them! Fallon was sporting a stained t-shirt; he couldn't stop throwing up his hands or touching his head like a spastic spider monkey; the 1:36 runtime was far short of the 5 minute target; over that brief period there were no fewer than eight edited cuts of Fallon on the same sound stage — and a preview of the end of the clip, since it was such a long time away.

It's kind of comforting that, amid economic collapse and a new political order, Ron Burkle is still a dirty old billionaire luring teenagers onto his jet and caressing distracted girls in clubs. Why, just this weekend he was out with Leonardo DiCaprio again, at Cipriani. Close personal friend Bill Clinton was not in attendance this time, but there's been no public sign of a split. Which, actually, is kind of a problem for president elect Barack Obama, particularly now that another of Burkle's sketchy business ventures has spectacularly exploded in scandal, this one involving large amounts of cocaine.

A stalker emails: "Alec Baldwin came into Equinox on Broadway and 91st this morning trying to get into my spinning class at the last minute. He was denied because the class was full and lifted weights instead. Didn't have much of an attitude and was pleasant to the other people working out around him." Also:

Rolling Stone just laid off several more staff, including Online Editor Kyle Anderson, a tipster informs us. Other casualties include another editor, an assistant and a fact-checker. The cuts come one month after Wenner Media shed online, marketing and advertising staff, plus the entire offices in San Francisco and Detroit. They pave the way, we're guessing, for CEO Jann Wenner's exciting new RollingStone.com revamp, for which he's just hired a "Chief Digital Officer" from — wait for it — Reader's Digest, that bastion of online innovation. Steve Schwartz's stodgy pedigree should fit in well with Rolling Stone's steady slide deeper into irrelevance, and with old-man Wenner's vision of the internet as the place where that process can continue, only faster: