Sam Zell's Tribune Company is exploring a bankruptcy filing, the Wall Street Journal and Times are reporting. Profits have fallen faster than the media conglomerate can sell off assets, leaving the company in likely violation of debt covenants and scrounging to pay nearly $1 billion in interest. Of course, nearly two-thirds of the company's $12 billion debt comes from Zell's leveraged buyout of the Tribune last December. The cranky old real estate mogul is like a guy who bought his house with a subprime mortgage: He thought he could refinance before interest rates kicked in, but now the price of his home is plummeting and he's getting desperate.

You may have heard that Larry Summers, Barack Obama's chief economic advisor, has a controversial past. In 2006, protesters at Harvard University demanded he resign as president after he made remarks suggesting women were congenitally dumb. So what did Summers do?

A long-dormant virus aimed directly at Facebook struck Thursday, spreading quickly via the social network. What's surprising isn't that Koobface hit Facebook so hard. It's that it took so long to do it.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia any unemployed Internet commenter can edit, has been banned by British Internet service providers over a display of child porn.

Did People cut a sneaky deal with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to get photos of the couple's newborn twins? Absolutely yes, the New York Times said last month. Today? Absolutely not, says the Times.

Many people ask us if Jason Calacanis, the Internet entrepreneur, is stupid. No, but he says stupid things. While he's an expert at timing the market, his plan to fix the economy is all backwards.

There's a story in today's Page Six Magazine about sadsack clown Bill Murray's supposed midlife crisis. It's brought him to random Brooklyn house parties and other odd, wistful New York places. The most melancholy and peculiar detail comes from a story, an urban legend of sorts, about Murray playing a little game of hand-over-the-eyes Guess Who with a stranger in Union Square:

Robert Thomson, the wily Aussie installed by Rupert Murdoch as editor of the Wall Street Journal, wants his newspaper to be big in Japan. And Europe. And Chicago. And Los Angeles.

[That's Madonna eating food in Buenos Aires; image via Splash]

Christmas (and the Jewish Chanukahs) are almost upon us! People are literally making a killing at the discount stores. But you, bedraggled and drunken procrastinator, you probably won't get started with your shopping until the 23rd or so. And then it will be a mad dash. What to buy? And for whom?? Well, after the jump I'll give you a few helpful suggestions that ought to help expedite the process a wee bit. Print the list out, file it away, then go back to lying on the rug and drinking spiced eggnog from a mug with a straw and laughing dimly at George Lopez reruns.

NBC has named David Gregory the official replacement host of their Sunday morning show Meet the Press, in which politicos and reporters of all sorts chat about Issues and then cry a little and then do some whippets and take a nap.

Here's a nice little article about Slings & Arrows, the great Canadian TV dramedy about a Shakespeare Theatre Festival (I know, I know) that's rerunning again on the Sundance Channel. Watch it. Kids In the Hall alum! [NYT]

Hi there. The economy stinks, so I have to work on the weekends. At least I have terrible, no good, very bad celebrities to make myself feel better. Today we have a badboy young actor, an actress's vomity dog, a cheatin' hubby, and a teen star turned porn star. Enjoy them all after the jump, then go get me a mimosa. Thanks.

Last month, we noted that acting poor is all the rage among the rich. Sort of like reducing your carbon footprint was the big thing last year. Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson brings us more obnoxious examples of the wealthy complaining about how poor they are now. For instance, the laidoff Lehman executive who is cutting her maid's rather than sell her handbags or the ghastly idea of flying commercial.

You know how newspapers write obits on people long before they die? Usually it leads to hilarious screw-ups when it gets sent to the web early. But today's New York Times rembrance of Sunny von Bülow (a good a candidate as any for an advance obit given she was in a coma since 1980) briefly had a very different kind of error, running a very non-Timesian byline "ENNEMY." (Says the tipster who spotted this: "The final insult to Sunny. Her obit was written by a member of eminem's posse.") When it was corrected, the actual byline turned out to be Enid Nemy, a feature writer who started at the paper in 1963 and retired around 2002.

Yesterday, diminutive Robert Reich, one of Obama's economic superfriends and Clinton's Secretary of Labor, frighteningly used the D-word on his personal blog. The 533,000 jobs lost in November, he wrote, "begs the question of whether the meltdown we're experiencing should be called a Depression. We are falling off a cliff." Then this morning our new President of Hope announced a massive a public works program that's going to start with energy efficient lightbulbs. But why stop there? If the federal government is going to start printing money like it's a Depression, let's bring back the old New Deal arts project for artists, musicians, actors, and writers that ran from 1936 through 1943. The Library of Congress hosts a nice collection of posters the old WPA produced. Some of our favorites are after the jump.

As President Bush continues his farewell tour (just 45 days left to go!) he stopped by a fancy club in downtown Philadelphia (think Trading Places for the unveiling of his portrait. He started his remarks with a joke: "Welcome to my hanging!" It got a big laugh in the room full of white Republicans. It's funny because it's true. See the video after the jump.

Last night, the New York Times got the scoop that Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK and Jackie O, had thrown her hat in the ring to fill Hillary Clinton's Senate seat once she becomes Secretary of State. How'd that happen? Well, we couldn't help but wonder if it has something to do with the close friendship between the married Kennedy and the recently single Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Scientists at Berkeley hooked up a bunch of wires to a bunch of 9- and 10-year-old rich and poor kids and have discovered that the poor ones might as well have been hit over the head with a shovel. Says one: "Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult." One more reason to hate the rich.

After spending 28 years in a coma, heiress Sunny von Bülow, 76, has died, according to the NYT. She was first discovered unconscious on the floor of her Newport, R.I., mansion in 1980, and her husband Claus von Bulow was convicted, but later acquitted, of attempting to murder her with an insulin injection. With characters like "Prince Alexander von Auersperg" (Sunny's son who pushed for Claus' prosecution) and "Maria Schrallhammer" (Sunny's maid), the Dynasty-like tale generated a media frenzy and served as the basis for the Jeremy Irons-Glenn Close film Reversal of Fortune.