Wild-haired and possibly murderous publisher Felix Dennis sold Alpha Media—home of Maxim and Blender—to a private equity group last year for about $250 million. Now, hey look, Alpha Media may have to be turned over to its creditors because, you know, advertising revenues are down thanks to the economy. The company is currently "in restructuring talks." So Felix Dennis has a quarter of a billion dollars, and the finance whizzes who paid him have cornered the market on Tila Tequila covers. Felix Dennis is smart. [Folio]

You know the economy is in bad shape when a fake Bloomberg News story with the headline "Somali Pirates in Discussions to Acquire Citigroup" starts making the rounds: "The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker." [Bankers Ball]

Twilight made a bamillion dollars this weekend! $70.6 million, to be exact. And while we tried to explain the whole phenomenon last week, the figures and demographics for this teen-falls-in-love-with-vampire horromance tell us all we need to know. Though the whole craze is mostly attributed to teens, a large swath of the film's audience was depressingly over 25, and the younger folks that did show up to ogle the specatcle found the whole thing, well, pretty silly. The Hollywood Reporter tells us what we've sort of already heard: that kids were laughing—laughing! at these precious words: "and so the lion fell in love with the lamb"! that is beautiful Britishy foggy dells and swoopy moors poetry! Lord Byron Shelley Austen! my crotch is sobbing!—while the film flickered on the screen. So leave it to Variety's reported 45% over-25 audience to be the serious ones. They probably sat there all chaste and serious and adulty, whispering small benedictions to remind themselves that it's a good thing to have said "no" to Barry and that someone else will propose—he smelled like onions!—and that the living situation is just temporary and it's not that weird to have a litter box in your bedroom. Then the kids laughed and they got angry and fist shaky that, though it had looked touch-and-go there for a second, the irony which had plagued their lives for so many years was, in fact, not dead at all.

The rich have always felt a vague guilt about being rich, which is what the charity-party circuit is all about. But it's incredibly annoying to have them jumping on the cutting back/scrimping n' saving bandwagon even though they don't have to—these are the people who benefitted so hugely when we were in boom times. And their children are even worse: listen to Bee Shaffer, daughter of Vogue editrix Anna Wintour's, fake-whine about how she doesn't think she'll be able to find a media job after graduating from Columbia: "I finish in May, and I'm really nervous about the fact nobody's hiring right now," she told New York mag at the fancy CFDA Fashion Awards, presumably while fluttering her hands and wearing an obscenely expensive designer dress. Being "responsible" is the new trend!
Of course Thomas Friedman has to chime in via his NYT column, as he does with every trend. He's stopped yapping about "going green" and instead:

Anderson Cooper arriving in LA after a flight from NYC ... Ed Westwick leaving his trailer on the Gossip Girl set ... Matthew Broderick helping son James with his scarf in the West Village ... Kiefer Sutherland signing autographs outside NBC ... Kirsten Dunst walking down the street... Katie Holmes getting out of an SUV outside the Schoenfeld Theatre ... Alec Baldwin and Salma Hayek standing on the set of 30 Rock ... Madonna's daughter Lourdes walking with her father Carlos Leon ... Madonna carrying son David into the Kabbalah Center and later visiting a preschool on the Upper East Side ... Twilight star Robert Pattinson leaving his hotel ... Rosie O'Donnell and Becky Newton outside the Conan O'Brien show ... and Alex Rodriguez getting into a cab in Midtown and having lunch with music manager Guy Oseary at Da Silvano yesterday.

Hey, the government has agreed to bail out Citigroup. Surely we'll now be saved from worldwide insolvency! Right? Or is this a profligate waste of money? We have to level with you: this whole bailout thing has now exceeded the media's ability to critically analyze it. You've heard everyone throw around figures like $750 billion for the earlier bailout costs. This Citigroup thing includes a guarantee of $306 billion in assets. But think about this: according to Bloomberg, the US government has now pledged more than $7.4 trillion to rescue the financial system in the past 15 months. How much is 7.4 trillion?

Just because your mother is the most important person in fashion, designers fight to dress you, you're top of every party-planner's guest-list, and you had a newspaper column at the age of 18, that doesn't mean the idea of graduating from college and trying to find a job in this economic climate isn't scary: "I finish in May," says Columbia student Bee Shaffer, "and I'm really nervous about the fact nobody's hiring right now." If it helps, Bee, we have a strange feeling—a premonition, even—that someone, somewhere, will take pity on you and offer some lowly little entry-level editorial position, just so you can pay the bills and hold your head high.

Isn't it so much easier when you just admit that you love trashy gossip and have left The Dubliners unread on your nightstand for months? After the jump, trash: which television co-hosts are getting on a little too well at work, stripper-sharing exes, a gal celeb caught spiking her water with vodka, and a well-known socialite with no money of her own who keeps spending her in-laws' cash.1.) "Which TV host has such good rapport with his fetching female co-host that his wife has correctly guessed they're having an affair?" [P6] 2.) "Which ex-couple - an actor and a model - still share some aspects of their sex life? Both are known to sleep with a fa mous Lower East Side topless dancer who has a reputation of never going home alone." [Page Six] 3.) "Which celebrity has been hiding her raging booze problem by slipping vodka into coffee cups and glasses of water?" [Mirror] 4.) "Which publicity-loving socialite has a set of parents-in-law who can't keep up with their bills? The upper East Side couple keep moving from apartment to apartment to avoid paying their obligations, including more than $30,000 in medical bills. One posh Park Avenue doctor ha seven hired a private investigator to track down the pair's current residence to get them to pay up. Their daughter-in-law still thinks they're flush with cash and, even though she doesn't have any income of her own, continues to spend, spend, spend." [NYDN]

Once almost the sole preserve of women who wanted to know if that guy they'd met on Match.com was a trangendered serial killer or the father of their future children, now psychics and tarot card readers are enjoying a whole new client base: Men for whom rational approaches to making business decisions have turned out to be worse than useless, so why not ask the spirits for advice on which investments or real estate to buy and sell?

When times get tough and employment becomes a far-fetched hope for many, it's good to know that you can still turn to the Paper of Record to direct you towards the last remaining employers. Specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency. They still need bodies! The shadowy government spymasters are the lead advertisers under the "Jobs" tab on the New York Times' website (the ad clicks straight through to their homepage). There are only two possible explanations for this. Both of them are bad. Conspiracy: The recession has forced the Times' true role as a government propaganda agent to the surface! You think Judy Miller's WMD coverage was a mistake? The paper has been promoting the CIA's position to the publi for years! Open your eyes, people! This ad is but the tip of the iceberg! The Job Market Is Even Worse Than You Thought: I mean, they couldn't even get Wal-Mart or somebody to sponsor the Jobs page? Campbell's Soup isn't hiring factory workers? Clandestine operations in the War on Terror, it seems, are the last place to get reasonable health care coverage. And Jesus Christ, you can't even make 80K for parachuting into Pakistan with a submachine gun to hunt Al-Qaeda. Times are tough.

Hope you didn't try and cheat on your taxes last year or pull some sort of shady maneuver that you were hoping no one would notice. With the state now facing an unprecedented budget shortfall, tax authorities are now pushing people who haven't paid their outstanding tax bills to pay up in a hurry. Ralph Lauren had to hand over $4.18 million in back taxes recently, a debt related to taxes on his Gulfstream jet (photo here), although the fashion mogul says he plans to fight the ruling. Secretive billionaire Ira Rennert has been battling the state over a tax bill imposed on his holding company, the Renco Group, although he's since settled the case by coughing up $1.77 million. And Shelby Bryan, Anna Wintour's boyfriend (and the father of Alexis Bryan), also had to write a hefty check to New York State recently. In August, he handed over $976,222, although the IRS also hit him with a $1.6 million lien for outstanding federal taxes. Looks like Anna may not be able to retire so soon after all!

Georgina Bloomberg's family scrapbook [Page Six Mag]

♦ After listing his 2,900-square-foot condo at 505 Greenwich Street for $5 million in October and then lowering the price by $500,000 just weeks later, James Frey has chopped the price again. The four-bedroom pad is now listed for $3.995 million. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
♦ Sun Capital Partners managing director Gary Talarico and his wife, attorney Linda Filardi, paid $10 million for a six-bedroom duplex at 875 Park Avenue. [Real Deal]
♦ Grammy-winning producer Ric Wake's Cove Neck mansion, which was on the market for $6.5 million for the past year, was reclaimed by Bancorp Bank last week after it failed to attract any buyers at a public auction. [Newsday]

If the economic crash helped usher in a new political era, it has also, no less importantly, caused a quiet revolution in Manhattan dating rituals, at least within the particular group of Wall Street men and golddigger women accustomed to viewing romance as top-rung prostitution. Joshua David Stein of Page Six Magazine goes out into the field ("Meatpacking District hot spot Bistro Bagatelle"), where his anthropological eye identifies as "fake" both the handbags (Louis Vuitton clutches) and the hair (blonde) of three Eastern Euro chicks.

Actress Katherine Heigl celebrated with a big bash last week, but her actual birthday is today—she's 30. Colin Hanks, the actor and son of Tom Hanks, turns 31 today. Actor Billy Connolly is 67. Famed author Arundhati Roy is 47. Dan Glickman, the chairman of the MPAA and a former congressman, is 65. Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue is 68. And the infamous Linda Tripp turns 59 today.

Silda Wall Spitzer has a new job! According to New York, last month the wife of the former governor joined Metropolitan Capital Advisors, where she will be helping the hedge fund recruit new investors. (If that sounds like an impossible task in this market, consider that she's managed to put up with Eliot for 21 years now.) She's not the only one in the family looking ahead. Supposedly, the former governor is considering writing a book, although it won't address his taste for high-priced call girls or why he wears black socks in bed, unfortunately. The book will address the "root causes of the mistakes that have brought us to the economic precipice," and "take a wistful look at his fourteen-month governorship and its unfulfilled goals."

♦ Amy Winehouse's loving, supporting marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil appears to be over. Now free from police custody, Blake appears to have taken up with a German model named Sophie Schandorff, which means Amy will have to find someone else to fulfill her sex fanatasiesd described as "too gross" to "mention in a newspaper." [P6, NOTW]
♦ Chef Gordon Ramsay has been carrying on an affair with "Britain's most famous mistress" for the past seven years. Allegedly. [NYP]
♦ Michael Jackson and the sheik who sued him last week for $7 million have a reached a settlement. [NYDN]

Chuck Philips: "They deceived Pellicano and his lawyers for six months, knowing it was a violation of his Constitutional rights .'" [Patterico]

• Anna Wintour's daughter Bee Shaffer, the aspiring journalist, is graduating from Columbia in May and is "really nervous about the fact nobody's hiring right now." If she gets desperate she could take one of those awful personal assistant jobs working for a magazine editor. (She won't get desperate.) [NYM]

♦ Following a weekend of non-stop negotiations, a deal is now in place to stabilize Citigroup: The bank will get a $20 billion cash injection from the Treasury Department and the government will guarantee $306 billion worth of toxic assets. [Bloomberg, NYT, WSJ]
♦ The next group in line for a bailout? Home builders, who are now lobbying Congress for a $250 billion stimulus package. [WSJ]
♦ The U.S. economy may need $300 billion and $600 billion more to survive the crisis, says George Soros. [DB]