All right, all right: Perhaps it was a tad bit mean-spirited to begrudge young parents their first vacation to Disneyland with a child. Six Apart president Mena Trott, who spent the weekend in the happiest place on earth with husband and CTO Ben Trott, is hilariously unapologetic about taking a vacation right after laying off 16 staff members at the blog-software company they cofounded. Beating Valleywag to the punch, she's written the worst captions she could invent on pictures of her highly adorable daughter and way hot husband at the theme park. Not that this will be any comfort to the people she laid off, who will only remember how Trott followed up the cuts by announcing that she was going to Disneyland in the manner of an NFL player who just spiked a football in the end zone.

In an attempt to boost morale at Yahoo, signs showing CEO Jerry Yang with cofounder David Filo went up around the Web giant's Sunnyvale campus recently. They had no measurable effect. News of Yang's resignation, pending a replacement, might do more to cheer up the troops. The signs have proved easily edited to accommodate the news. (Photo by docwho76)

· Uh—we think we just saw Chris Matthews grab two heaping handfuls of Ellen DeGeneres. · Heather Locklear was charged with a misdemeanor DUI. The complaint alleges she was driving under the influence of drugs; "to wit: prescription medications." The florid language didn't end there, as the filing went on to state "that which we call OxyContin by any other generic name would impair as sweetly; Heather! Doff thy name, and for that name which if no part of thee, takest while riding most heavy of machineries." · Having trouble figuring out what today's TRL finale means for a nation at historical crossroads? Idolator explains. · The first reviews of Australia from Down Under suggest it has "has international blockbuster written all over it," and "is certainly not one destined to be a classic." · Yes, we all know Prince told The New Yorker he doesn't approve of "people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever," over a nice plate of soup. But what kind of soup? Starfish and Coffee soup? Cream of AwwoooooooahHundalasiliah soup? Turns out it was just carrot, but BWE.tv let their imaginations run wild.

This photo from the Albuquerque set of Men Who Stare At Goats reassured us that George Clooney has proudly inherited the mustache mantel from Robert Downey Jr. We instantly felt the need to draw up another one of those celebrity mustache visual cue-charts—the kind we distribute as retractable blackboard teaching aids to classrooms that incorporate Defamer into their curricula. Help us decide which of these five candidates most closely hews to the goat-staring original in a brand new mustache poll after the jump!

Why is Yahoo looking for a new CEO? Because founder Jerry Yang, in his year and a half on the job, has proven himself incapable of meeting the company's many challenges. Here are five key moments where Yang failed to rise to the occasion:1. The all-too-sacred cows. When he first became CEO in July 2007, Yang promised that there would be "no sacred cows" and a 100-day action plan. Instead, his efforts became mired in Yahoo's famous bureaucracy; the cows were spared. While the company had layoffs last February, they were not nearly enough; next month, Yahoo is cutting another 1,500 employees. 2. The Microsoft deal. In retrospect, Yang should have taken the $45 billion offer Steve Ballmer made in January and run. With the stock trading below $11, the company is now worth a third what Microsoft would have paid. 3. The Google deal. Google and Yahoo had struck a tentative deal to have Google sell ads on some of Yahoo's search pages; because Google is more effective at selling such ads, the deal would have added an estimated $800 million a year to Yahoo's bottom line. But Microsoft executives, enraged at being spurned by Yahoo, made so much trouble for Google and Yahoo in Washington, D.C., that Google CEO Eric Schmidt chose to walk away rather than accept a deal that would set a precedent for regulating Google's monopoly on search advertising. 4. The Carl Icahn insult. Corporate raider Carl Icahn pressed hard to get Yahoo back to the negotiating table with Microsoft, then tried to unseat Yahoo's board. Yang and the board retaliated with a campaign on Yahoo's homepage which suggested Icahn was clueless about technology. Days after the diss on Yahoo.com, Yahoo's directors relented and nominated Icahn to a board seat. While he's been mostly quiet, Yang's unplanned exit is a sign that he has not forgotten the slight. 5. Jerry Yang. Since becoming CEO, Yang has been pressed for an answer on the most basic of questions: Why should he be the one to run Yahoo? His answers have boiled down to this: Because he founded the company. A Newsweek article last month proved his last chance to articulate why he should be CEO, and he botched it. "Bleeding purple," to use Yahoo's in-house jargon for being passionate about the company, is not enough of a reason. Just because it bleeds doesn't mean it leads.

An ad currently running on Variety is promoting something called Carmen Meets Borat, a documentary about a Romanian girl whose life is thrown into upheaval when Sacha Baron Cohen and co. substitute her village for the title character's Kazakh hometown in Borat. We use the term "promoting" loosely, however, unless you consider "inviting a lawsuit by alerting Cohen to your existence" is promoting:

How untidy was Jerry Yang's exit from the CEO seat at Yahoo? Here's a clue: Tech blog AllThingsD obtained a copy of Yang's all-hands memo before the PR team had sent it to the staff. It must be genuine, since, like the rest of Yang's memos, it completely lacks capitalization. The founders of Internet companies are too busy, it seems, to reach for the shift key. What Yang does not explain: Why, when he took over as CEO last year, he took pains to say this was not a temporary job. His excuse seems to amount to this: The changes he has made at Yahoo are so amazing, so transformative, that it is a "significantly different company" today which requires someone who can "manage this opportunity to leverage the progress up to this point." Translation: Jerry Yang was the right man to be Yahoo's CEO, until he wasn't. The memo:

Now that our Kiefer is free as a bird and more velvet-voiced than ever, he's opening up about the seven-week jail stint that made shower soap negotiation almost as perilous as saving the free world. Speaking to Men's Vogue, he details the jail's living conditions (bad, but at least it wasn't the plebeian hellhole inflicted upon Raffaello Follieri) and the cerebral, mercifully short-lived experience that was his sobriety:

Yahoo founder Jerry Yang is stepping down as CEO, and a search is underway for a replacement after a tumultuous 18 months on the job. Which is curious. In a recent interview, Yang had just told AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, "In this uncertain environment, I think I am absolutely the right person" to lead Yahoo. He must have changed his mind; Swisher reports that the decision was a "mutual" one made by Yang and Yahoo's board of directors. Either Yang was lying to Swisher, or he was deceived about the board's lack of support for him. Executive recruiter Heidrick & Struggles is conducting a search for Yang's replacement. Finding a successor to Yang will be difficult — not because Yang is irreplaceable, but because he has made such a mess of things that it will be hard to persuade a capable executive to risk their reputation fixing it.There are, nevertheless, some possibilities. One is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been toying with entering politics. eBay and Yahoo have long flirted with a merger, so she's reasonably familiar with the company, and with the challenges of running a large Internet company. A similar candidate: Jon Miller, the former CEO of AOL, who is now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture-capital firm. Money is tight in venture capital, and Velocity has yet to raise a promised new fund in the multiple hundreds of millions of dollars it had planned for when he joined it. Yet Miller has a problem: Time Warner, the parent of AOL, used his noncompete agreement to prevent him from joining Yahoo's board; it's not clear why they would waive it to let him become CEO. The agreement does not expire until next spring. News Corp. COO Peter Chernin does not seem to have much hope of succeeding Rupert Murdoch as CEO, who is expected to hand the media conglomerate over to one of his children instead. But he does not have a credible claim for having much online experience — overseeing MySpace is the best he can do there. And lastly, as a courtesy, Yahoo's president, Sue Decker, is under consideration. Some say Decker's Machiavellian maneuverings helped out former Hollywood studio boss Terry Semel as CEO last summer. But she's seen inside and outside the company as a bad manager who lacks a vision for what Yahoo should be. More:

· Music Round-Up: The Breeders at the Wiltern, The Shys, Army Navy, and The Takeover UK at The Troubadour, and Raul Midon, Morley, and Leftover Cuties at The Hotel Café. · REDCAT hosts An Evening with Kenneth Anger: Dangerous Cinema, featuring several of the experimental queer director's shorts, and a rare public Anger appearance. (It's sold out, but we got our tickets early. We'll be in the assless chaps on the Satanic Harley. Say hi!) · A new print of When We Were Kings screens at the Academy Linwood Dunn Theater as part of "Oscar's Docs: Part 4." Also on the bill: Work of Mark O'Brien, "a portrait of the life and accomplishments of the paralyzed poet-journalist who's lived for 40 years in an iron lung."

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk could be Steve Jobs. If only his visionary companies and products were successes. Today's featured commenter, growhappy, connects more dots between Steve and Elon:

After a weekend where NBC sent an intimidating message to recently galvanized "Logo viewers" (as "they" are euphemistically referred to in media-savvy red state households), get back to basics with multi-camera sitcoms and early 90's revival casting. WATCH The Big Bang Theory [8 PM, CBS] - Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) thinks he's found his soul mate until his crush (Sara Rue) meets Leonard (Johnny Galecki). TBBT hit a series high in viewers last week and has improved significantly since first season. Rajesh Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar) is our favorite character, and his MacBook chats with his family are oddly reminiscent of our own.

Barack Obama, during the Democratic primaries, cited as influential to his thinking the book "Team Of Rivals," about Abraham Lincoln's opponent-stocked cabinet. It would appear this was more than mere campaign puffery: Obama's former presidential rival Hillary Clinton has accepted an offer to join the president-elect's cabinet as Secretary of State, according to a report in Britain's Guardian, carried on the front of Drudge Report. Rather than a thorny problem outside of the Obama administration, in the senate, Clinton will now be on the team, and focused on international problems where political disagreements with the president are less likely to erupt into public view. Of course her appointment could still go spectacularly wrong.

If or when the U.S. Treasury stumbles too badly to stop America's slide into recession, we'll always have Fox Searchlight to bail us out. The mini-major had another specialty smash last weekend with Slumdog Millionaire, the Mumbai-based genre-bender whose $35,043 per-screen average was the fourth best of any film this year, trailing The Dark Knight by less than $1,300 per location. And if a quick scan of the Searchlight record tells us anything, the numbers will continue to astound — and they portend even better things for the Oscar race.With critical raves in part pushing it to a $416,000 opening since last Wednesday, Slumdog is Searchlight's fifth best opening average in the last five years. The three titles just above it: 2007: Juno ($59,124 per screen; $143.5 million cumulative gross) 2006: Little Miss Sunshine ($52,999 per screen; $59.9 million cumulative) 2004: Sideways ($51,760 per screen; $71.5 million cumulative) All of which went on to earn Oscar nominations for Best Picture, and all of which won for Best Screenplay. Of course I Heart Huckabees trumped them all with $73,044 per screen, and we all know how that turned out. Still! Clear spots in your Oscar pools, and let the Obama transition team know where they'll find the real economic stimulus. You can thank us later.

Tough times, frivolous junkets: That's the modus operandi of Jason Calacanis, the grandiloquent emailer-in-chief of Mahalo, the Internet's most overfunded Web directory. He and butler/assistant/videographer Tyler Crowley posed for a picture while on a trip to Japan taken shortly after he promised to curtail his travel schedule while laying off Mahalo staff. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Friday's winner: m0nty.au, for "Eric Schmidt's 20 percent time project." (Photo by namekawa; used by permission)

Small Wonder: Though this picture appears to show Johnny's Deppy's Willy Wonka after an intense meth bender (and affixed with a Top Model weave), it's actually a photo of Depp as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland. Since the actor's role is rumored to be entirely motion-captured, we're assuming the look is just a test shot. No word yet on whether the mushrooms consumed by Depp's makeup artist made her grow bigger, get smaller, or simply made her totally fucking high. Click through for full-size. [ICYDK]

Mark Zuckerberg's social network has lost much of its swagger over the past year. He once thought nothing of poaching Google's best and brightest; then Google started poaching back. After Facebook's flacks learned that Google had scheduled its holiday press party on December 8, the same day as Facebook's planned media fest, they rescheduled for December 10, rather than fight for reporters' affections. Embarrassing — especially considering that Facebook's top PR guy, Elliot Schrage, came from Google himself.

Few were surprised when NBC axed Lipstick Jungle, figuring that if a brutal, Project Runway-assisted title indoctrination couldn't help it gain a ratings foothold, nothing could. But wait! insists star Brooke Shields to Us. "It's not true," she said. "Our bosses are saying, 'You’re not canceled, don’t worry. We’re just trying to figure out how to make this make sense.'" Yes, if only a major media conglomerate like NBC could get the word out somehow! Still, James Hibberd writes that even though there's been a fan outcry (really?), there are other factors at play that may doom a new application of Lipstick:

Once again, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is offering two of its XO machines for $399. One goes to you, one goes to a third-world child. Technologizer editor Harry McCracken, the pathologically honest former head of PC World, bought into the program last year. This year, he says, he'll do it again, but he's not sure you should:

"The biggest booty ever taken on the high seas... the Sirius Star was heading towards Eyl, a notorious pirate haven." The London Times' breathlessly-reported version of Somali pirate beat. [Times Online]