Sarah Lacy, the Silicon Valley author, BusinessWeek reporter and notorious interviewer, worked a bit of grave-dancing into her blog "tribute" to Valleywag, the site gutted by Gawker Media Wednesday. Gawker Media chief Nick Denton was the "best" Valleywag editor, and his posts were "sexy, fun... and important." The site's current editor, Owen Thomas, has had far more time to dutifully torture Valley fixture Lacy and, what do you know, she writes that Valleywag "just stopped being a daily, must-read for" her under his tenure. Perhaps Lacy imagines she could have run the site better, had she taken Denton up on his offer to take the reins a couple of years ago, before Thomas came on the scene.

We asked earlier for tips about layoffs at Time Inc.'s Essence, and have since heard about 12 people were let go — around 10 from marketing and business and two from editorial. A shared services group on the same floor, which services several magazines, lost four more. It's been nearly a month now of watching Time Inc. layoffs unfurl, and we can't help but wonder if the magazine group might not have spared survivors some pain and the company some bad publicity by executing a little faster.

· We really don't know what ET expected to get out of this interview with the stars of a porn version of Facts of Life, but we'll just consider ourselves lucky we never got to meet Mrs. Garrett and Jo. · Videogum lays out a compelling conspiracy web implicating Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Abraham Lincoln, and Elton John. · We hear there was a hot Cartman boys' shower scene that never made it to the final cut of South Park's ode to High School Musical last night. · Bush gives the shocker. · On Tom Colicchio's Top Chef blog, the judge admitted that the smell of fresh bear blood on freshly sliced apples drove him wild with desire. (Actually that's just how it played out in our heads.)

· And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead The Echo, Kathleen Edwards & John Doe at El Rey, and Joe Satriani is at The Wiltern. · John Updike lectures at Royce Hall. · The Joy Luck Club, the play based on the novel, is at the David Henry Hwang Theater. Bring hankies!

Tough times, tough decisions: Which media outlet will cover the delivery of Jason Calacanis's $109,000 all-electric Tesla Roadster? Calacanis, the braggadocio-burdened CEO of Mahalo, an overgrown website directory, has called for camera crews from CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox, and, for good measure, the New York Times. He's also registered the domain name Tesla16.com. "16" is either the production number of his Roadster, or the number of employees he could have avoided laying off with the money he's spending on it. We're not sure which. Either way, we're looking forward to photos of Calacanis's bulldogs, Taurus and Fondue, with their tongues hanging out the window.

The employee stock purchase plan seems like one of the few ways left for Yahoos to make money off their employer. Should it be eliminated because of short-term stock-flipping? sunnyvalesteve doesn't see the downside: "Hurt morale?? Like there's any left!"

Hey guys! So, we're starting this rumor that, uh... Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (yes, the dreamy president of Iran, who else?) is going to be making a, uh, sweeps-week cameo on, well, let's say Private Practice because why not? What's that? We sound a little unconvincing? Well, congratulations, you just beat out the rumor-sniffing skills of the crack team over at Page Six! Let's take a look at this similar, outlandishly wrong rumor they ran today about Sarah Palin, shall we:

The jury has delivered their verdict in the Anand Jon Alexander model-raping case. With a mindblowing 23 counts of rape and sexual assault filed against him in L.A. County Superior Court, Jon was found guilty of 16 of them. WaxWord reports:

We certainly don't know what Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore does. We have even less of an idea how Adam Hirsch, the tech blog's COO, stays busy. Hand-cranking the site's server, perhaps, to save on electricity costs? In this just-unearthed Halloween photo sent in by a tipster, Hirsch seems to be short a piece of clothing. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: kfury, for "We can see Google from our campus!"

Real Estate, Bubbles. Michael Jackson has finally ceded the deed to the Neverland Ranch. It goes to a company he has a partial stake in, but consider this the final goodbyes between deposed pop monarch and his personal Touch Mahal. He hasn't lived there since he was acquitted in his 2005 molestation trial, and we understand in recent years its rusting carnival rides have become home to a small pack of feral llama-boys, who wandered off on a school field trip to the legendary estate in 1998 and were eventually taken in by a family of camelids as their own. [E Online]

JAP-y comedian Sarah Silverman, who used to be funny and fuck Matt Damon but is now mostly obnoxious, just sold a book to HarperCollins for $2.5 million, reports the New York Observer. Silverman, who dated equally unfunny Jimmy Kimmel and who would be so much more attractive if she stopped dressing like a teenage boy, will follow the Tina Fey book-writing formula by writing a "collection of comedic essays." Fey got $6 mil, by the way, and her proposal was modeled on the "humorous essays" of the also-unfunny Nora Ephron. "A collection of comedic essays" is the new phrase when you're a celeb who wants to sell a book for a lot of money, but haven't actually started writing one yet.

Few things made us laugh harder than Tina Fey's devastatingly precise Sarah Palin send-ups on Saturday Night Live this season (or the fact that the quote that will be attributed to the candidate for all time, "I can see Russia from my house," was said not by Palin but by Fey). Still, as the hardest working woman in comedy was repeatedly spirited away from her 30 Rock duties, we grew worried for her — after all, she has a show, a kid, a book, an Emmy, an upcoming Steve Carell romcom... couldn't Lorne Michaels let the woman rest? We voiced our concerns after the SNL sketch where Fey appeared with the actual John McCain (her sixth appearance on the show this season), and now Fey is telling EW that she took our words to heart:

It had to happen: Whispers are speeding out of previews of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road, leaving Paramount behind a breached embargo wall and knee-deep in mixed buzz for the former and generally glowing praise for the latter. Surely the studio's shrieking winged attack flacks are sniffing the most direct trail to the leakers' (mostly anonymous) domains, so make their sacrifices worth it! Hear the early word after the jump.The first Button item we saw was submitted by an "industry spy"; if it was published by anyone other that Anne Thompson, we'd assume it was just a publicity intern practicing her press-note chops:

Today marks the first time older-lady (and oddly capitalized) website wowOwow has actually contributed something important to the Internet. They tracked down Linda Tripp! You know, the grouchy lady who ratted out Monica Lewinsky's blow-job confessions. She's running a craft store in Virginia. It's called Christmas Sleigh, and features—we assume this is a Freudian slip on behalf of wowOwow's writers—"mouth-blown and hand-painted ornaments." They asked her opinion on Obama, and she responded—bizarrely, of course—via e-mail:Quoth Tripp,

What's a really fast shortcut to addiction? Being a child star. Remember Full House, the lovably terrible situation comedy about the whitebread-dorky Tanner family, whose cast included infants Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen? Jodi Sweetin—the actress who played young Stephanie for eight years—went through meth-addiction hell and lived what she called a "double life." She's since gotten married, had a child, and acted in an indie TV pilot, Small Bits of Happiness. Today, reports the Observer, Sweetin signed with Simon and Schuster for an addiction memoir. The price was "in the six figures"—America loves a redemption/celeb combo! (Click for a video of Jodie's best work on Full House, which very well may have led to her urge to smoke just about anything.)

Those who fund young, growing companies love to tout their industry's role in job creation. Jobs — we could use some of those now, right? But with venture-capital firms like Sequoia Capital insisting on across-the-board layoffs, it's hard to buy that argument; jobs may be created at startups quickly, but they are just as rapidly destroyed. But startups aren't the only ones being pinched by venture capitalists — they're also taking their investors for a ride, according to an industry insider.That insider is Adeo Ressi, the lanky, geeky founder of TheFunded.com, a site which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists on everything from smarts to etiquette. (One effect of the site: Entrepreneurs say they no longer see as many VCs rudely pecking away at their BlackBerrys during pitch meetings.) Ressi recently gave a presentation to faculty members at the Harvard Business School. His message: venture capital has crossed a line. That line is the amount of money venture-backed companies have generated when sold, either to public-market investors in an IPO, or to larger companies in an acquisition. Historically, that has exceeded the amount invested in venture capital by pension funds, college endowments, and other institutions. Put dollars in, get more dollars out: that's the magical money machine that drove a multibillion-dollar boom in venture capital since the mid-'90s. In the first half of this year, that ground to a halt: Venture capitalists raised approximately $22 billion from investors, but their companies only generated $19 billion when sold. The reasons are many, but they amount to this: Venture capitalists are clubby, insular, and unimaginative, passing up 9 out of 10 deserving companies. And as a result, hundreds of their funds return no money to investors. If anything, the situation is far worse than Ressi posits; some of the profits from startup sales go to their founders, after all. And a large chunk goes to the VCs themselves, who typically take 3 percent of the money they invest each year as a management fee, and 20 percent of the profits they distribute to investors. One venture capitalist I know estimates that the actual venture-capital deficit — the difference between money invested in funds and money returned — has been running at $6 billion a year for years. Not all of that goes into VCs' pockets; some of it is simply wasted on businesses which will never turn a profit. But still: $6 billion a year, up in smoke. What is this — the automotive industry? Where's the bailout for venture-capital investors? The truth is they haven't been that outraged, if only because venture capital is such a piddling business for them, compared to their other investments. Those larger investments are in peril, however, and are jeopardizing VCs' fortunes. Some pension funds are running short on cash, their money locked up in securities they cannot easily sell — and their managers are turning down venture capitalists' requests for more cash. That, in turn, is spilling over to startups, which are being told they cannot raise more money. The consequence: There will be a slow-motion bloodbath. Slow, because the partnerships which tie venture-capital firms and their investors together are notoriously tricky to unwind; slow, too, because the extent to which VCs' startup portfolios are worth less — or just plain worthless — will take years to unfold. The problem has been an excess of optimism. To a bullish venture capitalist, every investment looks like it might be the next Google; to a pension fund manager, every VC firm might be the next Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia Capital. That optimism has been turned from liquid cash into illiquid hope, to the tune of billions of dollars. Bleeding out that hope — finding the deep, despairing bottom — is a process which might take a decade. Ressi thinks that the number of venture-capital firms should drop from 4,800 to 1,000 — while funding a larger number of startups. This will require painful changes in how they do business. But the venture-capital industry has hid its sickness for a long time, making a recovery all the more prolonged. Ressi will no doubt watch gleefully: He feels VCs mistreated him at his last company, Game Trust. "I will not rest until there is balance in the force," he told The Deal last year. Revenge is a dish best served cold, via PowerPoint. Ressi's presentation:

["Hills" villain Spencer Pratt filming some sort of video with his sister Spencerina in LA today; image via Splash]

By 1:00 this afternoon, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 316 points. It closed three hours later up 552 points. What's going on in this insane market? Let's turn to the experts: "The market’s abrupt about-face left investors and analysts grasping for explanations. 'I have no idea,' said Michael Feroli, an economist at J.P. Morgan Chase." There you have it. [NYT]

Hollywood PrivacyWatch: 11/13 - Just saw sweaty dooshy oily sweaty pudgy squishy BRETT RATNER walking in Beverly Hills accompanied by a nonchalant blonde. He was passing us on the sidewalk, eyeballing a red-headed blue-eyed beauty wearing a black Obama Tshirt that had his face on it in sparkles. I stopped to tell the girl that THE WORLD FAMOUS Brett Ratner had given her the thrice-over and she pondered the possibility of crossing the street a different way to catch his eye again. HOWEVER, she did not do so. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]