After McColo Corporation, a San Jose Internet service provider suspected of providing services for major spam operations, got its uplink service disconnected, the global volume of spam saw a detectable drop overnight. Some researchers say McColo accounted for a third of spam worldwide. Now, all we need is for people to stop buying fake Viagra off emails. [The Register]
Was the Page Six item about semi-famous, media-savvy retired escort Natalie McLennan—and the anonymous website that sprung up accusing her of informing on Spitzer's hooker Ashley Dupre—just a timely form of PR placement? After all, the former call girl has a book coming out November 25, The Price: My Life as Natalia, New York's $2000 an Hour Escort. And we've got a copy of the book proposal. The tone in the excerpts is a bit flip, low on any serious, raw introspection. But if anyone is interested in the economic breakdown of how a high-class call girl makes her living—she doesn't keep nearly all of the money herself—here's her explanation of the take-home pay of a two-grand girl.
Though many "No on 8" protesters have been talking about a Utah-penalizing boycott of the Sundance Film Festival, we initially wrote the idea off as unrealistic (though it provides a great face-saving maneuver for rejected indie filmmakers!). Now, though, David Poland has brought to light a direct impact that one "Yes on Prop 8" donor — the CEO of the Cinemark theater chain — could potentially have on the festival:
Silicon Valley still dreams of the mythical equity culture — the notion that if you make your employees shareholders, magic happens. What it really does is make them as avaricious and obsessed with short-term gains as your average shareholder. Yahoo's owner-employees are as eager to unload their shares as the rest of the market — which means they've been abusing an employee stock purchase plan for quick cash.This explains why Yahoos have been fretting more than usual about the stock's plunging price. Yahoo's stock-purchase plan offers employees a 15 percent discount on shares; the price is set periodically based on market prices, and the discount taken off that. Monday was the most recent price-setting date; the company has a one-day waiting period before employees can sell shares. Hence the concerns that the stock not drop 15 percent in two days — which it nearly did, rendering even the instant profit from the discount void. It's legal for employees to sell after the one-day waiting period, but it's hardly in the spirit of stock-purchase plans. Yahoo's management is in a tough position: They can crack down on the share-flipping by putting in a longer waiting period, which might hurt morale; or they can allow it to continue, and thereby coddle employees who don't have the company's best interests at heart. What it really illustrates, though, is how the equity culture turns toxic when share prices tumble. The makeup of the human mind sets us up to treasure gains too little and fear losses too much; that means that employees take stock gains for granted, but fume when their options go underwater. When that happens, taking a company's 15 percent discount on stock and treating it like free money is just barely understandable. Employees should wonder why they ought to be the ones to buy and hold when it hardly seems like their company has a future. And shareholders should wonder why employees like these are getting free money. So much for aligning interests. (Photo by 42dreams)
Today is a good day for literary agent Dan Strone and the dark-haired Jewish comedians on client list. Leon Neyfakh reports that the bidding for Sarah Silverman's first book has topped $2.5 million. But Strone may have an even bigger deal in hand for one of his clients by the end of the week. It seems Jerry Seinfeld's latest book proposal has resulted in "two publishers crazy enough to submit bids in the $7 million to $8 million dollar range." [NYO]
We hear that National Geographic just laid off 13 people on the magazine staff—including a cartographer. We also hear that they are planning 5%-10% cuts across the entire company. This is bad. What will become of the cartographer? When a magazine cartographer can't get a job at National Geographic, the rest of the magazine cartography market must look especially barren. If you know more about the layoffs, email us. [UPDATE: We hear that the mag has "over a dozen" total cartographers on staff. And further, "They did similar 'restructuring' in the 1990's and laid off lots of people, but they were quite generous with severance and benefits."]
Quantum of Solace opens tomorrow, and will likely draw out every stripe of James Bond fan. (Except the George Lazenby contingent, who all these years later still feel the On Her Majesty's Secret Service and The Kentucky Fried Movie star was wrongly stripped of his double-o status.) But as audiences thrill to the secret agent's adventures battling the nefarious Dr. Heinrick Discord and his plans to detonate the planet using a sympathy-powered nuclear device, some of the touchstones of the Bond brand—the gadgets, the martinis, and, most of all, the cringe-worthy double-entendres—will be nowhere on display.Ex-Bond Roger Moore has recently voiced his disappointment over the character's devolution into a monosyllabic id, lumbering around hotel lobbies and breaking necks in skimpy gay swimwear. "My Bond," he said wistfully, "was a lover and a giggler." Yes, we remember him well—so it's in his honor that we dedicate the above montage we call Five Decades of James Bond Sex Puns. We hope it Moonrakes your Octopussies off. (Thanks to Nick McGlynn for putting this together, and Maxim for finding the clips.)
The producers and the director of the Nicole Kidman-Hugh Jackman epic Australia are on the same page — just days before its Australian premiere on Tuesday, Australia isn't done. Luhrmann renewed the debate over exactly how unfinished the film is on the LAT's The Envelope blog, revealing that at the end of the "emotional cinematic banquet" there will be a death of some kind, even if he's not quite sure yet who buys it. Meanwhile, Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman tried to dismiss the controversy over the $130 million dollar film's "six endings." This barely counts as optimism when it comes to the film's still-ongoing editing process. Since they are shutting down a street in Sydney for the premiere, should the local authorities prepare for a riot or can Luhrmann deliver in time?When Luhrmann was palling around at the MoMA the other night, he was either joking about how pressing the situation was, or speaking the frightening truth: "We're right up against it, I literally have to on Friday night push that button." He admitted he's given himself 24 hours at the 'mixing desk' to put the film together. "This is really dangerous, I hope there's no problem with the plane going back," he managed.
Name-dropping old man James Brady is just about the oldest old man in all the working media. He's turning 80 on Saturday, so he decided to dedicate his Forbes column to that most interesting of topics: his own career. This is a slight departure from his usual practice of reciting as many names as he can in 800 words and being shocked about this modern age. Brady's learned a mess of things in his long, long media career; but "modesty" was not one of them: He's a lover:
We can tell by your reactions to Jennifer Aniston's recent Vogue indictment of Angelina Jolie (e.g. "She needs to build a bridge and get over it") that there remains plenty of demand for Aniston to swing away at her spouse-snatching archnemesis. So off she went to visit Oprah Winfrey, who, in an interview to be broadcast later today, wouldn't let Aniston out of the studio without claiming her own stake of the fuss. Hint: That bridge may be on the way! To Pitt, anyway:
Just in case you have some extra cash burning a hole in your pocket and you happen to be totally obsessed with Jonathan Adler, W Hotels has introduced the "Design Dream" package. The basic promotion includes a "stylish" room rate and a basket of Adler-branded goods. But for $10,000 more, "design-daring guests" will get a "personal one-on-one session with the legendary potter himself" when he joins you for lunch and then accompanies you on a "private shopping spree at one of his stores in New York City." Alas, no word on whether you can throw in a little extra and get Simon to show up, too.
The new lean, mean, blue-eyed killin' machine James Bond movie Quantum of Solace comes out on Friday! It's exciting, I guess, because 2006's Casino Royale franchise reboot was good and whatnot, but judging from early clips and reviews we've eyeballed, there's something missing. It's that spark, that joie de vivre, that sense of humor that colored the older films. We're talking, of course, about the sex puns. There may have been one or two in Royale, but they weren't nearly as good as the creaky old ones about something suddenly "coming up," or the more recent delightful Pierce Brosnan clunker "I thought Christmas only comes once a year," which he said while boning a lady named Christmas Jones. Terrific. Luckily for us, Maxim (natch) has put together a list of the punny best, and our video wunderkind Nick McGlynn smushed them all together into one handy video. Click above to enjoy it. (Was that a sex pun?)
Good luck getting your computer fixed today. Is there some strange flu that only infects sysadmins sweeping the nation? No — but Blizzard Entertainment did dump Wrath of the Lich King, an update to its online World of Warcraft videogame franchise, on the Internet at midnight last night. What this means: A lot of engineers are going to be calling in lich this morning, having stayed up to download the update and then level their new Death Knight for a foray into Northrend. Yes, World of Warcraft players actually talk like that.You don't need to be able to talk gold and swords to understand that WoW, as it's abbreviated, is a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" — which means that it's a group timewaster through which people bond. (A lot of people: The game, for which Blizzard charges a monthly subscription fee, has 11 million subscribers.) Sort of like golf! Venture capitalist Joi Ito has called World of Warcraft "the new golf," the social glue connecting a new generation of Silicon Valley businessmen. True enough, I suppose, for the overpaid, underemployed investor class. But for the people who are trying to pick up the slack for coworkers who overdid it on a raid last night, here's what World of Warcraft really is: the new binge drinking.
It's hard times for online media, and any twit with an idea and some bandwidth is no longer guaranteed an audience. With that in mind, actress Gwyneth Paltrow might want to get out before it's too late—or before she embarrasses herself further. Her puzzling soft-launched, minimalistic website—Goop.com (gross)—is about "nourish[ing] the inner aspect" and telling us how to live. (She already thinks we want her to tell us to vote.) In fact, the website is almost completely devoid of content, but we just received a GOOP e-newsletter, with quiet wisdom straight from Gwyneth.
Because there is no morning so terrible that it cannot be rendered less terrible with some one-on-one time with Jake Gyllenhaal in a cleavage-enhancing under-chemise, we bring you this ET footage from the set of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time—a Jerry Bruckheimerian extravaganza the superproducer says will be cinema's greatest headdress-and-scimitar-heavy triumph since Lawrence of Arabia. If you listen carefully, you can hear smacking sounds coming from the reporter as she gets her first taste of Jake's "convincing" accent (like the hunky love child of Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren), then later observes, "There's been so much buzzz about your physeeque!" There certainly has been—some of it emanating from Defamer HQ as worker drones vigorously rubbed their wings together to this photo. Though it doesn't open until May 2010, we can hardly wait to check out Jake's vast array of camel-gadgets.
If you're the sort of magazine industry obsessive who looks forward to the first week of December when Condé Nast releases its holiday luncheon seating chart—wherein Condé overlord Si Newhouse either exalts or punishes his editors according to where he seats them at the Four Seasons, and with whom—you're going to have to wait until next year. The company's CEO, Chuck Townsend, informed staffers yesterday that the lunch has been canceled. Of course, you probably don't need a chart to surmise that if the lunch had taken place, Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman could have expected to nibble on her Cobb salad in the coat room. [WWD]
What would happen if you threw the world's worst people into a room together and then, right before locking the door behind you, you said "oh, and only one of you is going to make it out alive"? I reckon you might get something like the madness and desperation of Stylista, The CW's swishy competition series about a group of nincompoops competing for a non-job at Elle magazine. Last night was the fourth episode, and it stunk. As usual. But I watched it, as usual. Carry on with me after the jump for a grim detailing of the proceedings. Grumble-chinned Megan, still the World's Worstest Person, continued her campaign of bitchery and double speak. She, at 22 years old, called out the little 19 -year-old pixie from NYU for being too young to be in the competition. Which is silly because grumble-chinned "boutique owner" 22-year-olds don't really know anything more than cute and perky editors of their large New York City university's fashion magazine. But Megan was grumble-chinned in her grumble-chinned convictions, so she grumble-chinned her way past logic and into the fallow fields of unabashed grumble-chinnedness. Kate, who hasn't been the same since the helium accident, wept and moaned and tried to keep up with the big kids by saying nasty things in return when they said nasty things to her, but it just didn't work. Tis pity, really, because some grumble-chinned people who will go unnamed really need to be taken down a peg or eight. Other people yelled too, including Fatsy, Gay Black Guy, and Gay Fake British Guy (that is TOTALLY a fake accent, he's probably from fucking Maryland). Basically half of this episode was people yelling at each other, trying to debunk each others' qualifications. Which is just sad! There, there guys. Stop the fightin' and the bickerin'. None of you are qualified. There were, as always, two challenges: the first was to throw some clothes in a sack for Elle fashion director Anne Slowey's jaunt to the Hamptons. She met them in the middle of the cobble-stoned street in the Meatpacking District, and sifted through the items awkwardly. I'm betting you that if you press a button behind her ear or something, her front will open up to reveal a little alien creature desperately pulling at levers, trying to manipulate this unwieldy human machine. She's the most graceless woman in fashion, after Michael Kors. No, scratch that. Miss Kors is more graceful than this old windup toy. Anyway, little NYU nymph was declared the winner of the Fashion In A Sack challenge, and some shall-not-be-named people were expectedly grumble-chinned about it, saying bitchy passive aggressive things to the camera. Sigh. Nancy NYU picked the teams for the big challenge, and stuck Megan and Kate together, along with Ashlie the Yelling Black Girl and Danielle the Token Fat Girl. What a miserable team! Of course they would win! The task was to take a Tory Burch (I don't care if that's not spelled right) outfit and do a photoshootz forz itz! Team Grumble-Chin decided to go "retro" because Kate found an old TV whose shininess attracted her. That explains why on long drives, she'll sometimes just pull the car over and wander into an empty field, toward a piece of metal glinting in the sun. It was a sort of "bored 60's, 70's housewife" vibe (or whatever) though Megan tried to argue that "retro was the late 1960's, no the 1970's." She said it with such authority, that it almost impossibly sounded even dumber! American Girls: Grumble-Chin Learns A Lesson time. Retro is a general adjective (or sorts), not a specific time period. Stop being dumb. Team NYU Bobcats decided to get some mannequins and make their model sad to be at a party. Dyson the Vacuum Cleaner decided that the theme should be Gossip Girl. This was later hailed as brilliant ("the idea just suddenly came to me") by all involved, which is true. Because some homo thinking about Gossip Girl while working on fashions in 2008 New York City is almost as fantastic and beautiful a synaptic leap of inspiration as sitting on the toilet and coming up with the idea "bad smell." Well done Dyson. Well it wasn't enough anyway, because they lost and Team Miserable got the grumble-chinned win. Megan remains to grumble-chin another day, and that makes me sad and mad and oh! Kate's still hangin' on too. They're like the Abbot & Costello of some hellish torture world. So, they're the Abbot & Costello of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Then the Anne Slowey axe fell: My First NYU Doll went home which was too bad because I wanted her to prove grumble-chin wrong. At least she didn't have far to go. The Post-Reality Show Loss R Train Ride Of Shame. Also sent home (two people!) was Gay Fake British fellow _______. I don't remember his name. Whatever. He was sort of cute in a really stupid fake British way, and I felt bad for him. But he seemed of good cheer when he left. I would have been too. I mean, Indiana Jones and Marion were happy to be the fuck out of that pit of snakes in Raiders, weren't they? Those sun-starved little Injun kids were thrilled as punch to be hot footing it out of Mola Ram's torture cave in Temple of Doom, yeah? And everyone in the audience was breathlessly happy to be fleeing Crystal Skull, for sure. Gay Fake British must have had similar feelings, as he clicked his heels, opened his umbrella and promptly got hit by a crosstown bus. Sad story. So that's that. The show soldiers on and somewhere right now they're oiling Anne Slowey's stiffening metallic joints and grumble-chin's grumble-chin is chinnily grumbling while the same indifferent sun beats down mercilessly on all of us. Isn't Fashion fabulous?
For crazy people convinced that secret government agents are stalking them with electromagnetic mind control devices, the invention of the internet was a great thing. It allowed them to form like-minded online communities of government mind control victims. It also made them even more convinced that their oppression was real, since they found so many other clinically insane people out there who told the same stories. The whole thing is actually very tragic! This far-flung group of paranoid psychosis-ridden conspiracy theorists bent on evading imaginary government spies has, however, found one staunch ally: a Republican elected official. Naturally:
