• Slow news week, right? Oy, where to begin. On Monday we were still laughing at Sarah Palin, when we weren't killing ourselves with worry. Obama cried, about his grandmother.

This is Adam Smith, "also known as Steve Zacharanda," in Chicago on Election Night. He is a reporter for the Birmingham Mail, a newspaper in the UK. He's just been approached by a friendly Dutch person with a video camera. He seems to be filing a story, and he's definitely been drinking. Please watch his hilarious reportorial style—"I'm just a little bit pissed.... Thank god for the BBC, because I'm cutting and pasting, baby!"—after the jump. Click to view As the Telegraph reports:

Hold on to that feeling! MySpace attempted to feign bubbliness last night with a Lionel Richie-headlined party at San Francisco's Old Mint. They even let in the competition: ubiquitous Facebooker Dave Morin is pictured here with iJustine, aka Justine Ezarik, the lifecasting personality, and, as commenter BowenDunlop helpfully notes, GeekSugar editor Heather Dale. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: Shadowlayer, for "Adidas: Run from your investors." (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

Fuzzy handheld footage of Obama's first meeting with his economic team. "This is literally coming in at the moment... It's gonna be a little rough here, folks." None of the talking heads have any idea what's going on.

These are the men and women Barack Obama assembled today to advise him on how best to fix the cratering economy. They are a largely respected group, and though they ain't perfect—so many CEOs and so much Larry "Women Be Unable to Learn Math" Summers!—they are certainly more reassuring than the ideologues and incompetents our last guy surrounded himself with. We've identified them for your benefit and their brief bios are below.

Purchasers of the first Googlephone, T-Mobile's G1, are already discovering that with great power — root access to your phone operating system! — comes great responsibility. There's an as-yet-unpatched bug: If you type the letters "r-e-b-o-o-t", the phone reboots. A-w-k-w-a-r-d. Oh, crud, I just wrote a shell script. [ZDNet]

Now that California's Proposition 8 has passed, many celebrities are decrying the anti-gay rights measure — and then there's addled songstress Courtney Love. Your Defamer put in some time phone-banking for the "No on 8" cause before the election, and often we discovered that people thought they'd be granting gay people equal rights by voting "yes" on the proposition, a misconception they needed to be hastily disabused of. Sadly, Love never got the memo, and she took to her Myspace blog to brag about her yes vote and celebrate the proposition's passing:

In honor of the Friday layoffs sweeping through the media today, we bring you even more funny-sad stories of being fired. (Esquire, Wenner, O at Home, this one goes out to you.) As always, send your own anecdotes to tips@gawker.com. Read on for sick-bed and weekend layoffs and a guy who's been laid off so many times, he's a "kiss of death" to any company.Get Well Soon! Yeah Right:

Black Sheep, Black Tie. Gossip Girl's new ad campaign features a low-angle shot of rapscallion Chuck Bass, dapper in a tux with his face in shadow, and the tagline, "The price of winning could be losing his father's empire." They certainly have toned things down since the last campaign, which featured images of Blake Lively getting triple-stuffed by Chace, Ed, and Penn under a review pullquote reading, "If your child watches this, THEY ARE SODOMIZING BABY JESUS. -Leah Rozen, People." Click for a full-size view. [Videogum]

Tough times, easy decisions. How can you tell if a startup's founder has too much time on her hands? When she is spending time impersonating cats on Twitter.

[Jim Behrle's Kartoon Kitties are befuddled. What to do in a world where we are slightly less racist than we thought? There are new rules against being a negative asshole, apparently. IS THIS THE END OF KREEPIE KATS? Click through and find out!] Click to view

If there's a hell, it might look, feel and sound like the slapfight between aggrieved Oscar bloggers Patrick Goldstein, David Poland and Tom O'Neil, who today aired their tired tussle for all the world to overlook. But with your awards-season intelligence at stake, you really mustn't miss a minute of the wheezing action that so influences how Hollywood's biggest prizes are distributed every year. Your highlight reel follows the jump.· Back before the Internet, Patrick Goldstein used to sit at an old-fashioned typewriter and daydream and have the whooooole Oscar beat to himself at the LA Times. Then came bloggers, whom he couldn't read on his typewriter. Word got back to him they were writing about the Academy Awards! The effrontery! Grumpy Goldie upgraded and eventually wound up blogging himself, culminating in today's bitter screed arguing: "Anyone who doesn't believe that the Oscars haven't been thoroughly hijacked by a gang of daffy, clown-suit-clad Oscar bloggers making endlessly moronic best picture predictions just hasn't been paying attention." He specifically referred to political commentary like yesterday's insane EW item "How Obama Helps Batman," but the point was clear: Patrick misses his typewriter! · Not one to back down from an opportunity to write 5,000 words of self-defense from a piece where he isn't even mentioned, early blog adapter David Poland fired back:

As recently as a year ago, Google was scrambling to get more office space in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. Now, just as swiftly, it's trying to offload it, putting 50,000 square feet up for sublet. The company has cut back on snacks in New York, as elsewhere — but real estate is a far more serious thing to trim. With less room for warm bodies, it suggests Google will soon be shedding staff.

"Something has to happen for us to make fun of. Unlike the actual news, what we say is based in fact." From Daily Show writer J. R. Havlan, about the inevitability of comedians making fun of Obama. [NYT]

Want a MyPod? MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe hints that the social-networking site might sell MySpace-branded MP3 players to make its MySpace Music spinoff a more plausible competitor to Apple's iTunes. Last we checked, this plan did not work for Napster, either. [BetaNews]

A fine Friday news dump: a tipster tells us that a slew of layoffs just went down at Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, and Men's Journal. Let go, we hear, were several online people, several marketing people, an assistant, a sales rep, and three unnamed people from Men's Journal. Also, "the entire Detroit and San Francisco office," according to our source. That's harsh, but quite possible. Know any more details on the Wenner layoffs? Email us.

At last! We meet one of Decision 2008's most memorable and accidental heroes: Oprah Winfrey's anonymous "Mr. Man," her randomly selected human-leaning-pole and blubber-sponge throughout Obama's historic Grant Park victory speech. Who was this stoic, liverlipped everyman? An intensive search for the mystery face in the crowd—the likes of which hasn't been undertaken since the days of American Idol's Sanjaya-lusting Crying Girl—unearthed unassuming family man Sam Perry, who appeared on her show today to a rapturously appreciative audience. [Oprah]

One of the best parts of that juicy NYT story yesterday about all the infighting in the McCain- Palin campaign was the fact that a huge chunk of the story was given over to exploring who was leaking to sniveling conservative columnist Bill Kristol—a Times columnist! It's pretty unusual for a paper to start digging on its own columnist's confidential sources, but hey, it's Bill Kristol and nobody at the Times likes him, so they just went for it. That prompted some further review by the Daily Beast, which concluded, yep, Bill Kristol is basically just a lackey for political operatives:

Leah Culver, the ever-romantic founder of file-sharing site Pownce, does not think anything should keep two lovers apart, least of all work. True! And if she wants to date MG Siegler, the handsome VentureBeat blogger, more power to her. Brian Solis's lens captured the two sticking quite close to each other at a party for MySpace Music last night. But shouldn't Siegler, rather than Valleywag, disclose the relationship to his readers before he writes flatteringly about Pownce and quotes Culver in an article? (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

On The Office last night, we learned that Dunder Mifflin customer service rep Kelly Kapoor threw an America's Got Talent finale party, where she gave out personalized gift mugs featuring every worker's face over a blue star. (In a nice touch, you can purchase said mugs at the NBC online store. We'll take six Phyllises—something about her smile puts us in the mood for warm beverages.)A mugless Jim and Dwight never bothered showing up, however, and begin to realize that a vengeful Kelly was the reason behind their poor performance review scores. All of this is really just set up for the scene above, a perfectly executed comic gem in which the two engage in a role-playing sales call. It eventually climaxes with Dwight shouting something at the top of his lungs which, we think it's safe to say, has never been uttered on network primetime before. We'd suggest it veers on NSFW—but if it's safe for their office, we guess it's safe for yours. Enjoy!