With banks refusing to lend money to nearly everyone, it's no surprise to hear that business is booming at pawn shops. "In many cases now, we're not just the bank of last resort," says Jordan Tabach-Bank, the CEO of a pawn shop in Beverly Hills. "We're the bank of only resort.'' Jewelry and Rolexes, art works by Picasso, Warhol and Basquiat, and Ferraris and Porsches are being dropped off by those desperate for quick cash to pay for mortgages, debts, health care, and plastic surgery. One of the enticements of bartering your worldly goods? Discretion: "We're like bartenders,'' says Tabach-Bank. "People spill their guts to us even if it's embarrassing to them. They know we won't talk.''

At 2:30 today, President-elect Barack Obama will hold his first press conference since the election. Reporters will ask him for his magical plan to fix the miserable economy and Obama will announce that out-of-work Americans will be relocated to state-run Unicorn Ranches, or something, and the markets will rally, hooray. But he'll make no personnel announcements! Those wondering who might end up on his presidential money team could look at his current advisors, of course. Obama's assembled a 17-member all-star team of economic advisors, from Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin, who helped create the current crisis under the Clinton administration (Republican talking points yay!!) to the chairman of Google and Warren Buffet, America's two last remaining rich people. Obama's been totally cold to the press for the entirety of the campaign, and reporters don't actually like him very much, so it might be interesting. Obama to meet economic advisors after grim jobs data [Reuters]

Here in New York, advertisers will toss up huge billboards on every flat surface, zoning laws be damned (see here for nice chart illustrating how much the police care about illegal advertising). Well that's pretty embarrassing for us, because they're even cracking down on the insane proliferation of billboards in Moscow. In Russia! Is America poised to take back the international "Rampant and Rapacious Uncontrolled Advertising In Service of Almighty Capitalism" title? Well, only if the economic crisis doesn't force Moscow to quit taking down billboards before it starts. It's a nice idea, but we don't want to cut into revenue here!

We've been following the development of Real World Brooklyn closely, watching as they cavort all over the gentrified parts of the borough. Now that the trailer's out, It may be the most melodramatic Real World yet: you have an ex-solider admitting to killing people, a virgin Mormon accused of being gay, somebody putting a rodent in someone's bed, a dude talking about getting beaten bloody by his dad, and another guy smashing a glass coffee table. And that's only the two-minute preview! Click to watch.Click to view

Mary-Kate Olsen smoking during lunch with boyfriend Nate Lowman ... Jeremy Piven hailing a cab outside Balthazar ... Robin Williams leaving his hotel ... Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss crossing the street with a Starbucks cup in hand ... Brad Pitt getting in an SUV outside the Michael Kors boutique on Prince Street and later stopping off at Mercer Kitchen ... Kim Raver, Brooke Shields, and Lindsay Price filming scenes for Lipstick Jungle ... Katie Holmes walking to a yoga class and later carrying Suri into their East Village apartment building ... and Ed Westwick walking on the Upper East Side.

[Cokey model Kate Moss proceeds up a staircase and away from an unknown disturbance. Pic via X17. Click to enlarge.]

Raja Petra Kamarudin, a blogger in Malaysia, will be released from from government detainment today, after having been arrested on September 12th for no reason. Raja Petra is—you'll never guess!—"one of the most vocal critics of the current government," according go the Times. What was the critism that made the government mad enough to lock him up for two months?

My Wired essay "Kill Your Blog" has spawned a charmingly identical piece in The Economist's print edition this week. Same theme, same Jason Calacanis quote from July. But read this part out loud: "A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone." I'd love to meet The Economist's anonymous author, if only to confirm that anyone on Earth actually talks that way.

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A new book is coming out called Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Whoa, did Kafka experience the uncertainty of layoffs, and that annoying co-worker who keeps popping his head over the cubicle partition? As Bookninja put it, "Kafkaesque bureaucratic bewilderment existed pre-Kafka." The dark insect-loving Metamorphosis author used to be a lawyer, and this will be a collection of "Kafka's most interesting professional writings" of that time, including exciting legalese such as "Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines (1910)". This on the heels of his recently-discovered porn stash... the mind reels."His office work leeched on his time and energy as a writer, and yet his writing sucked blood and guts out of office life," it's noted on Zoilus. "It is like we get to see Franz Kafka playing Don Draper (cf. Mad Men)." As a commenter on that blog aptly put it,

Michael Wolff is Vanity Fair's media columnist and the author of a brand new book about Rupert Murdoch. He's also a man with inside info and impeccable sources. "My 83-year-old mother (today is her birthday) in New Jersey has just called me to say that she has just heard through sources who must remain anonymous, though she hinted at friends who have children who might or might not know people in the State Department, that George Bush is back on the sauce and Laura is getting ready to leave him." [Newser.com]

In case you've missed it, photos of the Obamas in their hotel room first hearing the results of the election. [Flickr]

Exposing a Checkered Past [TMZ]

It just might be that celebrities really have changed their ways for our new, hopier President, because they damn sure aren't doing things that will cause them to show up in blind items in the gossip pages. Richard, my colleague who is the heavy favorite for the 2008 PEN Literary Award for Eloquence in Blind Items, will be back on Monday, and the real dirt will surely start back up again by then. For today, all we have is a middle-aged soap opera star banging his producer's daughter, and an extremely vague "actor" who is "rude." Might as well read them, it's Friday: 1) "Yes, I know some of you dislike the soap opera ones, but there are lots that do love them. Today lets go over to NBC. Which married male cast member who has been on the show for a very long time is sleeping with the daughter of the one of the producers? Not a really scandalous thing until you realize she is still in her teens and our cast member is certainly past middle age. At least she is in college now. It was much tougher to get together when she was in high school. I will say that it has always been legal though apparently. Did not start until she was 18." [CDaN] 2) "This actor is going to find out the hard way it doesn’t pay to be rude and disrespectful to your peers. He may be good looking, but his bad attitude and weird behavior is ruining his career." [Blind Gossip]

As Candace Bushnell continues promoting her latest novel One Fifth Avenue, more unsuspecting journalists are emerging from interviewing her vaguely traumatized, wondering what she has to be so temperamental about (other than the fact that her obsession with glitz and shopping is suddenly anachronistic) and especially now that the whole will they-won't they make the SATC sequel juggernaut is underway. But as an Independent reporter discovers, there's not much you can ask Bushnell without getting a testy reaction.

Oprah Winfrey may still be celebrating Barack Obama's triumph Tuesday, but hopefully her good mood won't be ruined by the bad news this morning: Hearst, Oprah's magazine partner, has announced that O at Home, the shelter-focused spinoff of O, The Oprah Magazine, is shutting down. Guess Michelle Obama will have to look elsewhere when she starts thinking about redecorating the White House. [Mixed Media]

♦ Now that Julian Schnabel has reduced the price of his penthouse triplex at Palazzo Chupi, it only makes sense that the price of the two-floor duplex right below has been cut as well. Once on the market for as much as $32 million, it can now be yours for the bargain basement price of $23 million. [Curbed, Corcoran]
♦ Golfer Greg Norman's ex-wife Laura Andrassy collected $103 million in a divorce settlement earlier this year. Now it looks like she's spending some of it. Andrassy is reportedly paying $7.55 million for a 0.92-acre property in Southampton where she plans to tear down the 3,500-square-foot home to make room for a bigger one. [WSJ]
♦ Steven Gidumal, co-chief investment officer at Resurgence Asset Management, has paid $4.1 million for a three-bedroom condo at 1 River Terrace in Battery Park City. [Cityfile]

Skittish art collectors with shrunken fortunes continue to balk at the prospect of picking up expensive artwork: At last night's sale of impressionist and modern art at Christie's, works by Matisse, Monet and Renoir had no takers, and the auction house's owner, French billionaire François Pinault, looked on as sluggish bidding led to lots going for bargain prices or not at all.

Diane von Furstenberg is blogging—sort of. In the most recent entry on the DVF website, she welcomes the Standard Hotel to the meatpacking district (which, in case you haven't heard, is a "new luxe hotel" that's "minimalist chic but with a downtown NYC twist.") We're going to go ahead and place the blame on her assistant, though, for referring to the hotel's owner as "Andre Balaz." [DVF.com]

• Val Kilmer announced that he's officially thinking about maybe running for governor of New Mexico. Once he bounces the idea off some political types. [Post]