Out: Halloween. In: Celebration and/or Protest. The fun starts at sunset, at Castro and 18th in the cool gray City of Love. Sweaterbear and I may or may not be there, but either way I love this town. Don't forget to take your four-hour "voting" break today.

There comes a point in every cable network exec's career when they stare long and hard into a bathroom mirror, and ask, "I've already greenlit a show called Hurl! that pits players against each other in a battle to retain the contents of their stomach. Where is there left to go from here?" Well, if you happen to work at G4, the answer lies outside the box—or the home, car, hotel room, airplane fuselage, or any structure brothers Craig and Paul Pumphrey are willing to destroy using nothing but their own bodies. We'll let the Human Wrecking Balls press release take over as we gingerly step out of the way:

A tipster reports that Linden Lab, the maker of virtual world Second Life, is laying off its business-development department, which had cultivated ties with software makers. The move affects "9 or 10" employees," he says. A wise move, if tardy: Don't you need to have a business worth developing before hiring someone in business development?

"Honey, I don't even know where to begin with NeNe!" says Anderson Cooper, and we don't know where to begin with this clip, in which the newsman throws some serious shade on Ellen DeGeneres for not watching his favorite guilty pleasure, Real Housewives of Atlanta. Yes, when not globetrotting in Kosovo, interviewing Katrina evacuees, or organizing his closet of medium-size black t-shirts (by frequency of use, natch), the Coop is a reality television devotee. Still, even his love for Dancing with the Stars is eclipsed by his obsession with Real Housewives. Something's gotta fill the void until season two of Living Lohan! Clip above.

[RETRACTION: Since posting these numbers, we've learned their original source and had we known at the time, they would not have gone up. We apologize for the error.] See, we told you not to get too excited. The first state exit polls have crossed our transom and they look like Obama's margins are tighter than recent polling in key states Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. So hold your breath.

A tender postscript at the bottom of a New York Times article about iPod creator Tony Fadell's departure from Apple: His wife, Danielle Lambert, who works as a VP of human resources at the company, is leaving, too. A good thing: If she had stayed at Apple, the line that Fadell was leaving to spend more time with his family might not have run true.

Before we tell you what we're hearing the exit poll numbers are saying, can we just remind you about Bob Shrum who famously asked John Kerry, after the 2004 early exit polls came out, "Can I be the first to call you Mr. President?" After the jump, the numbers we're hearing are floating around.

How do you know when campaign season is over? Maybe when the boldest idea of the week comes from film and TV critic Marshall Fine, who argues today for the termination of TV series after one year. Even the hits! (Especially the hits, in fact.) And we might even sign on — with a few exceptions.Fine's logic is exactly that: literal and emotionally detached from the enduringly riveting qualities of shows like Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Grey's Anatomy and a handful of others. But wouldn't the outrage following those and other great programs' predetermined self-destruction after 12 or so episodes would be preferable to their having eventually squandered their legacies on so-called stunt-casting and/or firing controversies? Doesn't going out gracefully a la Rome or The Wire allow for a better fan memory (and presuppose a bump in DVD sales)? Can't we avoid syndication hell with Friends and Two-and-a-Half Men? Yes, yes, and yes, writes Fine, who points to the UK as an example of doing things right:

Fred Baron, a Texas trial lawyer, died last Thursday of cancer. Fellow litigators remember him for the "toxic tort" lawsuits he filed; politicos know him as the man who relocated former presidential candidate John Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, to Santa Barbara, in the hopes of keeping her away from the public eye. But the Internet-obsessed crowd will inevitably think of him as the man who inflicted chesty-news videoblog Rocketboom on them; first, by fathering videoblogger Andrew Baron, then giving his son the funding for his project. Oh, and then suing him over it. Despite that, Andrew sought to have his father given an experimental cancer treatment. Blood is thicker than blogs.

What's that on the top of every page on Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales's nonprofit encyclopedia? Why, it's an ad! Wales had long promised that Wikipedia would not carry advertising, but he makes an exception for the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's nonprofit parent. What Wales doesn't mention: Wikipedia will soon have many new ways of making money available to it, thanks to a revision in its open-source license. Wikipedia is switching from an obscure, restrictive agreement with its roots in software documentation to a much looser Creative Commons copyright license — which means the Wikimedia Foundation will be able to profit from its volunteers' editorial work. While they're at it, why don't Wales and company just run banner ads, too? The donation drive seems like an excellent opportunity to show potential advertisers how effective Wikipedia's ads can be.

Animal Magnetism: Seth Rogen's had to make some mainstream concessions to get in fighting shape for The Green Hornet, but they're nothing compared to how he responded to the threat of a Zack and Miri sex scene. "I shaved my back just in case," he told WENN. "I went fully bare, like a two year old. I was ready. I didn't want to be too real for the world. I don't think the world is too ready for a hairy back in a love scene." We'd make an easy Robin Williams joke here, but Rogen beat us to the punch: "Has there ever been a sex scene with Robin Williams? People don't want to see that. That would border on bestiality." [OK!]

US News & World Report is switching from a biweekly to a monthly publishing schedule. To be followed eventually by its inevitable collapse as a news magazine and evolution into a full-time college rankings business. [FishbowlDC]

A week after landing a case study on the New York Times tech page, workplace monitoring toolmaker FaceTime has sent home an unspecified number of staff. Here's the standard Tough Times, Tough Decisions email from CEO Kailash Ambwani:

Hey, all! Just a friendly message from Defamer HQ, reminding you to get out there and vote—if not for a brighter future for your children and coddled pets, then at least so you can send in a steady stream of primo celebrity sightings from your local polling stations. Let your voice and stealthy eavesdropping skills be heard! [Defamer Decides]

MSNBC's lovable Rachel Maddow is a "hobbyist bartender," as she explained to Martha Stewart, who eyed the cocktail Maddow prepared for her a little too eagerly. (We'll be reporting the election returns live from dive bar Milano's later this evening.)

For once, the exit polling consortium seems to have kept a pretty tight lid on the exit poll numbers (so far!) that first raised and then dashed the hopes of so many John Kerry voters in 2004. But there's no reason that your vote can't be counted in an entirely unreliable tally. Below, tell us how you voted today, and be sure to come back at 7pm for our liveblog and coverage of the election results.

What's going on at The Corner, National Review's online peek into the id of the Conservative base? Jonah Goldberg, in his role as television-raised idiot manchild of The Right, has been posting weird movie clips all day. Kathryn Jean Lopez, Fairy Queen of NRO, has just been posting the crazier selections from her amazing inbox. Mark Hemingway doesn't really understand the laws surrounding "politcking" very well. And this is a particularly admirable example of "the polls are wrong" wishful thinking:

A few years ago PC World's then-editor Harry McCracken had me look under the hood of the most popular voting machines. It came down to this: People trust ink-on-paper records more than anything stored in a computer. They only suspect tampering when they lose. Did you notice the lack of mainstream media stories about voting machine risks in 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress? There's your liberal media bias, right there. It's not that editors and producers killed stories questioning the vote, it's that they forgot to assign them after their side won. Today, Kim Zetter at Wired.com is the only reporter cranking out the e-voting fail. Ohio has some ESS iVotronics that will only vote for Nader. God help us all.

An internet report from a self-proclaimed "McCain strategist" claiming Joe the Plumber got busy with Kristin Wiig following the SNL afterparty—and also discussed becoming the next Bachelor with Ben Affleck's agent, Patrick "Something"—is now looking more and more to be a hoax, hoisted upon a gullible and Wiig-hungry gossip nation. The report came from a man calling himself Martin Eisenstadt—the proprietor of his very own, very-hard-to-come-by website bearing that name—and was picked up by the likes of Slate before internet skeptics and lovers of Sue the Surprise-Loving Lady alike started poking holes in the story:

Heavy.com continues to get lighter; Eric Hadley, who only joined the funny-videos-for-guys startup a year ago as chief marketing officer, has joined Yahoo as its VP of advertiser and partner marketing. He'd previously worked for a decade at Microsoft. We see the hand of Joanne Bradford in this; she's the former MSN chief who now runs ad sales at Yahoo. The pattern here?Yahoo has lacked a strong sales leader since the departure of Wenda Harris Millard, whom President Sue Decker disgracefully drove out of the company. With the hiring of Hadley to run marketing and Jeff Dossett to run media, Bradford is assembling her own team of loyalists, from Microsoft and elsewhere. In sales, personality rules. And every cult needs its leader. (Photo by Andy Plesser)