Sumner Redstone was the first major media mogul to get slammed by the economic downturn, and the Viacom chief's troubles continue. His pending divorce and the comical failure of his video game business are mere distractions. His bigger problem is that his company has $1.6 billion in debt to deal with, and Redstone is squabbling with his daughter about how to do it. For some, it's already too late; we hear that layoffs are coming down at Viacom tomorrow. But for the Redstones, there seem to be only three real options:

♦ André Leon Talley urged fashion students at the Art Institute of Philadelphia to vote, "no matter who your candidate is," and said of Anna Wintour: "She is not that person in 'The Devil Wears Prada.' She is like Catherine the Great of Russia. She has kept that magazine on top, raised money for the Met and for the Democratic party." [WWD]
♦ Election eve shocker! Donna Karan and Diane von Furstenberg are voting for Obama. [WWD]
♦ Michael Kors could care less which network Project Runway winds up on: "I just want people to watch the show." [The Cut]
♦ In the new Agent Provocateur campaign, Helena Christensen doesn't look very happy in cheap red lace, and we don't blame her. [The Mirror]

Last night's Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons featured a direct homage to Mad Men—the familiar strings accompanying a silhouette of Homer tumbling down the side of a building on whatever Springfield's answer to Madison Avenue is.(Probably the place that came up with this ingenious Kwik-E-Mart campaign, replete with a real live Comic Book Guy!) The Halloween episode scored the highest ratings in five years for the animated series. Unfortunately, the Mad Men parodying ended at the title sequence; as much as we wanted to hear Homer say, "It’s not called a wheel, it’s called a donut. Round and a round, and sprinkly delicious. Arhghghllll....dooonuttttt. To a place where we know we are loved," instead we got Homer on a bizarre celebrity killing spree that cost us Prince and George Clooney.

Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died this morning. She was 86. [CNN]

Time's Anita Hamilton is refreshingly honest about why the magazine has picked 23andMe, the mail-order DNA testing outfit, as one of its top innovations of 2008: Anne Wojcicki, the startup's cofounder, is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Few outlets are as forthright in displaying their motivations for celebrating 23andMe, arguably the least innovative and least scientific of the retail DNA tests on the market. Give Anne Wojcicki a prize, and her loyal husband will attend the awards ceremony. It's a great way to get Googler star power on the cheap.

What's becoming really big now that the economy is screwed? Budget beer, apparently. Low-end brews like Busch and Keystone have seen sales shoot up in recent weeks. [AdAge]

♦ Jean-Georges Vongerichten is opening his first "green" restaurant inside ABC Carpet. [NYM]
♦ British chef Fergus Henderson is cooking at Momofuku Noodle Bar tonight as part of his annual "FerguStock" publicity tour through New York City kitchens. [Eater]
♦ New York's Adam Platt tasted seven different coffees and ranked Abraço's the best and Starbucks the worst. [NYM]

Sienna Miller's struggles for relevance beyond the bedrooms of her paramours may have finally received the onscreen antidote they need: Cow's blood. The starlet appears in a new, Tony Kaye-directed music video for the British band the Hours, featuring Miller traipsing through various phases of hospital-gowned distress. And where handbag boutiques, CAT scans and tear-streaked therapy sessions fail, a romp through a Damien Hirst installation of cow carcasses and blood momentarily revives her with the clear-eyed sense of purpose that eluded even her acclaimed turn in Factory Girl. If this doesn't nudge Nottingham back on track at Universal by the end of lunch today — assuming the sight bovine entrails in the video after the jump don't void your lunch — then surely all hope is gone. [YouTube]

At a Salesforce.com event, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced that the social network has hit 120 million users — up from 100 million in late August. The company is succeeding in its stated plan to emphasize growth over revenues. A pity that, with the lack of a strong advertising business to support the growth, more users just means more spending on servers.

Do you feel that, liberals? If it's the first Monday of November, it must be nameless paranoid dread time! Maybe Joe the Plumber actually speaks to the secret fears of bitter Ohioans! Maybe Obama's bird-flipping scandal will turn off soccer moms! Maybe the polls are wrong, or tightening! Maybe the voting machines will be broken! Basically today all anyone can think about is how will we fuck this up? See, because all liberals have managed to do for thirty years is fuck everything up. So now they panic. Some have had scary dreams! A reader writes:

You know what's the most boring TV in the world? Election day coverage on cable news in the long hours before the polls close. It's like a 12-hour conspiracy to fill the airtime with gasbagging pundits trying harder than normal to say nothing at all. So, when news came out last week that the words "shit" and "fuck" would enliven tomorrow's oral arguments in the Supreme Court's case over what you can say on the tee-vee, we though that would make great filler content for bored news producers. But sadly, it's not to be.C-SPAN, of all networks, had asked to get the tapes and broadcast them (in full, one supposes) as soon as the hearing concluded, but Broadcasting & Cable reports that the greedy court won't release them until the end of the session next summer. Why the fuck not? They Court didn't say, implicitly sending the message that they want to ruin all our prurient fun. (You take it where you can get it.)

Money is a commodity. What venture capitalists really bank is their reputation. And Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners has just signaled that he's willing to cash in his reputation to protect a piddling $4 million investment. Levine is not amused by our report of how Levine got Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales fired from his job as CEO of Wikia, calling it a lie. The report is accurate, Wikia insiders confirm; Levine's denial is the lie. The only mystery here: Why is Levine willing to dissemble for Wales?The answer is pure self-interest. $4 million is nothing to a 97-year-old venture capital firm like Bessemer. It could easily write off its investment in Wikia, an attempt to capitalize on the anyone-can-edit wiki concept popularized by Wikipedia. But Levine has invested his reputational capital in Wikia. Admitting he made a mistake in backing Wales means Levine would lose face with Bessemer's partners, who will be more likely to question his subsequent investments. (That he has also invested in Yelp and Diapers.com surely does not burnish his record.) Levine would have us be impressed by the fact that Wales "volunteered to forgo his Wikia salary." This would be more impressive if Wales had not long ago forgone any pretense of doing any work to earn that salary. When Levine first invested in Wikia, Wales promised to spend 90 percent of his time on Wikia and 10 percent on Wikipedia. In fact, he spent nowhere near that proportion of time on either, focusing instead on an increasingly lucrative speaking career. I'm inclined to feel sorry for Levine, who was clearly deceived by Wales, but is stuck defending him, lest he admit to the con. We will give Levine this much. In a recent blog post, he wrote, "Valleywag reported some nonsense about Jimmy getting fired because of a bogus expense report. Nothing could be farther from the truth." What is uncontestably true: Levine was enraged when he learned that Wales tried to get Wikia to reimburse him for a $1,300 dinner with a private-equity investor, at which he primarily discuss ways to profit off of Wikipedia, not Wikia. But it is quite possible that Wales's attempted expense-account flim-flam was the least of his sins as CEO of Wikia, and that Levine actually fired him over more serious matters. If so, why doesn't Levine wash his hands of Wales, write off the investment, and tells us what Wales did? Otherwise, he'll find that he's only just begun his career of lying on Wales's behalf.

Madonna supposedly has the "World's Most Exhausting Workout Routine," because, among other things, she does "dancerobics," yoga, pilates, and even "jogs in the morning while fasting." No jogging with hot dogs for the Material Girl! [MyHogtown; A better way.]

We'd only just begun to recover from the news that Lamas Family Acting Dynasty scion Shayne Lamas had ended her arranged marriage to British Bachelor guy—a decision followed by a downward spiral of public bum-flashings and belt-chewing for the young, single actress. Now comes news that yet another of the series's pairings—that of onetime gazebo rejectee turned manhungry shopping-spree winner DeAnna Pappas to snowboard instructor Jesse Csincsak—has come undone:

Two weeks ago the news surfaced that Viacom chief Sumner Redstone and his second wife, Paula Fortunato, were divorcing after five years of marriage. Much was made of Redstone and Fortunato's 39-year age gap and the couple's pre-nup, which will provide Fortunato with a $5 million fortuno for the five years she spent by the not-so-healthy billionaire's side. But she's hardly the only one who has been married to someone who could easily pass for her father or granddad. After the jump, a list of famous New York couples and their equally famous age gaps.

“Anyone who isn’t prepared for ads to go down 40 percent is crazy.” That's what Valleywag publisher Nick Denton blabbed to the wantrepreneurs at an event in New York last week. AllThingsD reblogger Peter Kafka rolled up Denton's irrational gloom into a big-picture gloom post this morning. There's some good news buried in the middle of Kafka's post:

In Pershing Square yesterday, Defamer stood alongside fellow Californians waging war against the evil Prop 8, hoisting placards and cheering wildly as passing vehicles (including city buses and cop cars) honked their support for equal civil rights for all. Meanwhile, at a Yes on 8 rally outside City Hall, none other than Austrian fashion journalist and trendspotter Brüno had infiltrated the scene. (Amazingly, The Sun once again reports he was there to shoot footage for "Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt," our own parody title that simply refuses to die.) People reports that once Sacha Baron Cohen was discovered, his "own camera crew worked to shield him. Eventually, he was escorted away inside a van"—the suspiciously swishy hunter became the hunted! We salute what must have been an incredibly difficult decision for Bruno to wear Dockers, a Men's Warehouse shirt, and no hair product in order to blend with the unfabulous crowd more efficiently. More photos after the jump:

Now is the time when campaign reporters file their last, wistful dispatches of this hellbound two-year horse race. There is an absolute mess of these things! They all serve to fill space on the final, news-free days of the campaign, and also to remind readers of the invaluable role that the true heroes—political reporters—play in our democracy. We've slogged through the morass of remembrances today in order to answer the meta-question that really matters: what did this campaign mean to the media? You have to remember that for a lot of reporters, today is the last gasp of glory. By the end of this week the campaign will be over, and there will be far fewer opportunities to go on TV and be "experts." There may also be far fewer opportunities to be, you know, reporters; some percentage of these people are bound to be laid off in the coming year. We already know that the LA Times will be laying off the bulk of its Washington bureau. And most ofl those plucky young embedded reporters from TV networks are preparing to be fired when this thing wraps up. Everybody wants to make sure that you know that they were on the inside. Just because you, the consumer, didn't get all the colorful anecdotes in your morning paper doesn't mean that they didn't happen. Reporters have all types of fun memories from the campaign that they would like to share with you now that the campaign is over! Most of these fall into two categories: the "God these candidates are more morally bankrupt than I could ever say outright in the pages of my tepid publication," and the (more popular) "I made friends with important people!" Some key examples of each: God these candidates are more morally bankrupt than I could ever say outright in the pages of my tepid publication Michael Scherer from Time went to some Republican retreat in Michigan where politicians "came there to speak to state party activists, serving up stump pomp while waiters in white-tie tuxedos served drunk diners with pecan-coated ice cream balls." Then he finds a regular lady who says everyone in town is not like that. He rejoices. HuffPo's Sam Stein was set upon by a gang of disgruntled Hillary supporters in a Washington bar. "And soon the denizens were letting me have a piece of their mind. 'HuffPost sucks! HuffPost sucks!' they chanted, as I bit into my now-arrived Reuben. 'Fox News, fair and balanced! Fox News, fair and balanced!'" Although he does not say so, he hates them. Marc Ambinder from the Atlantic recalls watching Obama's little daughter Sasha talking to her daddy on stage at the Democratic convention; it "was very cute, but it also revealed how staged even Obama’s campaign had become." The thought of a little girl talking to her dad now makes him want to absolutely vomit. Politics has ruined him. I made friends with important people! Wacky old Dana Milbank from the Washington Post remembers Mike Huckabee "taking reporters hunting, taking them jogging, taking them to the barber for a face massage and shave." Dana Milbank would not object to being asked to appear on Mike Huckabee's teevee show, if Mike Huckabee so chose. Ana Marie Cox from Time had fun singing karaoke with McCain campaign hacks Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt. Salter even sung Dylan tunes! Later they went back to figuring out how to oppress black people. Adam Nagourney from the Times liked nothing better than sharing his Christmas dinner with failed Hillary flack Howard Wolfson: "We were quick to discover that there aren't a lot of restaurants open in Des Moines on Christmas night (or bars, but that's another story). But what was open was sure to warm the heart of two displaced Jews from New York: A Chinese restaurant." Aw! Then they made passionate love. You see, just about everyone on the campaign trail goes a little crazy. It's classic Stockholm syndrome; trapped on buses and planes for months on end, reporters come to regard their captors as friends. Just to get a fact-free look back at the election season to fill a hole in its Week in Review section yesterday, the NYT had to turn to Frank Bruni, who's spent the entire campaign eating brains at Manhattan's finest restaurant. But they needed an outsider who could say about this godforsaken campaign, presumably with a straight face, "that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times." Had they put Adam Nagourney on that story, the editors would have had to spend hours rewriting his knowing asides about Howard Wolfson's bewitching cologne. For the media, the campaign means life. It means purpose, and employment, and attention, and a sense of self-importance. It's an unparalleled opportunity to cast oneself as an expert with no qualifications whatsoever, and to profess to speak for millions of "real Americans" without any factual basis. In reality, campaign reporters have a far less objective view of the Presidential race than a fat, laid-off auto worker sitting on his ass playing XBox in the ugly part of Toledo. It takes a rare breed to remain sane during the ordeal. And we should salute those who do. So Joshua Green of the Atlantic, we salute you; you alone have found a moment that appropriately embodies American democracy:

Worried about layoffs? We'd suggest you embrace the Valley's alternative-energy lifestyle, but electric carmaker Tesla's woes seem to make that a poor bet. Still, SD Forum will be looking at how the next wave of innovation can bring clean energy and water solutions to the developing world at Orrick from 6:30-9 p.m. FountainBlue is also thinking cleantech tonight. Join the likes of Symantec, EnerVault, and Element Partners for a conversation on efficient energy storage at Jones Day from 5:30 p.m-7:30 p.m. More concerned about issues of scale? The MySQL Meetup will be sharing tips on sharding and replications at CBS Interactive while the SF Java Developers will be digging into another enterprise-grade scalability solution at the Marakana Classroom tonight. (Photo by Matt Honan)

With the presidential election just hours away, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on what George Bush will miss most when he goes from running the most powerful nation on earth to becoming the most hated president in modern American history. Will it be the power? The ability to twist the law to suit his own political agenda? Not according to his former chef, Walter Scheib. What he's really going to miss are the delicious huevos rancheros whipped up for him on Sunday mornings. Fortunately Scheib was willing to share Bush's fave recipe with Fox News, which you can see for yourself in the video to your left.