After taking on both Florida Jews and the entire United Kingdom, Sarah Silverman attempted her biggest feat last night: a grilling on Jimmy Kimmel Live by the on/off ex she sorta kinda lambasted at this year's Creative Emmys. And then, as though that weren't awkward enough, Kimmel had an extra surprise in store for Silverman (and it wasn't Matt or Ben).After some loaded, pause-laden banter, Kimmel unveiled footage of a teenage Sarah (just look at that cute little punim!) singing her heart out. Though Silverman was initially horrified by this blast from the past, the clip eventually became a running joke that both comedians cued up when things got a little too frosty. Would that we all had such an option, but here at Defamer, we doubt that even the old VHS of us belting "Tell Me Something Good" (at age 10!) could get us through an awkward, P.F. Chang's-set reunion with some of our exes. Sarah? Jimmy? Good luck with your post-breakup journey, you crazy kids.

New York City's been hit hard by the economic turmoil of the last few weeks. An estimated 25,000 jobs have disappeared on Wall Street alone since mid-September, and some are predicting that as many as 165,000 banking jobs will vanish over the next two years. But it isn't limited to finance, of course. Law firms, media companies, retail: Everyone is jumping on the pink slip bandwagon. In fact, if you run a company and you aren't firing people at the moment, you're liable to look naive and unprepared. After the jump, a rundown of the layoffs that have been announced in the last few weeks in media, finance and technology in the New York City area. Just so you don't waste your time emailing your resume if you happen to be job hunting.

A gentle reminder from the City-sanctioned Boo Tube: There is no fun in the Castro in the tonight. I repeat. NO FUN. So take your decked-out self downtown. E-storm International has teamed up with Lunch 2.0 to bring a very special Halloween Edition of free food, games, candy, horror movies, and, of course, beer from 12-2 p.m. After the you've gotten your fill of afternoon trick-or-treats, head over to Otis Bar for the afterparty. Going to be in the Mission? Head over to Amnesia for its "Buckets of Blood" Red Lagerparty with a back-from-the-dead Led Zeppelin cover band and shadow puppets. (Photo by erikogan)

MGM has released the final trailer for Valkyrie, and really, nothing here indicates why United Artists would have sabotaged this film with one Harveyesque bump after another, all the way off the cliff into the dead zone of February '09. (It now opens Dec. 26.) They may not have the viable Oscar contender they wanted, either, but beyond the late, portentous introduction of Tom Cruise's eye-patched, would-be Hitler killer, this new clip has us marveling at the irony of a feel-bad Nazi drama potentially doubling as the feel-good comeback story of the year. It's almost enough to make us want to swap the old Superman Returns stand-up at Defamer HQ with the fancy new Valkyrie display occupying MGM's own lobby. Bryan Singer, you are a continued inspiration to one and all. [MGM]

In tough times, overcommunicate, says Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, doing an inadvertent impression of so-sharey-he's-scary videoblogger Robert Scoble. One Kleiner portfolio company has gotten the message: Google! Kim Scott, the company's director of online sales and operations for AdSense, the company's system for placing ads on other websites, has sent a mass email to Web publishers who use the product. The letter refers to "recent economic turmoil" and reassures publishers that the company is "continuing to invest in innovations" — as opposed to, say, milking publishers for everything they're worth. The question Scott's letter really raises: Who's Google afraid of?Surely not Yahoo. Microsoft and AOL don't even play in the AdSense market; of Google's rivals, most have large pageview minimums which smaller publishers won't meet. Perhaps Scott is worried that small Web publishers will simply throw in the towel? Her memo:

Having had to evacuate Anna Nicole Smith's Coldwater Canyon residence after a freak cotton-candy-machine accident swept the home up in a cyclone of flossy, pink destruction, beleaguered babydaddy Larry Birkhead is left to pick up the pieces. For starters, that means taking work where he can find it—and in this dire economic environment, there just aren't many openings for 1-year-old-baby party planners. So Birkhead has relented and agreed to take the questionable step of laying bare his life, and the life of daughter Dannielynn, for the E! reality cameras.He justifies his rationale in the ET interview above, though we don't really see why he feels the need to. It's the next logical step for young Dannielynn, who made her TV debut at age 0 being pried out of her mother via C-section, and who now closes the Circle of Reality Show life on the very same network that pushed her mother's career to the next level. We mean—what's the worst that could happen, right? [ET Online]

We hear that this morning Joanne Lipmann notified the unlucky Portfolio staffers who will be losing their jobs as part of Conde Nast's cost cuts and the top of the masthead was hit hard: four of the magazine's seven senior editors have been ushered out. If you know names, please let us know. An email is also supposedly going out to the staff later today with management spin on the cuts.

Gideon Yu is flying back from Dubai today, we hear. His coworkers at Facebook are surely anxious to know what gifts he's bringing back — and we don't mean the duty-free kind. TechCrunch reports he was there on a fundraising mission. The Persian Gulf's sovereign wealth funds are swollen with petrodollars. But Yu's assignment was tough. Maintaining the $15 billion valuation Facebook obtained from Microsoft and Hong Kong investor Li Ka-Shing in the face of a declining advertising market will require a lot of Yu's demonstrated slickness. But if Yu can squeeze cash out of Bill Gates, surely he can navigate a Middle Eastern bazaar.The bad news: The company needs the cash. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has a detailed estimate of Facebook's expenses:

Cranky Times columnist Clyde Haberman has a long list of (really good) questions for the banking industry, like why banks can't seem to figure out how to provide pens that actually work. ("How can people feel confident that their money is being managed wisely if those in charge can't even provide a functioning pen?) But he also has an interesting conspiracy theory to share with the world. It seems Banco Santander, which announced the purchase of Sovereign a few weeks ago, is now advertising itself in the Times as just "Santander." "Want to bet that Santander left out "banco," except in very small type at the bottom of the ad, so that few would see right away that another piece of America had been acquired by a foreign institution?" Click through for Haberman's litany of complaints.

A former Scientologist named Peter Letterese is suing Tom Cruise and his favorite religion for $265 million. According to Fishbowl LA, Letterese's charges include allegations that "Cruise and Scientology bribed and improperly influenced a federal judge, a Florida state judge and a federal bankruptcy trustee to tie up his original law suit in bankruptcy court." Those are serious charges, and there's no word of proof, so you might be excused for thinking Letterese is a wacko. Then again, there was that earlier incident when Scientologists tried to convince Letterese's wife that he was gay, allegedly: Back in July, Paul Barressi, a private investigator who works for Tom Cruise, gave the Daily News court papers of Letterese's allegations, including this:

Lemon Party! Looks like Tina Fey's second, third, fourth, and fifth jobs this year have paid off, as 30 Rock premiered last night to the biggest numbers in the show's history. THR says the sitcom lured 8.5 million viewers and a 4.1 18-49 rating, up 21% from its premiere last year. We're a little confounded by the fact that Rock still lost 800,000 viewers of The Office — what do you people need, every character on the show to couple up? A premature guest stint from Steve Carell? Prolonged sexual tension between Frank and Cirie (actually, that one we could live with)? [THR]

So we've already heard about Fashion House, the Project Runway rip-off that Bravo is cobbling together in the wake of losing their flagship series to the clammy, potpourri-scented clutches of Lifetime. But today the increasingly-gay cable net is announcing a whole new spate of reality shows that they're working on, including two more fashion competition series. Don't worry though, one involves "celebrities"! Read about them all after the jump.

Lydia's Halloween costume is what's killing print. The publishing heiress and model referenced her recent little scandal of quitting her "column" in Page Six magazine by dressing up as the tabloid for a party last night. Cute, Lydia—but Britney Spears wore this exact same costume years and years ago:Update: "I am Lydia's PR. don't you get it? She is being Britany !!!! that was her costume? can't you tell that they are wearing the same outfit? Duh Gawker!!!!" (When we finally get the juice to hire a PRgay, we're gonna go with one who uses periods and questions marks properly?)

Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt's Teutonic catalogue-shoot adventure became all the more glamorous today as news leaked that Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung is preparing to join the cast of Inglourious Basterds [sic]. Not to be outdone, Tarantino alum Samuel L. Jackson finally got around to reading the bootlegged script on his desktop, apparently phoning the filmmaker to lobby for some motherfucking narration up in this motherfucking war movie. And it worked!Jackson won't likely make the trip to Germany, however, where Cheung shall make her diva descent shortly for the role of Madame Mimieux, the French cinema proprietor who, according to the Playlist, "takes in the protagonist Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) when she is homeless and being sought by the Nazis." A man whose Asian-film fetish defers only to his taste for toes, Tarantino will work around the minor French/Chinese ethnicity-disconnect problem later just for the chance to work with Cheung — and potentially finish the movie someday after first and second choices Nastassja Kinski and Isabelle Huppert reportedly bowed out of the same role. Meanwhile, Jackson's narration will come much later, a small part whose expository whimsy served as rich consolation yesterday from old pal Tarantino after the indignity of Jackson's attachment to... we can't even say it. That's what friends are for, we guess.

Click to viewProfessional annoyance Kara Swisher, the BoomTown blogger, went to a how-to-survive-the-downturn gabfest, and all she got was this lousy video. Captured on her Flip camera: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who didn't predict the downturn; Nirav Tolia, the Epinions cofounder — an entrepreneur — who hasn't laid anyone off since the last bubble burst and is surely rusty; Google investor Ram Shriram, who has way too much money to care about such mundane affairs as a recession; and Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, who is cheerfully clueless as ever. The bright side: If Scoble is saying companies need to conserve cash, perhaps we've hit a market bottom.

Fred Baron, the attorney who rebuilt the Texas Democratic party and became famous, late in life, for his unfortunate help in covering up the extramarital affair of former Senator John Edwards, died Thursday of cancer. He was 61. Baron made a fortune in asbestos litigation, and used the funds to found the Texas Democratic Trust in 2005, among countless other philanthropic causes. In the Edwards affair, Baron was revealed as the source of the supposed "hush money" keeping mistress Rielle Hunter living in relative luxury. Baron fought corporations to the end, demanding that a pharmaceutical company allow him to use an experimental drug in his treatment. He won, but it didn't work. He won, but it didn't work. He is survived by his son Andrew, founder of the dumb internet video program Rocketboom. Andrew organized a movement to get his father the drug, enlisting Bill Clinton, Lance Armstrong, and John Kerry to help. [DallasNews]

Great news for Obama: "Majority of Allegheny prostitutes are on the Democratic side." This is a fantastic piece of investigative journalism by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. See, they found 675 people convicted of prostitution-related crimes and then looked up their voter registration information. Look what else they discovered:

The most important election in a generation is just four days away. Every day brings fresh news about the crumbling American economy. So how are good 'ol Americans coping with these turbulent times? They're buying guns in record numbers, of course! That's what Fox News is reporting, at least, which says FBI background checks are up nine percent from last year. And just in case you weren't aware of it, this increase is all Barack Obama's fault. Decent Americans are just buying up lots of guns now so they have them in case Obama wins the election and he changes gun control laws, in which case you'll have to pry their semi-automatics from their cold, dead hands.

Paul Allen, the gazillionaire cofounder of Microsoft who has spent his subsequent years frittering away his cash on tech startups, sports teams, and a cable company or two, is ailing, reports Seattle tech blog TechFlash. Allen missed a "First Citizen" awards ceremony thrown by local realtors in his honor because of "an undisclosed medical procedure." We're thinking it can't have been something minor, or at least not easily postponed. Bill Gates attended the event, as did Patty Murray, one of Washington's senators. Murray's praise for Allen's civic contributions — including the Experience Music Project museum and the purchase of the Seattle Seahawks — brought the crowd to its feet. In 1983, Allen was treated for Hodgkin's disease. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Now that Madonna has entered the "ex texting" part of her breakup with Guy Ritchie ("OMG Debi Mazar Hates U 2"), it's time for Hollywood's looky-loos to saddle up and choose a side. On Team Madonna, we have Yankee T-friendly Rocco, a concerned Gwyneth Paltrow, and Alex Rodriguez, whereas Team Guy consists of little but his Sherlock Holmes cast, a discarded British accent used by Madonna over the last decade, and maybe Sarah Palin? Someone should ask her! Now, Page Six breaks the news of two new celebs warming the bench for Madonna: Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, who are loaning out their house so Madonna and A-Rod can get it on.