The publishing landscape is so bloodied right now that it's hard to keep track of all the corpses. This month has seen the end of Radar, Men's Vogue, CosmoGirl, 02138, Culture + Travel plus cuts at Time Inc., Portfolio, Niche Media, and Doubleday. Wow. Two casualties have gone largely unnoticed. A tipster informs us that Town And Country Travel closed a few weeks ago to little fanfare. Meanwhile, the New York offices of London-based travel book series Rough Guides are said to have closed, presumably doomed by declining travel, a declining pound — and perhaps a Gotham too depressing to visit. (Publishers, we know things are rough, but do allow us to give all your titles proper burials.)

Neocon Times columnist Bill Kristol was of course acting smug and cute last night on the Daily Show, since that's basically his gig: Smarmy right-wing fish in left wing ponds. But he just didn't seem to have it in him to truly bait the other side. He declared John McCain would triumph on Tuesday but, wait, ha ha, it's just a joke of the make-a-Daily Show-audience-heckle-me variety, and Kristol admitted as much (and did succeed in getting booed).

The "grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital," Don Valentine, founder of Sequoia Capital, showered money on the likes of Cisco, Apple, Electronic Arts, and Oracle, and has been amply rewarded — including Thursday night, with a lifetime achievement award from Deloitte, the auditing and consulting firm. But a speech he gave while accepting the prize showed Valentine as more doddering than domineering. Complaining that an internal presentation by Sequoia about tough economic times to come — headlined "R.I.P. Good Times" was leaked to the press, sending a shock wave through Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial set, Valentine said, "We thought it was all in the family."All in the family? If Sequoia is a family, it is surely the Borgias. The venture-capital firm has become known more for its ruthlessness than its nurturing. The partners there are obsessively concerned with making a mistake that causes them to lose face among their peers, and don't hesitate to jettison a CEO just to calm their nerves. And entrepreneurs? They know Sequoia well enough to trumpet its brand name — and watch their backs. No wonder family reunions, like Sequoia's crisis summit, prove to be awkward. Aside from showing up to accept the award, Valentine has become press-shy. He inexplicably turned down a friendly cover story from Venture Capital Journal. Perhaps he realizes he's out of touch. His biography page has a picture of him dated 1967. Since then, Sequoia has grown far too large to be the family operation Valentine recalls from its founding years, and Silicon Valley has changed beyond recognition. Valentine's career in semiconductors is little help to the companies he invests in now. And entrepreneurs are far more gossipy than they were in his heyday. Valentine's lament — that Sequoia's presentation spread beyond the VC firm's control — just shows how lost a chip guy is in a world of information networks.

As we noted Thursday morning, the Washington Post this week prominentaly mentioned that the wife of Democratic politician John Edwards, Elizabeth, was missing her wedding band when she recently stepped back into public view. Perhaps, we thought, this was a sign the marriage was over. But as commenter La Cieca first noticed, Edwards also went ringless in 2007; we dug through photo archives and found she's been slipping her ring on and off for years now, seemingly without regard for the ups and downs of her marriages. The band would appear meaningless as to the state of her marriage. And yet:

Amid Rachel Maddow's decisive ratings success, the most credible knock against the Keith Olbermann protege is that her guests tend to reinforce her own viewpoint rather than act, more provocatively, as foils. This made the MSNBC host's interview with Barack Obama tonight particularly tricky. If Maddow was too deferential, she'd be knocked as predictably in the tank; too hard and she'd alienate her lefty viewers. Her solution was clever: Needle the Democratic presidential nominee on his left flank with questions about why he doesn't slam the Republican Party more and whether Afghanistan might turn into an Iraq-style quagmire.

Brian Sugar, cofounder of San Francisco-based blog network Sugar Inc., sent two ominous Twitters this afternoon: "Sad day." "First rain, will last for 5 months." Was he just talking about the weather? Less than an hour later, he'd gathered his staff into a conference room and told them he was laying off nine employees, mostly in editorial — 11 percent of the company's 80-person staff. What's worse: More layoffs could come over the next two quarters, if ad sales don't improve.Sugar's CEO may have aimed to put employees on notice, in hopes of motivating them to perform. But leaving a shoe to drop is the worst mistake one can make in cutting employees, the meltdown's self-appointed layoff pundits agree. Sugar Inc.'s real problem may be self-inflicted: It took ad sales in-house from partner and investor NBC this summer, leaving it with a sales force still in development, right as the online-advertising market got a lot tougher.

· The Ron Clark Academy's T.I. parody "You Can Vote However You Like" (sample lyric: "Stick wit McCain you gone have some drama") is so frickin' adorable we could just bite their little equal-time-honoring heads off. · Breaking! King of the Hill's butane tank has finally run dry. · Jon Hamm will play Liz Lemon's boyfriend on a 30 Rock arc this season. Don't screw this one up, Lemon. · Obama sprinkled his magical ratings glitter on cable too, giving The Daily Show and The Colbert Report their largest audiences ever. · Apparently, there exist popular stereotypes that define residents of West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Sherman Oaks, Westwood and Holmby Hills, and Dylan McDermott, Zoe Saldana, Lake Bell, Nick Stahl, and Shannen Doherty are going to play them. We'll let you match neighborhood to actor. · And finally, we'd like to introduce you to Troublemaker, the kind of Sulawesi black-crested macaque you just wanna kick back and have a beer with.

Halloween's on a Friday. With people already more worried about keeping their jobs than actually doing them, you might as well plan on writing the workday off. Trying to figure out a clever costume in which to pester your remaining coworkers? Valleywag has done the work for you. Print up one of these masks, designed by Valleywag interim creative director Richard Blakeley, on the finest-quality office paper you can steal from the supply closet, follow our tips on how to act the part, and you're good to go. Select from our list:

How to wear it: Polo shirt, khakis, and a golf club. How to scare them: Go to Yahoo's Sunnyvale headquarters. Refuse to leave. Didn't find the right mask? Check out the rest of Valleywag's 5 scariest people for Halloween.

How to wear it: Soccer mom meets Castro lesbian, with a denim shirt and blue jeans. Oh, and a Pure Digital Flip camera. How to scare them: Find a tech-company executive. Insist on interviewing them. Blurt out the most annoying questions you can think of. If they flinch, threaten to disinvite them from your exclusive Wall Street Journal tech conference.

How to wear it: Black power suit and a kicky necklace. How to scare them: Find some Facebook employees. Be really, really nice. Talk their ears off about your days in Washington and how you singlehandedly solved the Asian financial crisis, with a little help from Larry Summers and Bono. At the end of the conversation, take out a notepad and ask them for their names. Frown a little as you write them down. Next:

How to wear it: Biz-dev blue dress shirt and pleated pants. How to scare them: Whenever someone starts talking to you, find someone more important in the room and walk away. If anyone complains, take a mental note of where they work and swear never to write about them again, unless they offer you a stake in the company. Next: Jerry Yang, Yahoo's undead CEO

How to wear it: Black mock turtleneck, blue jeans, and an iPhone. How to scare them: Find an Apple shareholder. Clutch your stomach and groan. Next: Kara Swisher, obnoxious AllThingsD blogger

Hollywood PrivacyWatch Fonzie's Birthday Edition!— On Yom Kippur (10/9?) I'm driving up Sepulveda, near the Getty Center. I'm stopped as people are crossing the street to make it to services in time, and who crosses right before my path? Worst attorney in the world, Mr. Barry Zuckerkorn himself, HENRY WINKLER. (According to the IMDB, he also played Fozzie in American Graffiti, where he jumped sharks). He seemed to be late, in a rush to atone perhaps, but it was still very cool. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

Digging around our Otherwordly TV Programming inbox this afternoon, we found just the bit of ephemera we'd been praying for: a spot teasing ABC's Unleached, featuring our experimental dance/comedy idol Cloris Leachman's finest outtakes from her abortive journey on Dancing With the Stars. It's all here — the sassy interviews, the heroic training regimens, her heaving bosom, and pretty much everything else preceding her pyrrhic-victory lap on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Alas, when contacted for additional information, an ABC could confirm only that we'd been duped by creative gag-reel editors from the inside. Cruel, and cruelly unfair at that; we'd watch three seasons of Unleached before watching another hour of CBS's entire fall line-up. Are we wrong? [YouTube]

Today's Hollywood Reporter points out "rare public evidence" of a looming crisis we first told you about seven months ago: Melrose I, hedge-fund financing that helped pay for a raft of underachieving Paramount films dating back to 2004, saw its investment grade plunge six notches recently in an assessment by Moody's Investor Service. It was bad enough at the time for the money men to threaten Brad Grey with court — and even if the lawsuit never came, the day of reckoning did.The shift guarantees that everyone from senior debtholders at Merrill Lynch to smaller equity backers around Wall Street are locks to lose on the $231 million slate financing deal. As recently as March, the investors were rumored to be considering suing the 'Mount and its free-spending chief Grey after the dramatic underperformance of The Stepford Wives, Alfie and other films partially underwritten by Melrose (the funders signed on during the Sherry Lansing/Jim Dolgen regime but had no say where their money went once they were gone). Viacom CEO Phillippe Dauman himself intervened, we hear, and based on renegotiated terms for Melrose Partners' second round of financing (and Grey's belt-tightening), the mutiny was defused. For now.

The Valley's hottest electric-car maker is running on fumes. Tesla Motors, the brightest hope of Silicon Valley's nascent clean-automotive industry, has only $9 million in the bank, a longtime employee tells us. The company, which recently laid off dozens of employees and announced the closing of its Detroit office, called an all-hands meeting yesterday evening to inform employees of its financial state. What makes the company's low cash balance especially scary, our tipster says, is that the company has taken "multiple tens of millions" of dollars in deposits from customers — anywhere from $5,000 to $60,000 per vehicle — and has only delivered 50 of them. The obvious conclusion: Having already spent its customers' deposits, it may run out of money before it delivers the cars they have paid for. Here's the Tesla insider's report:

Why is Time Inc., the giant magazine publisher, paying McKinsey millions of dollars in consulting fees, when it could just ask Valleywag's commenters for free advice? Here's how macbeach weighed in:

The Horror! Here is what you have to look forward to tomorrow, America: The View has pretaped its Halloween episode, in which the ladies are dressed, ridiculously, as presidents. From left to right, we have Whoopi Goldberg as the wheelchair-bound Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joy Behar as Teddy Roosevelt, Sherri Shepherd as Abraham Lincoln on the penny, Elisabeth Hasselbeck as a drag king version of Ronald Reagan, and Barbara Walters as George Washington (with whom she once had a fabulous conversation as they snacked on crudités at a Dominick Dunne-hosted dinner party). Click through for full-size. [The View]

Alex Payne, who manages Twitter's API, posted a thumbsucking essay on Tuesday titled The Internet's on Shaky Ground. Payne seems to have reverse-engineered blowhard New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's formula for a big-picture think piece: Take a self-contradictory slogan like "Worse Is Better." Lay out your case: The glorious past, the beautiful future, the crummy now. Don't advocate a specific solution, though. Say that a question remains. Ask that question. (Payne: "The question remains: What will it take to push us forward?") Then kick back and wait for Vint Cerf to show up and supply the actual details from memory. Did someone say the Internet was built on shaky ground? Cerf rolls his eyes in exasperation, but only two or three times max: