At Yahoo, life's a neverending, shareholder-funded party. Halloween started a day early for the troubled Web giant with a costume parade. What, are they giving employees Friday off to prepare for trick-or-treating? Not like anyone's working: Most Yahoos we know are trying to figure out if they're going to get laid off next month. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: DrewFinch, for "Steve Jobs must be on the Tesla waiting list, too." (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

It's a question that's been futilely pondered countless times before, and by artists and philosophers more sapient than we: What, exactly, makes John Malkovich tick? We like Esquire's approach: Forget about hunting for magical portals inside the actor's consciousness that don't really exist, and instead just invite him to participate in their ongoing What I've Learned feature. And what has he learned (besides the fact that most people are willing to forgive an Eragon if you've built up a significant enough body of non-dragon work) ? The answers will surprise and amaze you. Politics are like an Aspen Canker-infected tree. He feels unworthy of Michelle Pfeiffer's salutations. And he's constantly fearful that the guy rattling off the evening specials will dash off his Malkovich impressions to us via Blackberry between courses:

A giant datacenter on 800 acres of land in Pryor, Oklahoma, won't start operating until 2010, Google spokesbots now say. The $600 million datacenter was supposed to open early next year, employing 100 people. Local and state officials had bent over backwards to attract Google to the site, even passing a law which made Google's energy bills private, lest competitors determine how efficiently it was running. (Photo by David Jones/GTR Newspapers)

Always the type of man to make the best of a bad situation, Roger Ebert has now spun his recent Reviewgate scandal into a deeply constructive thesis on movie critic ethics. And by "deeply constructive," we mean "a point-by-point indictment of Ben Lyons" — that proven archenemy of taste, restraint and decorum in an ever-thinning field of trained professionals.Nearly all of Ebert's rules seem like common sense to our minds — "Provide a sense of the experience," "No freebies," "A trailer is not a movie" (though the "Avoid trailers" rule seems a little dire for even our purist sensibilities) — but one in particular stands out toward the end:

Brad Greenspan, the former CEO of Intermix Media, the company which launched MySpace, loves to make trouble for News Corp., the media giant he claims bought Intermix and MySpace for a song. Too bad he pays more attention to his ongoing, one-sided feud than his revenge vehicle, LiveUniverse. Greenspan's startup is having trouble with his uptime; a tipster says his LiveUniverse and LiveVideo sites have been down for two days running. That's not the real problem; the real problem is that it took two days for anyone to notice they've been down.

Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has a problem! It's not that he was found guilty of seven felony corruption charges, and that he faces reelection just next week, and the entire Republican party is calling on him to resign. No, it's that he's stuck in Washington DC getting convicted of crimes and he can't debate his opponent, who is in Alaska! The solution? They are just going to dump this debate on the internet, as if it was a big truck. And the debate will get in line, and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. [HuffPo]

The LA Times has a videotape of Obama at a luncheon with known Arab Rashid Khalidi. They say they won't release it because they promised their source they wouldn't. We said that somebody there should release it just so they can claim the $150,000 bounty offered for it and buy essential office supplies, such as toilet paper. Times are tough. But National Review's mongering blog The Corner has figured out that this conspiracy is way bigger than $150,000; $14.685 billion bigger! Break it down, crazy man: See, they figure it like this: LAT is owned by Tribune, which is $14.7 billion in debt, and the incoming Obama administration is gonna have $500 billion of government bailout funds to dole out, and $14.7 billion is "a very small proportion" of $500 billion (this is actually included in the reasoning) and if you keep Hussein Obama happy now then, hey, who's to say he won't give Tribune Co. $14.7 billion when he gets on the inside? Read the signs, people, they're all around you. The Corner also points out:

You'll probably be hitting up every thrift store in the Southland looking for the perfect Brian Grazer-as-a-slutty-nurse costume, but there's no reason to miss an important night of television. WATCH Destroyed in Seconds [9 PM, Discovery] - Basically, a half-hour of things exploding/crashing. Tonight's highlights: Hindenburg disaster, cranes falling down in Taiwan, and an experimental plane narrowly avoids destruction — J-fucking-K! It explodes/crashes!

Yet another contender in the FuckedCompany 2.0 sweepstakes, Screwdd — launched in February, I think, but suddently more bookmarkable — is a site about layoffs that's more built out than the newer FuckedStartups. At least the ads are. Nice touch: a 408-area voicemail line for tipsters wary of Internet TCP/IP connections. The quasi-anonymous "we" behind the site has already learned the dirty secret of gossip blogging: "Our most viewed story to date also had the least amount of details. If Digg could engage in a round of layoffs, we’d be golden."

There's a certain, overbearing art to the publicist pitch, especially when the flack is emailing an editor to suggest that a client receive coverage in their magazine. Not every thespian is a cover-worthy Angelina Jolie, but most publicists tout their C- and D-listers as though they are, filling their pitches with paragraph upon paragraph of that actor's multiple, stunning achievements (often bolded, capitalized, and punctuated with several exclamation points for emphasis). By the time you finished reading them, you'd be convinced that an actor's upcoming, three-episode arc on Brothers & Sisters deserved no less than Time's "Person of the Year." So, that's one way to do it. Then again, if you're Tom Sizemore's partner and you're pitching to one of the biggest publications in town, there's this way:

This is the layoff that matters. Motorola has already conceded to a demand by investment overlord Carl Icahn to spin off its money-losing mobile phone unit. Today's news is no surprise, but still: Motorola will ditch about 3,000 people through several agonizing waves of layoffs. Co-CEO Greg Brown is telling the press that Moto will save $800 million in 2009. In a conference call today, Brown's peer Sanjay Jha said Moto had been too focused on "bright, shiny objects." Now, the company will focus on dim, dull profits.Update: AP's photo library actually gave us a photo of another Greg Brown altogether, taken for a story on voicemail etiquette. Having looked at all of the corporate headshots of Motorola's Brown, we're sticking with this guy — he'd probably do a better job running Motorola, too. (Photo by AP/Alan Diaz)

What do average Americans count on for comic relief in these troubled times? Salvia clips on YouTube and G-spot enlargement injections, right? No, those are elitist coastal pastimes. Readers of Denver's Rocky Mountain News have a keener funny bone: "More than 2,000 readers wrote, e-mailed and called our comics hot line after the strip was dropped. Many Garfield fans told us that in these troubled times, they counted on the comic relief of their longtime favorite strip." Huh. And just the other day someone was saying that there were smart people in Denver. [RMN via Westword]

The Supreme Court hearing on "fuck" and "shit" on TV is getting to the good part: the part where all the lawyers will have to use said swears over and over in the august chambers to make their points. It's going to sound like a bunch of goddamned longshoremen or hard-boiled crime reporters up in there—only uttered by white-shoe barristers whose education costs are triple your net worth. "If [Chief Justice] Roberts allows it, such a display of blue language will be heard on TV and radio—in the middle part of the day—across America, and may be read the next morning in many newspapers," says the SCOTUS lawblog. WTF?Justice Roberts is undecided on whether or not he should even allow the lawyers to use the words—and if so, whether to allow the argument's audio to be played on C-SPAN. For hilarity's sake, we think he should. Then there's the issue of how the print media will handle it—would a "family paper" like the New York Times, for example, use the word "shit" to accurately quote the proceedings? (According to past practice, they would not.) [SCOTUSblog]

The gays—why do they cover politics? Because it is like a big campy gay soap opera, with divas and backstabbing and drama, of course! That is just one of the things we learned in Gawker Alum Jesse Oxfeld's story about the gays who cover campaigns! "'I think that the theater of politics is of real interest to political reporters,' says one of them. 'And a lot of gay reporters are theater junkies as well.'" You don't say, hah. Here's the paragraph most important for those of you keeping score at home:

Frankly, we like your odds of being one of the 66,000 people to whom the Screen Actors Guild owes some $25 million in unpaid residuals — members, heirs of members, and even non-members whose fluke payments have trickled into SAG over the last 20 years. As noted here last month, the union has kept money belonging to actors (Michael Douglas, Mick Jagger), politicians (John F. Kennedy, Michael Dukakis) and other luminaries who've relocated, died or both since SAG was last in touch with them or their families — and now it's going public with the tactful "Get Your Money" sweepstakes. And you could be the next winner!All you have to do is be Peter Gabriel. Or Patrick Dempsey. Or RuPaul. Or the Harlem Globetrotters. Or related to Roy Rogers, Katherine Hepburn, Fred Gwynne or any one of thousands of others with residuals, royalties and other cash having stacked up at SAG HQ. After Sharon Waxman broke the story in September, the union scrambled on the defensive to explain how even former president Charlton Heston or current board member Eric Bogosian could have unclaimed coin; it has since launched the "Get Your Money" ad campaign to help square up with Hollywood:

The latest we're-supposed-to-care chatter from the tipline: "It was just announced yesterday that Ziff-Davis Chief Technology Officer Robyn Peterson is leaving to go to NBC. Ouch!" Ouch? The real ouch is that Ziff-Davis Media, the considerably reduced tech-magazine publisher, was paying someone to be its CTO in the first place.

Formerly rotund critic Roger Ebert has sat through approximately one billion movies, so we supported him 100 percent when he walked out of a recent indie film after 8 minutes and gave it a bad review anyway. Nothing if not willing to drag himself further into the muck, he's released a long list of his rules for critics. We can only contend the longest tenured critic in the business is cruising for a bruising this time.After admitting that he cribbed most of the plot details of the film Tru Loved from its IMDB page, Ebert defended himself by saying: "The handwriting was on the wall. The returns were in. The case was closed. You know I'm right.'' We like that Ebert's willing to take risks, and he does the same in describing rules for critics, including some venomous shots at others in the field. As EW noted, much of the article is directed at the work of his tragically bad replacement on the syndicated At the Movies show, Ben Lyons.

Directors...They're Just Like US! David Fincher is one of the most exacting, visionary directors in Hollywood, having made iconic films like Se7en, Fight Club, and now The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Thus, when Empire sat him down to scribble his favorite movies of all time, we expected something a little less, well, AFI-y? Hey, sure, we like Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia as much as anybody. But c'mon, Finch: throw us a curveball or two! Click through for the full-sized list. [/film]

A cautionary tale for New York Googlers, who have been asked to vote on which snacks will be offered in its shrunken larders: New York magazine tried a similar approach, and found that people voted for much healthier snacks than they actually were willing to consume. [NYMag.com]

Culture + Travel, a four-times-a-year magazine "For Travelers Passionate About The Arts," is reportedly folding. Nobody has money for magazines any more, much less travel and art. [PDNPulse]