The most unintentionally hilarious video we've seen all day: This clip from the good folks at WCAX in Burlington, Vermont, who have been all over the arrival of Karl Lagerfeld in nearby Grand Isle. Karl purchased a home in the neighborhood a couple of months ago and this week he's using it for a Chanel shoot. And while some of the locals aren't entirely sure what to make of the ponytailed fashion icon in their midst ("It's hardly weather for sunglasses," the station's reporter observes), Mandy Hotchkiss, the owner of the Blue Paddle Bistro, is pretty excited. She's catering the shoot! Even Loomis Bean, Karl's new next-door neighbor, is willing to concede that having Karl in town is more exciting than duck hunting and fishing! [WCAX via The Cut]

What's wrong with this picture? That silver Mercedes almost certainly the Jobsmobile, iPhone Savior believes — except it's not parked in a handicapped spot. There's one right there, ripe for the parking! Here's a wild theory: Apple PR controller Katie Cotton is so concerned about continuing rumors about Jobs's health that she no longer permits him to take the blue spaces — lest someone think he actually needs one. 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: null, for "It'd hit me."

Halloween Week continues now at Defamer, where our latest dynamite holiday suggestion is not for the faint of heart. Not necessarily for its ghoulish qualities, but rather for the adrenaline that accompanies living in this dreamboat's body — starring in blockbuster after blockbuster, opposite one scorching leading lady after another, and, of course, raising hell in drugstores and traffic intersections all over America. Follow the jump to see how a carefully coordinated ensemble can make you, too, Hollywood's brightest young star.

Of all the people corporate raider Carl Icahn nominated for Yahoo's board, Mark Cuban, the loudmouthed Internet entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner is the guy we wished had made it. If only for the boardroom theatrics with milquetoast Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. Take Cuban's latest comments to Bloomberg: "Jerry's too nice a guy. He cares too much. They've got a lot of avenues they could take but all of them depend on being a lot meaner and a lot more aggressive and that's just not their style." Cuban should know: He took Yang for $6 billion during the dotcom bubble by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, then made sure to collar his shares so they kept their value while Yang's fortune plunged. Never heard of Broadcast.com? Exactly Cuban's point.

When we speculated about a future in TV for Olympian Michael Phelps, we thought it might involve, at most, a Screech-toplined movie of the week (along with the obligatory SNL stint). Imagine our surprise, then, when Page Six told us today that Phelps has embarked upon a second career in Los Angeles: renting himself out to satisfy Hollywood wives!

This is the hot new trend of late October: openly racist white people for Obama! It began with random tales of canvassers talking to voters who plainly said they were "voting for nigger." Now, this kind of amazing photo of a home in Indiana with an Obama sign and a Confederate Flag has been making the rounds in the Tumblrverse. There are more illustrative anecdotes below! Politico's Ben Smith wrote a story rounding up the stories of voters who "wouldn't want a mixed race marriage" for their children but are still voting for Obama. It featured this awesome Paul Begala quote:

Blind items are the gossip world's equivalent of the mathematical puzzles that keep engineers entertained. Try your hand! They're easier than a Rubik's Cube. CNET News reporter Caroline McCarthy has posed the following one:

As hard as it is to believe, the Phil Spector "I Told My Driver 'I Think I Killed Somebody' and Somehow Avoided Conviction" Retrial of the Century is underway, with prosecutor Alan Jackson describing the music genius as "very sinister, very violent and very deadly" in his opening statements. You'll recall that an experimental and wig-friendly Spector traded in his signature Dollytor look for something more closely resembling a lesbian talk show host at the opening of his last trial. But this time around he's arguably adopted his most stylish persona to date: that of Shootin' Filip Sprängporten, the long-rumored sixth member of Swedish supergroup The Hives. Veni Vidi Vicious, indeed! [Photo credit: Original Spector Photo AP Photo/Nick Ut]

[Samantha Ronson, a deejay, with her girlfriend Lindsay Lohan, an actress, at the Spring Street C/E subway stop today; image via Splash]

One sure thing worse for morale than a layoff is a multiple-stage layoff. Jason Calacanis told you not to do that. Valleywag's publisher sacked everyone early, and at the same time in multiple timezones. So the old saying was true: "If you don't know what's going on by now, it means you still work here." I get to sweat it out for Owen for another quarter. A Yahoo employee — for now — tells us it's the other way around there. The scariest part of the job, says our tipster, is not knowing whether to work or go jobhunting.

Joan Didion is sick and tired of Barack Obama and John McCain, but will still have her media heroes after the election is over: "The increasing destabilization of the economy was already clear—an average of 81,000 jobs a month were lost all through the summer—but discussion of how to resolve the bleeding still centered on such familiar favorites as tort reform. This word 'reform' kept resurfacing, but the question of who exactly was to be reformed was left to be explored mainly on The View, by Barbara Walters." [NYRB via Maza's Bazaar]

What exactly is happening over at Fox and Friends, America's drunkest morning show? As far as we can tell, this clip shows Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy playing the "Who Can Stare At Each Other Longest Without Laughing?" game while reporting on a killer earthquake in Pakistan. Then they just start showing murder scene video for no reason, which really causes extensive sputtering. Why is the Fox and Friends control room making Brian Kilmeade appear to support death? Click to watch.

Click to viewBoomp3.com West Hollywood conspiracy theorists have been working around the clock to find an answer to the age old question, "Was Natalie Portman picking out a wedgie or merely scratching her back?" Some believe that the positioning of Portman’s hand made it a quick back scratch. However, another theorist felt it was a wedgie, saying, “I was there and I got a wedgie, too. So I do believe a ghost haunts that particular shopping plaza. A ghost who torments and taunts those who need dry cleaning with vicious wedgies.” [Photo Credit: X17] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

Eight years ago Philip Kaplan, aka Pud, turned his anonymous rumor site FuckedCompany into a modest advertising business. Today, Kaplan is chief something-or-other at AdBrite, a Sequoia-backed startup whose CEO has dutifully slashed its payroll down to profitability. By contrast, sloppy typist "FS Crew" at FuckedStartups has already thrown in the towel. "We have incredible pipeline of rumors and tips," promises the For Sale post atop the site. "We have other projects and don’t have the time to focused (sic) our 100% attention on this project." What FS Crew really means is: "Fuck, this is hard. Someone please pay me to quit." Sorry, but on Web 2.0, it's the other way around: Your customers quit you, for free.

E!gads: Two months ago, we learned that Denise Richards: It's Complicated had been karmically snuffed in its crib, only to have Richards herself announce a month later that it hadn't (hey, no takebacks!). Still, we were skeptical, as no official announcement had yet come from E!, and that Richards? Kinda shady! Now, though, we have bad news: The network confirmed today that It's Complicated will indeed be returning. No word, yet, on whether the hair extension budget will be upped for the second season. [Us]

One of the newspaper industry's great hopes for the last several years has been that one day, technology geniuses would develop a flexible, paper-like display screen that people could roll up and put in their pockets. Then newspapers could beam their content to your magic screen daily and, voila, print survives, in a way! Well now Wired says that such flexible displays could be a mere two years away, thanks to a generous research investment from the US Army. And by then the Army Times will be the last newspaper left, so everybody wins! [Wired]

It's probably safe to say that Howard Kurtz is the most prominent member of his disreputable clan, the media critics. He analyzes the press full-time for the Washington Post, one of the few national papers left, while the Times has no one regular press critic. Kurtz also has a tv show of his very own! How did he swing such a cushy job? By regularly producing the kind of trenchant media analysis on display in today's column, about a magical fantasy world in which Barack Obama is losing. In this bizarro universe, the Obama campaign is poorly managed, beset by gaffes, and the candidate is a national joke. It's really useful thought exercise, if you're into thinking about things that don't relate to reality. This is his thesis:

Click to viewWhy is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is, with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7x7. The look reminds everyone why Diggnation cohost Alex Albrecht once said that Rose, a prolific dater, has "plowed through everyone in town." For Inc., Rose participated in a wacky crowd shoot which echoed the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night." It's obvious why Rose is a hot commodity: Write about him, and traffic to your magazine's website will soar. (Will he sell print copies? I doubt Digg users visit newsstands.)It's obvious what's in it for the magazines which write about them. Rose makes a compelling story, even if Inc. had to resort to ridiculous hyperbole:

The "pimps" at Marvel Studios may have finally closed the deal that pulled the last inch of Iron Man's blockbuster rug from beneath Terrence Howard, but a radical group of franchise purists are fighting his ouster with the new petition "Terrence Howard as War Machine in Iron Man 2." It seems a legal impossibility at this point, with Don Cheadle locked in as Col. Jim Rhodes, but! As the scrappy revolutionaries in Audrina Patridge's neighborhood showed us on Tuesday, there is no affront that can't be corrected with a surge of Democratic fervor — and maybe some fanboy earnestness to spare:

Now that Amy Poehler has had her baby and is gone from Saturday Night Live for good, the show is down to two lone ladies. There's Kristen Wiig, the brilliant if overworked performer behind the Target Lady and the wonderful Suze Orman impression, and then... well, then there's Casey Wilson. Poor Ms. Wilson has been given little to do since debuting on the show last season. Is she not making friends with the writers? Is she just not that funny? I mean, there have been some bright spots. Her brief Rachael Ray impression (video below, warning: bad quality) was amusing. So was that kind of bizarre paraplegic stripper skit she had early last season. But other than that... Well, it's mostly been the straight woman to Wiig's or the boys' wacky! characters. Maybe now that Poehler is gone, she'll get a chance to shine, thus getting more comfortable. Right now she just seems a bit stilted, a bit awkward. She's trying too hard. She needs to rein it in from the stage to fit the television. Also, she cowrote the upcoming Kate Hudson movie Bride Wars, which we're sorta counting as a knock against her (except, you know, good job selling a script, Casey. Hope you bought something nice.) But! She has a nice face and gave the wicked Sarah Palin a big ol' hug at the curtain call a coupla weeks back, so maybe she's a nice person, too. Now let her be funny! I mean, she got on the show, right? That must mean something! Though, Finesse Mitchell and Jim Breuer got on the show at various points, too. And we all know how well that worked out. It looks like it's now or never, Casey. Go buy the writers a round of drinks. Does anyone know her from her UCB days? Was she funny then?