I've been amused by the vast number of people who have uncovered Paul Boutin's dirty secret: The guy who just told Wired's 700,000 readers to kill their blog writes for a blog. Actually, a gossip rag, but come on. The real reason Paul wrote "Kill Your Blog"? So he would never, ever, ever have to write another servicey how-to-write-blogs article for the New York Times's Circuits section.

Hey, how about some more terrible news? The LA Times is laying off 75 people from editorial. "This is about 10% of our total staff and these cuts are comparable in scale to those made on the business side of The Times last week." Sigh. So soon after their redesign launch! Yes well innovation director Lee Abrams will probably have something innovative to say about all this, soon. This is not even the extent of the bad news. See, over the weekend the FAS-FAX circulation numbers came out and basically everyone lost. Circ was down more than 5% for the LAT. Meanwhile, on our coast, the Newark Star-Ledger is slashing 40% of its newsroom staff. They are trying to sell the paper but no one wants it. It is basically a bad time to enjoy getting a paycheck. Sadly, the Newspaper Industry is not too big to fail.

Hooker personality Tiffany "New York" Pollard (now there's someone we have a feeling is already well acquainted with Dr. Manhattan's cobalt nether regions) has addressed the media recently about Jennifer Hudson—whose skyrocketing career she doesn't envy in the least—and her fiance, a former I Love New York contestant whom she had the gall to liken to a gold-digging Al Reynolds. Having learned with the rest of us of the horrifying Hudson family deaths in Chicago, however, Pollard was consumed by guilt over her tactless remarks, and instantly set about righting her wrongs by issuing her deepest condolences to Hudson in the best way she knew how: by recording a heartfelt video message outside LACMA's streetlamp installation. She then went back about her regular routine of making kissy sounds at passing luxury vehicles in the hopes that one of them might contain the producer who will put her in his hip-hop movie musical, Dreamgrillz. [YouTube]

"Do you know that you're amongst the very best, but can't find a company that appreciates you or gives you the opportunity you deserve?" So begins Mahalo's come-on to developers. The bulldog-powered search engine just laid off a large chunk of its staff, including some developers. Why is it hiring more? We're sure Jason Calacanis, Mahalo's voluble CEO, has some entertaining spin, which we'll let him add it in the comments. But since his HR department didn't stamp the Craigslist posting with "DO NOT REPRINT," as Calacanis is known to do with his emails, we're republishing it below.

The publishing heiress and model just e-mailed us to remind us that the parting was amicable, and to give us the details about the Hearst dirt that was added to her column. [Click for update.]

">Hollywood PrivacyWatch Two-For-One! 10/26/08 — A friend and I stopped by Hugo's in West Hollywood for a late lunch. As we were walking through the patio toward our table, we passed a very familiar looking blond woman. We got to our table, and I excused myself to go to the ladies' [room]. My friend said "On your way back, could you check to see if that blond woman is SHARON STONE?"Sure enough, it was Sharon having a leisurely lunch with a friend. Sharon looked fresh faced and relaxed. She's very pretty in person. My friend and I ate our lunch, asked for the check, and sat for a bit longer to chat. I looked up and who should I see walking around the corner but ELLEN PAGE looking hipster-y in a black and white checkered scarf, t-shirt and skinny jeans. She was with a waif-ish dude who was wearing Risky Business sunglasses. They were moving fast toward the parking lot behind Hugo's. Ellen looked a little tired. Maybe she was heading home for a nap? Two great sightings in one meal, and all we had to do was sit there! Sharon was still lunching when we left. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

One more sign that these are tough economic times: more and more women are selling their eggs for cash. According to fertility specialists, the number of women willing to go through with the ordeal of hormone treatments and fertility drugs has risen 30 to 40 percent over the past few months as more women are tempted by the a payday that can be between $5,000 and $10,000. The trend isn't limited to eggs. Sperm donations are up, too, which may explain what former Lehman Brothers bankers have been doing as of late (when they're not selling stuff on Ebay, of course). [ABC News]

I used to work at an arm of Time Warner, the media conglomerate. What employees there learn: Synergy is a joke, and the company's many divisions hate working with each other so much they'd sooner partner with outsiders than give someone in-house a deal. The most famous, if apocryphal, anecdote: When Time Warner Cable asked to license the Road Runner character from Warner Bros., the studio initially wanted to charge $1 billion for the use. Putting AOL in the mix only made things worse. I'd hoped things might have gotten better in recent years — through my retirement plan, I'm still a shareholder. A recent press release made me despair. The headline: "Warner Bros. Digital Distribution Partners with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment." Only inside Time Warner would a collaboration like this be considered newsworthy.

It should be by now well-established that Nouriel Roubini's media persona—an economist so dour he's known as Dr. Doom—is entirely at odds with his party-loving hottie-stalking ways. (We've published several items about the salons at the playboy-professor's Tribeca loft and the 50-year-old bachelor's rambling and self-aggrandizing notes to women on Facebook.) But that isn't the only tension between the celebrity economist's public and private pronouncements. Roubini—recognized as one of the few economists who predicted the credit crunch—was at the same time just as gloaty as any other self-satisfied real-estate owner about the appreciation of his own apartment. In one of his regular party invitations in 2006 (reproduced below), Dr. Doom boasted to friends and random Facebook hotties that Scarlett Johansson had moved into an apartment directly above him—paying 2½ times what he had just three years earlier. (The apartments have the same double-height 1,300-square-foot floor plan though one assumes the decoration upstairs is more conventional than the moulded vaginas on Roubini's wall.) But the actress' purchase—"very good taste/style on her part"—was less of a boon than it first seemed. The buxom young movie star, most recently in Woody Allen's Victoria Christina Barcelona, was among neighbors who complained about Roubini's party guests wandering the halls of their Leonard Street building, says a former tenant. The building's new policy on parties—the doorman checks off all names against an RSVP list—is apparently designed for Roubini's haphazard salons.

For months, fans obsessed with Zack Snyder's superhero opus Watchmen have harbored fears about the movie's epic running time, wondering whether the version that comes out in theaters (assuming it ever does) would be cut or uncut. Now, thanks to the HD version of the second Watchmen trailer, we have a new focus for that very same question: Billy Crudup's bare, cerulean penis! As big blue hero Dr. Manhattan, Crudup spends the bulk of his on-screen time in the buff, and unlike the anachronistically clothed Spartans that starred in Snyder's 300, the director is allowing Crudup to let it all hang out. So, is it real, or is it CG? The NSFW wang, after the jump:

Sure, speed dating can find you seven minutes in heaven, but how about a chief whatever officer? Tonight, Right-Hand Partners sets out to pair fundable execs with the hot startup next door. For a shot at entrepreneurial love, get yourself to Fenwick & West at 5:30 p.m. You just might get lucky. It may be the end of the real world as we know it, but what about the virtual one? The Virtual World SIG is having their annual "Future of Virtual Worlds" panel at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman from 6:30-9 p.m. Tomorrow, learn how to go viral at the Snap Summit^3. The one-day conference on user experience and engagement will help your website find its perfect match: fans and money. (Photo by hlkljgk)

OK, who's sending all the white powder to New York newsrooms—and can you snort it? Reuters evacuated their newsroom today due to a powder-filled envelope. Last week, the New York Times had to seal off some elevators and evacuate one floor after a similar incident—which, as we reported, was scary, but no reason to stop working. Nothing to see here, folks. (We hope.)

Crystal (which we hear the clubgays are calling "Bristol," although maybe that's just a tipster pulling our leg) is fast replacing cocaine in New York City, reports UPI. Why? It's cheaper, as the price of snow is going way up. Parties are about to get a lot more paranoid and chattery, with far more "shivering messes" than usual. Unless.... well, public-service messages are usually annoying, but we figure that this one might actually work for looks- and youth-obsessed New Yorkers and gays: before and after pics from Faces of Meth campaign. Problem solved.

What's in the stars this week? Stock market turbulence? More octogenarians behaving badly? Answers below. If today - October 27 - is your birthday: Your numbers are 11, 39 and 54. These would be lucky numbers, if they didn't already equate to the ages of the individuals on set today who will yell at you for fucking up their lunch orders. Scorpio (October 24 - November 21): Instead of putting that Jamie Kennedy reality competition series into production, how about you greenlight some time with your son? He's starting to burn things at school. More celestial wisdom after the jump!Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21): At Tuesday's call, don't greet your fellow petite, blonde, fresh-faced types that are at every casting session with hugs and polite questions and displays of real friendship. Save your acting for the room. Capricorn (December 22 - January 19): You will know that you have found your ultimate love match when he/she agrees that Synecdoche, New York was a perfect first date movie. Aquarius (January 20 - February 18): Find better uses for your time. Ringo Starr's fan mail deadline was last week, and he already passed on your Yellow Submarine sequel - Return to Pepperland.

Larry, Sergey, and Eric have a fighter jet, and you don't. They also have a sweet place to park it: Moffett Field, the airstrip closest to the heart of Silicon Valley. Even Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has to get chauffeured down to San Jose to board his private plane. Remind us, how did the Googlers get such a sweet deal?Last year, Google struck a $144 million deal to lease land from Nasa's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, for future office space. Separately, but not coincidentally, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, through a company called H211 LLC, struck a deal with Nasa to lease a hangar at Moffett Field for their growing fleet of private jets. Why on earth, or in space, did the Googlers get parking privileges at Moffett? Nasa and Google came up with a great spin: The jets would be available to fly scientific missions. Larry and Sergey got to geek out, thinking their party plans served a higher purpose — while saving hours commuting to and from SJC or SFO. One small hitch, Miguel Helft reports in Bits: Using the party planes for scientific missions required tinkering with their electronics. And changing anything about the planes required new FAA certifications. This may explain why Larry and Sergey pulled their party plane from a recent Nasa mission. We know it wasn't out for repairs — around the same time, they used it to ferry guests to and from Gavin Newsom's wedding. Hence the Dornier fighter jet, which is deemed an "experimental" plane, and which will now satisfy H211's space-mission duties. But that leaves the Googlers and Nasa in a rather unsatisfying position. When the Googlejets were flying for Nasa, they had a reasonable excuse for parking them at Moffett Field. But the purchase of a special plane to run space missions leaves Larry and Sergey's party-plane fleet used solely for civilian purposes. What are they doing at the field? Why, satisfying a quid pro quo, like they always were. This latest twist on Larry and Sergey's lease just makes it more obvious.

Think the meltdown on Wall Street will ruin bonus season for bankers in town? Not necessarily! Merrill Lynch has set aside $6.7 billion to pay annual bonuses. Goldman Sachs plans to dole out $6.85 billion in total, an average of $210,300 for each employee. And Morgan Stanley has $6.44 billion for bonuses, or $138,700 per person. And you were concerned the $700 billion bailout would be misspent. [Bloomberg]

Although they run competing Web sites, Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington are friends.

Venture capital returns have yet to feel the full impact of the capital markets crisis. Payoffs, as measured by the private equity performance index (PEPI), dipped over the first two fiscal quarters, but were still higher than those out of the NASDAQ and S&P 500, according to a new report released by the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters.

Microsoft just announced a new offering called Windows Azure, a new online service for developing web applications. Azure, which has been discussed in very general terms in the last few months (as Project Red Dog, Windows Cloud and Windows Strata), sounds like it marks traditional software giant Microsoft’s biggest move into the Internet cloud, and into the software-as-a-service business model.

Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes has a new gig: She's promoting Little Barrel, a line of "clothing based on the love of drinking wine." The company was apparently founded by Stahl's daughter and neckties with images of little wine glasses go for $75. The site's tag line? "Enhance your vineyard lifestyle." [Fox News]