Something is stirring at Forbes Media, the publisher of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, two similarly named but otherwise uncooperative publications. Bill Baldwin, the paper tiger who runs print editorial, has issued a memo to his staff announcing two promotions. The Dickensianly named Stewart Pinkerton "will continue to spend a lot of his time overseeing the contributions of print writers to Forbes.com and vice versa." The other guy, Tom Post, will remain another faceless middle-management drone, but we're inclined to like the guy, since he went to the University of Chicago.

Raffaello Follieri's precipitous slide from Anne Hathaway's Italian prince to just another fake Pope-anointed land baron hit bottom today in New York, where a judge sentenced him to four and a half years in prison for wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. Follieri, 30, pleaded guilty last month to bilking investors of nearly $2.5 million in funds intended for the Vatican and other low-end Catholic properties; his plea required him to agree not to appeal any sentence up to five years, three months. But it didn't mean he couldn't keep appealing to Hathaway, according to InTouch:

"Sorry for the spam but this is important," random play mogul Marc Canter spammed me on Facebook. "Please check out the video version of my treatise. Its easy! Just sit, watch and listen for 33:33." Dude, like I have half an hour to watch Blip.tv now that they've laid off everyone else here. I never know what Canter's talking about, but I love his manic energy. The first minute or two made me LOL the way we used to, before lulz were invented.

What's it like to live the life of Oscar winner Adrien Brody? Apparently, it pays enough to buy your actress girlfriend Elsa Pataky (Snakes on a Plane) an enormous castle in upstate New York, but not quite enough to keep you from opening up the doors to said castle to Hello! magazine for some extra coin. At least, that's the conclusion we came to after a perusal of the magazine's 35-page spread that includes shots of Brody and Pataky so cheesy that even Spencer and Heidi would turn away in white-hot shame. Won't you come inside with us and take a tour?

Life has been good on the Googleplex, even for contractors; the search engine's legendary perks, spread across its luxuriously infantilizing office parks, have been enjoyed by all. Next month, that changes, a tipster tells us: Contractors will have to stick to designated "zones" based on the building they work in. The main object is to cut the cost of offering foods and other perks by preventing contractors from visiting cafés meant for employees, or using gyms and other facilities on the main campus. But the "zones" have another benefit for management, as Google girds for deeper cuts.They make it easier to group contractors away from employees, sparing Googlers from the painful reality of watching people boxing up their desks. Google is rumored to have laid off 500 contract recruiters — sensible, because the company barely added 500 employees in the third quarter — with more contractor cuts to come, as soon as next week. Will regular employees be spared? Unclear.

Goddammit. Mike Bloomberg is going to be mayor again, forever. He will pay lip service to the poor and raise the cigarette tax to $400 dollars and ban watching too much tv and give the entire Bronx to some developers and the NYPD will continue to shoot black people, tase crazies, and arrest hippies. But we need him, now, because he is a Serious Nonpartisan Grownup Expert Business Manager, and the City is in a Crisis. [NYT]

Oh, this is really not what you want to hear if you are a fan of the newspapers, or journalism as a whole, or especially if you're an investor in the NYT Co.: In the wake of shitty third-quarter earnings, the ratings service Moody's is warning that it may downgrade the company's debt to junk status. It's currently at Baa3, the lowest rating before junk. A downgrade would make it even harder for the company to borrow money, which—without going into a lot of financial mumbo-jumbo—is not what they need right now (Pictured: their year-to-date stock price). Financial mumbo-jumbo quote from Moody's analysts below:

Results for Microsoft's September quarter are in: $15.06 billion in revenues, versus analysts' expectation of $14.8 billion. A unit which includes Microsoft's Xbox game console pulled in $1.8 billion, $350 million more than analysts hoped for. And the company's online division surprised with revenues of $770 million. But what's really surprising? How small that number still is, despite Microsoft's years of investment. [CNBC]

Teen pregnancy just isn't the Oscar-nominated, tabloid-cover romp Hollywood makes it out to be, according to a new report released today in Chicago. Amid the gloomy data noting 400,000 such births per year (at a public cost of $7.6 billion), experts cited increasing cultural influence among girls who look to Jamie-Lynn Spears, Bristol Palin and even Juno as models of upstanding teenage motherhood. Alas, as you probably could have guessed, the experts at a subsequent panel discussion begged to differ:

What the hell? The stores where GOP robocaller/professional Palin shopper Jeff Larson supposedly bought $150,000 worth of shit for Sarah to wear to fancy conventions? Yes well some stores listed in the records don't have any receipts proving these purchases, you know, happened. Which is kinda funny, and helps explain why Governor Palin does not really look $150,000 better-dressed than she did before the conventions! ($10k better maybe.) So what happened to that money, then?

Martha Stewart, a lady who made billions of dollars talking about stuff for your house and dinner parties and things like that and also went to jail once, is already feuding with her company's new co-CEO, Wendy Harris Millard. Recall that, just this past summer, Stewart's company pushed out Susan Lyne, the former CEO. Now even Millard (Lyne's replacement) herself acknowledges there's been "healthy debate," which means the shit must have been too bad to even try to deny. The "differences" are attributed to different "personalities." For example, Martha Stewart's personality is that of a tyrant. [NYP via Cityfile]

Billionaire Andreas von Bechtolsheim — "Andy" to us — cofounded Sun Microsystems in 1982. The original Sun team of Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy were like the Beatles to a previous generation of Silicon Valley engineers. Now, Bechtolsheim's using the current imaginary financial apocalypse to plant good news about Arista Networks. "Innovations in Cloud Networking" is the company's meaningless slogan. What Andy really wants to say: Throw those stinky old Cisco routers away! Oh, here's the part where Sun PR tells everyone a lie about Bechtolsheim "continuing his present involvement" at Sun as an advisor. Never mind that — just read the nut from his NYT article.

BREAKING HEADLINE NEWS over the wires from Extra! We'll cede them the floor: "An outspoken activist for autism awareness, Jenny McCarthy speaks out about whether [Sarah] Palin, who also has a child with special needs, can make a difference in Washington. McCarthy responds, 'You know, I don’t know.'" MUST CREDIT EXTRA! [Extra]

[A young mother named Britney Spears visits her children at their school in Los Angeles today; image via INF]

Click to viewBoomp3.com Pausing slightly during a whirlwind shopping expedition, Mickey Rourke and beloved dog Loki decided to experience Rome in all of its glory and splendor. "It’s a beautiful city," Rourke said. "Just ripe with culture and history; I mean it’s just a real work of art. Something to savoir and behold.” When asked for comment, Loki said she preferred the majesty of Venice and itss various canals. Loki added, “It’s easier to get away with certain things on the street.” [Photo Credit: INF Daily] *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.

We hear there's some kind of party happening tonight at the Pacific Heights mansionette of Larry Ellison, Oracle's multibillionaire CEO. He's not in town, so it should really be a rager. The occasion: The 10th anniversary of NetSuite's founding. Our invite was lost in the mail, but we're glad to hear Ellison's still doing his part for the local economy — especially considering how he just lost $6.6 billion in the stock market — more than any other tech CEO, according to the Wall Street Journal.

[Update: Surprise! It's a hoax!] A woman in Pittsburgh was mugged and beaten near an ATM last night by "a dark-skinned black man, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 200 pounds with a medium build, short black hair and brown eyes." She was robbed of $60. This wouldn't be news except that, according to the woman's testimony, the mugger "became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter 'B' into her face." Even then this wouldn't be news beyond the Pittsburgh Metro Area except that Matt Drudge has broken out the 72-point red font. Because he wishes to press the narrative he's been trying against the odds to push all month: that Democrats are becoming violent. So there you go. Do with this information what you will. File it right next to the person whose house was shot at because (or maybe not because!) they had a McCain sign up. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the woman refused medical treatment after the Liberal Mugger attacked her. Update: Ok. Uh. We're just going to report this without comment: the 'B' appears to be backwards. (Drudge is currently leading with the same image, we have no idea where it came from.)

It's a bad time to be backstage at ABC: not even twenty-four hours after word broke about behind-the-scenes in-fighting at The View, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting similar agita over at Dancing with the Stars, where the tyrannical Cloris Leachman has proven impossible to send home. It appears the producers and fellow dancers are firmly on Team Florence Henderson, as they're tired of the 82-year-old Leachman evading the ax simply by hamming it up for the cameras. "She has a Quentin Tarantino role to get to," they cry! "Does she need anything else?"

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Web-video-for-guys startup is "laying off" 11 people, but hiring another 11 with different skills, according to its CEO, Keith Richman. Dude, that's not a layoff — that's a classic nutshot.

Yesterday the New York Times had an anthrax scare at its headquarters. White powder in an envelope! The lobby was closed. People were barred from the main elevators. Who knows how many grammatical errors were made by scared and distracted reporters? Turned out the white powder was "some kind of pebbles." You know what? All this irrational anthrax fear is going to have to stop. Think about it: A lone nut was able to effectively seal off the entire New York Times building—and get an entire floor evacuated—by filling up an envelope with some fish tank pebbles or something. The same thing happened to the Times a month after 9/11, and they evacuated the entire newsroom. Also, "since then, there have been several other cases of suspicious materials being sent to The Times. None turned out to be harmful." It doesn't take much extrapolation to figure out that you could cost the NYT millions of dollars over the course of a year with just a box of safety envelopes and two scoops of baking soda. (And the Times can't afford it!) And really, is anthrax still a thing? It takes an incredibly sophisticated scientist to produce weapons-grade anthrax, and we haven't had any real anthrax attacks since that one rash we had several years back. It's basically the skyscraper equivalent of being made to remove your shoes when you go on planes. One single dude ruined it for everyone. So our suggestion: If you receive some powder in the mail, calmly call the cops. Don't shut down the building. Don't evacuate everyone. A decent actuary will tell you that, hey, in the long run your odds are extremely good. And that's what the New York Times stands for: facts, statistics, and a life chained to a desk. Back to work! [We reserve the right to change our minds when we receive anthrax here.]