We bring now distressing news from the set of Gossip Girl, where 15-year-old Taylor Momsen—who plays Jennie, the fashion-designing little sister eager to break free from her humble roots living in a finished loft in Brooklyn with her dad from Everclear—has survived a brush with a "potentially life-threatening" (italics, underline, and bold ours) throat infection. Her doctor wisely chose Us to offer his prognosis exclusive:

BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen, whose sideline career is in writing horrifyingly violent fiction, approached me at a charity event Tuesday to discuss Valleywag's recent posts about him. I'll give him credit: He's as unapologetic about writing lines like "I don't like fucking bitches like you so don't count on not getting seriously hurt" as I am in criticizing him for them. In Valleywag's comments, Jenna Cohen, Bram's wife, has posted a defense. She says Cohen "has never used" Asperger's syndrome as an excuse. But she does have an interesting explanation for Cohen's stories of torture and rape: They're a turn-on. For her, too. She suggests they were his "porn collection." Here's the full comment:

In a Craigslist post titled "R.I.P. Good Times? Save Money by Sharing our SoMa Office," a San Francisco startup seeks a cotenant to defray its monthly lease. It's an allusion toVC firm Sequoia Capital's times-are-tough presentation, which called on startups to cut their burn rates. What the ad doesn't say: The fact that this startup has space to spare means it rented an oversized office, likely in the hopes of making more hires, and now realizes it can't fill it. Any guesses, based on the details in the ad — a top executive named Justin, an office at 7th and Mission — who it is? Leave them in the comments. Here's the ad, with more pictures:

[Athleticist Alex Rodriguez, who plays for the New York Yankees baseball squadron and is maybe sleeping with Madonna, leaving his New York apartment today; image via INF]

A Vice Magazine story about an extremely prolific sperm donor was condensed, reworded, and run as a story in the New York Post today, with no source other than Vice. The Post is now officially a blog on paper, and Vice is officially the mainstream media. Tears all around.

A lot of fighting happened in front of the cameras on today's heated installment of The View, but according to a tip we just received from a Defamer operative, it was nothing compared to what went on after the show was over. Our tipster says that Elisabeth Hasselbeck was upset that Joy Behar has been using The View to tout Behar's upcoming stand-up performance, and the conservative co-host demanded equal time in a confrontation that got ugly:

“We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” So said Steve Jobs, during his surprise appearance on yesterday's earnings call. Remember January 2003? Analysts forecast nothing but price cuts because of the economy. CNET leaked a rumor about a slim, portable multimedia device. Jobs unveils instead: A $3,299 laptop with the biggest screen ever. Now, Jobs says Apple doesn't know how to build a sub-$500 computer that isn't junk. Haha! Of course he knows how. Which is about to crack: The $499 price point, or the piece-of-junk legacy hardware in the current Mac Mini? I vote both. (Photo by mark_b)

This could make that planned Nov. 1 appearance on SNL a little awkward: during an interview with a D.C. news station, Barack Obama was prompted by some "gotcha journalism" to dis his Saturday Night Live portrayer, Fred Armisen. "Are you disappointed at all that the person who parodies you on Saturday Night Live just isn't very funny?" said the interviewer, asking the late-night comedy version of "So when did you stop beating your wife?" A trapped Obama then conceded that Armisen's interpretation was definitely a run or two below its high Tina Fey watermark. Clearly, Obama is in the tank for 30 Rock. [WUSA9.com]

Click to viewBoomp3.com Walking the velvety red steps at the third annual Rome Film Festival, acting legend Al Pacino delivered one of his more popular catch phrases to his adoring public. Pacino titled his sunglasses slightly and unleashed a mighty “HOO-ah!” to a thundering round of applause. [Photo Credit: Getty Images] *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.

Bulldog aficionado Jason Calacanis recently predicted that a large number of Web 2.0 startups will end up on "life support." Could Mahalo, his so-called "human-powered search engine," be one of them? He has laid off 13 of the humans who power Mahalo, with plans to rehire some of them offshore in the Philippines. It's not clear how many staff members that leaves Mahalo with.Silicon Alley Insider reports that a third of Mahalo's full-time staff was laid off; Calacanis, in a blog post — wait, we thought he stopped blogging — muddles the issue by saying Mahalo has 70 full-time and freelance staff. A former Mahalo insider, however, says the real full-time staff has dropped by roughly half, from 60 this summer to 30 before the layoffs. The Brooklyn-raised CEO is ever the artful dodger.

We all have dreams—dangerous, beautiful, wonderful dreams—though, sadly, not all of us get chances to realize them. But when you do get that chance, when those sparkling stars align, oh it's a most joyous occasion. I for one always wanted to get paid for calling people gay. And we all know that turned out! Pretty darn well. Now I'd like to pay it forward, and help out a young Craigslist poster who dreams of going on a romantic getaway to the islands with CNN anchor and silver fox pretty gay man Anderson Cooper. You see, the young fellow, moored in the dusty meat lockers of Chicago, has recently called it quits with his boyfriend of two years. Now he has these plane tickets and these hotel reservations and... sigh. So does anyone have the Coop's email address or phone number to pass on to the young dreamer? Oh, and Anderson, he'll pay for "90% of the expenses"! Who knows what the other 10% will be for. We're guessing that it begins with an 'A' and ends with '-nguillan rent boys with killer brown eyes.'

Now here's something to consider: stay out of the rainy economy and take shelter by hiding out at college—and earn a $10,000 "blogging scholarship." "Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs?" OMG: your Livejournal even counts as a blog. They do not mention Tumblr, however. [College Scholarships]

· Anne Hathaway is set to star in The Fiance, about a young woman who, despite her parents' wishes, leaves her seemingly perfect fiance in order to find herself. Let us guess — he's Italian, right? [Variety] · Lionsgate has attached Ashton Kutcher to portray an ex-hit man in the action-comedy Five Killers. [Variety] · Today in survival: ABC has picked up a full second season of its medical soap Private Practice, and CBS ordered more scripts for its new series Worst Week. [The Live Feed] After the jump: What Oscar-nominee hopes to win the Nobel Peace Prize and call Bill Clinton a "weenie" in her next film?· Naomi Watts is close to a deal to star in My Name is Jody Williams, a biopic of the brash teacher-turned-activist who launched a controversial, Clinton-needling campaign to eradicate land mines. [THR] · Rosie O'Donnell will star in and executive produce the Lifetime original movie America, an adaptation of E.R. Frank's touching book about a troubled, 232-year old superpower fighting its way through the foster-care system in New York. [Variety]

Daniel and Isabella were the most popular baby names in New York City in 2007, according to an insanely exhaustive, 81-page report issued today by the city's Department of Health. (So that's what they do when they're not checking restaurants for mice and roaches.) More interesting is the second most-popular name for boys: It's Jayden, which one baby name "expert" attributes to—you guessed it—the "Britney effect." She also adds that the "entire '-aiden' phenomenon has been a huge naming force" over the past year, and she's been seeing an increasing number of parents name their kids Hayden, Caiden, Raiden, and Zaydon. "I'm even hearing Graydon," she says. Consider yourself warned, Mr. Carter! [City Room]

Web hosting? So 1990s. Rackspace is now into "cloud computing." The company has acquired Slicehost, a small but popular virtual private server host, and JungleDisk, an online-storage startup. The deals comes as Rackspace is pushing its Mosso service as an alternative to Amazon.com's computing-power rental offerings. The question is now this, will Rackspace bring their world-class downtime to both services?

♦ Do Sam Ronson and Lindsay Lohan ever actually stay in one city for more than five minutes? Today they're in Tokyo for Charlotte Ronson's runway show, and to the delight of the audience, LiLo made an appearance. [The Cut]
♦ Don't knock the Real Housewives of Atlanta, pleads Simon Doonan: "Despite the jarringly superficial materialism exhibited throughout this show, Nene and Co. are performing a profound and vital function: It's called consumer confidence." [NYO]
♦ One benefit of the recession? Plentiful sample sales, like Betsey Johnson and Castle Starr. [Missbehave, Fashionista]

Deep down, the smokers among us knew that this day was coming: a new study says that warning labels on cigarette packs subconsciously make people want to smoke more. Does this mean the City of New York will stop running all those anti-smoking ads with the tracheotomy dude who can't swim any more and the amputee lady who lost her fingers? No, those are just good old-fashioned punishment. [Ad Age]

Die Power Der Veto. We assumed a headline reading, "Hitler planned 'Big Brother' style television to broadcast Nazi propaganda," meant that the Nazi dictator was the John de Mol of his time. Turns out they were just talking about boring, old Orwell-style Big Brotherism: projections of the dictator speaking in public squares. It would have so much more fascinating to think Hitler was way ahead of the reality TV curve, with a plan to put a dozen Aryan out-of-work bartenders inside a house rigged by Leni Riefenstahl with hundreds of cameras, and broadcasting the ensuing bickering and hottübben shenanigans for an enraptured German population. [Summer's Assholes 10 photo-illustration courtesy of Glark.] [Daily Mail]

Oh, surely you didn't think Bill Gates would fade away into saintly obscurity after retiring from his day job at Microsoft, did you? Techflash reports he has a new company, a sort of think tank called BGC3. The letters stand, roughly, for "Bill Gates Catalyst". The three? Possibly a reference to the companies he's founded. Microsoft was Gates's first company; Corbis, the photo-licensing agency, his second. (Should we count the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, since it's a nonprofit.) BGC3 will house Gates's intellectual musings, with the resulting innovations to be funneled largely to Microsoft or to his foundation. It sounds a bit like former Microsoft research chief Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, minus the controversial accumulation of patents.

Fat Chance: Our first exposure to the greenlit MTV show Model Makers — in which eager wannabe models would have to lose 80 pounds in 12 dangerous, light-headed weeks — managed to offend even our already MTV-wary sensibilities. Now, HuffPo blogger Darryl Roberts says that MTV has decided to quietly discontinue their plans to air Model Makers. Guess we'll have to fill the gap waiting for the premiere of Ruby! [HuffPo]