We already took our shot at what was behind Samsung's so-crazy-it-makes-sense attempt to acquire SanDisk. Samsung, we said, has supplied the memory chips for Apple's iPhone since its launch last year. That's why Samsung needs to bulk up to contend with the might of Apple, one of the largest buyers of flash memory. Now that Samsung has dropped its $5.8 billion bid, does that mean we were wrong? Well, yes. Big corporations act like teenagers. These crazy kids will eventually make up, or find other partners. Here's the official breakup note from Samsung CEO Yoon Woo Lee:

Yesterday we asked for your best sleazy tabloid headlines for the story about the gay British cannibal chef who is now cooking for his fellow inmates in prison. There were many brilliant lines, but in the end only one could win and that was Carol Gardens' lovely and simple "Irony Chef." Yay! Thanks to Steve Dressler for the mock-up. Click the thumb to view it in full.

Are you aware that the LA Times revealed its redesign this week? Let's hope you are, because this is what's gonna save the paper! What people both inside the Tribune Co. and out really want to know is not, "How does the redesign look?" It's, "What does Tribune Co. Chief Innovation Officer and Vice Admiral of the Martian Army Lee Abrams have to say about it, in his own unmistakable way?" Well: "As we've seen with all the other Tribune newspapers, the 'plunge' is the first step. Nothing more...nothing less." Ha. And?:

Ever have one of those days when you stalk out of work in a huff? Then, stepping outside, wonder WTF you are going to do with your day? Do you go over to Broadway and finger a tray of cashmere gloves at Club Monaco? Do you take the 6 train uptown, pop a Xanax, and watch TV? Or do you wonder which downtown bars are open and serving? Is it maybe 11 a.m. on a Tuesday? If so, you might enjoy Milano's on East Houston.If you want to drink in grave-like silence in the middle of the day, pondering the economy and your role in it, this hallway-shaped dive's for you. "Sex causes high blood pressure," an old man tells the bartender. "You know, the heart races and stuff." (Are you the only female in the bar? Are you, at this point, used to this?) You know what else causes high blood pressure? Not the failing economy! There've been reports that people are actually healthier (if not happier) during hard times. Another even older man comes in off the street, asks the bartender, "What's 2 across?" and heaves himself onto a barstool. It collapses and he falls to the floor. "The legs just snapped off," he says sheepishly. Which sort of represents the subprime market—and as someone wise once said, "nothing is so successful that you can't fuck it up." The answer to 2 across? I-R-R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L H-U-B-R-I-S. Anyway, Milano's. A pint of Brooklyn Lager? $5. The day off? Priceless. [Photo: Trig's Flickr]

Samuel L. Jackson and Barack Obama may have a certain amount of preternatural cool in common, but there's one thing Jackson can do that the presidential candidate can't: curse up a storm! While promoting his new film Soul Men, the actor opined at length on all things Obama, and thanks to Hollywood Outbreak, we have the NSFW audio (caution: as though he were back on the set of a Tarantino film, Jackson lets fly with a torrent of "n-words").You may be interested to hear Jackson hold court on Sarah Palin rallies, how Obama is hamstrung by what society wants to see in a black man, and his greatest fear involving the candidate, but our favorite moment was Jackson's brief, jowly McCain impression. Hey Sam, we hear SNL is hiring — sure, there's that whole racial barrier thing, but that hasn't stopped Fred Armisen from playing Obama, has it?

"'Thanks to convoluted laws and corrupt officials, claiming ownership over a piece of property in Bangalore can be as easy as hiring thugs to paint your name on the side of a building.' The chaos makes gangsters who can impose order — like the murderous Muthappa Rai — very wealthy."(Disclosure: Former Valleywag pageview champ Nicholas Carlson now blogs at a higher pay scale for Silicon Alley Insider. Good reblog, Nicholas! Now quit rewriting like you're an NPR foreign correspondent. I work in tech. If I want to meet "the murderous Muthappa Rai," I'll book a junket to visit the call center. (Photo for Wired by Scott Carney, who unlike Carlson actually went to Bangalore.)

Click to viewBoomp3.com After a lunch date with a good friend, Four Christmases star Reese Witherspoon went in for a kiss since she felt the meal went well. However, Witherspoon’s companion gracefully glided Witherspoon to her cheek. The companion said, “Lunch dates get the cheek. Now, take me to Katsuya and maybe I’ll reconsider the lips.” [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.

The explosive New York Times Magazine story on the complete disarray of the McCain campaign is live online! It's full of revealing exclusive info that one was previously forced to just infer based on the available evidence! Like: the tone, strategy, and narrative of McCain's campaign has been inconsistent because the candidate himself is terrible with organization and consistency, and has relied on metanarrative crafter/biographer Mark Salter, Rovian media guru Steve Schmidt, and close friend and day-to-day campaign head Rick Davis to work it all out between the three of them. And there is infighting, of course, and everyone will soon blame everyone else, but honestly the ultimate responsibility for the failure of the campaign (should it fail in two weeks, obv) comes down to Senator McCain. He's a terrible candidate, unable to read from teleprompters and unwilling to do campaign events before 9 a.m.. He chafes at taking directions—told to gently explain once in the first debate that Obama might not understand an issue, McCain condescendingly repeated the mantra "Senator Obama doesn't understand..." ten times. These are unfair and surely maddening criticisms—ability to read from a teleprompter is not actually that presidential a quality, or else Sarah Palin would be qualified—but this is the world we live in, and GOP strategists certainly helped create it. But more importantly, his high self-regard makes him utterly unable to forgive or get over minor personal slights. He can't understand why everyone else doesn't see how much of an unprepared phony Barack Obama is, and the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" attitude is always, always a loser—ask the last five Democrats to run for President not named Clinton. His ability to justify his own inconsistencies isn't shared by the electorate either. In his mind, he can square Palin's inexperience and robocalls and negative campaigning with the honorable man he's always been. The constant schizophrenic narrative changes are, of course, Steve Schmidt's fault. And here's some inside shit on the Palin pick—the serious grownups had a decent shortlist that included Pawlenty, Romney, and even Bloomberg. But they weren't exciting and mavericky ernough, so Schmidt and Davis quietly picked Palin based entirely on image without examining substance.

More cheerful symptoms of the recession: Based on the number of prescriptions filled in the first eight months of this year, people appear to be scrimping on their medications in order to save money as they're increasingly forced to choose between gas, meals and drugs. But the pharma companies aren't panicking just yet: The US still spends around $286.5 billion on prescription drugs, more than any other country in the world. [NYT]

Henry Blodget, the former stock analyst who kicks himself every day for still being a Yahoo shareholder, notes that Yahoo spent $37 million on advisory fees in the third quarter. What did it get? A botched Microsoft buyout; a search deal with Google that's getting a rough reception by antitrust cops in Washington, D.C.; and Carl Icahn on its board — a man Jerry Yang and company called a technological nincompoop on Yahoo's own homepage. In other words, nothing — save for cutting its operating income by more than a third. That $37 million did, however, result in one concrete cost-saving initiative.Bain Consulting, the firm that's working on Yahoo's cost-cutting plans, has come up with what a Yahoo finance-department insider calls its "first major breakthrough":

You won't find former AIG chief Martin Sullivan in a very good mood today: His former employer has agreed to Andrew Cuomo's demand that the company suspend $19 million in payouts that Sullivan was supposed to receive. The insurance giant also agreed to withhold more than $600 million in bonus payouts to senior execs. [NYT]

Hollywood PrivacyWatch: 10/21 — So I’m at the lab next to the CitiBank in Burbank, minding my own business, and I look out the window at the parking lot, and there’s this guy who looks like Ozzy Osbourne getting into an Audi station wagon, and I’m saying to myself, you know, that guy looks like Ozzy, but he’s moving kinda well, no shaking. And then I see Sharon Osbourne getting into the back. And there was Kelly Osbourne in a Mercedes behind them. No carpooling in this family, evidently. Sorry, but that was cool. See? Post-production has its rewards. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

This is fun. Whenever the crazy culture wars heat up, someone starts mailing dangerous white powder to senators, newspapers, and banks. A New York Times human resources exec just sent an email around to the office staff warning of a suspicious white power found in an envelope addressed to the newspapers. The cops are there and the lobby is closed. Click through for the email. From: NYTIMES MAIL Date: Oct 22, 2008 12:24 PM Subject: Note from Dennis Stern re the Building To: NY TIMES NOTES Folks, At about 11:30 a.m. today an employee on the 13th floor of our headquarters building in New York opened an envelope addressed to The New York Times. A white granular substance was in the envelope. The New York City police were called and are now on site investigating. The 41st Street side of the lobby is closed but people are able to get in and out of the building. We will keep you updated on any developments. Dennis

God, it's been a year. I've been keeping a little file of crazed "glaring omission" e-mails from both friends and foes. I've provided a mix n' match quiz. Who said what? It's up to you to guess. Featuring Julia Allison, Emily Gould, Ryan Adams, et al! There's a whole lotta dirt after the jump.
POP QUIZ—MIX N' MATCH 1.) "Jesus Christ, could you be any more of a bitch if you tried?!" 2.) "Seriously, dude, you should just quit... I can't imagine writing any of this shit is making you happy." 3.) "If you really believe what you just wrote you are half-way to soulless." 4.) "thank you for being a very noble and good person" 5.) "i want you to call your broker and buy a LARGE position in SORC tomorrow, after the market opens and BEFORE it closes. They report tomorrow after close and I expect them to beat earnings significantly, and I expect to see a huge short squeeze." 6.) "Did I mention how much sex I've gotten off of Gawker? It's weird. WEIRD!" WHO SAID THE ABOVE? GUESS! The answers are in no particular order, to protect the guilty parties. a.) Emily Gould, former Gawker b.) Ryan Adams c.) Rod Townsend, commenter d.) My boyfriend, after I leaked something off the record e.) Julia Allison f.) ?? Also, the above pic is one of Men's Vogue writer Hud Morgan that someone sent me. Not sure who, or why. But I enjoyed it. Oh, and also, thank you to the person who sent me six pictures of someone (himself?) receiving oral sex. Thank you. All of you! Here's how to get a reservation at the Waverly Inn:

Venture capital is returning to an old formula: Doling out money for expansion to already-profitable businesses. That's why AdMob, a mobile-advertising startup, has gotten $15.7 million from Sequoia Capital. Sequoia, the backer of Apple, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google, summoned portfolio-company CEOs to an emergency meeting, warning them to cut costs and become self-sustainable. So why did AdMob get the cash?Because, Sequoia partner Jim Goetz says, mobile advertising is potentially a large market, and the startup, he claims, already generates more cash from its operations than it spends. Never mind that Goetz, shown here, was spewing a grow-at-all-costs investment philosophy a year ago; mental flexibility is the hallmark of a venture capitalist. Goetz's indecisiveness shouldn't matter to AdMob's founder, Omar Hamoui, who didn't need a flip-flopping VC to know he had to run his business like a business. For entrepreneurs more used to spending someone else's money freely, this must all seem a puzzle on the order of a Zen koan: How do you raise venture capital? By not needing it.

That's Piper Palin, Alaskan governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's 7-year-old daughter. In her hand is a $790 monogram Louis Vuitton handbag. That's over a hundred dollars per year of lil' Pipe's life! So maybe part of her mom's $150,000 Neiman Marcus shopping spree was picking up sweet ass designer shit for her chic and worldly seven-year-old. Or maybe Piper just saved her allowance for a real, real long time. Orrr... heh. It's fake. Who knows! [via Deceiver]

Roger Ebert survived a battle with thyroid and salivary gland cancer with his prodigious mind still intact, but ever since his notorious binder-thwacking at the hands of Lou Lumenick, things have been a little... askew. First, Rog stumped his audience with an ode to creationism that seemed more appropriate for Free Republic than the Chicago Sun-Times (later, he informed us it was just satire). Now, Ebert is in hot water after posting a review of the gay independent film Tru Loved that he admits at the end was written after watching only eight minutes. The one-star review is here, his original disclaimer is here, and Ebert's attempt to walk back the firestorm is after the jump:

Ah England, home to both world-class soccer hooliganism and a world-class reputation for stuffiness. What we're implying is that any outwardly polite Brit is, at any given moment, seething with murderous rage. Well! It seems that a BBC radio interview this morning took a turn for the wacky when the interviewee's cell phone went off, live on air! Which caused the host, John Humphrys, to threaten to take the man out back and shoot him dead. Funny Brits! Click to listen to the tape. Gunshot not included.

Much of Hollywood is on edge (and making "eeeeeeew" faces) this morning as news quickly spread that some of our most treasured lesbian DJs, their reformed starlet girlfriends, a various other tenacious hangers-on have been exposed to waters that recently held a dead body. The location was the Roosevelt Hotel—certainly no stranger to corpses, hosting at least one accidentally fatal date-rape-drugging per weekend—but what made this tragedy unusual was the fact that: 1. the victim, a 30-year-old New York native, was discovered at the pool's bottom, not in a cabana with an iPod boombox still playing "I Kissed A Girl" on infinite loop, and 2. the pool was never drained. Page Six reports:

Real estate prices may be headed south, but that isn't stopping Courtney Sale Ross, the widow of late media mogul Steve Ross, from putting one of the most expensive apartments in Manhattan on the market. Max Abelson of the Observer reports that Edward Lee Cave is now "quietly taking offers" on Ross' 32-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue. The price? Over $60 million. [NYO]