Layoff-driven journalism: "Let's expose all the patterns in the media! It'll be great for us! Don't forget to link to our previous coverage." Owen, please listen to what readers are telling us: Bury, bury, bury.

· Tuesday Night Music: Yaz vocalist Alison Moyet plays the Grove of Anaheim, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band play the Henry Fonda, and the Silverlake Lounge hosts Monster, My Name is Guy, and Satellite Crush. · It's a star-studded night at the Dave Hill Explosion: none other than Rufus-sirer and Apatow Repertory Player Loudon Wainwright III and Xena: Warrior Princess's Lucy Lawless herself will be the guests. At the UCB Theater, with Dave Hill as your master of ceremonies, as always. · Animation historian Jerry Beck hosts a night of monster cartoons from the 1930s to the 1960 at the Cinefamily Silent Movie Theater—one of our favorite places in LA.

Who will move the E-meter needle tonight? If Katie can't do it, we know Cloris will. WATCH Scream Awards 2008 [9 PM, Spike] - Here's an awards show that won't bore you to tears. Taped last Saturday at The Greek Theatre, the Scream Awards honor sci-fi, horror and fantasy entertainment. Many of us remember a delightful Page Six item from two years ago involving Quentin Tarantino, finger-sucking and sliders which was courtesy of the Screams. If that wasn't enough motivation to cancel that rendezvous with your tennis coach, note that Tim Burton arrives onstage via hot air balloon, George Lucas accepts an award while flanked by stormtroopers and the Smashing Pumpkins perform.

This summer, LiveJournal founder turned Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick briefly sported a fu manchu, a facial-hair styling usually seen in old movies, gay porn, and old gay porn movies. His wistful expression seemed to capture today's end-of-an-era weltanschauung. Will his new pals at Google get trimmed away like his 'stache? Suggest a better caption in the comments, and the best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: "Tesla's alternative energy: the tow truck," by Scalawag. (Photo by Brad Fitzpatrick)

What has Mark Penn, the scandal-plagued strategy guru for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, been up to as of late? He's back to doing what he does best: conducting useless marketing research. The "2008 Presidential Image Power Survey," conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland and Landor Associates, asked voters to associate the presidential candidates with various brands, including "fictional spies, retail outlets, snack foods and cars." The answers? Voters connected Obama to BMW, Google and Target, while Mr. McCain was compared to Ford, Wal-Mart, and AOL. Translation: Obama is associated with cool stuff; McCain makes people think of a car company about to go bankrupt, a big-box retailer that abuses its employees, and an Internet company that peaked 11 years ago. [AdAge]

With the Sarah Palin-skewering SNL ascendant and the Republican-helmed satire An American Carol flailing at the box office (because of those pro-immigration chihuahuas), Boston Globe writer Lisa Wangsness has a provocative point to make: that events like these illustrate "the extent to which comedy has become a liberal genre in America." If you take the success of left-leaning satires like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and couple it with the mileage wrung from the McCain/Letterman War of '08, does it augur a bold new era of Democratic ha-has?Says Wangsness:

Normally I don't screengrab reader mail and publish it. Paul Ogle at Tippit summarized the current zeitgeist so well, though, that he deserves a hit. "How can I save my job?" That's the only question on any Google engineer's mind right now. I'm starting to get why two Stanford grad-school dropouts hired an army of Ph.D. degree holders. Right now, you Googlers are saving your jobs like there's no tomorrow. And in academia, as I learned as an MIT sysadmin, there is no tomorrow. Publish or perish, people. Thank God you have America's CTO to handle the big issues, like which of you gets fired.

As mysterious to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang as the location of his keyboard's shift key is the trick to communicating layoffs. Jerry, you should deliver them the way Steve Jobs unveils the latest Apple products: All at once, and tell the audience they can get them now. Instead, in his latest no-caps memo, Yang informs Yahoo employees that 1,400 of them will lose their jobs, but they won't find out any details for "several weeks." Jerry, you're doing it wrong. Here's Yang's latest botched communication to his staff:

Click to viewBoomp3.com Popular film actress Rosario Dawson appeared to be very excited about unloading some negative energy and loading up on the positive vibes at a Los Angeles loading station. Dawson said, “There’s just so much negativity in the world and thank goodness there’s a place where I can unload and stock up on the good vibes without having to go San Pedro.” [Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin] *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.

Hey, is this Mitch McConnell campaign ad a little odd, or is it just us? Mitch is a Senator running for reelection. Schumer is a Senator too. So far, so good. But the thing is, McConnell is running in Kentucky, and Schumer is not running in Kentucky. So it's just weird that McConnell's ad would be all about how this NEW YORK Senator is spending all this MONEY on building museums for hippies, and illegal immigrants, and also presumably shining his diamond collection. Also the voice over guy... his accent is a bit... ethnic. Just what is Mitch McConnell trying to suggest, exactly? Can anyone enlighten us??? Full ad after the jump.

Most magazines keep their Web and print staffs apart, a legacy of petty rivalries, bureaucratic turf wars, and a fear of change. But Forbes Media has elevated balkanization into an art form. The two sides of the company barely speak to each other. The Forbes family tolerated this, but Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity fund which counts Bono as a partner and now owns 40 percent of Forbes is not so patient. A tipster tells us that a "big shakeup" is coming, with the editorial staffs of both magazine and website getting "smashed together."Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes. What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

For years, one man controlled all the news: Matt Drudge, nutty conservative weather-obsessed Miami queen blogger. He "broke" the Monica Lewinsky thing, sort of, and then for nearly ten years his website drove news narratives and pushed stories to the forefront. Even as recently as the primary season, some years past his peak influence, Drudge helped destroy the Clinton campaign with relentless Obama-boosting. Then, of course, he had to switch back to being a straight-up GOP hack. We'd say he just boosted Obama because he felt McCain would beat the Illinois Senator, but the fact is, his visceral hatred for the Clintons probably drove him just as much as anything else. Since the conventions, though, he's been an embarrassment. He highlights completely misleading bullshit and can't get anyone but the dumbest of bloggers to pick up on his pet stories. As Eric Bohlert notes in Media Matters today, Drudge has become so divorced from reality that even the serious press people who've religiously trusted his instincts since the Clinton days can't square his headlines with reality. His cherry-picked poll results are plainly ridiculous, last week's Drudge-touted "McCain Comeback" never even pretended to materialize, and he's completely, completely missed, by design, the major narratives of the last month of the campaign: Palin's national meltdown, the increasingly crazed McCain rallies, and Obama's fundraising and ground advantages. Instead we get... Biden on Botox, a little ACORN, and feeble attempts at finding crazy liberals attacking McCain supporters. They all work like a charm on the Conservative Blogosphere, but back in the good old days, that was just the first step toward mainstream discussion. Now, no one gives a shit. Maybe after the election Drudge will buckle down, like Fox, and provide the voice of the embattled opposition. But a conservative crack-up and the apparent disillusion of the tacit MSM/right-wing noise machine cooperative venture is not great news for Matt. And it's a long time until the next hurricane season.

Having already enjoyed the effects of one defribrillation at the hands of master career re-animator Quentin Tarantino, '70s TV acting icon (with occasional forays into B-movies like Alligator and Disney's The Black Hole) Robert Forster makes another deserved comeback on NBC's sprawling super-power fantasia, Heroes.On last night's action-packed episode, Forster reprised his role as the previously-thought-dead Petrelli family patriarch. Our initial fears that evaporated Oscar chances and a recurring role on Huff had inflicted unspeakable damage upon his physical well-being were quickly put to rest when Forster began laying his hands on various deathbed well-wishers, thereby sucking away their youthful supervitality and melting away the years. (We imagine Joan Rivers employs a similar technique.) In the scene above, his own son—played with convincing, Windex-conducting intensity by Milo Ventimiglia—falls victim to Forster's devious ways, stripping Ventimiglia of all his special gifts, including the one where he pretends to care about Japanese dolphins long enough to get inside some indestructable-cheerleader spanky pants.

The last time Apple announced earnings, Steve Jobs's health was a hot topic on CNBC. Why wasn't he on the earnings call? CNBC's Silicon Valley bureau chief Jim Goldman had to slap his fellow pundits down, reminding them that Apple's CEO never, like never participates in the ungodly boring quarterly ritual. Guess what? Steve Jobs is on the Apple earnings call right now. Which means he really, really wants to reassure Wall Street about Apple's prospects, even after the company announced predictably boffo earnings. Strangely, that is not reassuring.

Rudy Ray Moore, the blaxploitation icon, rap pioneer and generally batshit genius behind Dolemite and roughly 1 million dirty jokes over the last 50 years, died Sunday of complications from diabetes. He was 81 — and he lived every day of it, too, from his early R&B circuit roots to decades of working comedy rooms so blue that his labels couldn't promote him and record shops had to hide his racy, soft-core album covers behind the sales counter. His cult exploded in 1975 with the release of Dolemite, featuring Moore as a wronged ex-con seeking revenge, redemption, and not just a little sex; the sequel The Human Tornado emerged in 1976, followed by the Moore's sureally rhyming, ass-kicking apotheosis Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-in-Law in 1978. His influence touched three generations — often inappropriately and unapologetically, and we miss him already. Follow the jump for an all-too-short (and NSFW) sampling of his finest, and wish St. Peter the best of luck checking Dolemite and Mr. Blackwell in within one day of each other. [LAT]

We hear that Forbes is making changes—something along the lines of a decree that "everyone must write for both online and print." Makes sense, if true! If you have with more details, email us.

From the Department of ZOMG: There is a preview online for the new Whitney Port reality show The City! As I'm sure you're all well aware, Port is the strange, saturnine sidekick to Lauren Conrad on MTV's sideways-spilling, late afternoon sunsplash Los Angeles reality show The Hills. Now Whittles is moving to the Big Apple (that's New York City!) to pursue her dreams of being paid to talk about fashions. Judging from the elegantly produced preview, the show will feature: work intrigue, personal intrigue, lots of great Whitney facial expressions (the Cow Eye, the Bulge Buster, the Battle Toad), socialite of sorts Olivia Palermo, the fearsome and scrumtrulescent Kelly Cutrone, and the most awkward lingering kiss/hug of all time. Are you so excited??? Yeah, me neither. Watch the clip above.

So we all know that this Halloween there will be a million people dressed as Sarah Palin. These people are terrible and should be shunned. But some people will be a little more creative. Like maybe there will be some Levi Johnstons. Or Barney Frank! A "sad banker" or whatever is a bit generic, but why not Neel Kashkari? Take speed and go as Jim Cramer! Go as Nancy Pfotenhauer and declare your party to be outside of Real America. Or go as "the 'old' John McCain" and be really super honorable as you call your wife a cunt and befriend Charles Keating. We invite you to suggest, in the comments, your own news-based Halloween costumes that won't be terribly overplayed. We'll round 'em up and help you figure out how to put them together tomorrow.

Yahoo's earnings announcement was ghastly in two ways. The bad news: Its revenues were flat and earnings down 64 percent. The worse news: It is only cutting 10 percent of its workforce, or 1,500 employees, which will reduce expenses by $400 million. The cuts are not nearly deep enough. Yahoo is forgoing immediate pain for a prolonged period of uncertainty, as investors continue to abandon the stock and employees expect further layoffs down the road.

Illustrious Doubleday book publishing exec Julie Grau takes to the pages of Vogue this month to muse about her "definitive ab-sculpting workout": "On the floor, we pretzel our legs and torque our bodies through an array of exercises that Tanya promises will 'fry the fat off your hips' and get rid of unsightly waistband overhang." Sorry Julie, spot reduction of fat is a myth. I'm surprised you didn't know that. You can read about it in a book. [NYO]