Sandwich Girls? If the raft of special guest stars hadn't tipped you off that NBC would do anything to draw eyeballs to the new season of 30 Rock, how about this: they're spicing up their promos with hardcore anal sex! According to MyHogtown, a recent afternoon ad for 30 Rock that ran in the Greater Toronto area was inexplicably spliced with a snippet of hardcore porn featuring some backdoor action. If viewers couldn't believe their eyes, they were in luck: the porn-laden ad ran again less than twenty minutes later. Truly, a programming move worthy of MILF Island exec Jack Donaghy. [MyHogtown]

A PR rep for the San Francisco Examiner's website pitched San Francisco Chronicle Web editor Eve Batey on a story — and then tried to deny that Examiner.com had any connection with the Examiner. If you don't read newspapers, here's some useful background:San Francisco used to be a two-newspaper town. Now we're a one-and-a-half newspaper town, if you're being generous. I'm just not sure if the "one-half" is the San Francisco Chronicle or the freely distributed San Francisco Examiner. The Examiner is the paper I see most people at the gym reading, if only because its tabloid format stays on a treadmill better. Anyway, the Examiner flack finally conceded to Batey that the website and newspaper were owned by the same company, telecom billionaire Philip Anschutz's Clarity Media Group . What she might have brought up: The newspaper has its own website, sfexaminer.com. (She mentioned it, in passing, but got the URL wrong.) No, that doesn't help any of this makes sense. The email exchange:

Last week, I listed some of the most liberal and conservative television shows on the air, my criteria being, as always, completely unscientific. Well now those old TV gurus at Nielsen have actually compiled hard data showing the series most appealing to conservatives, liberals, and—like a great big dim blue glowing dream of America!—to both. Conservative shows? Hillbilly sitcom The Bill Engval Show and Brett Michaels hepatitispalooza Rock of Love. No surprise. Liberal shows? Bill O'Reilly mockery the Colbert Report, natch, and toe-sucking mess of a dating show I Love New York. Sigh. (Rock of Love vs. I Love New York... Could be a conservatives vs. liberals socioeconomic race relations term paper in there, kids!) The best news of all though? That The Hills is gloriously, like a dove holding a bejeweled olive branch in its perfectly toned beak, bipartisan. Take a look at the full chart after the jump.

MISTRIAL! After extended jury deliberations that lasted twice as long as the trial itself, the Britney Spears License Trial of the Century ended this afternoon in a mistrial. Attorneys gave their closing arguments another try this morning, not long after the jury foreman acknowledged the panel was split 10-2 (he wouldn't disclose which way) as to whether or not Spears broke the law last summer while driving, hitting and running without a California license. The singer avoids potential jail time at a critical juncture in her career, thus clearing her name (for now), restoring her newfound momentum and reopening herself to another decade at least of catty Mr. Blackwell rejoinders from beyond the grave. Congrats, Brit! [AP]

Is Yahoo laying off 1,500 people? Or 3,500? It all depends on how you define "layoff." A commenter on Silicon Alley Insider has a theory on Yahoo's layoffs, which the company may finally announce in today's earnings call:

One side-benefit of Wall Street's turmoil: cabaret club The Box hasn't been entirely booked up by cash-waving bankers this year for holiday parties. And that let Nerve, the sex-and-babycare web publishing group, take over the venue last night for a party. Here with his wife Alisa is Rufus Griscom—now a father-of-two—trying to recapture Nerve's erotic heyday. After the jump, an unusual branding opportunity for Hendricks gin, sponsor of the event. (NSFW).

New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser is that degraded newspaper's usual voice of outrage, which is why she usually looks like this. But from now on we will use this photo of Peyser, in cat ears, cuddling with little "Barack Obama" at the CFA-Iams Cat Show this week. How could this be the same woman who wrote FELONIOUS BALL OF FUR DESERVED EVERY BLOW just last month? [MSG.com, Photo: Chad Batka]

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes attended a cocktail party for the cast of the revival of All My Sons last night at Hermes's flagship store in New York, shocking fans and jaded paparazzi alike as they emerged from their limousine to reveal that the two had morphed into virtually the same person—a freak evolutionary byproduct of Cruise having spent every waking moment since May 2005 obsessively observing his wife for signs of resistance or flight. Granted, Holmes still enjoyed one distinguishing feature in her six-inch height differential, but that should even out in no time once the ancient Scientological practice of calf-binding completes its painful, appendage-condensing process. [Photo credit: WENN via Hollyscoop]

This is what we've been reduced to: Guessing at how much Apple will underestimate its forecasted December-quarter earnings in today's earnings call. No one actually believes Apple's "guidance." For years, it's been shown to lowball the actual number so it can surprise Wall Street, a maneuver that no longer surprises anyone. This has reduced Apple's quarterly earnings call to an exercise in which its chief financial officer pretends he's not lying, and bank analysts pretend they believe him. No wonder Apple CEO Steve Jobs avoids the charade altogether.

Look, yet another good fact has emerged about Rachel Maddow, already the favorite news anchor of elitist coastal liberals simply by virtue of being a normal person (funny how that works!). Whereas most television news personalities are only "engaged" in the internet in the sense that they occasionally glance over their ghost-written blog posts before an underling posts them, Maddow actually made the following statement: "I care about Nielsen ratings, but I also care about Technorati searches.” Is she the future of news media people? Yes she is, and we'll tell you why. Could it be that part of the reason that the online world has so much love for Maddow is that she loves the online world back? It's crazy, but it just might be true! For example, she Tweets. Presumably with her own hands! And you have to figure that her 6,000 Twitter followers include at least several thousand bloggers, some of whom run blogs that are actually influential. Since internet memes often grow out of groupthink, her mere twitterings may have had an outrageously large impact on her positive reputation in the blogosphere, which is now equally influential, in ideas at least, to the mainstream media. Crazy! Further:

Though she's received widespread acclaim for playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey is typically self-effacing about the gig. First, she claimed that her uncannily accurate impression was the easiest voice to do since Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, and now, while talking to TV Guide about the physical adjustments she makes to play Palin, she belittled her own looks in comparison to the candidate's:

The debates are done. The mail-in election has already started. The Obama campaign will go on hiatus for a couple of days while he visits his ailing grandmother. So it's a good time to pause and take stock. Rather, it's a good time for our resident armchair political strategist Peter Feld to pause and take stock. The former Dukakis adviser will be hanging around the comments to answer your questions.

Paging John Gruber! Apple's Mac Mini, which CNET once dubbed the harbinger of a "petite-PC revolution," may soon be replaced by something newer, better and inevitably smaller. [UPDATE: Yes, Owen edited in a stupid CNET quote, "petite-PC revolution," which I obviously wouldn't type even while drunk. Bear with him a few days, because Denton just made him lay everyone else off. But Owen, I warn you: Gruber doesn't miss a thing.] Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo reports, "Two major retailers in Europe have confirmed to me that they can't afford any more of the little computers. While this could signal an updated model coming in, they have been told by Apple to expect no more of it. Their impression is that—once again—the Mac Mini may be dead dead DEAD for real." Why do I have the gut feeling these two leakers have been hacked by Apple PR? They'll keep their jobs, but will need to submit to Gizmodo under new names.

And now, for what will presumably be its last trick before tumbling into a three-and-a-half-year election hangover, Saturday Night Live is rumored to have booked Barack Obama for an appearance on its Nov. 1 episode. The cameo replaces the candidate's original guest spot on last month's season premiere, which Obama was said to have backed out of in anticipation of Hurricane Ike. But one blogger's recently posed conspiracy theory is way more fun, suggesting that Lorne Michaels and Obama campaign overlord David Axelrod instead colluded at the time for a November surprise. But like Alec Baldwin, whom Michaels is said to have coaxed to the set last week with Harvey Levin's home phone number and a week's supply of gay venison, Obama, too, is pay-to-play through Election Day:

Chace Crawford, well-coiffed pretty pretty princess Gossip Girl actress, is plagued by rumors that he is gay, mostly because he is a beautiful lady who lives with his costar Ed Westwick. He was even on the cover of Out magazine a few months back! Now he's gracing, solo!, the front of V Man magazine, a publication targeted at a readership who enjoys looking at photos of gorgeous, feminine young men. In the mag, he's got a sweeping hairdo and says things in the interview like "I don’t know if I could pull off a Kevin Spacey, but I’ll try!” Oh Chace. I'm sure you could pull off Kevin Spacey. Just ask him. I'm sure he wouldn't mind. Hey! There are two more of these silly V Man photos after the jump.

Stewart Alsop, the goofy San Francisco-based venture capitalist, has this in common with Nouriel Roubini, the louche New York University professor known as "Dr. Doom" for his timely predictions of the current market collapse: Both are Facebook stalkers, aggressive in their requesting of friendship from attractive young women. But Alsop has one key difference: He's utterly shameless about it. Roubini was spurred into late-night Hitlerian name-calling by Gawker's reporting on his Facebook habits. We've sometimes felt the urge to hire a bodyguard for CNET video personality Natali Del Conte when she and Alsop attended the same party.But confronted by Mashable about his relationship collection, Alsop freely fessed up: "In his mid-50s, Alsop reaches out to young attractive women and asks if he can be their friend. Many say yes. Alsop says he's an old guy and it makes him feel as if he's got something going on. There's no downside for Alsop. Some may think it's weird, but it doesn't change anything for him." In case you had any doubts on how free-thinking the Bay Area is on such matters, Robin Wolaner, Alsop's "No. 1 girlfriend" and the CEO of social network TeeBeeDee, supports her man's Facebook habit. Even though, in the same Mashable article, she recommends against accepting friend requests from people you don't really know. Like, say, her 50something venture-capitalist boyfriend.

The Obama campaign, not content with the eleventy billion dollars it raised last month, is going to squeeze countless thousands of dollars out of news outlets who want the "privilege" of covering election night in Chicago. That'll be $935 for access to the filing center, please. Or for those publications on a budget (all of them), $880 will buy you a nice spot on a riser! The public must know what the view is like from the sixth step on the riser there, fellas! The campaign says it's just covering costs, which would indicate risers made of white gold. Full rate card after the jump; reporters across the country are, right now, literally begging for their bosses to purchase them access to the heated section. Sad:

Click to viewBoomp3.com Sporting her finest cut-offs, Spider Man trilogy star Kirsten Dunst stopped off at a Early Voting facility. After she walked out of the voting booth, Dunst did her best Palin Dance to celebrate her decision to rock the vote. Dunst quickly added, “I may be doing the Dance, but it doesn’t mean that I voted for her. Although, I would love to see Tina Fey have all that work.” [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 election, the economy, and Madonna and Guy all faded into insignificance last night when MTV aired the first clip of The City, and we saw our girl Whitney stepping inside Diane von Furstenberg HQ and getting ambivalently eyeballed by Olivia Palermo (who seems to have a weirdly strong screen presence). [NYO, NYP]
♦ The sixth season of Project Runway has wrapped: Rebecca Romijn, Eva Longoria and Lindsay Lohan reportedly make guest judge appearances, although regular judges Nina Garcia and Michael Kors earn less airtime than before. Yet due to legal issues we can't wrap our mind around much less summarize, no one knows when or where the show will air. [WWD]

I'll give Yahoo's culture this much: It is democratic and egalitarian, treating all employees equally. Equally like children. Yahoo's "start wearing purple" campaign was a clue — really, where do you see adults wearing purple, outside of a science-fiction convention? But I didn't realize how institutional the infantilization was until I got an eyeful of Yahoo's management-training materials. They are Web 2.0 meets The One-Minute Manager — all bubbly, rounded corners, big quotes, and emoticons. There's even a mirror, to remind Yahoo's leadership what preciously unique snowflakes they are. The richest part for me was the letter from CEO Jerry Yang, calling for "managerial courage." If only he could take his own advice. Here's Yahoo flash-card-sized advice for managers: