So it's happened: the Montauk Monster has sold out. This Brazilian Volkswagen ad purportedly features a "dogfish," but its true identity is clear. You've come a long way, Monty. Video proof after the jump:

Christians are not taking the Atheist War on Christmas lying down. Heathens ran quirky, anti-god ads in DC recently, so Christians are striking back with a novel strategy—quirky, pro-god ads!

Ad creep, recessionomics, etc: a beauty company will pay you 100 BRITISH POUNDS to plaster their logo on your eyelid. But you have to wink a lot. Stunty! And unique. Click for bigger pic.

The Huffington Post announced just weeks ago that it had landed $25 million in new investments. Now, their traffic is (predictably) plunging. Arianna Huffington's dealmaking abilities are awesome.

• The bloodletting at CBS is underway. [THR]
• Macmillan Publishing and FSG are both trimming staff. [AP, NYO]
• Ad spending for the first nine months of this year fell 1.7 percent. [WWD]
• Katie Couric, Campbell Brown, and Rachel Maddow will appear in the next issue of Vogue. [TVN]
• Sean Hannity's Alan Colmes-less show begins January 12th. [NYT]
• The Disney Channel is taking its act to Russia next year. [NYT]
• The most amusing corrections published this year. [Regret the Error]

Consumerist's Biggest Business Debacles [AdAge]

Nobody lives in Detroit any more, and nobody reads print newspapers, so maybe it's not so bad that the few remaining Detroit residents can no longer get their awful papers delivered to their burned-out homes.

On the Colbert Report tonight, Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps confirmed the NIGHTMARE scenario Anderson Cooper only hinted at: He's letting his body go, and soon will be the trashiest Greatest Athlete Ever... ever.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" remixed as life in an ad agency. They make Pigpen work through the weekend! Monsters. Click through for the video:

• Newsweek is planning to cut staff as well as give the mag a makeover. [WSJ]
• NPR is cutting 7 percent of its staff and dropping two shows. [NYT]
• Ad spending fell 2 percent during the third quarter, although online advertising continued to grow. [Adage]
• Les Moonves isn't too worried about Jay Leno's move to primetime. [NYP]
• Rumor has it Entertainment Weekly may go web-only. [Gawker]
• Reed Elsevier, which has been trying to sell trade titles like Variety and Publishers Weekly, is pulling them off the market. [NYP]
• Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. [HFPA]

What would you do for some free cell phone porn? Stand on one foot? Lick the pavement? Ha, Playboy is willing to work with you on this! Now, what would you do if it wasn't exactly porn, but a reality show webisode thing? You'd participate in a convoluted cell phone-based marketing scheme, wouldn't you. There's babes involved!

Sites like Myspace and Facebook, which are technically called "social networking" sites but are better known as "Lisa is...OMG are you watching The Hills right now? Craziness" ego-projection mechanisms for creating alternate realities, are suffering just like everyone else during this recession. Not traffic-wise; humans' desire to keep the outside world appraised of their moment-to-moment "status" only continues to increase. But money-wise, things are not looking quite so wildly engrossing:

Donny Deutsch, the recently-fired insufferable CNBC host and official Gawker Douchebag, has been photographed in an affair with another man's wife, and it's all over Page Six.

JCPenney's new terrible, stupid prison ad is probably the future of advertising, sadly. It's been released as a five-minute internet video and was created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the same firm that kinda-but-not-technically created a "yay teen sex" ad for the retailer earlier this year. This seems to be the same sort of play: controversy=attention. And it's working! All Saatchi had to do this time was film some loser husbands crawling around like dogs, in a dungeon, ruled by women. (Yes, it's after the jump.)

How to make fat Swiss children change their ways? How about slapping an "Every fifth child is overweight" sticker on playground swings which are refitted with super-thick chains to hold up the fat ass of the fat child trying to swing on the anti-fat ad swing? That'll teach 'em to go out in public! An ad agency did this, by choice. [Copyranter at Animal]

You cokeheads just don't listen to reason. So the government tried metaphors. Remember when they cracked an egg, representing your brain, into a sizzling frying pan, representing drugs, to indicate that drugs will "fry" your brain? Years after that, it turns out that people are still doing drugs! Now the UK government has hit on a brilliant message: If you do coke, you are killing this innocent dog. The clever use of a grisly puppy murder makes this, honestly, the best anti-drug campaign we've seen in quite a while. Tell poor scruffy Pablo you needed that bump—or tell his dead body:

If you're working for a client-service business that's facing serious uncertainty because of the crumbling economy, the last thing you want is a stressed-out CEO. So you'd be grateful for a boss like Kevin Roberts, the CEO of massive global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who's written a long blog post about his recent refreshing five-day luxury vacation at Elizabeth Hurley's favorite Thai spa. The Classic Cleansing diet and daily massages really helped him get some perspective on his employees' crumbling 401(k) plans:

♦ What recession? Condé Nast is launching a new magazine in the UK. [WWD]
♦ More on the fallout from the Tribune Co. bankruptcy. [NYT]
♦ Yesterday the New York Times revealed plans to mortgage its office building; now it says it's in talks with lenders about upcoming debt payments. [AP]
♦ Jann Wenner has hired a new chief digital officer. [AdAge]
♦ Is the advertising world sexist? Maybe! [HuffPo]
♦ Jay Leno may earn $40-50 million a year for his new gig on NBC. [MP]
♦ NBC still has some Super Bowl ads available, if you're interested. [AdAge]

We talk about the ongoing death of the newspaper medium a lot around here, because we are evil bloggers who hate the paper industry and, furthermore, are personally responsible for every beat reporter laid off in the past five years, because their CEOs decided to cut their jobs after reading about how bad their industry is here, on the blogs. Well, at least we have numbers on our side—the side of darkness and unemployment. How bad is the outlook for newspapers in 2009? How about epically, historically, never-seen-before bad? Is that bad enough? Because that's how bad it is: