Just in case you had any remaining shred of a suspicion that inane Microtrend maker-upper Mark Penn might actually have some worthwhile advice about something, today he touts blogging as a good job opportunity. Ha!

Cool Web kids are fighting the plague of long Internet addresses "URL shrinkers" — quirky names like TinyURL and Is.gd. One of them, Bit.ly, just raised $2 million. Great news for Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi!

Since you asked, Mediaite.com is an unpronounceable mess. But only because you asked.

A word of advice: If you happen to be a hotel manager and you notice an employee come to work with a bit of ash on his forehead, you may want to check a calendar before demanding that he "wipe that fucking shit off." It could be Ash Wednesday! Unfortunately, no one bothered to mention this to Niklaus Leuenberger, the (former) managing director of the Palace Hotel who was fired on Monday for doing just that. Of course, the rather unique location of the hotel probably didn't help Leuenberger's cause. Not only is the Palace conveniently located across the street from St. Patrick's, the church owns the property the hotel sits on, too. [NYDN]

Marcelo Tas is a Brazilian TV host described as "a tropical version of...Jon Stewart." But you could also describe him as "the first celebrity to trick a company into paying him for bullshit on Twitter."

The publishing industry is led by experienced professionals with deep knowledge of literary appeal. So if they say Kathy Griffin deserves a $2 million book deal, who are you, the public, to argue?

Shocker: PepsiCo hired the profound geniuses behind the Breathtaking, universe-shifting multimillion-dollar tweaking of the Pepsi logo to redesign Tropicana's packaging. It was a complete and utter failure! Yet another reason "rebranding" is dumb:

Oh boy, this has instantly become our new favorite trend in advertising: Catvertising. It's advertising, on "trained" cats. The catch: fools, you cannot train a cat!

Press release of the day: Do you care deeply about landmine victims, and also about your own personal cleanliness? Now you can combine those two interests, with the world's grimmest bar of soap:

Motorists find ads annoying when they are placed on billboards, hundreds of feet away. "Better" idea: why not make them think that your ad is actually vandalism to their car? Yea!

The guy who thought it was a good idea to get the eponymous number from Tommy Tutone's tuberculosis-for-the-ears (it's catchy and uncomfortable) 867-5309/Jenny , has decided to sell that number.

Today is important, because it is the day we get to show what may be, without exaggeration, the single most stupid internal memo ever sent to a newspaper staff. It concerns "productivity."

Did you know that the most important thing about Barack Obama's election is the fact that he's giving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free publicity to the makers of Blackberry? It's true.

Which New Year's Eve TV experience was more painful: Kathy Griffin screaming about knocking "dicks outta your mouth" on CNN, or Dick Clark's stroke-ravaged Frankenstein muttering on ABC? Click to watch and choose.

Should the New York Times Co. sell its stake in the Boston Red Sox? Some people say yes. But this clever Monopoly metaphor says NO:

First, the good news: Reese Witherspoon has confirmed the postponement of the Cameron Crowe film that would have paired her with Ben Stiller in a supernatural romantic comedy about volcanoes and human sacrifice.

Fancy business school degrees—who has time for them? Instead of an MBA, wouldn't you rather have some sort of laser-printed homemade certificate stating that you spent six months hanging out with a dude who writes books about "Purple Cows" and "Small is the New Big" and "Meatball Sundae" and other made-up marketing terms? Well Seth Godin's game-changing new "Alternative MBA" is just the program for you! "This sounds as good as summer camp, MBA school, and a spot on 'The Apprentice' mixed together," says one of Seth's enthusiastic minions. Yea, that sounds about right!

After we went to all the trouble of offering Spitzer hooker Ashley Dupre seven—seven!—different career choices yesterday, what does she do? She goes and tells Diane Sawyer, "I want to go after my music and do what I love. And not lose track of who I am on the way. I'm trying to pursue my music. I'm still living for it. I'm not gonna give up my dream. I'm not going to change. I'm not going to let this change who I am. And what I love." All of those short declarative sentences do not change the fact that your song "All We Want" is just the sort of generic R&B bullshit blathering that has already largely destroyed our nation's airwaves. We say this as a friend! Regrettably, Ashley is listening to her other friends: her MySpace friends. Like Whitney Houston, and "Fin" from Williamsburg:

What's the point of having a "Climate Czar" if it won't be Al Gore? The rich and chunky Tennessean has taken himself out of the running for the made-up position in Obama's cabinet, meaning it will probably go to some dead-ender ex-governor who never even won an Academy Award. Is this the beginning of the end of Obama's alleged "Celebrity Cabinet" plan? We're going to say yes, and thank god for that. Remember a couple of days ago when that flowchart of unknown provenance came out that allegedly showed the frontrunners for all the cabinet positions, and they were all like political superstars? But then Colin Powell took himself out of the running for the Secretary of Education, and Gore is out, and do people really want RFK, Jr. running the Environmental Protection Agency? If you're going that route, why not Captain Planet? Why not Aquaman? Other bad-idea frontrunners on that chart: Screamin' Howard Dean for Health and Human Services, Smilin' Bill Richardson for Dept. of the Interior, and NYC police head Ray Kelly for Homeland Security. It's like the lineup of ABC's Sunday morning talk show! Also John Kerry and Chuck Hagel and Tom Daschle and every other politician that any significant portion of Americans have heard of is on that list. Barack Obama doesn't need a celebrity cabinet. He's the celebrity. Any further political celebrities require air, water, and attention that should be reserved for Barack Obama and his lovely family and a dog to be named later. [Pic via MSNBC]

The lovingly jumbled piles of books at Shakespeare & Co., the famous Paris bookstore, must madden Googlers. All that information, unorganized! In the wake of its $125 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by book publishers, Google is now thinking about turning its money-burning Book Search product into an online store. This will end badly.Remember the Google Video Marketplace? Exactly. Launched months before Google bought YouTube, the video store required cumbersome copyright protections and was a nonstarter with consumers. Google closed the store last year, enraging the dozen or so people who'd actually bothered to buy videos. And Google's Book Search operations are a disaster, overseen by Ramsey Allington, an unqualified IPO lottery winner who joined Google at the right time to get valuable stock options and social connections. He has made a mess of his department, driving out qualified female employees by being a sexist boor. Publishers would do well to steer clear of Google until he's gone. Even if Google Book Search is placed under competent management, I doubt it will succeed. Google lacks a merchant's sensibility, trusting algorithms over salesmanship. But most people do not walk into a bookstore knowing what they are looking for. They seek serendipity — a quality that Googlers, with their overplanned vision of the world, hope to eliminate. There is beauty in an untidy stack of books. But a Stanford MBA's spreadsheets will never capture that. (Photo via Paris Parfait)