• Federal government trying to make Times op-ed page less boring. [NYT]
  

Usual caveats apply, but a tipster writes:

• Big shakeup at Yahoo includes resignation of former ABC head Lloyd Braun. [NYT]
  

Last Friday, when meeting with NBC News anchor Brian Williams to help launch his latest messianic charity endeavor, U2 frontling Bono was waiting for an elevator with Williams next to a lightboard ad of the anchorman's face. Bono asked the crowd of handlers for a Sharpie, and one was instantly produced from the rectum of an NBC page (each page contains a complete desk set at all times). Bono then scribbled on the face of the Williams ad, fashioning a bandit mask or a pair of his signature bubble shades, or something. As a last straw, he "signed" the lightboard with his initial, thereby turning it from a piece of crap corporate furniture into a $50,000 collectible piece of crap corporate furniture. Williams was politely amused for the crowd, but this can only increase his well-known distaste for the Irish.

• Willie Nelson and friends have been issued misdemeanor citations for posessing about 1.5 pounds of weed and 1/5 of a pound of mushrooms. And this surprises you not in the least. [Billboard]
• Bono tells the fashion crowd to "take your fucking finger food and fuck off." Which at least implies that someone was actually eating. Baby steps. [OAN]
• Did you miss the Brooklyn Book Festival? Aren't you lucky. [Galleycat]
• Cheers to the Times for throwing in a good old spoiler for fans of The Office. [NYT]
• It always helps to have your wife working in your favor on Amazon. [Greatest Living Poet]
• Greenwich Village reaches boiling point; gay teens and cranky old potheads to throwdown before November. [WaPo]
• Robert Hughes would like to thank radical Islamic terrorists for removing that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" from the New York skyline. [The Australian]

• Bono buys into Forbes, filling the "Sanctimonious Media Mogul Twat" position recently vacated by Ted Turner. [NYT]
• Dishy Jared Kushner wants to do things that are "exciting and respectable." Just like Bono! [NYM]
• Has Men's Health supplanted Maxim as the nation's best-selling newsstand men's mag? Rodale says yes, Dennis denies. Either way, we're pretty sure of who's still ahead in the all-important "incarcerated" demographic. [WWD]

Remember Bono? Irish fella, used to sing in a band? They named an iPod for him or something? Well, today he's editing the U.K.'s The Independent as part of his whole campaign to "Save Africa" or "Cure Poverty" or whatever the hell thing it is that makes hanging out with Jesse Helms acceptable. So what's a Bono-edited paper like? We don't know: it's kind of earnest, and you understand that there are good intentions behind it, but it just seems like the same three chords, over and over again, and it gets a little too preachy after a while. It feels just like the last two records papers. Your dad will probably love it, though.

• Nicole Kidman is questioned by the FBI, and reporters trying to write about Steven Seagal received death threats (presumably from the public.) [Page Six]
• Jessica Simpson decides life is too short to spend an evening with intellectual inferiors. [NYDN]
• Lizzie Grubman and her future husband enjoy his-and-hers stripper table dances, plan to wed this Saturday in a secret undisclosed white-trash snubbing location. Do people still care about Lizzie Grubman? Isn't she sort of 2002? [Page Six]
• Candidate-for-sainthood Bono is apparently quite the gossip. Which is the polite way of saying that once you get an Irishman talking there's nothing you can do to shut him up. [R&M]

· You make the (very tough) call: Which is the more important piece of gay cinema history: Jake Gyllenhaal's shirt from Brokeback Mountain or Vin Diesel's pants from xXx? [The Reeler has more charity auction fun.]
· Bono confronts the one living being who might not be completely bored with him yet.
· Hey, Harrison Ford, try not to sound so f'ing excited about the only movie sequel we really care about: ''I'd like to get it over with so I don't have to answer the god-damned questions [about it] anymore.''
· Mena Suvari may have met her own Federline, though with a crucial difference—her new boyfriend seems to be employed.

Time announced its Persons of the Year early yesterday morning, and the winners were Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates, "[f]or being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow." This is good news for things like philanthropy and poverty reduction and debt elimination, but it also very bad news for Mother Nature, previously thought to be the leading contender for this year's honor. It's also, perhaps, a harbinger of a very bad 2006: If the tsunami, the earthquakes, and Katrina weren't quite enough to put Nature over the top in 2005, we hate to think what she's now planning for next year.

· Club owner David Marvisi (Exit, Spa, Capitale, Butter, and Estate) is part of an ongoing money-laundering probe and may be headed for the same fate as '80s club owner and impresario Peter Gatien. [Page Six] architecture critic Herbert Muschamp: "I'd kill him on the spot." [Page Six]
· Bono is buying Steve Jobs's $14.7 million triplex in the San Remo on Central Park West. [Page Six]
· Sports Illustrated model went nuts when fellow model Bridget Hall walked off with her "goodie bag" of freebies at the swimsuit issue launch. "Where are you going with that?" Tavares snapped, snatching the bag out of Hall's hand. [Page Six]
· Sony America chief Howard Stringer on getting iced out of previous Grammy parties by Tommy Mottola: "I don't think it's asking very much to be invited to events I was actually paying for...The one year I was invited to Sony's party after the Grammys, I was seated by the exit sign." [NY Daily News]
· Madonna is collaborating with fashion photographer Stephen Klein on an exhibition at the Deitch Projects in Soho. [Intelligencer]
· The Mission (the Bowery's newest club) decries the gentrification of downtown in their press release, but says the club "is set to become Manhattan's new 'it' spot for corporate functions, media industry events, and private parties." [Michael Musto]

One happy Danish boy last night. David, a 20-year-old kid brother visiting New York, tags along to the Cubbyhole in...