Did you hear Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang had his house lined with Kevlar before he laid off 1,500 employees? No idea if that's true, but that's the best rumor I heard all week.

Where are laid-off Yahoos drinking away their sorrows? Some in San Francisco, where Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator is located, have congregated at Hotel Utah, a bar South of Market known for its live music. I called the bar and bought them a round of shots — the least I could do after all the fine, fine tips Yahoo employees have provided me over the years. The Brickhouse office will close at the end of the year, one told me. (Photo via 7x7)

The power is out in South Park, San Francisco's startup epicenter. Wired and Yahoo Brickhouse — in the same building — are affected. Caffe Centro is down. Jack Falstaff isn't answering the phone. Six Apart, a block away on Fourth Street, is up. Workers are roaming the neighborhood. Got any more data points? Send 'em in to tips@valleywag.com.

Does Twitter miss former architect Blaine Cook, the technician who was simultaneously blamed for the site's outages and hailed for keeping it alive? We're guessing so, if only because Cook's long-haired mug still — still! — gazes from Twitter's jobs page. Cook recently took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator. He was chummy enough with his coworkers to show up at a going-away party for departing Brickhouse chief Chad Dickerson. But Cook is apparently a short-timer there. A source reports Cook saying he couldn't wait for his contract to expire so he can leave around the end of next month. That's a brief stint, even for Yahoo.

How many ex-Yahoo managers does it take to reproduce a classic Beatles album cover? From left to right: Salim Ismail, Chad Dickerson, Scott Gatz, and Bradley Horowitz. All four were, at some point, responsible for parts of Yahoo's advanced-products group, including the Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. The band reunited last night at the 21st Amendment bar in San Francisco's South of Market district to bid Dickerson farewell; he is leaving Yahoo to become CTO of Etsy, the Brooklyn-based marketplace for hipster-friendly handicrafts one must nod politely about. Ismail is attending to Confabb, the startup he failed to sell before joining Yahoo; Gatz is now running GayCities, a queer-travel website; and Horowitz is now at Google. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments The winner will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: Naughty Jason L. Baptiste, for "One bubble Pete Cashmore would like to pop."

In what seems like another age, my predecessor once wrote about companies' "blogger appeasement groups" — units dedicated to generating buzz, not bucks. With Chad Dickerson leaving Yahoo Brickhouse, the troubled company's troubled incubator for new ideas, I think we can declare the delusion of blogger appeasement groups safely over. The self-appointed punditocracy of the blogosphere never was a real customer — nor even a twisted proxy for a real customer. Playing to the echo chamber only generated noise — a specialty of former Brickhouse head Salim Ismail.

Chad Dickerson, who has been responsible for Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator since December, is leaving the company to be CTO at Etsy, an online handicrafts retailer. We hear Google, where former boss Bradley Horowitz now works, had been heavily recruiting Dickerson. With this move, Dickerson has deftly dissed both Web giants. Well done, Chad! [TechCrunch]

Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear that he made it a quid pro quo before signing a new, lucrative contract with Rupert Murdoch. He's not the only MySpace employee Slingshot played a part in keeping down in Los Angeles. We hear Nick Granado, a top engineer behind MySpace's iPhone version, first flirted with a job at Facebook, then worked briefly at Imeem, before getting lured back with a gig at Slingshot.

Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect led to its frequent outages. We'd heard he left Twitter with plans to relocate to the U.K. Instead, we've learned, he took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse, the troubled San Francisco office meant to incubate new projects. He's believed to be working for Chad Dickerson, who recently listed a position for a software engineer experienced in the Ruby programming language — one of Cook's specialties.

TechConfidential's Joshua Jaffe intensely awaits a serve at Yahoo's Brickhouse party for Web 2.0 last night. Suggest your own in the comments. Yesterday's winner: BartKela. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Is Yahoo shopping the 14,000-sq. ft. space where its Brickhouse incubator sits? Several prospective renters came through on a recent weekend with the building's property manager, a tipster tells Valleywag. With offices now vacant in Sunnyvale, paying for Brickhouse's San Francisco lease surely seems like an unneeded frill. (Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

To find Yahoos ready to bolt, recruiters are taking a wide stance. Cake Financial, a startup, occupies the same building in SoMa as Yahoo's San Francisco incubator, Brickhouse. Employees at Cake plastered Yahoo's entrance and building restrooms with fliers, snaps of which we received from a tipster in the building. Wired confirms that, unlike electronic attempts to hunt down restless Yahoos with targeted ads, the restroom campaign has borne fruit in the form of actual résumés. The flier:

We hear that Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's advanced-produts czar, has finally fired Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. Today's layoffs likely provided a convenient excuse to get rid of Ismail, a suavely incompetent liar. Ismail, a failed entrepreneur turned failed manager, was good at one thing: Getting press for products his group had not yet launched. We told you so.

Desperate to deflect attention from impending layoffs, Yahoo's top management has put pressure on the ranks to deliver some splashy product launches and distract the media. Gullible as the tech press corp is, they'll likely fall for it. A top candidate: Fire Eagle, Yahoo Brickhouse's long-delayed location-data tool. Brickhouse chief Salim Ismail, embarrassingly, has been talking up the project long before it was actually ready; he last promised to deliver it by the end of November.

Salim Ismail's incompetence as a manager may have brought the wrath of the IRS down on Yahoo. One of his employees at Brickhouse, Yahoo's San Francisco incubator, has moved abroad while being classified, for tax purposes, as "working at home." There are a number of steps companies ought to take when employing a U.S. citizen living abroad, but Ismail apparently skipped them. Now, one of the employee's coworkers has received a summons from the IRS's Criminal Investigation Division, where are investigators are looking into a case of tax fraud. While any penalties Yahoo might pay are small in comparison to the Web giant's bottom line, they'd certainly speak to the sloppy management that's been given a pass at Yahoo for far too long. (Photo by irisheyes)

As we reported first, Yahoo's Scott Gatz confirms he's leaving. Chad Dickerson will move from the Yahoo Developer Network to take over running Advanced Products. This is hardly a promotion for Dickerson; we hear he had a falling out with his boss at the developer group, ex-Microsoftie David Sobeski. Dickerson is now in charge of someday making Fire Eagle a real product. He also gets to work oh so closely with professional conference attendee Salim Ismail. And that brings us to our career advice for Dickerson.

Rumor has it Scott Gatz, the brain behind Yahoo's search strategy earlier in the decade, more recently heading up part of Bradley Horowitz's Advanced Products Group, will leave Yahoo at the end of the year. Our source, who claims to have failed in trying to hire away Gatz in the past, tells us Gatz always professed to be happy at Yahoo. Apparently that's changed. Why?

A press tour is oft the last refuge of a scoundrel. Salim Ismail, the pushy head of Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco and newest Silicon Valley Tool, is still talking up Fire Eagle, an admittedly useful software tool for broadcasting one's location to websites. Never mind that Fire Eagle isn't actually ready, and that Ismail's still omitting any mention of Tom Coates, the project lead. Smartly, Ismail is peddling his tale to gullible New York journalists at outlets like BusinessWeek, for whom Silicon Valley must seem too far away to bother with factchecking.

Go to a game show with your favorite videobloggers, get all scholarly, or spy on Yahoo's new digs, all in tonight's Valleywag Calendar.

When you can't take market share, take credit. That's the unspoken motto of Yahoo since Google overshadowed the Web pioneer, and no one has mastered the art like Salim Ismail, the desperately unpopular VP in charge of Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco incubator charged with inventing the company's future. One Yahoo insider calls him "notoriously slimy," and points to Ismail's recent announcement of Fire Eagle as an example of how Valleywag's latest and lamest Silicon Valley Tool does his work.