Michael Jackson's greedy estate is sure trying to cash in, but no scheme would make the King of Pop happier than a tour and Vegas show by the famous circus troupe inspired by his music. Will Bubbles be cast?

The hottest fantasy in Silicon Valley involves a big, hot... tech bubble. Facebook and Yelp supposedly want one, so they can IPO in 2010; even Penthouse publisher FriendFinder Networks wants to go public, despite a sex harassment scandal.

The Way We Live Now: Bubblicious. The Great American Real Estate Bubble is so one bubble ago. People are already gulping in fear for the new bubble. Will it be stocks? Asian currencies? Failed laundromats? Boutique hotels? Golden pennies? Sure!

Good news, jobless poors: The recession is over, according to the billionaire nerds who run Google. Their computers told them so, and now the executives are in New York to spread the word and count their gold bars.

The Brits at the BBC checked in on the Silicon Valley economy, and found this horrific scene: People quitting perfectly good jobs and investing perfectly good money under the delusion that boom times are here again. Ouch.

Foursquare has raised its first venture capital investment, and it couldn't have been easy: There are persistent rumors the social networking company stole its code from Google. Plus, it wanted to invest the money in a domain name. Ooof.

The economy may wax and wane, but overheated tech rhetoric lives forever. Today's how news: The internet apps for Apple's internet phone will soon be bigger than the internet. What?

The Huffington Post raised $25 million right before traffic cratered post election. Ad Age's Simon Dumenco ran the new numbers and decided HuffPo is just a sad new version of Salon.

Wanna know why Bill Clinton hates Barack Obama so much? Because our Hopey President-elect is basically rerunning the entire script of Clinton's '92 campaign, including the Obama meme-of-the-day: chafing at life inside "the bubble."

There are so many gaudily fraudulent characters in the story of this country's mania for buying and selling homes — like Sam Leccima, the former Flip This House star who allegedly slapped "Sold" signs on unsold houses and didn't even have a real-estate license. A&E yanked his shows from the channel's lineup after charges that his house-flipping efforts were a hoax.

If Gay Talese had a blog, he'd be all about promoting Last Call at Elaine's, Brian McDonald's memoir of bartending at the legendary old-school New York intellectual hang-out. Elaine's was to the '60s and '70s what the Magician was to three years ago. That means that McDonald is as connected to old-school media types as you can get without a masthead position at the New York Review of Books. So even though this book appears to be an account of an era only a few dozen people could care about it, it's the right few dozen people. Brian McDonald is Sloane Crosley for The Olds. At a reading last week on the Upper East Side, the book sold out, presumably to its entire audience.

Sony's Bravia line is famous for making incredible, spectacular ads. They did one that involved dropping a quarter of a million Super Balls. They did another in which they blew up 70,000 liters of paint. You get the idea. Awesomeness! Their newest (unreleased) ad has them covering entire city streets in Miami with bubbles. What does this have to do with selling TVs? No idea! Is it worth it to make wildly expensive performance art pieces as branding exercises for a line of electronics? Who knows? But we have some pictures of them filming the ad [via Adland], and a clip of that crazy super ball production, after the jump. If you can parse the logic here, you are either a great philosopher or a great salesman.

Denise Lefrak "We Built This Lefrak City On Rock 'N' Roll" Calicchio, also a former Sotheby's broker, explains the current "trend" of buying extremely expensive apartments and spending years remodeling them and also buying $30,000 couches with this awesomeness: "This trend is not going to go away because there are so many people who want these apartments. There's the new rich and there's the old rich. There's the poor rich and the rich rich." This is from a great article which is especially priceless because each rich person gets to talk about how much they donate to charity when they're not buying $30,000 couches. Well sure y'all do, darlings! Gotta offset that travesty of a tax burden somehow! Also: a couch that costs $30,000! Do want!

Today on The View, the audience was treated to the bubble magic of world-renowned Bubble Scientist Fan Yang, who played with bubbles. Maybe it's not your thing, but whatever, we find it utterly soothing.