We live to serve, and so we're thrilled to have the chance to help reader Gordon, who emailed this request last night:

Despite whatever fallacies you may have been forced to endure during your youth, we're happy to announce that cheaters do, in fact, win. (Those of you who went to boarding school probably already knew this.) We're not quite so happy, however, to announce that the new maxim of victorious cheaters extends to Bauer Publishing's glossy toilet paper, Life & Style:

Celebrity weeklies do the funniest things. Just ask Bonnie Fuller, who famously took heat for a Star cover that changed Demi Moore's dress to a lovely shade of white, so as to compliment a rumor that the actress would be marrying Ashton Kutcher. Leave it to Life & Style, however, to raise the bar by releasing a cover in which 3/4 of the images are actual Photoshop cut-and-paste jobs. After the jump, a quick lesson from the entrails of tabloid photojournalism, in easy-to-digest, charticle form.

We can't say we were blown away with the union slogans y'all submitted for the not-actually-striking writers at The Onion. There are several potential reasons for this, we realized. First, you are not Onion writers, and, thus, are less funny than they are. Second, strikes are not inherently funny. And third, and perhaps most significant, it's not a real strike, and our gullibility did not inspire you to deliver your best work.

Click to enlarge.

Yeah, well, a new Hummer could drive right through a hurricane while eating that bomb for breakfast. No contest, dude.

Folio: funnyman Dylan Stableford — and we're pretty sure there's also a Bront hero with that name — takes a hard look in the new issue at the messy business of product placements. He's not saying that mags accept payments for placements in their editorial (sorry, BusinessWeek). But all bets are off, he says, when it comes to which products editors will push on TV, where an editor will often mention products from a company with which her magazine has a "relationship."

Political cartoonists are a special breed. They must bring to work every day a delicate mix of elegant artistry, clever wordplay, gimlet-eyed observation, genuine insight, biting satire, and a refined appreciation for the absurd.

The problem with deadpan humor is that you never know whether to take seemingly serious stuff seriously. To wit, this note on the top of The Onion's website:

At first we thought this was our favorite thing in the current New York Review of Books:

Good morning, class! Please sit down and take a moment to look at the above image, which compares the front pages from today's editions of our city's two beloved rags. You'll note that the individual covers are completely distinct from one another, free of overlapping coverage. This is nothing short of monumentous: By managing to make themselves mutually exclusive, the papers have finally articulated our an implicit, socio-cultural divide. For tonight's homework assignment, figure out which side you're really on.

• From the Us Weekly website today: "In some early editions of the July 18 issue, Us Weekly inaccurately reported that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were adopting a baby boy together. Her new daughter is, in fact, a girl, and while Pitt was present when Jolie signed the adoption papers, he himself was not a party to the adoption. As the magazine went to press on the night of July 4th our reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia were continuing to report out the story. By the following morning we learned that we had made these errors and stopped the print run in order to correct the story. However not all issues were corrected in time."

In the poll our slutty sister Wonkette is running on whether Matt Cooper and Judy Miller should just give up and reveal their source, the enough-with-the-First-Amendment camp is kicking some ass.

We want to be dismissive of The New York Sun. We really do. We disagree with its politics, something about Seth Lipsky frankly scares us a little, and, while we know plenty of folks who write for it, we don't know anyone who actually reads it. But then the paper goes and runs a piece like it did today — and exegesis on the history of perhaps our favorite food, the ice-cream sandwich, complete with recommendations for good gourmet sandwiches in the city and a recipe to make one at home — and we kind of fall a little bit in love with those kooky right-wingers.

It's nice to see that even in these trying times, old newspaper hands are able to keep intact their characteristic self-importance, victimhood, and total lack of proportion. On Romenesko's letters page today:

This afternoon is the big, climactic showdown in the Matt Cooper and Judy Miller anonymous-source saga. (Unless it isn't: There could always be another postponment or something.)

Sometimes, our mothers see our nasty apartments and beat us with copies of Martha Stewart Living. And sometimes, we read those copies and find fascinating articles on entertaining. In particular, we're enamored by a recent spread called "Dessert and a Movie: Cinema and treats under the stars are a sweet tradition at this New York farm."

Photo caption from the New York Sun homepage this morning:

It's Friday, so it's time again for Sexy Jon Fine's Sexy BusinessWeek column. He whiffed the first one and fouled off the second; will he strike out on the third?

A fellow media obsessive points us today to the Studio 360 website, which features what is quite clearly the single coolest action figure ever: a custom-made Kurt Andersen doll. The images aren't great, so we can't really make out the copy on the packaging, but we do note that Kurt comes "with Kung Fu Action Grip!!" and also with a warning: "Not For The Overly Treacly."