Hey, so long as Oprah is buying that "essential truth" crap, ain't no way Tanenhaus is disagreeing.

• Jesus, whether you believe in him or not, loves you, and that's why he's given you the documents from Paris Hilton's deposition. You knew the bitch was dumb, but you never could have predicted this level of retardation. It's medical, really.
• The transcript for Colin Farrell's sex tape makes our hearts surge with hope. Just like we felt the first time we saw Bridget Jones' Diary.
• We expect NYC restaurants to be filthy, but Soho House? Oh, the $1300/year horror of it all!
• We've seen promo posters for The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, based on the book by Fake Writer JT Leroy — and the marketing department behind them clearly has no clue what the fuck is going on.
• Opinionistas writer Melissa Lafsky is revealed. Now that you know her name, you can also know she's the estranged step-sister of Jordan Catalano!
• William Shatner returns to his true calling as an awards show host, which naturally ups the worth of his kidney stone to $25K.
• Packs of cigarettes seem to be falling from the sky, for reasons we can't quite figure out. Either some sneaky guerrilla marketing is afoot, or God has taken pity on your habit.
• Your job sucks. Get a new one with Gawker Jobs.
• Stop reading James Frey, and defintely stop reading him in public.
• Tina Brown takes a "break" from the Washington Post. Will we ever see her again? Or has she lost her will to buzz?!

Perhaps not the best tag for a film based on the work of JT Leroy.

On Fake Writer James Frey's website, an update announces that the BigJimIndustries.com is currently down not because of detractors, but because traffic was affecting access to other sites that share the same network. "We basically forced James to take the site down," it reads.

Click to enlarge.

Now that you know A Million Little Pieces certainly doesn't contain James Frey's life story, as you'd long thought it did, we can imagine you must be desperate for any sort of printed-and-bound account of Frey's real past. This is why we're pleased to direct you to America's best stomping ground for obsessive collectors of useless ephemera: eBay. Where you can now find the 1986 yearbook from Frey's high school.

We were flipping through the press clippings included with It's Not Me, It's You, the hardcover debut from former Observer and Post writer Anna Jane Grossman and Los Angeleno Flint Wainess, and we noticed a blurb mentioning that none other than Fake Writer JT Leroy had contributed "his" worst breakup story to the book. Considering JT Leroy doesn't, you know, really exist, we found his essay to be delightful. A sampling:

Now that we're fully into week 2 of Fake Writer Day, it's time for all the weekly publications to play catch-up with their insights on Fake Writer James Frey. Time and Newsweek give us the expected recaps, just vanilla enough for red-state readers who have no idea what the hell is going on. Tom Scocca at the Observer however, has no qualms about flat-out calling James Frey a liar. Which, of course, he is.

• On the website for NBC's The Office, there's a cutesy little feature which allows users to upload original photos documenting their own office torture sessions. Someone posted the picture at right with the following caption: "Art Director of a major magazine busy at work with some fashion samples for Holiday Gift Guide." Alright, kittens, IDENTIFY THIS MAN. Who is he? We know you know! [The Office]
• It was inevitable: James Frey faces a class-action lawsuit regarding the false claims in A Million Little Pieces. [HND]
• Urban Outfitters liked online retailer Johnny Cupcake's t-shirt designs, so they asked for a sample to be considered for placement with the retailer. For whatever reason, a deal wasn't worked out — presumably because Urban realized they could save cash by stealing the designs and making the t-shirts themselves. [Consumerist]
• What does your H&M location say about you? Personally, ours says "poor and desperate." [VV via Curbed]
• How to write Gay. [MBToolbox]

Memoir poser and Fake Writer James Frey has wisely added password protection to his personal page, Big Jim Industries. Christ, so many people are relapsing this very minute.

We promise that this will be our last James Frey post of the, uh, minute — but it's really important, we swear! While the Smoking Gun has dug up and disproved that which can be disproved in rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces, much like us, the boys at Freakonomics have wondered what else Frey might've falsified. Apparently, there's a disturbing little resource called the Mortality Detail File, which provides information on every death in the United States. Oooh, why not use that to find out if anyone resembling Frey's lover Lilly, who hangs herself in a Chicago halfway house just as Frey is coming from prison to see her, ever existed:

The Smoking Gun, Sunday: "The Man Who Conned Oprah: 'Book Club' author's best-selling nonfiction memoir filled with fabrications, falsehoods, other fakery, TSG probe finds."

Late yesterday, it was announced that James Frey would be adding an author's note to future editions of his memoir A Million Little Pieces. While we doubt this note will contain an unabridged reprint of the Smoking Gun's 4,000-page exposé; on the book's repeated inaccuracies regarding Frey's "criminal" record, we're sure it'll be just enough to appease Oprah and keep our grandchildren from attacking him 50 years from now.

• Honestly, you didn't think another day of FreyGate would pass without the media's resident rehab expert Seth Mnookin weighing in, did you? Hell no — we were wondering what was taking the dude so long. [Slate]
• You may be dismayed at Frey's dishonesty, but admit it: You're also kinda jealous. Here's how to mack his style and make Oprah your bitch. [BlackTable]
• What if Frey is really a diabolical story-stealer? WHAT IF?! [Exile]
• Considering the stance Frey's publisher, Nan Talese, has on the definition of memoirs and what her husband, Gay, thinks of nonfiction, you have to wonder what this mess has done to their marriage. [GalleyCat]
• Tomorrow is Friday, meaning you have only one day left to compose your own parody of a gritty, dramatically embellished memoir. Come Monday, that shit's gonna hit unprecedented levels of tired. [BlaggBlogg]
• Listen to Frey talk about being in the prison yard. You know, for irony's sake. [B&N]
• Oh! Look! James Frey is walking! With people! This is huge! [Telescreen.org]
• Assuming A Million Little Pieces still gets made into a movie, we'll be petitioning for Joey Fatone to star. [Defamer]

We were actually going to do a live-blog of "memoirist" James Frey's appearance last night on Larry King but, if you saw the program, you understand why we couldn't bear to put forth the effort. To put it mildly, it may have been the most uncomfortable, uninformative, painfully banal hour of television to which we've ever been subjected. When he wasn't nervously sipping from his coffee mug every two seconds (surely that thing was empty after 10 minutes), Frey deftly handled hardball questions. For example:

Yes, yes, we know it's ironic.

BREAKING! FAKE WRITER DAY(s) UPDATE! From the Random House website:

Click to enlarge.

• James Frey will be on Larry King tonight to give his first interview (or statements of any kind, really) since the Smoking Gun first broke the news about his "dramatic embellishments." Inside scoop: we shit you not, he'll be bringing his mother on the program. Grab the kleenex, Oprah. [USA Today]
• In a "holy shit how far can this go" move, Random House will offer full refunds to readers who bought A Million Little Pieces directly from the publisher. If you scored your copy at the bookstore, have fun arguing with the pimple-faced staffer at Barnes & Noble. (If you actually do try to make a return at the store, do let us know how it goes.) [CNN]

We've spent an unhealthy amount of time alone lately, quietly mulling over the implications of the synchronized scandals of James Frey, who falsified key details in his Oprah-sanctioned rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces, and JT LeRoy, who falsified a tragic past and a case of AIDS when, in fact, he doesn't really exist. We've pored over our old texts of literary theory and given much thought to existential issues of criticism, but we're still not sure how to feel about this whole stupid mess. Help us, won't you?