We got a tip that the San Jose location of Spoons, a favored happy-hour spot across the street from eBay's headquarters, was getting purchased by Hooters. An eBayer attending CES acknowledged this last night, but wouldn't confirm the other half of the tip: that eBay CEO Meg Whitman had gone to the city council, asking them to stop the sale. She must not like hot wings. Fortunately for eBay's owl-eyed employees, the changeover seems to be going on despite any of Whitman's efforts. (Photo by PunkJr)

Bijan Rezvani dropped his iPhone on the subway tracks in New York City. Instead of contacting the transit authorities like a sane person, he braved oncoming trains, the electric third rail, and plague rats to jump down and snatch it. His exuse? "I needed my phone, so... I got it." Even though we call it the Jesusphone, people, it's not going to save your life.

Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen is "sobbing with excitement" over the news that a newly discovered drug, orexin A, eliminates the effects of sleep deprivation. "SIGN ME UP!" [blog.pmarca.com]

Before Larry and Sergey named Google after a typo, Larry Page called his Stanford project BackRub. Blogoscoped thinks the name comes from the way Page's algorithm used backlinks to judge a search result's relevancy. We just think the name is kind of pervy, especially since Google is now a verb. Millions of people, BackRubbing all day long — it's some kind of geek dream. And yes, by the way, that is Larry Page's hirsute paw.

That New York Post item about an "Internet billionaire" and his "lady-loving," "wild-child" daughter who's been to rehab twice still has us thinking. Former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's daughter Courtenay is wild enough, but her dad's not rich enough. How about Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the aspiring film producer? Her MySpace profile lists her as "bi". And while we haven't heard anything about stints in rehab, she did write the following in a MySpace blog entry:

My editor comes from the world of magazines, not tech companies. So he has an odd habit of leaving early before holidays. "Most offices will be closing at 1pm," he announces in our chat room. Or, "Remember our readers are focused on leaving early today." What he really means: Owen Thomas will be leaving early. Seeya, boss! For the rest of us, the SiteMeter is about to cross 100,000 and Ted from Uncov shows no sign of letting up on me via IM. Any real geek knows this is the most wonderful time of the year — all the lusers are logged out and the network is wide open for business. We'll be rockin' the failboats right into January.

The hot Santa at Marissa Mayer's Christmas party inspired us. Readers, we've heard all about your tragic holiday parties — like Facebook's prissy shot luge, where health inspectors forced partygoers to use a glass rather than press their lips against the ice to get a drink. Pictures are worth a 1,000 words. Send in your photos of the most embarrassing holiday-party moments this season, and we'll run the best — the worst, rather — as a present to you next week.

What's this we hear about Google executive Marissa Mayer's holiday party, held in San Francisco at her ritzy condo in the Four Seasons this Saturday? A hot Santa with a lump not made of coal? Scandalous! Does her Facebook profile still say she's looking for "random play"?

Pay By Touch, the San Francisco biometrics company in the middle of a legal implosion, employs over 700 people in offices scattered across the country. Previously, we reported that the man at the top, cocaine addict CEO John Rogers, is a convicted felon. Word out of Pay By Touch, however, is that Rogers had his 1998 felony converted to a misdemeanor. Fine. Show us those papers. But either way, a new legal classification won't change what Rogers actually did to his ex-girlfriend and her property. Here are the legal documents detailing the incident so you can see for yourself. It's all there: legal threats, destroyed kitchens, and a promise to make her life a "living hell." Our source has asked us to blur the victim's name.

Who says Facebook is the province of the young? Increasingly, the 30something bosses of naive recent college grads are proving adept at turning the social network against its earliest adopters. Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank's North American arm, was busted when he told his manager, Paul Davis, that he'd miss work due to what colleagues took to be a "family emergency". Davis turned up the photo above, freshly posted to Facebook from the Halloween party Colvin apparently missed work to attend, and attached it to his reply, copying the rest of the office as he did it. The email thread is now spreading around the net. After the jump, the entire exchange, and the incriminating photo.

EAST VILLAGE, NEW YORK — Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who sold social-news website Reddit a year ago to the publisher of Wired, brought Reddit's beer-laden world tour to New York last night. And, on the promise of an open bar from 7 till last call, the people showed. Among the crowd a pair of Condé Nast Newhouses and a whole mess of Silicon Alley's scruffiest. What'd I learn? Some tidbits such as that Huffman doesn't always flush and that at Reddit, Ohanian just draws the aliens. But mainly we learned that the people wanted to know: Would Jakulia show?

Ashton Kutcher's greatest contribution to geek culture — and no, we aren't referring to Internet telephone startup Ooma — is coming to Boston. Fulfilling every nerd's wildest fantasies, the guilty-pleasure reality show Beauty and the Geek is coming to Beantown on Saturday . Producers are searching for dweebs and bimbos willing to provide the CW network's viewing audience with endless entertainment at their personal expense. And the specifics of the casting call?

New voting site Dig a Silicon Valley Girl has reached the pinnacle of loser-generated content. It makes the implicit explicit — the sex-starved id of the male-dominated Valley made tangible in a thoroughly useless, if entertainingly revealing site. DSVG recycles the social voting of Digg, mixes it with rating site HotorNot, and, we're sad to say, mixes in a thorough helping of Valleywag's archives, minus the social critique. Now lonely geeks can vote for their juvenile obsessions in public, rather than leaving juvenile comments across the Web, tittering in whispers at the next Web 2.0 event, or entertaining themselves singlehandedly to tech-news podcasts. There's only one higher purpose this site can serve: Becoming the destination for all the frustrated prepubescents who clog up the comments of sites trying to cover significant, breaking news ... like the wardrobes of videobloggers, for example.

We were wrong about the identity of the Viking-clad Facebook founder living it up on Friday night. It wasn't Sean Parker, who, we hear, is in Spain. (Sorry about that, Sean!) VentureBeat claims it was Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook's VP of engineering and one of the three official Facebook cofounders. The person in question wore a Viking helmet and a fur skirt. Nothing else. (Ed.'s note: Rawr!) Our tipster must have been pretty hammered, because the description supplied — "tall, has dirty blond hair and glasses, and is not particularly attractive" — fails on two out of four counts. Moskovitz has brown hair and is, according to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, "such a fox." Again, our apologies. But we're glad Moskovitz is taking notes from Parker on how to get down. Update: We now hear Moskovitz was in Palo Alto Friday and Saturday. Can anyone identify that fur-skirted man for us? (Image by VentureBeat)

"One of my roommates tells me this morning that she went to 'the craziest party ever' in Pacific Heights last night," a tipster writes in. "It involved an indoor pool, a lot of champagne, naked people, and someone in a Viking costume who said he was a Facebook founder." Ah, she must be talking about the house owned by Founders Fund partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, nicknamed the Grotto. And who was the Hagar the Horrible Facebook Founder? "She's trying to find out his name from other friends who were there, but said he's tall, has dirty blond hair and glasses, and is not particularly attractive." Based on that somewhat unkind description, we'd guess the Viking was Sean Parker. Shame we weren't there to remind people that Parker's not actually a founder of the social network. The party was ostensibly held to toast Microsoft's recent investment into the social network, though we've heard whispers of other reasons behind the celebration. Were you there? Snap any pics? Let us know.

Event-planning site Going.com created Naughty Gifts for the Facebook platform last summer, hoping the app would bring traffic to the site. But instead, a lot of users have come and gone. The company says Naughty Gifts has gathered 4 million Facebook users, predictably including my boss. [Ed.'s note: Come see me in my office, Carlson.] Going.com, however, hasn't seen a commensurate benefit from all that attention, with less than 250,000 monthly visitors according to Compete.com. So what's a startup to do?

In May, former Creed frontman Scott Stapp hurled an Orangina bottle at his beauty-queen wife.

The Lobby, David Hornik's Hawaii funconference, may have no agenda — but a lot is happening all the same. One delicious incident recounted to us: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who'd previously wooed BusinessWeek columnist and Valley fox Sarah Lacy onto his TechCrunch40 judges panel, apparently said something that made her throw a drink in his face. That's the first thing I've heard about The Lobby so far that actually made me wish I was there. Update: We hear the glass was empty. Okay, so make that two wishes: That we were there, and that Lacy wasn't so quick to sling back her booze.

The Web 2.0 Summit attracted the Valley's elite to the swanky Palace Hotel, but Oracle's OpenWorld conference, scheduled for November 11-15 at the Moscone Center, draws the far nerdier enterprise IT set. How do database dorks spend an evening in seedy San Francisco after a long day of conference sessions? A Market Street strip club knows. They're not interested in wining and dining networkers in hopes of attracting VC millions. No, they go straight to the city's many strip clubs to blow off steam accumulated from many hours in back office server rooms. The Market Street Cinema posted the above signage upon the conclusion of the Web 2.0 Summit anticipating a stampede of sex-starved database administrators. (Photo by ChannelWeb Network)