I started writing for Defamer one year ago tomorrow. I am relieved of my duties today. Reflecting on the roughly 1,400 intervening posts — and looking ahead to the future — something occurred to me.

I've been instructed to use my goodbye post to relate a story I haven't told before. So strap in, kids: you're getting the never-before-revealed tale of my brief foray into reality television.

Cloris Leachman's improbable Dancing With the Stars run concluded Tuesday night on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where the irascible 82-year-old hoofer ultimately settled not long after being ousted from the show's final seven competitors. Ever the gracious host, Kimmel joined her on his stage, Indian-style, for an exit interview combining a heady blend of batshittery, pathos and defiance amounting to a defeated cry for help that not even nine Emmys, a Golden Globe and an Oscar waiting for Leachman at home could quell. Or maybe it's just her final, insolent means of saying, "Suck it, Lucci." Either way, Cloris remains first in our hearts and has a standing invitation to rearrange our furniture any time. Godspeed, girl. [ABC]

A tender postmortem in today's New York Times reminds the world yet again that seriously — like, really, this time — David Geffen is leaving DreamWorks. Having shepherded the monolith through the Hollywood establishment from conception to its first marriage (and divorce) before giving the frazzled bride away a second time in an arranged marriage to its dashing Indian suitor, Geffen's tenure is remembered fondly by his 'Works co-founders Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Not that they'll admit to knowing what they're doing without him.Such modesty! To a point, anyway: If and/or when his Reliance Big Entertainment honeymoon ever tapers off, Spielberg and DreamWorks president Stacey Snider really won't have the Geffen touch to help woo another international conglomerate into bed. But by then Spielberg, 62, will probably be ready to scale back anyway, and survival will be less about braintrust than brand (and the library it manages to develop with its new distribution partners at Universal). He shouldn't even be there now, if one of his more illuminating disclosures today is to be believed:

There's nothing like a truly excellent goodbye letter. One case in point is a rambling missive to the world from former hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde, who closed shop last month after deciding that it was just too risky to keep doing business with banks. Specifically, he calls out the, "low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."

The Downsized Employee woke up the first business day after the downsizing somewhat disappointed to be angry at no one. The Downsized Employee stayed in bed a full fourteen minutes longer than she really wanted to while considering the emotional fuel that might sustain a final task. On Sunday the Downsized Employee had woken up angry at the middle manager whose idea of a heads-up was not replying to two email requests she'd sent a couple weeks earlier asking for a key fob to the office. On Saturday the Downsized Employee had risen at 7 a.m. with a hangover and an uncharacteristic cache of fury directed at her ex-boyfriend, who had been a shithead, but really, had he ever once humored any of her long-repressed desires for stability or security, no, and that brings us to the underlying slight. The Downsized Employee could summon no rage toward the boss who canned her, because her boss had never given her any reason to believe he would treat her anything other than as a disposable commodity.For this reason the Downsized Employee felt somewhat foolish considering the many hours her mind had spent re-enacting the flashpoints and foreshadowings in what had been, really, an utterly unremarkably bad relationship with her boss. The Downsized Employee's Boss was not reconsidering his decision to Downsize the Downsized Employee. The Downsized Employee's Boss had downsized some 18 employees along with her, some of whom had been re-hired in different capacities. Did the fact that Downsized Employee received no such opportunity have to do with the fact that "The" Downsized Employee had been an unusually vociferous voice of dissent? It was possible. When the Downsized Employee had started at the company to co-launch a new website her boss decreed should position itself to compete with a supremely inane website for celebrity photos and gossip overseen by a dogmatically shallow celebrity tabloid reporter, the Downsized Employee filled with righteous indignation and said she would rather quit or hell, die than do any such thing. The Downsized Employee proceeded to co-produce a website she saw as being the precise opposite of that and co-usher said new website to prominence and widespread popularity by offering to the public what she saw as an antidote to the easy, sloppy superficial bullshit. Oh sure, it was easy for the Downsized Employee's Boss to say, "Come on, it is not like you are offering the Paris Review," but it was far harder, she felt, to actually show up every day and bother trying to reconcile the dumbed-down, image-based internet habits of the American public with what she knew - okay, she did not know, but for sanity's sake she had to believe - to be a deeper, harder-to-satisfy longer-term hunger for content that would be more challenging, more nourishing, more unique or in any case actually funny. The Downsized Employee's Boss generally only ever exhibited contempt for employees who made concerted attempts to reconcile those things. But the Downsized Employee understood this. She had watched previously Downsized Employees stubbornly cling to some rituals and pieties and time-consuming traditions that she personally appreciated but knew had sadly prevented their intellectual gifts from reaching their well-deserved wider audience. The Downsized Employee's Boss had taught her a few things in that regard: don't get clever with a headline, numbers and photos are more important than words, etc. etc. the important thing was always to strive for balance. But there remained a fundamental difference of opinion as to where that balance was. The Downsized Employee felt that the Downsized Employee's Boss's customers craved - and deserved - a slightly smarter, more skeptical product than her boss desired to give them. The Downsized Employee felt silly bringing it up again, but the Downsized Employee had been notably instructed by her boss to write a post about an "exclusive" on the Drudge Report claiming that the staff of the Oprah Winfrey show was "bitterly divided" over whether to have Sarah Palin on her show, even as Winfrey had a year earlier publicly decided to host no political candidates on her show until the election as a consequence of her endorsement of Barack Obama. The Downsized Employee had felt this "exclusive" to be a fabrication concocted by cynical Republican operatives eager to paint all liberal females as craven elitist hypocrites whose intolerant sorority of Accepted Feminists coldly dismiss any woman who tries to embrace True Christian American Values. The Downsized Employee's Boss felt that the Downsized Employee was wrong, that the takeaway of the story ought to be that "Sarah Palin Sells," period, and the Downsized Employee felt that sure, of course, she sells, but could "She Sells" be the end of the story?

A Long Goodbye to an 85-Year Run [NYT]
Yankee Stadium photos [Flickr]

So, goodbye Ramiele, huh? It was about time. The girl who started out as one of my favorites (one of those "dark horses" people like to talk about), quickly fizzled out and got lost in a sea of better, clearer voices. It was sad to see the perpetual crier cry for herself, but her closing rendition of "Do I Ever Cross Your Mind" was a decent enough send-off. Why is it that people always sound better once they're voted off? Cathartic singing? A lack of nerves? Whatever it is, we'll be seeing you Ramiele (or, I mean, I won't because I don't go to concerts) on the tour.

Terrible news about English filmmaker Anthony Minghella's death. Some criticized him for the high-gloss of his pictures, but really that just seemed emblematic of a certain admirable style, a visual elegance that was traditional and constant in today's jump cut, shaky camera auteur scene. In the films he wrote and directed, from the supernatural romance Truly Madly Deeply, to his masterpiece The Talented Mr. Ripley, to his last, curious effort Breaking & Entering, Minghella (who also produced and worked extensively in television) showed the passion of a true devotee of the medium. His technique may have lacked a certain zingy flair, but that was made up for by a refreshing lack of cynicism. Minghella's films brimmed with sincerity, a commodity that, especially today, feels pretty rare. After the jump, find some clips of his work.

Of the 9 or 10,000 posts I've done since we started this site, this one is the hardest to write. After almost four years here at Defamer, I've decided it's finally time to move on. In an effort to keep this short and sweet, I'll be climbing out of the blogging hamster-wheel this Friday, and though I wish I had exciting news about where my next paycheck will be coming from (or some great story about why I'm leaving other than "it's time"), I'll probably just be taking a little hiatus to figure out what's next and work on some projects I haven't had the time or energy for since, oh, mid 2004: writing that might not involve typing in a tiny box in a browser window, eating the occasional lunch, spending lazy afternoons standing in front of the Chinese Theater in a loose-fitting Power Ranger costume, shaking down tourists for money. You know, how everyone in L.A. spends their idle hours.

LolSecretz, that wonderful mash-up of Post Secret and lolcats, has called it quits. The pressures of facing redundancy and dealing with real life overwhelmed the two charming-looking bloggers. So, we mourn the death of a big, bright flash in this oddly shaped pan. It was great. And that is not untrue. Gudbai, frenz.

Vice co-founder and resident badboy mascot Gavin McInnes is, finally, officially, OUT at Vice. And VBS (Vice's MTV-partnered online video site) and even Dos & Don'ts, the last vestige of the magazine and brand his suddenly grownup colleagues still allowed him to helm. The news shouldn't surprise anyone who's read about Vice's new money and newer social consciousness. McInnes broke the news himself earlier today in an email to friends. "It's a long story but we've all agreed to leave it at 'creative differences,' so please don't ask me about it." Like Craig Kilborn taking 5 Questions to CBS, Gavin will soldier on with his photo mockery at streetcarnage.com. McInnes promises other projects soon, to be announced on his site "as they blossom into fruition like a hundred humid vaginas in the presence of God's boner." That's the kind of '90s retro edgy ANSWER Me! ripoff tone we miss from the new, "child soldiers are so sad" Vice. Full email after the jump. [Previously]

Another rabid Apple fanboy has put down his Jonathan Ive-designed pom-poms. His complaints? Wholly predictable and tiresome. He's upset over a software update which can disable iPhones and prevent third-party applications from running. Actually, the "goodbye cruel world" post has some pretty good analysis on the whole situation, though it's a little — ok, a lot — heavy on the melodrama. His rant about Apple CEO Steve Jobs, after the jump.

As you know, Doree Shafrir is leaving us today, which is an occasion for great sadness. As readers, you know her from her fantastic work here on the site, but those of us who work with her have been lucky enough to see a whole other side of Doree. Who is Doree Shafrir? Let's take a quick trip down memory lane, via the magic of stored e-mails.