$19-billion-in-debt California is considered putting ads on license plates: "The electric plates would look normal while the car is in motion, but would flash advertisements any time the car is stopped." Wasn't this in Wall-E? [Time, image via]

After yesterday's robotic buzz saw failure, and America's reluctance to use nukes on the well, BP is turning to a huge pair of shears to cut the leaky pipe in the Gulf. December isn't too far off, right? [AP, pic]

So, "top kill," BP's last-ditch effort to seal up their oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, has failed. Now that our best chance for stopping the leak didn't work, what's next? And what sexy nickname will it have?

Nate Hill, the furry artist behind the "Free Bouncy Rides" and Death Bear, is being pursued by producers interested in offering him a TV show, according to Bucky Turco. Dude. This guy is a TV show. Easiest script ever. [AnimalNY]

Jersey Shore, the (overly) buzzed-about documentary series created by the vengeful ghost of Margaret Mead, is coming to an end tonight. (Well, a season end, at least.) So what do we do now? Explore other terrible youth cultures, of course!

Sloane Crosley got a book deal by being the most popular book publicist in New York. Now, Sloane Crosley's book publicist has gotten a book deal herself. Taste the meta! There are only five other ways to get published now.

Back in May David Simon, creator of The Wire, asked lawmakers to relax the nation's anti-trust laws so newspaper owners could get away with collusion. Now he's telling the New York Times and Washington Post to flout the laws completely.

Former MSNBC host Dan Abrams, not content with running his shady new conflict-of-interest-laden PR firm for working journalists, now wants to start up his very own "'Drudge meets The Huffington Post' site." Oh good.

The mantra of modern lying news executives these days is "Doing more with less." Sure, we have fewer people and pages and dollars, but we'll do more with less! Time for a new motto.

Rupert Murdoch is fundamentally a newspaper man. That's how he built News Corp. into a world-strangling media conglomerate. But will his stubborn soft spot for papers be the thing that brings the company down?

Newsweek, which traditionally (dentist's office joke), has for the first time ever correctly identified an overarching trend in American society and formulated a reasonable response, unaccompanied by any special "The Historical Jesus" stories!

NYT editor Bill Keller directly addressed questions about the paper's business model today—specifically, about charging for online news, and the possibility of the paper going non-profit. He'll have to decide sooner than he'd like.

What has our favorite semi-anonymous ad vandal Poster Boy been up to lately? Just tearing down the commerce-based capitalist infrastructure and replacing it with a vision of public utopia.

A laid-off journalist has proposed a fancy idea that would have the twin benefits of re-employing a lot of unemployed journalists, and producing a quality historical record of our time that could reside in the halls of our nation's finest libraries forever. So needless to say it will never happen, because the public hates journalists, and is functionally illiterate. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, now that the liberal elite is in control of the public purse strings! So is it time to bring back the Federal Writers Project?

Hey, whoa, BLOW UP your television and get ready for DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT sound and visuals comin atcha from a WIDE SPECTRUM OF NEW HOOKS. This is the future, people. The Tribune Co.'s "Chief Innovation Officer" and craziest dude in the newspaper industry Lee Abrams has some new memo-fied ideas that will have you looking at TV weeded out of your mind a whole new way. Consider: "The old line 'Don't fix it if aint broke' makes no sense. It's like saying: Let it break...then we'll fix it." And that's just the beginning!:

Our rapid 24-hour-a-day news cycle is turning "solid journalism" into a quaint anachronism! As you may have heard. First it was round-the-clock cable news, then the internet happened, and now even real news outlets are making all types of errors trying to keep up with blogs, where we just invent our stories whole, like Keyser Soze staring at a police station bulletin board. Fortunately some journalistic theorists have just the thing to prevent the general public from being suckered into believing everything they read: media training for tots!

When Radiohead unveiled the then-breakthrough gimmick of letting anyone pay whatever they liked to download its In Rainbows album, opinion was pretty much split between those who thought they had discovered the future of the music industry, and those who thought that nobody in their right mind would pay more than $0.01 if they didn't have to. Well, now the (approximate) sales figures are finally out:

Viral video may be dead, but that doesn't mean that the whole concept of the "viral" campaign has disappeared. It's just moved on to newer, more annoying creative formats. And now viral campaigns don't even need a corporate sponsor—agencies are doing them with the mere hope of attracting a corporate sponsor. Advertising apocalypse, or creative marketing? Or maybe both? An agency called General Projects launched a site called Schtock.com that basically shows cut little mashups of stock photos. Everybody assumed it was a viral campaign for Corbis, the stock photo company. But actually GP did it on their own, and then took all the attention it generated and went to Corbis like, Hey, hire us, we can get you attention like this! So far Corbis hasn't done it. [via Adrants] So, waste of time, right? Unless you consider pics like these art, in which case, good job of making internet art. Ultimately the agency probably will get business off this clever stunt, but let's hope the idea doesn't spread. We have enough viral shit as it is without people doing it on spec:

So I was in my bathroom last night, flipping through the "It Girl" issue of Nylon* and the whole thing reminded me of another thing I saw but had no desire to post about earlier this week, the fact that Leigh "Princess Coldstare" Lezark was photographed attending at least 21 shows at Fashion Week. Yeah, no one cares! Blame the Subprime Celebrity Crisis.Of course no one cares about Leigh Lezark and Cory Kennedy and Peaches Geldof and even Julia Allison and no offense but their "zero money down" strategy w/r/t talent! This silly idea of Andy Warhol's about everyone getting to be microfamous is just as silly as the idea that everyone in America needs to own a house when obviously they really don't have the "marketable skills" our society would deem worthy of that sort of security. But we invested then-valuable hours in their crappy fundamentals and look what happened: they and Lindsay and Paris and the pothead socialite tranche and the Kardashian tranche and the reformed rapper concubine tranche brought the WHOLE CELEBRITY MARKET crashing down with them. And now it is up to Us Weekly to make sure Sarah Palin doesn't get elected while we at Gawker educate you in the ways of the new communist regime. Look, it is not like people were paying us to give them "AAA ratings." We hated them all along, every one, but we get paid by the page view. That is how the free market works. Or doesn't, I dunno! Anyway thank you market for rallying in support of us trying to figure out complicated things such as "How fucked are the people who don't actually have any money?" Please celebrate the liquidity while it lasts this beautiful cold weekend!