Look at it this way. Chill with the old dude a couple nights a week, donate his $10,000 to Meals on Wheels, and then write about your life-changing experience on the front page of The New York Times Magazine. Next, you parlay that little gem into best-selling memoir. The critics don't know how not to rave about such a thing. You'll get on Oprah, housewives will throw money at you. And, most importantly, you just might learn a thing or two about the little bundle of troubles that is you. Click through for full-size image. [Craigslist]

Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. will not be jumping from Marvel to D.C. anytime soon. In an interview with MovieHole.net to promote Tropic Thunder, the dashing actor fearlessly tore the ass off The Dark Knight and the comic empire behind it. "Didn't get it," he said, "still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? Fuck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

Our little end-of-the-day fun-fests have ignored the golden-er, black and white-age of movies and TV for far too long. We all know that many of the most important and memorable moments for both mediums occurred before the widespread use of color film kicked in, and before color film was even invented at all, for that matter. So let us celebrate our colorless faves this evening. I'll kick it off with the series that sent me to sleep every night as a kid.

The fighting between Russia and Georgia took its toll on Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. Footage of the embattled leader literally putting his necktie in his mouth and chewing on it while taking what was clearly a stressful phone call started making the rounds today. The BBC even used it to illustrate a story on the ceasefire, saying Saakashvili "chews over his next move." See for yourself after the jump.

It's Madonna's 50th birthday today! And not 36 like her whacky religion says. Anywho, just to ensure that this event doesn't encroach upon some perfectly innocent item, please feel free to celebrate-or bash-the most famous woman on earth on her B-day to your heart's content in the comments. And if you come across other pics of her from back when she was adorable, that would be awesome too!

As you may have read, yesterday master of comedy Bill Murray jumped out of an airplane over Chicago to kick off the city's 50th annual Air and Water Show. And now there's video of the fearless funnyman's free fall. It's Bill Murray-versus gravity! Must see!

Comedian Roseanne Barr took to her website yesterday and unloaded on everyone. Hey, it's fun! On Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: "jon voight your evil spawn angelina jolie and her vacuous hubby brad pitt make about forty million dollars a year in violent psychopathic movies and give away three of it to starving children trying to look as if they give a fuck about humanity as they spit out more dunces that will consume more than their fair share and wreck the earth even more." And that's tepid compared with what she serves up for Voight himself, George Bush, John Edwards, and his former mistress Rielle Hunter.

Former child actress Lindsay Lohan is defending her kid sister, reality TV actress Ali Lohan, against rumors that the youngster has had breast augmentation surgery. When someone posed the question, Linds ripped the bounder apart on her Myspace page. "It made me feel a bit sick to my stomach," she wrote. "My response simply was, 'Did you really just ask me that? She is a 14-year-old girl, and you are a pedophile!'" She then goes on to stand up for her mom.

The director of the carnival comedy Splinterheads, whose people had been cynically piggybacking the most important story of the summer by claiming that Monty the Montauk Monster of Montauk was nothing but a prop for the little flick-and that the origin of the story was the producer's sister-is finally admitting that they lied, lied, LIED! "I'd like to go on record and say our movie 'Splinterheads' has had nothing to do with this Montauk Monster thing. We're shooting a comedy out here in Patchogue-not a horror film. My producer Darren does not have a sister Rachel, but a Rachael Taylor is starring in the film." But even this admission is a little fishy, as it's all put on the shoulders of some anonymous teenager.

So, remember those guys who were going to reveal their earth-shattering Bigfoot discovery at a huge press conference? Well, the huge press conference happened yesterday and the intrepid hunters revealed exactly diddly-squat. Not bothering to display the alleged Bigfoot corpse they say they've kept in a freezer since finding it in Georgia over a month ago, a couple of yokels still received several hundred journalists at a press conference in Palo Alto, CA, yesterday. The liars, a cop on medical leave from the Clayton County Poilce Department and a former corrections officer, instead plugged their website and offered Sasquatch-hunting weekends in Georgia for $499. Oh, but they did produce one bit of evidence.

Yeah, I know, we're giving lying writer, horrible hack, and obvious scat fetishist Tucker Max too much attention. But, well, he's an awful... thing... and there's always the hope that once in a while showing how much of a shit someone is again and again will actually harm them. I know, windmills and such. Still, here is one of the idiot's sycophantic goons/circle-jerk buddies putting someone in a potentially fatal choke-hold because the victim-also some kind of Tucker follower-dissed him on a message board, apparently. You know, coz Tucker and his dudes are raw. And coz this kinda shit is fuckin' h'larious bra.

Sheesh. War sucks! Here's more journalists getting fired at in the line of duty—they all lived, we think!—followed by yesterday's clips of warzone violence. Update: The Committee to Protect Journalists writes with context:"That video you posted shows Turkish journalists in a car under fire—one of the three in the car was injured." Sadly, at least three journalists have been killed in Georgia since fighting broke out.

In these uncertain times for the newspaper industry, it pays to think "outside of the newspaper box" when it comes to coverage of breaking news events. So the Chicago Tribune is trying its hand at live-blogging! And they picked the perfect unfolding story: Droopy-eyed comedian Bill Murray's parachute jump at the Chicago Air and Water Show! Which we would make fun of, except that that is, sadly, the most important piece of news occurring in America at the moment (we've looked). Let's check in on the up-to-the-minute coverage of Capt. Zissou's perilous skydive:

CNN press release: "CNN Recruits Key Political Experts for Campaign Coverage." Exciting! "Building upon its winning coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign and other political contests, CNN has added five more top political reporters and commentators to its deep bench of political contributors and analysts." Great! So who exactly are these five new additions to the best political team on whatever? One Dem strategist, one Washington Post columnist, and these three:

Despite an absence of any "news," every political magazine and newspaper is rushing to publish special "St. Paul and Denver" editions for the political conventions. CQ, Roll Call, and The Hill are publishing on-site daily! Politico will be there! Local papers are throwing everything they have at the event! National Journal expects big things! Meanwhile, all the high-powered attendees will be getting drunk and occasionally checking the New York Times on their iPhones, and the smart reporters just stay home and make shit up. The real reason for the outpouring of journalistic effort:

Here was the Spanish Olympic basketball team, minding its own business by posing for a full-page newspaper ad in the "Slanty-eyed Chinaman" pose, which, as all Spanish basketball players know, is funny and endearing. Then the scurrilous English-speaking media goes and writes a news story about it, twisting it into some sort of "racist" gesture. Despite the fact that Spanish athletes have many Chinamen friends! Spanish nationalist outrage has risen up at the foreign misinterpretations of this widely practiced gesture of eye-based friendship among Spanish athletic teams. So it's only fitting that the (English) reporter who broke the story has now had to write a groveling piece defending his decision to cover this Spanish leisure activity:

When a Hong Kong paper said earlier this week that it had gotten its hands on a 21-point memo from the Chinese government's propaganda unit telling the national media how it must cover the Olympics, the head of the Beijing Olympic committee scoffed, "There is no such 21-point document. Chinese media, according to the Chinese constitution, are free to report on the games." But then the Sydney Morning Herald got the same document, and published it in full. Witness the worldwide free press in action, propagandists! Highlights of the edicts to the proud nation's "journalists":

As of just a couple hours ago, former Seventeen EIC-turned-spokeswoman for all American girls Atoosa Rubenstein was en route to the hospital. To have a baby! The tot will, no doubt, be dubbed "beta kitty" or something and, let's all pray, will be a girl. News of the Toos' water breaking was itself "broken" (ha) on important journalistic tool Facebook. Which is perfectly in line with Toos' general pregnancy oversharing habit. Screengrab of the historic Facebook update, after the jump:

The precious Times has finally condescended to do some original reporting the John Edwards scandal, pulling from the tabloidy muck a scoop establishing that Edwards loyalist Fred Baron, who can't quite recall these things clearly, admits he maybe set Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter and Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young up with two separate lawyer buddies of his, and also maybe paid their legal fees?? All this happened right before one of the lawyers announced that his new client Hunter was not carrying Edwards' love child, and then the other lawyer announced that her new client Young was the father of the love child. And you know, funny thing, both of the lawyers forgot to mention their ties to one another via Baron. Here are some great quotes where swaggering genius lawyer Baron (pictured) pretends he's an Alzheimer's patient, to the Times:

Lewis Lapham's forthcoming Harper's column on Tim Russert is not entirely unexpected, given the cranky literary liberal's public pronouncements on the late host of Meet The Press. But Lapham, sometimes slammed as insufferable bore, has spun a compelling essay out of his rough initial pronouncement that "1,000 people came to [Russert's] memorial service because essentially he was a shill for the government." Maybe Lapham's thorough disassembling is so tasty this time around because the reverence for Russert (not to mention his son Luke) was so completely over the top: two days and three nights of televised memorial, or some 96 hours of airtime, by Lapham's count. Lapham's column is called "Elegy For A Rubber Stamp," entertains the concession that Russert was probably a good father and friend and Catholic, and then swifty moves on to saying Russert had "the on-air persona of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter," that his "stock in trade was the deftly pulled punch" and that Russert was a "pet canary." Further excerpts after the jump.