THe L Word doesn't show any ads, because it's on Showtime. But now the show popular with lesbians and non-lesbians alike has done something that will either become the future standard of television, or destroy the show forever: it has given its writer and creator the power to "control all brand integration" in the show. That means the writer, rather than the ad people, will be selling the product placements and determining how they play out. And it may become the de facto place for bad companies looking to make sweet $300,000 advertising love with the gay audience:

Bernann McKinney mortgaged her home to travel to South Korea to have her pit bull cloned. Turns out, 30 years ago she kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed, and allegedly forced him to have sex with her. The Times of London further reports: "To add further mystery and zing to the whole story, Mr Anderson was said to have been wearing a Mormon chastity belt at the time." [The Australian, The Times]

The September issue of W magazine features actress and Lance Armstrong lover Kate Hudson glaring purposefully down her nose at the camera. "The look is a definite departure for her!" writes W's flack, enthusiastically. The look's not a departure for the magazine industry, though; it's strikingly similar to this 1994 Harper's Bazaar cover. There simply must be new ways of looking at the camera, people. Click to enlarge. [via J'Adore Joey]

John McCain's been hammering home his "Obama's a celebrity" angle for weeks now. The not-so-hidden message behind those ads is an old and effective one-Obama is the candidate of Europeans and Hollywood nutjobs. Get it? Now Democrats are upset that Obama's not fighting back hard enough. Meanwhile, the polls remain infuriatingly even. Attached, a graph of InTrade market predictions closing prices for Obama over the last couple months, measuring how likely an Obama victory is. As you can see, the polls are nearing a statistical tie but Obama's still the odds-on favorite to win. Here's the thing, though-nothing that happens in the campaigns between now and the conventions means a damn thing. We're in stasis. Silly season. It's media Groundhog Day, replaying and debating the same stories and narratives over and over again. Sometimes they'll switch the players around-now McCain's on top! But we're still in the post-primaries hangover. Once that campaign finally ended, Obama got his requisite little bump and then things evened back out. But the campaign stories now are just an excuse to pass the time. The citizens who care about politics were already energized by the primaries. As those dragged on, the likely voters all made up their minds. The undecideds and uninformed maybe grew briefly interested or invested, but by the end they were burned out. The campaigns they don't want to energize everyone again until the final leg of the battle, so for the most part they're treading water (Obama) or just throwing shit out to see what sticks (McCain). The majority of Americans, even the ones who probably will vote this year, are not going to pay attention again until the conventions provide something interesting to look at. Those of us who are still obsessing over every little campaign detail are just torturing ourselves. The polls will remain in stasis until Denver and St. Paul, then we get to actually see where this godforsaken nation is heading. In the meantime, enjoy your stupid Paris Hilton videos and tire gauges and trips to Sturgis and surprisingly pleasant Entertainment Weekly interviews (McCain loves Viva Zapata, the forgotten Elia Kazan/Marlon Brando collaboration. Obama says Shrek 3 was "not as good at the original.").

"Then he suddenly stood up and said, 'Lemme go find out something, hold on' and, inexplicably, went to lunch." [LA Times]

"The Vanity Fair editor, who already co-owns the Waverly Inn, has bought the lease of East 54th Street's famed Monkey Bar from the Glazier Group with two partners, hotelier Jeff Klein and London- based restaurateur Jeremy King." [Post]

Time Warner yesterday announced some weak quarterly financials, with earnings off 26 percent. But there was a big bright spot, the media conglomerate's cable networks like HBO and CNN, where profits were up 18 percent, led by advertising gains. There's a similar situation at NBC Universal, where ratings gains at Bravo (Runway, Top Chef), MSNBC (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews) and even the USA Network have formed a thick silver lining around the storm cloud that is the flagship broadcast network. The business-side gains add a financial dimension to the cable industry's creative golden age, described by the Times' David Carr in June and obvious to anyone with a smartly programmed DVR or Netflix queue. Cable is the swaggering golden child of television, and it's only going to get more confident, because the advertising model that's fueling all its fun happens to be perfect for a recession.

In perfect sync with some apparently genuine positive news out of Iraq, Judith Miller is yet again delivering spoonfed reports on America's glorious strategy there, just as she did before she was disgraced at the Times. It seems we are finally being greeted as liberators — within the massive prison camps we have constructed. Miller, now employed by the neocons at the Manhattan Institute, reports in Reader's Digest that Iraq's "Camp Bucca" has been transformed from a riot zone into a super-empowering bakery, gym and mini-University, except for the 20 percent of prisoners sent to some sort of inner prison too terrifying to detail:

The Raleigh News & Observer, which unlike other newspapers has never declared itself too good for the John Edwards love-child scandal, is first with the angle that will probably at long last propel the sordid tale into the Times and Washington Post and basically everywhere: Edwards' presumed speaking slot at the convention, which "ordinarily would be locked in," may be taken away unless he eliminates questions about his alleged affair and love-child. The News & Observer seems to have assembled the piece before the blurry new pictures of Edwards-and-daughter surfaced today, so it probably shouldn't have much trouble scaring up another statement like this, the only supporting quote in the article:

A totally disreputable website called WhosDatedWho has reported that Maureen McPhilmy, who's now married to Fox shouting head Bill O'Reilly, once dated cracked-out rapper Flavor Flav. This has already spawned much mockery and philosophical schadenfreude among bloggers, who point out that O'Reilly is the prototypical rap-hating nilla Republican bastard. The fact that the same website says that O'Reilly himself has dated both Jeff Gannon and Reichen Lehmkuhl doesn't seem to have come up as a counterpoint. Still, we're going to choose to believe that Bill O'Reilly married Flavor Flav's ex until Bill personally comes on our show to tell us otherwise. [The Slanderous Rumor]

Somebody copied Slate writer Jody Rosen's old article on Jimmy Buffett—he found it plagiarized in a small Texas alt-weekly called the Bulletin. So he decided to hunt him down. That's when things got weird and he discovered that, basically, the history of the entire paper was plagiarized from a cornucopia of sources:

Speaking of the constantly, publicly self-flagellating New York Times, now they're just co-opting our ragging on them. "After Deadline," a column on one of their 600 blogs, has an item today on phrases the Times overuses and grammatical mistakes they make far too often. It's like four nice little Gawker posts, but they're running them for some reason. What are the Times' various crimes against language? Misusing "Like." It's not a conjunction, people! Well, it is in casual English, but not according to the stylebook. Please use "as" or "the way." "Best" is the superlative form of "well." In other words, there is not really such a thing as "most well-known." They make this mistake all the time. "Meltdown" Meltdown! The easiest way for the Times to reference the current fiscal crisis is to call it a "meltdown," as they have 400 times this year. Finally, most egregiously, Tale of Two Cities references must be stopped. The Grey Lady published eight headlines involving the "Tale of Two..." construction last year, and one this year. This does not even take into account the many "Best of __, worst of ___" references. Editors, there are far, far better Dickens works to constantly allude to. Isn't Hard Times more appropriate these days? Still, we're pissed that someone in-house picked this up before we could. Stop taking the fun out of mocking you, New York Times!

The time has come for us to put together a current list of default email styles for media companies: First.Last@CompanyName.com, or whatever it may be. Send us your (media) company's style with the subject line "Email Style," and we'll have this public service project ready for you in the near future.

Andrew Fisher, the President of Cox Television and a former reporter and Emmy award winner, is currently locked in a nasty divorce battle in Atlanta-one that centers on allegations of Fisher's "sadomasochistic sex affair at the Mayflower Hotel in 2003." That's the same hotbed of sin hotel that played host to Eliot Spitzer's famous zoom-a-zoom-zoom and a poom-poom with call girl Ashely Dupre! The Atlanta media is strangely silent on this whole affair despite Fisher's big-shot position. A custody hearing is scheduled for next week, and the S&M evidence has been ruled inadmissible. Which is good for Mr. Fisher, except for the fact that the lawyers put out a press release about the whole sordid mess:

You know those handy online calculators that purport to tell you exactly how much any website is worth, were it for sale? They're the type of thing that bloggers use so they can brag that their blog is "worth" many thousands of dollars in a parallel universe. All these things are pretty blunt instruments, but Mental Floss found one called WebsiteOutlook.com that is very bad. Don't like our assessment? Why don't you just buy this entire website for $1.1 million, then? In reality, that won't even cover the value of a single Montauk Monster post. But oh, it gets even more ridiculous:

The penchant of America's greatest newspaper for self-flaggelation is no longer a harmless peccadillo; it's positively self-destructive. Vanity Fair's Bruce Feirstein accidentally stumbled upon a New York Times reader response survey they've been asking web users to take. Usually these things are done for advertisers, to gauge demographics in order to target readers more effectively. This one, though, is a bizarre paranoid list of every scandal, minor and major, the Times has been involved in over the last decade, followed by worried queries as to how much each one upset you, the reader. The questions are embarrassing—"What is the main reason your opinion of the New York Times has gotten worse?"—and specific—"The New York Times' Judith Miller reported about the probable existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Those stories turned out to be wrong. Has this made you feel better about The Times, has it not affected your opinion of The Times, or haven't you heard enough about these stories to say?" That's the most direct admission of error the Times has yet made on the subject, right? More of these terrible survey questions below.

Anonymous sources can usually put some faith in the journalistic principle, that the anonymity of a source is a sacred thing, to be protected even at the risk of jail. But they should have less faith in a reporter's competence. Last week, a New York Times reporter withheld the name of a critic of the Chinese government but gave him away accidentally by mentioning the restaurant he owned. And there's an equally moronic slip in this week's cover story on plastic surgery in New York magazine.

Are you excited that Vanity Fair and American Express' glamorous "Campaign New York" launches in a mere 40 days? The "dazzling two-week series of events," as far as we can tell, offers the following dazzling events: a discount hotel room, a book signing at Barneys, and a "cocktail and shopping night" during which you can swill booze and go spend money on Madison Avenue. That's it. Any AmEx card holder attempting to enter the Waverly Inn at any time during the course of the dazzling two-week series of events will be laughed off the premises by Graydon Carter himself, who disapproves of riff-raff. [Campaign NY via Jossip]

Moguls-relatively unmoderated by outside shareholders, capricious, dictatorial and long-tenured to the point of senility-do have one redeeming virtue. They're distinct individuals who can afford occasionally to tell the truth, while hired managers stick to mealy-mouthed platitudes.

It goes without saying that we will not be in Beijing to cover the Olympics. Furthermore, we've never been to Beijing, and our Olympic experience is limited to one pair of first-round tickets to see the Dream Team crush Kyrgyzstan or somebody in Atlanta in 1996. None of this precludes us from rounding up all of the information on the Internet in order to tell the media that actually is covering the Olympics in Beijing how to do its job. So listen up! Don't be just another sap writing about Michael Phelps while being beaten by Chinese police. After the jump, the only guide to covering the wondrous 2008 Olympics you will ever need: