There may be a glimmer of truth behind the spoof video posted here Friday of Rupert Murdoch calling a tabloid parody of his Wall Street Journal "a fucking outrage... I want every single copy burned." An apparent Journal circulation guy has been going newsstand-to-newsstand in Los Angeles buying up all copies of the Journal parody pictured (click through for larger image). It's possible neither Murdoch nor anyone else at WSJ owner News Corp. is connected to the scheme, but the guy buying up the papers is the same one who usually brings Journal promotional materials, was wearing a WSJ shirt and paid with a corporate Amex, one newsstand operator told the Times:

That "MILF Island" episode of 30 Rock everyone was talking about Friday? In which 20 hot moms square off in front of 50 eighth-grade boys at "Erection Cove?" It aired during NBC's "Family Hour," in which the whole family is supposed to be able to gather in front of the TV together. NBC executive Ben Silverman re-launched the concept just 10 days ago. Anyone who took the man at his word — and hopefully few people did — either had a very awkward night or has a very interesting family. Now NBC is trying to rewrite what it meant by "family hour." Here's network exec Mitch Metcalf in tomorrow's Times:

As some of you may have heard, oft-chronicled Star magazine editor-at-large Julia Allison was on CNN's Reliable Sources this morning. Host Howard Kurtz asked, "You've been called the Paris Hilton of the media world. And Radar magazine says you are the third most hated person on the Internet. I don't know how that statistic was arrived at, but doesn't that kind of criticism and mockery, doesn't it-don't you find it depressing?" Ms. Allison responded, "Actually, I found that really amusing. I actually ranked above the Marine who through the puppy off the cliff. That's quite an accomplishment. I mean, you know, I said to 'Radar'-I said, 'Thank you very much for hating me more than Rachael Ray, more than Tony Kornheiser.' I mean, how is that possible? I was impressed with that, yes. My parents were very proud.'" Then Kurtz asked if she thinks that any press is good press.

Tee-hee. The Amadeus Net author Mark Rayner is hosting a photoshop contest at his blog that's yielding giggly results such as this one. More examples after the jump.

With the exception of women's gymnastics, the Olympics have pretty much been a big bag of turds for the last forty years. Aside from the general boredom, there was the the massacre of hundreds of student protestors in Mexico City in 1968, the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in '72, our boycott of the Commies in 1980, the Commies' boycott of us (and Mary-Lou Retton!) in 1984, East German women, and now all this blah-blah-blah about Tibet. What to do? "There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them."

In today's Salon, Heather Havrilesky writes about The O.C. and Friday Night Lights and other shows I will never watch. But she opens with a fascinating and disturbing reminiscence of how she used to horribly mistreat a child's most precious possessions. "When my sister and I were kids, we made our Star Wars action figures go on dates with each other. First we'd take turns picking our favorite action figures, then we'd set up 'apartments' for each of them. (We knew from 'Three's Company' that single people always lived in apartments.) Next, Luke would knock on Leia's door, but she'd usually say she was busy or had to wash her hair, because she secretly wanted to go out with Mark (that was the hunkier 'Empire Strikes Back' version of Luke) or Harrison (the hunky 'Empire Strikes Back' Han Solo)." More of her sinister molestations after the jump.

First, someone at The New York Post selected this open-mouthed photo of Aretha Franklin to illustrate a tiny item about the singer in today's Page Six online. Then, some Sixer began said item with, "PAPS, get your wide lenses ready-Aretha Franklin is coming to the Hamptons this summer!" In the next sentence, Franklin is referred to as "The large and in-charge diva." Okay, we get it: Someone, or several someones, at the often thuggish paper doesn't like the singer and wants to point out that she's fat and demanding. Except, the rest of the item is pretty obviously a space-filling favor drop for Franklin's own agent.

Stuff. Indians. Like. Do I really need to do context on this one? Okay, here goes. First there was the blog "Stuff White People Like." And then a bunch of white people were all, "But what kind of white people?" Then the Jews came and they liked stuff too. And more whites came who didn't like anything-not even Mythbusters! Now Indians, from India, have a stuff-we-like blog of their own! Or is this a big ol' racist prank?

I'm guessing that Time's "Most Overrated Blogs" feature doesn't include Tumblrs. There's a readers' poll that goes with the article-we're on it, natch-but I like that Time has picked a few blogs out for particular ridicule. "Reading Slashdot these days is like visiting the IT guy at work. He's infuriatingly smug and cares passionately about stuff you don't care about, and views your lack of interest as further confirmation of his intellectual superiority. Enjoy." Jim Cramer's money.com rantings? "The place to go to be reassured that the financial market is fine, just fine and Bear Stearns isn't in any trouble at all. Be sure to check back later in the day to see if Jim has posted any updates."

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday that he would fight an initiative to amend the California Constitution to ban gay marriage if it qualifies for the November ballot. Schwarzenegger said he was confident that such an amendment, which already are on the books in 26 other states, would never pass in California and called it a 'waste of time.'"

Now that Katie Couric is leaving the unwatched CBS Evening News before her contract expires, CBS CEO Les Moonves has little reason to keep pumping money into its putrefying corpse. Moonves "isn't a news guy, he's a showbiz guy," notes Huffington Post power-blogger Rachel Sklar. And Couric is hardly the first person to fail at anchoring the crappy program.

Slate, the online magazine that exists to tell you why you were right—but not for the reason you think, today tackles the sensational Nazi orgy scandal of British auto racing exec Max Mosley. And in typical Slate fashion, they ask the knowing, highbrow, we're-already-over-the-interesting-parts-of-this-scandal question, "Mosley's bedroom habits may be distasteful, but are they pathological?" Well, Slate would like to give you a long disquisition on psychiatry to answer that question!

The Wall Street Journal broke a terribly large piece of media news this week—CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is leaving the network after the elections, before her contract is up. That they had this story and not, say, the Times—who generally handle the TV media beat pretty well and on their own, thank you—is a nice coup for Murdoch's newest acquisition. It took a little while for the Times to catch up, but they came out last night with their own story on the meeting that ended Couric's career. (Amusingly, they credit "press reports in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere on Thursday" for breaking the Journal's exclusive scoop. Petty!) While some speculate as to what Katie will do next, or when she'll leave, Henry Blodget wonders who killed her. We're inclined to believe she killed herself.

Erica Jong says Matt Taibbi wants to fuck his mom! But he can't, so instead he channeled that desire into print by calling Hillary Clinton's arms "flabby." It's all part of the feminist author Jong's theory of "Misogyny, Momism, and Militarism," which she chronicled on the Huffington Post. "Momism is a kind of Oedipal obsession with the bad mother — to counter a boy's attraction to his good mother...You cannot fuck your mother so you must revile her," she explains. Taibbi, the angry Rolling Stone writer who is the most entertaining political journo in America, surprisingly took offense to Jong's logical inference that his use of an accurate adjective in a magazine story pointed to his own desire for incest. So he replied: you're an old, ignorant hack, Erica Jong!

Husband-of-Touby Jon Fine, who writes for Business Week when he's not being lassoed by his millionairess wife's trademark boa, sneaked a look at Rupert Murdoch's speed dial. The Australian media mogul's old cellphone is on display at the Newseum, that mausoleum of 20th-century media bric-a-brac, which Fine checked out this week. Murdoch's key phone numbers include those of his children, various executives at News Corporation-and, slightly less predictably, a Tunisian movie producer called Tarak Ben Ammar.

In the Moscone Center, former vice president and current Valley privateer Al Gore will be speaking at the RSA Conference 2008 today at 2:15 p.m. — but there's no press allowed. There will, however, be hundreds of people with top-of-the-line technology and at least a passing familiarity with cryptography and the like. Hacks in the press room have been overheard discussing plans to sneak in. Valleywag encourages anyone with Wi-Fi, EVDO, a Twitter account with SMS enabled or, better yet, a videophone that can live stream to Qik or another service to let us know where you're posting smuggled coverage of the speech. (Photo by Dan Spisak)

Are you aware that there's an entire blog on the New York Post's website which consists of nothing but Post staffers chronicling their own ongoing quests to lose weight? Water retention, battles with birthday cake, and the perils of Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches, all chronicled in loving detail. By New York Post writers. Were we not so supportive of health in the media, we might be tempted to make some sort of joke. [NYP]

Nature magazine polled their readers on their use of "cognition-enhancing drugs," such as Adderall, that great booster of the chattering classes. Oh, let's just call them by their street names: Speed, people. Uppers. Bennies. Blues. Results of the poll? Readers are for them! Twenty percent have taken neuroenhancers like Ritalin, Adderall, or Provogil, seeing them as a perfectly acceptable way to focus and "stimulate concentration or memory." More proof that the modern world has shot our attention spans to hell.

When eccentric billionaire and Maxim publisher Felix Dennis confessed to killing a man in an interview last week, he quickly realized, once the hangover wore off, that he'd need some expert public relations help with this mess. So he turned to the trusty Drew Kerr, the former Radar publicist who managed to hang on to his Maxim account even as his firm, Four Corners, dwindled to little more than Drew himself and a bag of baby carrots. (Drew was very proud of that baby carrots-sent-to-Gawker stunt). So how does Kerr help the menacing Dennis back out of his murder confession? With an ill-timed joke about how he's only a killer of magazines.

Cosmo, the sassy, sexy source of sex secrets he's too scared to tell you, is going to an incredible amount of effort to promote its August issue: the magazine is trying to break the Guinness World Record for "most people photographed on a beach in a bikini." The old record? 1,010 girls on a beach in Australia, set last year by... Cosmo! Good to see they have a hobby. They need 1,200 "chicks 18-34" to show up on Miami's South Beach next Friday, so start hitchhiking now! You'll get a free Old Navy bikini, "style to depend on available quantity and selection." Unfortunately swimsuit photos appeal primarily to straight men, who don't buy Cosmo anyways, so this is all a big waste of time. After the jump, photos of the last record, which is still perfectly good and pointless if you ask us: