Shouty radioman Rush Limbaugh is having trouble with his Mac, he recently announced in an on-air appeal, asking Steve Jobs to please help him fix it. Meanwhile, fashion photog and America's Next Top Model judge Nigel Barker has added to his Renaissance man capabilities: photog, saver of baby seals, and now, rater of laptops for Laptop magazine... including his verdict on the much-vaunted Macbook Air.

The Sulzbergers' grip on the New York Times has loosened, a bit. The Times Company announced today that they've given in to the hedge funds that have ammassed 19 percent of the company's publicly traded stock and given them two seats on the company's board of directors. Harbinger Capital and Firebrand are now free to demand the Times sell the Boston Globe in person at the next board meeting. "Under the truce with the hedge funds, the number of directors elected by Class B stock will rise from 9 to 10. The number of Class A directors will rise from 4 to 5." (Class B is the Sulzberger family-controlled non-publicly traded stock.) One of the new directors will be douchey NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway. Banks and Australians are taking over everything! Journalism is dooooomed! [NYT]

Boa-wearing weird-lady Laurel Touby, CEO of MediaBistro (and windfall wealth recipient) stars in a completely ridiculous promotional video for the upcoming MediaBistro conference. It's called, inexplicably, MediaBistro Circus. Just as inexplicably, the video stars Laurel in a ringmaster's uniform and top hat, holding a fake "press conference" with a gaggle of reporters. Stunts like this make our job too easy, but then we realize she's a millionaire, so guess who has the last laugh? Click for the video.

Fabulous new idea for a video game: the destruction of New York City! You're just one man with a bunch of guns, and the Nazis are bombing Manhattan. They're blowing up the buildings! They're blowing up the Statue of Liberty! It'll be great. Who doesn't want to see NYC's violent demolition played out in digital graphics? I do! No, seriously, I might buy this one. But I will swear off the "violent demolition of NYC" movies. One medium at a time. After the jump, the full trailer for the new game, "Turning Point: Fall of Liberty," the latest in the disconcerting procession of entertainment based on Gotham's death. See if you can find your home exploding!

A tipster points out that horndogs Googling for "ashley dupre naked" get, as their first result, this search engine optimization page from the Huffington Post. It has a zillion search terms and three big ads on it, but no Ashley in the buff as promised. Not even a witty op-ed post. At least if you search for "ashley dupre photos" or "ashley dupre pictures" and click the Valleywag link atop the page, we deliver.

Score another one for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which nabbed exclusive photos of outgoing Governor Spitzer's $4,300 date. (Click the thumbnail for a bigger, better look.) It's hip to hate on the Post, as Gawker's Alex Pareene does here. But admit it: If the same pics had turned up first on Digg, you'd all be tripping over yourselves to declare it a victory for social something-or-other 2.0. Me, I wanna know if the Post is hiring.

From moral outrage to "here is a picture of a topless hooker" in three days. Kudos, New York Post. A grateful nation salutes you.

Sedate national readers are so curious about Eliot Spitzer's sexy sex affair of illegal sex that the Times had to post a whole list of FAQ's about the story. Complete with answers! One of the most asinine questions is, "Why did The Times track down and identify 'Kristen,' the prostitute in the case?" Our answer would be, "Seriously?" But the Times, being a respectable news outlet, tells its curious old readers that the real answer is: because she's in the news. Well, why did they have to print a picture of her sexy sexiness, then?

Shazna Nessa, former executive multimedia producer for Portfolio.com, has left the shaky Conde Nast business-like title and returned to the AP, where she worked before. [AP]

Stanley Fish, the author, law professor, columnist, and one of the Times' innumerable bloggers, thinks it would be helpful if readers know exactly what his motivation is with all this highbrow writing he does. "Given a choice between being trivial and being ethical in any direction whatsoever, I'll take trivial (although I might want to debate the judgment), because ethics is not something I'm doing in these columns," he explains in his latest entry. How about superfluous, then? Would you consider being pompous and superfluous, Mr. Fish? Sure you would!

Paying bills is for the little people. Not Alex Vieux, publisher of the Red Herring, who has left a trail of stiffed vendors behind him — hotels, software makers, and consultants. The latest to go unpaid: Red Herring's dental and vision insurance plan. A former employee still getting benefits through COBRA tells us that on a visit to his eye doctor, he was told he no longer had coverage. A plan administrator told the ex-Herring that even though his COBRA bills had been paid on time, Red Herring hadn't paid the insurers — so forget seeing dentists or optometrists. For now, Red Herring's current and former employees still have regular medical coverage, but that's it. Oh, and what's this we hear about unpaid taxes? A sick business indeed.

Back in more civilized times, the New York Times never once mentioned the name Jennifer Fitzgerald. That name, Times vet R.W. Apple famously explained in Spy, was "known everywhere, and it is not used." Fitzgerald was the woman who supposedly had a lengthy affair with former President George H. W. Bush. The Times never even looked into the story. "All you've got is sordid gossipy bits," explained another reporter. The first reports of Bill Clinton's alleged extramartial affair didn't name the "Arkansas employee" who made the allegations herself. (Not until the tabloid The Star used her name was it safe to also do so.) Before the Post broke the story of Judith Nathan, the Times coverage of the end of then-mayor Rudy Giulaini's marriage to Donna Hanover was obnoxiously winking. Elisabeth Bumiller only named the mayor's good friend after Rudy and the Post beat them to it. Basically, how insane is it that the Times broke the story of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the hooker who took down Eliot Spitzer? And how insane was the story that broke it, what with its links to her MySpace profile and bizarre criticism of her "rhythm and blues" music? Arthur Suzlberger truly is "the prophet of the high church of journalism."

A U.S. attorney announced the bust of The Emperors' Club last Thursday. We noted that the Duke of Westminster was allegedly linked, back in the day, but otherwise the story seemed mostly innocuous, as the only people named were in brothel management, not customers. Except to the Times reporters who realized that a government official was involved. They learned it was Spitzer by Friday, and they amazingly held on to that news until the following Monday, when they went live with it at 2 p.m. and immediately caused all sorts of media hell to break loose.

The 18-34 year old demographic is most frequently described as "coveted," so those of us lucky enough to be in it know that the things we do are important. Not just to ourselves, but to the media, advertisers, and the nation at large. We set the trends, not the olds! So it's a big deal when they discover that out of all the things our sweet demographic does—eat cereal, purchase pogo sticks ironically, have sexual relations in the new style—one thing we're definitely not doing is watching the evening news. In fact, the latest numbers show network news ratings among important people like me and you are falling straight off a cliff, into what may prove to be the final resting place of the 6:30 news broadcast.

Sheriff Santiago Barrera Jr. of Duval County, Texas would like you reporters to shut the fuck up, or else he will throw you in jail. It's really just that simple. After the Alice Echo-News Journal ("A Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper serving Jim Wells County and the area for over 100 years") wrote a front page story about the sheriff's son getting arrested for public intoxication, Barrera told a reporter, "If you guys keep interfering with my business, I'm going to have you arrested." Old school! Unfortunately, what with all the electronic communications and so forth these days, word spread quickly around the nation, and now the sheriff just looks like a crooked old bastard, which he surely is. But it does make you pine for the days when the lawmen were dirty, the reporters were in cahoots, and small towns were dusty fiefdoms ruled by power-mad, ignorant scumbags. Not really. [AP]

It would probably be better if Photoshop had never been invented. Not only does it distort our mental image of what the human body looks like, but, when wielded incorrectly, it can actually destroy bodies altogether. Some parts get weirdly erased; some get warped beyond reason; and sometimes, unrelated parts of other bodies materialize in pictures like traces of a poltergeist. From a long list at the Photoshop Disasters blog, we bring you the five most grotesque works of Photoshop hackdom you will ever see—unless the monster strikes again.

Above: the February 15 cover of staid journal Science, showing the structure of the ion clouds around the NH3-HCl hydrogen bond; the February 29 cover, showing atoms trapped in a lattice of optical microtraps; and the March 7 cover, a photo of a spray-painted flower, the work of insufferable British graffitti art-prankster Banksy. A reader reports: "I got my mail today to see what is clearly a piece of Banksy art on the front of Science, and I exclaim to my roommates, 'what the fuck is Banksy doing on the cover?!' When my roommates starting asking 'What does his lab study?', I realized that I was going to have to bring this to the attention of someone else." Click to see the incongruous cover lineup in full.

A brilliant way to get reporters' attention: Invite them to a strip club. On assignment, of course! Unlikely crunk crossover rap group Three Six Mafia is promoting its new single with a "Strip Club Tour," and the media is encouraged to attend. "Please reply to this email by 3PM today (3/12/08) if your site has correspondents in the following markets and you would like to cover them at the strip club," says the pitch. Reporters across the South and Midwest are stumbling over each other to find the relevant angle on this one. On a professional level. After the jump, a full tour schedule, and a video of 3-6-M's new single "I'd Rather" Set to a montage of Eliot Spitzer photos. This may prove to be the most successful music marketing strategy of all time.

Oh, this is just bad. A black female reporter in South Carolina was standing on a street covering a crime story when she was attacked by an entire white family, yelling racial slurs [CNN]. The reporter, Charmayne Brown, was thrown down on the ground, punched, and, it appears, strangled a bit. The entire attack was caught on tape by another (white) TV crew on the scene. Which raises the point: WAY TO JUMP IN AND STOP THE ATTACK, RIVAL TV CAMERA CREW. Jesus. News is a rough business. The entire ugly video is below—Brown's own (black) cameraman helped pull her to safety, and she is fine.

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth across the state of New York today as the citizenry tries to come to terms with the scandal that has ripped our illusions away: the Yankees signing comedian Billy Crystal to a one-game contract. He'll appear in a spring training game, as a publicity stunt. This sudden disgrace of our heroes is shaking us to the very core! The New York Post splashed the outrage on their (back) cover, and fired off a defense of our collective moral standards: