Is it sad that the only people trying to save this marriage are the editors of US Weekly?

Okay, we know how much our slutty sister site paid The Times' Alessandra Stanley to plug her in her review of HBO's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, since she took the money out of petty cash and that's why we won't be ending this week with our traditional Gawker Media Ben & Jerry's Vermonster Social.

Oh the humanity! Or inanity.
[Drudge Report]

· Men's shopping mag Cargo must be doing great; you can even get a 4-year subscription on eBay for .98 cents. [eBay]
· Regarding Jack Shafer's anonymous source on James Surowiecki's outside speaking engagements: yes, we know Surowiecki's been dating Slate's Meghan O'Rourke. We can connect dots, too.
· We think it's first and maybe the best Year in Review. [Fimoculous]
· Since Leslee Dart was sacked from Pat Kingsley's PR mecca, celebrity clients are running out the firm's bejeweled doors in droves. [Page Six]
· MTV VJ-turned-blogger Adam Curry is back with Podcast, a subscription service in which listeners receive updates of Adam Curry's playlists. [Newsweek]
· Carlos D may have given you herpes, but at least Paris Hilton didn't give you genital warts (spin-offs rule, right?). [Paris Hilton...]

Today's Page Six reports that Tom Wolfe's daughter, 24 year-old Alexandra (or Charlotte Simmons, as most like to call her), has signed a deal with Broadway Books to pen American Coddle. The book is based on her Observer article about children being—you guessed it—coddled by their parents. If she gets this thing to the stands quickly enough, she may be the first non-fiction writer in history to compete with her own fictional alter-ego.
We Hear [Page Six]

Vanity Fair scribe and blogger-come-lately James Wolcott is finally beginning to grok the new medium he's adopted.

We'd mostly forgotten about Toby Young, the British writer who managed to turn his coffee break at Vanity Fair into a cottage industry replete with book, movie deal, and status as the go-to commentator whenever Graydon Carter so much as burps the wrong way.

We're actually a little afraid to write this. We can almost feel the 'breath of fire' on our necks, but it's our job as journalists to get the story out even if we're risking the yoga mafia going all chattaranga on our asses. If our bodies are found wrapped in thin, rolled up mats, you know who's to blame.

We have to hand it to Stuff magazine editor Mike Hammer, just for having some hefty (if not slightly misogynistic) balls. While speaking at Syracuse University, Hammer doled out the secrets to successful covers, including such nuggets as, "Make sure [your cover girl] — or their caboose — is huge." Also, singer Sheryl Crow is not "super hot," so photogs have to work extra hard to make her look good. Hammer then revealed that Carmen Electra and Pamela Anderson are great fallback covers, if all else fails (their publicists are going to love that). Most importantly, Stuff does NOT use Photoshop to increase chest size, but they do shave some inches off the hips. Because "child-bearing" simply isn't fuckable.
Stuff Magazine Editor Shares Insight On Cover Girl Choices [Daily Orange]

Slate's journalism top cop Jack Shafer spends part of his 'Press Box' column this week beating himself up for indulging an anonymous source in his examination of New Yorker writers Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki's outside speaking engagements.

Actually, we never watched yeh. Sorry, dude.

From today's Times 'Corrections: For the Record':

Normally, we wouldn't advocate plunking down your hard earned money to buy The New York Post. You can get most of it for free on the web, and we should each do our part to keep the paper from reaching maximum profitability.

Good morning, early risers!

From the The Provincetown Banner, page 23, Nov, 18, 2004.

Our sun-kissed West Coast brother site alerted us to the fact that legendary producer/self-aggrandizer Robert Evans is in talks to bring his unique form of auto-hagiography to Broadway.

Drudge Report

We've had some terrible employers during our adventures in semi-employment over the last decade. Buy us a beer one day and we'll tell you about the boss who left her cat home alone for an entire week while she was away on business and how the nasty little fur-ball bit us when we tried to feed it. (The cat, not the boss.)

Sara Nelson's column in today's Post alerts us to a book we might actually read: baseball cap-bedecked Boston hottie and Times mag contributor Benoit Denizet-Lewis' upcoming tome about the state of addiction in America. The book is still untitled (Nelson writes that the book has been titled America Anonymous, but Denizet-Lewis doth protest) and, while we weren't interviewed for his book (for shame!), the sporty Frenchman tells us:

We don't usually dabble in the dark "service journalism" arts, but just this once, we wanted to alert you to a line of products made in cross-promotional heaven and born just in time for the holiday season.