Did you hear Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang had his house lined with Kevlar before he laid off 1,500 employees? No idea if that's true, but that's the best rumor I heard all week.

Where are laid-off Yahoos drinking away their sorrows? Some in San Francisco, where Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator is located, have congregated at Hotel Utah, a bar South of Market known for its live music. I called the bar and bought them a round of shots — the least I could do after all the fine, fine tips Yahoo…

The power is out in South Park, San Francisco's startup epicenter. Wired and Yahoo Brickhouse — in the same building — are affected. Caffe Centro is down. Jack Falstaff isn't answering the phone. Six Apart, a block away on Fourth Street, is up. Workers are roaming the neighborhood. Got any more data points? Send 'em…

Does Twitter miss former architect Blaine Cook, the technician who was simultaneously blamed for the site's outages and hailed for keeping it alive? We're guessing so, if only because Cook's long-haired mug still — still! — gazes from Twitter's jobs page. Cook recently took a job at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator. He…

How many ex-Yahoo managers does it take to reproduce a classic Beatles album cover? From left to right: Salim Ismail, Chad Dickerson, Scott Gatz, and Bradley Horowitz. All four were, at some point, responsible for parts of Yahoo's advanced-products group, including the Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. The band…

In what seems like another age, my predecessor once wrote about companies' "blogger appeasement groups" — units dedicated to generating buzz, not bucks. With Chad Dickerson leaving Yahoo Brickhouse, the troubled company's troubled incubator for new ideas, I think we can declare the delusion of blogger appeasement…

Chad Dickerson, who has been responsible for Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator since December, is leaving the company to be CTO at Etsy, an online handicrafts retailer. We hear Google, where former boss Bradley Horowitz now works, had been heavily recruiting Dickerson. With this move, Dickerson has deftly dissed both Web…

Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear that he made it a quid pro quo before signing a new, lucrative contract with…

Whatever side you're on, everyone agrees that Twitter's problems with downtime come down to one man: Blaine Cook. Cook's advocates claim he was hobbled from fixing the site by incompetent managers; Cook's detractors say his decisions as Twitter's chief architect led to its frequent outages. We'd heard he left…

TechConfidential's Joshua Jaffe intensely awaits a serve at Yahoo's Brickhouse party for Web 2.0 last night. Suggest your own in the comments. Yesterday's winner: BartKela. (Photo by Brian Solis)

Is Yahoo shopping the 14,000-sq. ft. space where its Brickhouse incubator sits? Several prospective renters came through on a recent weekend with the building's property manager, a tipster tells Valleywag. With offices now vacant in Sunnyvale, paying for Brickhouse's San Francisco lease surely seems like an unneeded…

To find Yahoos ready to bolt, recruiters are taking a wide stance. Cake Financial, a startup, occupies the same building in SoMa as Yahoo's San Francisco incubator, Brickhouse. Employees at Cake plastered Yahoo's entrance and building restrooms with fliers, snaps of which we received from a tipster in the building.…

We hear that Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's advanced-produts czar, has finally fired Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. Today's layoffs likely provided a convenient excuse to get rid of Ismail, a suavely incompetent liar. Ismail, a failed entrepreneur turned failed manager, was good…

Desperate to deflect attention from impending layoffs, Yahoo's top management has put pressure on the ranks to deliver some splashy product launches and distract the media. Gullible as the tech press corp is, they'll likely fall for it. A top candidate: Fire Eagle, Yahoo Brickhouse's long-delayed location-data tool.…

Salim Ismail's incompetence as a manager may have brought the wrath of the IRS down on Yahoo. One of his employees at Brickhouse, Yahoo's San Francisco incubator, has moved abroad while being classified, for tax purposes, as "working at home." There are a number of steps companies ought to take when employing a U.S.…

As we reported first, Yahoo's Scott Gatz confirms he's leaving. Chad Dickerson will move from the Yahoo Developer Network to take over running Advanced Products. This is hardly a promotion for Dickerson; we hear he had a falling out with his boss at the developer group, ex-Microsoftie David Sobeski. Dickerson is now…

Rumor has it Scott Gatz, the brain behind Yahoo's search strategy earlier in the decade, more recently heading up part of Bradley Horowitz's Advanced Products Group, will leave Yahoo at the end of the year. Our source, who claims to have failed in trying to hire away Gatz in the past, tells us Gatz always professed…

A press tour is oft the last refuge of a scoundrel. Salim Ismail, the pushy head of Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco and newest Silicon Valley Tool, is still talking up Fire Eagle, an admittedly useful software tool for broadcasting one's location to websites. Never mind that Fire Eagle isn't actually…

Go to a game show with your favorite videobloggers, get all scholarly, or spy on Yahoo's new digs, all in tonight's Valleywag Calendar.

When you can't take market share, take credit. That's the unspoken motto of Yahoo since Google overshadowed the Web pioneer, and no one has mastered the art like Salim Ismail, the desperately unpopular VP in charge of Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco incubator charged with inventing the company's future. One…