Posting his chart on twitter, Reitman breaks down all the questions he's been asked in his Up In the Air press appearances. Shown in full the chart demonstrates first of all what a deadening experience it must be, sitting in junkets and having to answer, by his count, a full 111 times, "What's it like working with George Clooney?"

However, pulling up the number two slot, the world's entertainment journalists, sparked by the big contemporary issues raised by Up in The Air, asked Reitman 96 times about the economy. No doubt these were probing questions posed by the hard-nosed financial analysts of Ok! and Hello! to the director of Juno; questions we imagine along the lines of "So the economy,...isn't that just awful?" and "What does George think of the economy?" and "If the Federal Reserve were an ice cream store, what would be its most popular flavor?"

But hey, maybe those are just the sort of questions we need to be asking if this nation is ever going to think its way out of this mess.

The stage had been set; a six month lead-up to their return kicked off by a celebrated appearance at the American Idol finale, Gene Simmons sharing the mike with Adam Lambert. Their first album release in 11 years was being backed by the current gold standard of record releases — a Walmart exclusive. With the album tracking in the 150,000 sales range, the music press had all but proclaimed it a lock on the #1 slot.

And then today, somewhere out there in KISS' tour bus, Gene Simmons stepped over passed-out groupies and the bodies of decapitated farm animals from last night's victory party. He made his way towards the front of the bus where today's Billboard had just arrived, pausing to roll his cow tongue up and down the cooling strippers' pole, giving himself a little bracing jolt before he took in the new issue which would feature his made-up face under the banner hed "#1!"

And then he looked down and saw...Michael Fucking Buble.

Today the numbers were tabulated and KISS placed a distant second to crooner Michael Buble's Crazy Love album. As explained on Hitfix, all the world's music gurus neglected to take into account the one power in the Universe stronger than Walmart — Oprah herself, who invited Buble on last Friday, sending his collection of olde timey ballads soaring off the racks over the weekend and earning him the top slot.

If it's any consolation to the face-painted army, at least they missed losing to Streisand by a week.

Enjoy it. Click to enlarge.

Yup: fucked.

Grown, that is, in the eyes of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists, slaves to the technology fashions for which Twitter is the leading model: real-time, micro, iPhone friendly and acquisition bait for Google. Twitter might say it's in this for the long haul — someone is spreading word the company has $30 million, or most of its last funding round, sitting in a bank account — but the company has proven far more adept at finessing moneyed suitors than in groping for reliable revenue streams.

Twitter's trend hopping founders, whose project management company begat their blogging company which led to their podcasting company which begat Twitter, seem more likely to seize on the easy exit of the former rather than the long grind of the latter.

Especially when, as these charts of their past investment rounds show, they're so very good at jacking up their price:

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, left, and Evan Williams. By Joi Ito.)

Over the past 10 weeks, she's come close a couple of times to surpassing but this is the first instance during that time period when she has more words on the page (310) than the person who the interview is supposedly about (305). When interviewing Benjamin Todd Jealous, Solomon clocked in at 303 words, while Jealous only had 357, and when interviewing Howard Dean, she got off 278 words and 395. Doesn't that mean that the column is now officially about Solomon? Maybe that's why It's called "Questions With..." instead of "Answers From..."

Each of Solomon's columns bears the tag "Interview has been condensed and edited," a tag that was added after a dust up concerning the accuracy of her questions and answers. It is now well known that Solomon finesses what both she and her subject say in any given interview. That means that, rather than running a transcript and dealing with a taciturn subject, Solomon has chosen to give herself more column inches than who she was interviewing. Family Guy may be painfully unfunny, but that's a little harsh, even for the acid-tongued Solomon.

It's more evidence, in case you needed it, that the federal bailout was little more than a collossal plunder, and all we're doing now is shifting tax-payer money around from failure to failure in service to the goal of keeping executives employed so they can still afford to stay at places like the St. Regis.

Here's how it works: You get a job, in order to make money. The federal government takes up to a third of that money in income tax. But don't worry, it's for your own good! Even though you are making money, AIG is not, so the federal government gives $85 billion of the money it took from you to AIG, which then spends $440,000 of it at the St. Regis on $210 spa treatments and $1,600-a-night rooms. AIG also gives $2.3 billion of that to CItigroup, because it owed them insurance payments on bad bets Citi had made. Oh, but we totally forgot to mention—even though Citi is getting paid all that money from AIG, it still wasn't making any money, so the federal government took another $45 billion of that money it took from your paycheck and gave it to Citigroup.

And then, even though the St. Regis is getting all that money from AIG for their retreats, business isn't so good, in part because of the public uproar over AIG paying all that taxpayer money for its retreats. Which means its owner can't make good on the $70 million owes to... Citigroup! So Citigroup takes over the St. Regis.

But! The St. Regis is a money pit, because of all the aforementioned outrage and on account of the fact that nobody has any money or jobs, and that the executive class-types who still do have jobs are too scared by all that outrage to book any retreats there. So Citigroup is actually losing money on the St. Regis. From the Los Angeles Times:

Becoming the owner of the resort will be expensive for Citigroup, which now will not only have to pay interest on the $230-million first mortgage, but also cover St. Regis' operating losses.

And Citigroup losing money is a bad thing, because, even though they made $4.3 billion last quarter, they're still in really bad shape, and probably won't make much money any time soon. Or so they say. But they do make enough money to offer executives $2 million per year. But just forget about that for now.

Because if Citigroup doesn't get better—and by "better," we don't really know what we mean since they made that $4.3 billion last quarter, but whatever—then the federal government might have to take more of that money from your paycheck and give it to them. Or even if it doesn't get more bailout money, it's still bad because the federal government owns about $27 billion worth of Citigroup. And the more money Citigroup makes, the more money it pays to the federal government, and the faster the federal government returns that money to you—just kidding about that last part.

To recap: The federal government owns a big piece of the obscenely expensive hotel that AIG executives spent hundreds of thousands of your dollars on after you bailed them out, and it's losing fucking money on it. The most important lesson to be learned here is this: If you soak a bandana in urine and wrap it around your face, it will mitigate the effects of tear gas. It's gross, but it works.

Illustration by the inimitable Steven Dressler

Clarium Capital lost 4.4 percent in June, taking it to a 6 percent loss for the year, a source with knowledge of the fund tells us. The New York Post heard the same numbers. Fund assets, our source adds, are at $1.5 billion.

As the chart above shows, that's quite a fall. Clarium had $7.8 billion at the end of June 2008, the Post reports, a figure in line with other media reports at the time. It was only a few months before funds fell to $4 billion; by the end of last year they had fallen to $2 billion and would skid still lower.

The dwindling assets are fueled in part by investors withdrawing their money; the withdrawals, in turn, must have something to do with uninspiring monthly returns, shown in the chart below.

Maybe Thiel should blame the government. He is said to reign over a Silicon Valley "mafia" of former acolytes, but the libertarian has never been particularly comfortable with power when it's wielded by the government. Tech-savvy Thiel may have been smart enough to invest in Facebook, but he's had trouble navigating an economy increasingly run out of Washington.

HuffPo just shared some key details with Irin Carmon of Women's Wear Daily:

This year, The Huffington Post will have 22 interns... a number that approaches that of paid staff (about 35 in editorial, 60 on staff overall.) That includes one intern who paid at least $13,000 in a charity auction for the privilege.

...Half of these interns are being paid, a spokesman for the Huffington Post confirmed. The spokesman declined to say how much, calling the question "silliness."

It's not clear how publisher Arianna Huffington decides who to pay and who not to pay (we've asked and not yet heard back). But it's worth noting that some Huffington underlings have higher profiles than others. This year's staff, for example, includes former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's daughter (per WWD), as well as editor Nicholas Graham, of the family that owns the Washington Post.

Liz Hanks, daughter of actor Tom Hanks, has also worked for the site. And Huffington this year handed an important management role to her godson, heir to a computer fortune worth billions of dollars.

So if you're trying to get paid at Huffington's innovative new media game-changer, it might help to be born to the right parents, if you can pull that off.

It's brutal. Carter wrote around the quotes and got exactly what he wanted: to write a Riot-Act level piece capable of inciting the pitchfork-wielding masses of Hollywood suits, gossips, and former NBC employees who want a Blackberry lodged through Silverman and Jeff Zucker's skulls (and put on display prominently at the NBC-Universal commissary). The title alone ("NBC Hired a Hit Maker. It's Still Waiting.") is fairly cruel. But then again, so was what he managed to get. For the first time, we're seeing less signs of Silverman hanging himself out to dry, and what might be the first instances of a somewhat apologetic-sounding Jeff Zucker beginning to try and swim to shore on Ben. Yes, Zucker is now trying to save his own ass:

Jeff Zucker, Mr. Silverman's boss and the chief executive of NBC Universal, says he continues to value Mr. Silverman's work. "Ben has a skill set that is incredibly appropriate for these times," he said. "If we weren't supportive of Ben, he wouldn't be here."

Still, the fact that there has been no formal deal announced to renew Mr. Silverman's contract will probably set off speculation among Mr. Silverman's critics that Mr. Zucker does not want to make a public endorsement of him.

As for his personal life, Mr. Silverman said he had taken steps to temper his social profile, which made him a frequent target in the Hollywood blogosphere. (He famously held a party populated by models in bikinisand white tigers in cages.) "I am more conscious of how I'm being presented," he said.

The off-hand remarks:

He was quoted dismissing two network competitors as "D-girls" - or low-level development executives. "I should never have called them that," Mr. Silverman said.

Silverman's goal posts:

...In its current position, still last among the major networks, NBC needs up, not flat; it also had the Super Bowl this season and it won't next year. To pick up [the] slack, it will require something (or several somethings) shiny and successful out of Mr. Silverman's shop.

...as well as his removal from the day-to-day of developing and green-lighting shows, the programming failures (though there is some praise reserved for his success with The Biggest Loser and The Office, both of which arrived via him, before he got to NBC). Oh, and then there's this gem, which makes Silverman sound like he showed up to work on the first day in boardshorts, ready to rock the lot with a set of aged cedar bongos under his arms:

"What I didn't realize is, it's really hard to have a vision running a network," Mr. Silverman said. "You can have an agenda. But it's almost impossible to have a vision because of the scale of the business and the entropy that already exists."

What the hell were Zucker and Silverman thinking giving anything - quotes, on the record or off - to Carter in the first place? How did they not know he was gonna hang them out to dry? If anything, this is throwing a propane tank on the coals: the piece in it of itself represents a massive fuckup on both of their parts, and Silverman - probably sitting at home right now, face in a Pyrex - will inevitably go deeper into hiding from being the programming rockstar he once saw himself as, and further into the dark, cavernous corridors of his advertisers' offices to do the "business stuff" he imaginably despises. It doesn't help that they included a chart (pictured below) to show how terrible of a job Silverman's doing. Growing up: bummer, man.

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The Charges, Straight From the Freelancers

Men's Journal: One writer's still waiting for a payment since April, 2007.

Genre Magazine: One person still waiting since November, 2007. Also, I'm still waiting for a freelance payment for a story I wrote for them last year. Too bad Genre folded last month. I still want my money, you fucking deadbeats.

Metro NY: Don't respond to calls for payment of multiple invoices, including one more than a year old.

Contemporary: Failed to pay a freelancer for stories dating back to last year; publisher's full of excuses.

Toronto Star: Seems to have lost the ability to pay for a story from April, 2008.

TONY: Screwed a freelancer for a year-old story espite being "harassed endlessly to no avail."

Nylon: Nada for nine months.

Metro Pop: The LA mag has taken more than half a year to pay less than $50.

Canadian Geographic: Still owes for photos submitted last summer.

Zink Magazine: Editors and writers are having trouble getting paid for any work they've done since last summer.

The National (UAE): One writer's had to wait up to six months for a check; funny, since The National is the paper whose leaked salary spreadsheet showed they pay better than 99% of the papers in the US.

SUCCESS STORY: Our stiffed Brooklyn Paper freelancer who topped the first chart finally got paid. Gawker gets results!

DISCLAIMER: All info is provided by you, our loyal, disgruntled readers. Publications that want to dispute this can email us. But don't try to lie your way out of it; the best solution is to pay all your invoices in a prompt fashion. For all you stiffed freelancers out there, we will continue this feature with your help. Email us your own media payment time stories (good or bad), Subject line "Payment time."

Friends: 25
Family: 21
Mom: 7
Being employed: 7
Barack Obama: 6
Getting knocked up: 3
Not having to ride the subway: 2
God: 1
Weed and other trifles: 18

On the Conservative right you have jingo-tastic torture and shoot first, then maybe ask questions 24. Alongside it are The Hills (Heidi Montag endorses McCain, he calls her "a very talented actress", John Adams twirls in his grave. Plus it's all about remorseless spending and there are no gays on the show and, actually, thousands of gays in LA, especially working in fashion for God's sake), The Sopranos (we think it's more about conservative people than it is conservative, but some people read it is rah rah family values, in perverted way. And yes we realize it's not on the air anymore, whatevs), and Two and a Half Men. OK, so we don't normally watch that show but lots of people do! We suspect they're the 60 million people we don't want to talk to, enemies of ideas and progress and rebellion against the status quo.

On the left you have Liberal nutjobs like 30 Rock (though Tina Fey's character once said she would probs end up voting for McCain, that was a while ago, and man oh man things have changed. That "Cooter" episode alone qualifies it as one of the most searingly liberal shows on the air), gay-friendly fare like Greek (best show on TV right now, no joke. Watch it.), the aforementioned GG (its actors are libs, its cast ethno and homo friendly, the really rich kids avoid talking about what would probably be conny politics), and Mad Men. This show is a toss up because, like The Sopranos it's about some conservative people, but not necessarily conservative in its messages. It's ultimately a study of the Beginning of the End of the American dream, which gives it some trenchantly liberal undertones. Plus that sad gay character. Hm. Just like Sopranos.

And then there's South Park in the middle, the cartoon show with its own brand of Libertarianism. I suppose it's fair for an iconoclast to claim no particular affiliation other than with one's own self-satisfaction.

What else would you add to the chart, and where? Maybe a conservative nod to "fuck habeas corpus" shows like Law & Order: SVU?

6/22/08

WE HEAR: THAT Stephen Colbert will belt out the National Anthem at the Partnership for Public Service gala Tuesday night at Cipriani 42nd Street, where Police Commissioner Ray Kelly will be presented with the Theodore Roosevelt Award by his friend, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

6/19/08

SIGHTINGS: "DANCING With the Stars" runner-up Jason Taylor and former Miami Dolphins teammate Dan Marino backing up Carlos Santana on bongos and cowbell at the Samsung Four Seasons of Hope Gala at Cipriani Wall Street.

5/25/08

WE HEAR: The 540 Latino-philes at Cipriani 42nd Street the other night applauded the news that Goya Foods owners Joseph and Carmen de Unanue donated $3 million to the Fifth Avenue museum of Hispanic culture.

5/20/08

WE HEAR: THAT comic Lewis Black will perform at the 21st Anniversary Gala of the Cooke Center for Learning and Development tomorrow at Cipriani 42nd Street.

4/29/08

WE HEAR: THAT John Catsimatidis is being honored with Frankie Valli by the Friars Club on June 16 at Cipriani 42nd Street, where the cast of Broadway's "Jersey Boys" will perform.

1/26/08

WE HEAR: THAT the Halcyon Company will auction off a walk-on role in "Terminator Salvation" during the Cipriani AmFAR event Thursday.

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[Outside of Page Six, we should note, the Post seems to cover Cipriani's troubles pretty aggressively.]

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[Numbers via The Big Lead. Pictured: schlock merchant Mitch Albom. Anybody have any additions to/ disputes with this chart? Email us.]

Honorable mention: The blog Culturegraph does the same thing; my favorite is Middle Earth Ring Distrubution Analysis.