First, Arthur Kade's harrowing experience.

today while in the gym for the second time with one of my good friends (I had just taken his NO2 supplement at his house), I started feeling lightheaded and my heart was racing, and I actually pulled him into the locker room because I thought I was having a heart attack. It's amazing what you think about when you may be dying, and what went through my mind was in this order: 1) I can't let millions around the world down, 2) I wonder what the media will say about this if I land in the hospital in front of the Gen Pop, so I need to do this in private, and 3) I can't let this happen when I am about to make millions, I can have any girl I want being Arthur Kade, and I am clearly on my way to Little Oscar.

I think we echo all of humanity's sentiments when we say: Don't go with the cheap stuff, dude—make sure you take genuine NO-Xplode. Hardcore pumps and smooth, even energy that still gets you crucially ripped.

The other exciting news: Emily Brill, the Ultimate Narrator of the internet's pre-Kade era, may be making a comeback. She tells us via email (in response to our question): "I've gone back to writing. I'm working on a book, but there's nothing official to report. It's a recent decision."

Fameballs: Don't act like you do not care for them.

"We are seeing... good people leaving their jobs and joining startups, which is always a sign of confidence," a partner at Redpoint Ventures told the Beeb. "We are entering a stage of new reality." Apparently, there's talk of a boom. A handful of medium-sized companies most people have never heard of were recently acquired — Mint.com, OmniTure, SpringSource — and venture capitalists are dribbling out some cash from the oceans of money they are paid to invest. The Nasdaq has limped its way past the 2,000 mark again.

But enough of the selective evidence. Unemployment is still nearly 10 percent. The flow of capital outside the Valley startup bubble is still severely constrained. And even within the tech sector, the big paydays are few and far between. The IPO pipeline is dry, and startup buyers like Google and Yahoo have tightened their purse strings. This is why hot companies like Twitter, which is taking a fresh $50 million even with a reported $30 million in the bank, are stockpiling cash. Many are unprofitable, which also helps explain why, like Facebook, many have no plans to IPO any time soon.

This sort of brutal assessment is frowned upon in the Valley, where the hope of a big payday can get engineers working long hours for cheap, lawyers accepting scrip as payment and gullible investors pumping money into unworthy ventures. Hence, hype all too often prevails, despite an utter lack of profits or even, as is the case today, any big speculative infusions of cash from the equity markets. That's not a "new reality;" it's a cycle as old as the State of California.

(Image via)

Apple has posted video of its closed iPod event yesterday, material Wall Street will no doubt seize upon to double-check its initial reaction to Jobs' return yesterday, when Apple shares hit a 52-week high but closed down 1 percent. It could have been worse, had Jobs been a no-show, a stock analyst tells the Wall Street Journal. Such is the demanding CEO's importance to Apple, and shareholders must now weigh Jobs' still-gaunt look and scratchy voice against his characteristically enthusiastic delivery.

Ideally they could take Jobs at his word, and leave the physical evaluations to the CEO's own medical caretakers. But Jobs' past obfuscations and distortions have made hard evidence an especially valuable commodity.

Sure, Apple's stock would have survived if he'd skipped out. But, as we wrote earlier today, it would have taken a hit. Many investors would have seen Jobs' absence as a conspicuous, out-of-character dodge by a leader known for his obsession with control and an amazing ability to extract money from worshipful customers via direct appeals. We were right to question the expectation that Jobs wouldn't show up; wrong to write that it was only a "remote" possibility.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that, as much as he hates providing information about his health, Jobs would rather calm Wall Street with a public appearance than spend months answering especially heated questions about his health, which would certainly have happened if he hadn't walked onto that Moscone Convention Center stage.

Now, of course, comes the endless analysis of how Jobs looked and sounded. We might as well get things started; above and below are Getty pictures of Jobs at this year's iPod event, on the left, next to pictures from last year's event, on the right. (Full-sized originals are here and here.) The CEO seems to have neither lost — nor added — much weight. But given the once-declining state of Jobs' health, no news is probably good news.

So this reporter went on up and found Dick at his Ketchum mansion, just cold hiking over mountains and chilling out. His first words to the reporter:

"You don't have a gun; that's good."

Ha, okay then! So then he went on about how much he has suffered and how ridiculous it is that the government didn't bail out Lehman and how oh well, he knows nobody wants to hear all this from him, he's such a big villain, yea right, whatever, this too shall pass. I mean he has to sit with his back to the wall at restaurants just so some joker doesn't come in and hit him in the face, with a pie! That is absolutely in the story, yes! And he's down to his last four mansions! But he's keeping on a happy face:

"I'm not a defeatist," he said. "I do believe at the end of the day that the good guys do win. I do believe that."

You better hope not, Dick.
[Pic: AP]

[via Adrants]

Jayson Blair is now a certified "life coach." Which one could argue is just as fake a career as his time in journalism was. Or maybe not! "Life coach" of the Blair variety sounds like it has elements of "substance abuse counselor" and "shrink," both of which are real careers—but when they roll up into "life coach," we start to doubt the expertise at work. Then we remember that this is Life Coach Jayson Blair. He tells the AP:

"People say, 'Wait a minute. You're a life coach?' That makes no sense,'" says Blair, the ex-journalist best known for foisting plagiarism and fabrications into the pages of The New York Times. "Then they think about my life experiences and what I've been through and they say 'Wait a minute. It does make sense.'"

We were with him through the first part there, but when he got to the "It does make sense" part, we lost him. But we should not judge! He's been doing this for two years, and he now works for "one of the most respected mental health practices in northern Virginia." (Strangely, his long bio says nothing of his years at the New York Times). Oftentimes the most fucked up people do make the wisest counselors once they get cleaned up. Jayson Blair could certainly fall in that category. [Ever been life coached by him? Email us.]

Here's a little-known fact about Jayson Blair's post-NYT-meltdown career: After he wrote a (not well-reviewed) book, he was a bookseller! On Amazon! Jayson ran Azure Press Books, selling stuff from home. He was just another guy up in the Amazon Seller forums, discussing postal rates. He apparently let his bookselling domain name expire in September of 2007, just as his life coaching practice was really taking off.

So, Jayson Blair's career: The world's most famous sham journalist, author of a maybe-not-so-well-thought-out book, Amazon bookseller, and now life coach. We're not mad at ya, Jayson. Redemption is possible for anyone.

But not in journalism.
[Pic: Getty]

Eberhard has suddenly dropped his suit, the San Jose Business Journal reports. It seems safe to assume some sort of settlement was reached; the $465 million in federal funds Tesla received from the Department of Energy after Eberhard filed could have freed up other cash for a payout, or convinced Eberhard that Tesla had the resources to mount a protracted fight. Or maybe Tesla was simply scared: it just lost a preliminary motion to throw out the case.

Tesla's money also helped it secure land in the Stanford Research Park, not far from Facebook's new headquarters, replacing a San Jose parcel it had planned to acquire but lost in January thanks to its lack of capital.

Now the company can turn its attention to the real challenge: Fighting off Nissan, which just rolled out its "Leaf" electric car, which it plans to introduce in 2012. Nissan, which will lease the battery pack separately, has said its car will compete with gas-powered vehicles costing $25,000-$30,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, has staked his company's future on the Model S, which is a full-sized sedan to the compact Leaf but starting around $50,000. In addition to an apparent price gap, Tesla must also wrestle with the recent departure of its science director, in charge of the critical battery system. And it must site and build a factory to manufacture the S itself.

Like most startups, Tesla has been through its share of booms and busts. Right now it's on a roll; the question is whether it can build up enough momentum for the inevitable crash back to reality.

[lawsuit news via Business Insider]

Blodget, whose career as an analyst ended in 2003 with a $4 million SEC fine and a lifetime ban from the securities trade after then-Attorney General Spitzer publicized e-mails showing that he knew the stocks he was promoting for Merrill were worthless, asked Spitzer to sit down for an online Q-and-A to talk about Wall Street, redemption, and old times.

The two men got back on their feet by doing almost precisely the same thing: Writing for Slate and leveraging the honesty that only people who have nothing left to lose can afford.

It's a fascinating and good-natured conversation between two guys whose public humiliations have reduced their egos to manageable proportions (for now, at least). A smiling Spitzer tells Blodget: "It was never personal for me."

The video is chopped up into segments for Yahoo!'s TechTicker site. Start here.

Oh hell, we'll say it's good: A full $1.5 billion of that profit is going to AIG's primary owner, the federal government. So we can afford Cash for Clunkers after all! It's like Uncle Sam found a sawbuck in an old (red-white-and-blue) coat pocket.

But it won't last—AIG says business is still suffering from "weak economic conditions and the lingering effect of negative A.I.G. events earlier in the year." The "negative AIG events," you will recall, culminated in an orgy of outrage and threats of violence against the company after it redirected taxpayer dollars to the executives who engineered the financial collapse in the form of bonuses. So if AIG's apparent turnaround ends up being temporary, remember—it's your fault.

Spitzer's rehabilitation into public life has aligned cosmically with the economic collapse: He first dipped his toe into the waters with a Washington Post op-ed last November that leveraged his reputation as the deposed "Sheriff of Wall Street" to urge Obama to impose tough regulation over the banking sector, and he launched a column at Slate a month later. His first television interview after leaving office was cunningly—or perhaps just fortunately—scheduled for a week last March when the furor over bonuses to AIG executives was at its most intense.

Since then, Spitzer has worked himself into semi-regular rotation on MSNBC and the network morning news shows as a stern voice of populism when it comes to the bailout of the financial industry. His tarnished past has in some ways enhanced his credibility—he's a damaged man who has been through the crucible and who can, by virtue of his having lost everything, only now afford to speak the complete truth. And speak he has: Last week, his scathing indictment of Goldman Sachs and the New York Fed on MSNBC made the blog rounds, largely because he is the most prominent and knowledgeable public figure who has been willing so far to state the obvious fact that the AIG bailout was a "Ponzi scheme" and an "inside job" designed to benefit Goldman and other banks without forcing them to surrender equity stakes to the American taxpayer.

The positive reaction to Spitzer's eagerness to take on Goldman—whom he had previously prosecuted, along with a bevy of other investment banks, as attorney general—points to a way forward for him. He's got his villain. The emerging resentment of Goldman as the bete noir of the banking crisis has largely coalesced thus far around Matt Taibbi, the author of a Rolling Stone takedown of the firm that gained widespread attention but has been criticized for, among other things, trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes. Taibbi is an entertaining writer and reporter, but he's just reporter. Spitzer's embrace of the anti-Goldman banner lends the cause a legitimacy that elevates it beyond conspiracy-mongering, and lends Spitzer something with which to identify himself beyond his love of hookers.

So what next? Spitzer should refashion himself as a shadow prosecutor, or shadow inspector general—he should be to Goldman Sachs what Ralph Nader was to General Motors. (Goldman isn't the only bank that profited wrongly from the AIG bailout, but it stands as a clear and handy surrogate for a vast and difficult-to-comprehend industry; Nader's auto-safety campaign focused on GM's Corvair, but all cars now have seatbelts.) The New York Post has reported that Spitzer is planning a run to retake his post as New York's attorney general, a fantastically stupid move that displays the same sort of hubris that it takes to engage the services of a high-end prostitution ring while you're a sitting governor.

We hope he's learned something from his trials and stays in the private sector—he should launch a nonprofit focused on monitoring the bailout along the lines of CREW or any of Nader's organizations and apply his prosecutorial gifts to civil litigation in the public interest, aimed at getting documentary evidence through the discovery process of how banks like Goldman gamed the system and harvested our money into profits. It'd be the best way he can do penance for his misdeeds and satisfy his own desire for glory and attention.

The conventional wisdom is of course that Sanford's career is dead. The National Review is reporting that a move to impeach him is inevitable, and that he will have to resign. But Sanford did everything right in his confession—he admitted to what we knew, confirmed what we suspected, took full responsibility, threw himself at the mercy of his god, and seemed to maintain some sense of wounded dignity throughout. And while it's hard to fault the man for doing it right, his crying game is already paying off in some quarters:

That's Slate magazine's John Dickerson swearing off Sanford coverage via Twitter. Hasn't the man been through enough?

Atlantic editor-in-chief James Bennet sees targets of opportunity in Sanford's story, but is clearly sympathetic to the man's troubles:

And the Corner's Mike Potemra lays out the bones of a comeback argument:

This dramatic news conference was the first time I had ever watched him, and he came across as a very sincere, humble, and impressive person. If you come across this well on the worst day of your life, you must be doing something right. Is his political career "over"? I frankly don't care about that. I'm just glad to have seen somebody standing up and doing the right thing, being honest about sin and responsibility.

Still, other folks you might expect to be dislodged far enough from rationality to defend Sanford's disappearing from his job and family for a week-long international swan song with his Argentinian mistress are so far stayin hard-hearted: Michelle Malkin's take is headlined, simply, "Bastard." And Red State, which yesterday insisted that Sanford's wife and staff knew all along that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, is mourning his loss as a 2012 Republican contender.

But Sanford's clearly good at snowing people. Here's Mark McKinnon—yesterday—writing in the Daily Beast that a week-long fictional jaunt on the Appalachian Trail makes him a perfect presidential candidate:

Mark Sanford unplugged. Literally. He decided to take a hike. And he told his security detail to take a hike as well.

Guy wanted some alone time in the woods to clear his head.

Here we have a guy in politics who actually likes to get OUT of the spotlight. How exceedingly normal.

And Hannity hasn't even been on yet! Even if Fox throws him under the bus, how long will it be before Sanford becomes a "tested politician" who can be trusted because he's been through the crucible of a family crisis and came out the other side stronger? How much will we make this family go through before we let him get on with his life? This was an attempt at a Checkers speech, and we all remember how that worked out. So look out.

Yukari Iwatani Kane and Joann S. Lublin of The Wall Street Journal - who, it now appears has an outright monopoly on exclusives and leaks regarding Jobs (something that'd make sense, considering the most direct implication of the Apple CEO's various health crisis: Apple's stock price) - reported last night on the revelation. Though not going to far as to state anything but the actual surgery as outright fact, the Journal's filing vaguely speculated that Jobs' 2004 pancreatic cancer came back, and spread to his liver:

William Hawkins, a doctor specializing in pancreatic and gastrointestinal surgery at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., said that the type of slow-growing pancreatic tumor Mr. Jobs had will commonly metastasize in another organ during a patient's lifetime, and that the organ is usually the liver. "All total, 75% of patients are going to have the disease spread over the course of their life," said Dr. Hawkins, who has not treated Mr. Jobs.

Getting a liver transplant to treat a metastasized neuroendocrine tumor is controversial because livers are scarce and the surgery's efficacy as a cure hasn't been proved, Dr. Hawkins added. He said that patients whose tumors have metastasized can live for as many as 10 years without any treatment so it is hard to determine how successful a transplant has been in curing the disease.

Jobs took a leave of absence in January, handing control of Apple's day-to-day over to COO Tim Cook after publicly disclosing that he had a "hormone imbalance" that was "robbing" Jobs of his body's healthy proteins. Which sounds nothing like what causes one to get their liver removed.

The Apple CEO's been beset by rampant speculation about his health problems by Apple shareholders, journalists and bloggers of the tech and financial stripe, and some very self-entitled fanboys since said 2004 cancer scare. He's also been notoriously mum on the details of said health. Even when more or less busted red-handed, like this, the company continues to run interference, with Apple flack Katie Cotton barely even dignifying the question ("Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there's nothing further to say.") and Jobs not returning anything for comment to the Journal.

The notoriously showy CEO enjoys managing his own press, and probably isn't too ecstatic about this bit of news leaking; then again, after what sounded like a pretty traumatic few months, he could probably care less. The guy's got his health back, and a company to run. No doubt the inevitably glitzy Steve Jobs Comeback Special will happen soon in front of a grey curtain, with cheeky jokes and maybe a not-so-subtle U2 soundtrack.

Meanwhile, the company didn't go down the shitter while he was gone (at least no more than maybe this), and other than what's no doubt going to be rampant speculation on this potential efficacy (or lack thereof) of Jobs' procedure and a few nutty conspiracy theories on whether or not Jobs pulled a Woz and cut in line, there's not too much more to see here until the guy gets back up on stage and shows us his about-town face. Don't worry, fanboys, haters, and otherwise: your vicariously lived-through deity carries on.

Jobs Had Liver Transplant [WSJ]
Apple boss 'had liver transplant' [BBC]

Previously: Why Steve Jobs's Health Matters to Us

Writes the Journal:

Two people who do business with Apple said senior Apple managers have told them the company is now trying to coordinate Mr. Jobs's return with a product launch or public event.

The prospect of a public return by Apple's CEO, following a six-month medical leave, will no doubt help build buzz for the company's developer event, where Apple is expected to launch a new iPhone into a barrage of free publicity.

But the inside information leaked to the Journal also helps highlight how traumatic Jobs' health scare has been for him and his company — despite past indications to the contrary.

Apple once attributed Jobs' rail-thin appearance to a "common bug." When later announcing his medical leave, Jobs avoided disclosing the seriousness of the situation, saying he was leaving due to the complexity of his health issues and even because of the distracting "curiosity" over them."

But things got pretty bad, at least according to the Journal's well-placed source. Select members of Apple's board received weekly updates about his condition, a "person familiar with the matter" told the paper, and they wouldn't have all been pretty:

He was one real sick guy... Fundamentally he was starving to death over a nine-month period. He couldn't digest protein. [But] he took corrective action.

From a PR standpoint, it seems unlikely Apple's directors and executives would want Jobs up on any stage until he looks as healthy as he feels. But the CEO is notoriously headstrong about these sorts of things. If he wants to show up Monday, he will.

According to Star Magazine, a stapled together collection of glossy pages with colors on them, LiLo is slated to star in an "indie fantasy comedy" called The Other Side. Think of it as Hannah Takes the Stairs mixed with The Mummy and Zelig. I kid. It'll be much pornier. Per Star, "the plot centers on a graduate student who takes a summer gig working at a science research facility on a remote island. Once there, she comes across and interesting cast of characters." Though promising, this little indie "fantasy" comedy, faces some major hurdles.

Copyright infringement: I'm fairly certain I saw this exact movie on the Spice Channel back in 2002, when I used to order 10 movies simultaneously on my Dad's television in some sort of strange revenge. It was called something like Desert Dissertation Vol. IV: Anal Proctor

The Cast: Along with the esteemed actress, other cast members include Woody Harrelson, Dave Matthews and Alanis Morissette. Combined, this trio once wrote, "Life has a funny way of sneaking up on you. When you think everything's okay and everything's going right. Sweet like candy to my soul Sweet you rock And sweet you roll. A black man would rather miss than look bad."

Lindsay Lohan Is Uninsurable: This is the least fun but also the most serious hurdle. As talent manager Bernie Brillstein once noted, "I believe [Lady Lohan]'s uninsurable. And when you're uninsurable in this town, you're done." Simply put, who's going to put money on Lohan actually finishing this project as opposed to say, freaking the fuck out and re-enacting her own personal Grey Gardens, holing herself up with a Kilimanjaro of cocaine and cat pee? The answer is probably no one.

Will this movie, slated for 2010, ever get released? And if it doesn't, will the world still survive the calamity? Maybe, probably, respectively. But the world without a film about a wise-cracking Lohan graduate student on a desert island with Dave Matthews wearing a Pukka necklace and little else is a sadder impoverished dystopia.

Fine by us! And we're sure future Tonight Show successor O'Brien and the NBC Entertainment co-chairman Silverman are both relieved to have Leno back on his feet. Although it's safe to say only one of them has been waking up in cold sweats, praying to a new-found God for Leno's good health.

Given that Spitzer is the focus of the frame, one gets the sense the cameraman knew this was no ordinary cutaway. Several viewers did, too.

Thanks to tipster Luke for sending in this screengrab.

1. Picks his new traveling companion, Jaws.
2. Leaves LA, snazzy suits behind.
3. Signs up for Stallone movie. Sells out.

Yep.

Somehow we were imagining a more artful finish to his Oscar letdown. Maybe, he'd follow up The Wrestler with another heart-wrenching turn in a small indie film that cements his position as one of our Greatest Actors. Unfortunately, Iron Man 2 ins-and-outs aside, it looks like Rourke is going the sell-out route: joining up with Sylvester Stallone in his next action flick The Expendables, which has an all-star cast that's an odd consortium of A-List and D-List, including Dolph Lungdren, Ben Kingsley, and Jet Li.

The two were spotted in L.A. a few days after the Oscars having tea together, which seems sort of wrong. Mickey Rourke and Sylvester Stallone should be drinking Everclear straight out of the bottle and giving each other shots of Human Growth Hormone, not sipping tea.

Anyway, that's not the Stallone movie that makes us sad. (I should point out I have inexplicable reserves of love for Mickey, so Mickey if you're reading this, consider this tough love): It's the possibility that the wrestler will be slumming it in Rambo V.

We understand a man's gotta eat, but isn't it possible to star as a villain in something a bit cooler, like say a Bourne thriller, instead of Rambo? Or even a part in Rocky would be better. Oh, wait…

Last December, we'd heard his departure might have something to do with wrongful-termination lawsuits Tesla was facing. (Our sources had told us the employee lawsuits been settled at considerable expense; in fact, they're still pending. And Siry, who was subpoenaed in a case, ended up not being asked to testify.)

What actually prompted his departure: Siry learned last fall that CEO Elon Musk planned to collect deposits from customers for Tesla's Model S Sedan, a car that exists only in prototype.

Why would that drive Siry to quit? Tesla has no factory to build the car, and no financing for it. Musk recently said that Tesla had gotten $350 million in loans from the government; in fact, it hadn't, a reality even Musk's own flack had to acknowledge. Taking deposits from customers under those circumstances in the hopes that everything will come together amounts to a fraud, Siry believed, and he wanted no part of it.

Valleywag first reported Musk's plans to take deposits from customers for the Model S. And sure enough, he's going ahead with them — taking $40,000 deposits starting next month, for a car he may never be able to deliver.