It was an odd pairing, the shameless blog-and-video fameball, with a contributor to the famed Eggers line of elaborately precious and self-consciously-old-fashioned written products. But then, judging from the Twitter account Allison, 28, set up for young Eggers, 26ish, there were mutual benefits to the relationship. Toph, reportedly developing a feature film, was determined to make Allison school him in the tricky art of internet self promotion:

Allison, meanwhile, got the high drama of a tantalizingly secret relationship with the mysterious "TK" to write up for her various revenue-generating "lifecasting" endeavors.

More surprising than the pairing was how it ended: At Allison's behest. We hear that Toph had an ex-girlfriend who wasn't ex- enough. With the breakup and its slow leak into public view, Allison is feeling "teary" and old and "the world would be a much better place if we were all more honest."

Hard to imagine this fairy tale romance went awry, given how sweetly it started:

Awwwwww.

(Top pics: NonSociety, Facebook)

Allison has confirmed to us that her "lifecasting" startup, NonSociety, is behind this audacious Craigslist ad. It's already been chewed up and spit out in the blogosphere for, among other things, asking the world for a "vibrant" personality, "ridiculously reliable" work ethic, maybe a Harvard degree and a glamorous spouse in return for no money and no equity. Or, as Allison puts it, "all of the support, the audience, the connections and the PR you need to launch your brand."

It doesn't help that the list of potential lifecasting roles outlined by Allison and her partners sounds like it was ripped from a catalog of stereotypes: "gay, style guy, teen, prom obsessed" ... "alternative lifestyle, interior/exterior design expert" ... "preppy" ... "rapper." As Just Another Brooklyn Blog put it:

Oh, so I can either have some quirky skill, or just enjoy man on man anal sex. In lieu of a resume, should I just send you a picture of me giving another man a reach-around.

If your life fits into a category that Allison and business partner Megan Asha consider brand-able, AND you clear their application process, you'll have the privilege of constantly broadcasting your life for NonSociety through "text, photographs, videos, perhaps music selection, quotes - and beyond." And beyond.

And, who knows, maybe after a few years you can graduate into a paying gig endorsing consumer electronics or "enhanced water." If that doesn't pay the bills, why not start a lifecasting platform of your own? After all, the internet fame game played by Allison and her protocelebrity cohorts might be a deflating bubble, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of people still willing to buy into it. It's not like media and financial companies are hiring much these days.

(Pic: TMIWeekly)

It's still easy to sneer at Allison as an overreaching wantrepreneur; her NonSociety made all of $60,000 last year and lost one of its three partners this year. It replaced an option from NBC's national network, Bravo, with a deal involving NBC's local lifestyle cable channel, a much smaller venue. And Allison's Time Out New York column ended — so when Sony calls her a "columnist and Web celebrity" it's a bit of a stretch.

But Allison has come a long way from selling Dunkin' Donuts product placement on her blog and pimpage in Herald Square, and from getting paid to blog about a cheesy trip to Sea World. In the pantheon of brands Allison has been closely associated with — AM New York, Star magazine, Dunkin' Donuts, Sea World, New York Nonstop, etc. — Sony is easily the most distinguished. And the electronics company is putting her in good company, alongside writer Amy Sedaris, singer Justin Timberlake and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. Via national TV commercials, radio, print and online ads and retail display, Sony will hawk...

...the BRAVIA television line, Blu-ray Disc home entertainment, Cyber-shot digital cameras, alpha digital SLR cameras, Handycam camcorders and Sony professional high-definition camera systems, VAIO notebook computers and Sony Reader digital books

Allison is more of a Macbook and Canon and Kodak and iPhone/Kindle kind of girl. But if Sony — last real hit: PlayStation 2 — wants to connect with the Facebooking, Apple-loving young masses, it has to start somewhere, and spokespeople like Allison and America's Next Top Model judge Nigel Barker are clearly meant to help endear the company to the tech-savvy, style-conscious younger women Sony thinks should be buying its products.

So while reality television might be an saturated market, Alllison and her agents at ICM have stumbled onto a new opportunity for lifecasters, in a down market no less: Lending flailing tech companies a distinctly Webby buzz they hope to deploy against cooler rivals. For this, Julia Allison the crossover protocelebrity deserves her due. Now Julia Allison the aspiring Web media mogul has to finally show how her uniquely relentless brand of self-promotion can actually power a company (NonSociety) that offers long-term value to people other than herself. There will be, it is safe to say, plenty of people watching.

Yes, it's red. And yes, Allison assures us, it's permanent. As permanent, at least, as her two-year stint as a Time Out New York dating columnist (the magazine now brags of its "Julia-free Sex & Dating section") or her overpaid gig as a Star "editor at large" ("an embarrassment" one editor later sneered).

The fameball is not without her assets; she retains her "lifecasting" Web startup, NonSociety, and a deal with NBC's obscure digital channel New York Nonstop, which gives Allison a toehold into the glamorous world of cable-news punditry (she was on MSNBC just this past Sunday).

But as Allison's fellow protocelebs can attest, fameballing in the midst or a recession and reality TV glut isn't what it used to be. And her business grossed just $60,000 last year, before things got really bad.

So while Allison might say (as she did in a recent instant message to us) "I feel like I haven't been on Gawker in eight weeks; it's making me feel happy / irrelevant" and ask if she's "blacklisted," her real problem isn't grabbing attention. It's making a living, and thus a life, out of it.

UPDATE: Regarding the hair, a tipster adds:

Julia was broadcasting for some really random network from a soccer event at Hudson Terrace last night. While she was still sporting that HIDEOUS one piece (it looked Aladdin-inspired) she's wearing in the pic on Gawker, her new 'do was covered by a huge headband. The reason? Apparently the dye turned BRIGHT RED near her scalp over the course of the day, leaving her with noticeably two-toned hair. It looked entirely heinous. In typical Julia Allison fashion, she was bitching very, very loudly about it. She obviously mentioned that it was Anne Hathaway's colorist that did the job so she "should have known better." Yeah, ok, Julia.

Another choice remark: "I was trying to look like Lindsay Lohan but it ended up like the fifth element!!!"

UPDATE 2: Allison wrote in to say her decision to part ways with Time Out was mutual and that she hadn't "lost" her job, as we had it, or "complained" about not being on Gawker.

Socialite Hearst has, until now, been careful not to go this far; when she did the cover of French Playboy, she was careful to note there was "no nudity for me" and that the publication was "very high fashion." Similarly, the model-heiress emphasized the "high fashion/couture" aspect of her lingerie shoot for an "upscale" panty brand.

Hearst's new topless spread is wrapped, of course, in the same sort of market positioning: She's in an upscale fashion glossy, GQ, and the Italian edition to boot. The model's poses are as stiff as ever, but they're also "low key [and] artistic," according to the blog Drunken Stepfather.

Well, we guess. She's still taking off her shirt, which is way more than her otherwise shameless protocelebrity competitor Julia Allison had to do to get a big Condé Nast cover. How is it the willowy Gotham heiress has been outclassed by a brassy social-climber from the Midwest? By making the same mistake as so many luxury retailers: responding to hard times by cheapening the product in the mind of the consumer. Not necessarily by taking off her shirt — you're only young once, and you might as well take your racy pictures then — but by doing so in such a marginal venue.

UPDATE: And, of course (we should have known), Hearst has gone topless before in an even more obscure venue, which you can see here or here (NSFW links, duh). So she's actually shimmying her way up the stripper pole of minor fame into ever-slightly-classier outlets. Dutch Esquire next? Hearst will make money on both sides of the deal.

(Pics from Italian GQ via Drunken Stepfather)

Leno, whose mother is Scottish, thinks he might be related (see attached clip). The reviews from across the pond: "scarily similar — even down to the same unruly eyebrows." Left by the British tabs as an exercise for the reader: Drawing parallels between the unexpected success of two determined Scots, one in reality television, the other in late-night hosting wars.

Blago, who just pled "not guilty" to federal corruption charges in the most insane way possible, is in talks to star in a forthcoming survival-style reality show on NBC, the Chicago Tribune reports. His attorney just warned the judge in his case that the governor will soon ask for dispensation from his travel restrictions to travel to the Costa Rican's jungle for the show.

Here's the show's official description (via Hollywood Reporter):

"Ten celebrities of various backgrounds will be dropped into the heart of the Costa Rican jungle to face challenges designed to test their skills in adapting to the wilderness and to raise money for their favorite charities."

It's not yet clear which charity Blago plans to shake down over his potential winnings.

That's per Page Six. Per the oversharing queen's Twitter, we know Allison was showing the new QB her headband at 2 am in one tweet, and then not posting again until 7:35 am the next morning (see below left).

"Jay is one of the top 10 quaterbacks in the NFL," she wrote a friend. "I didn't know who he was until last night."

Now she knows him.

It's rough time for Allison's "lifecasting" startup NonSociety; one of her three co-founders just split and an option to expand a reality show deal with Bravo expired at the end of February. A little tabloid-fueled traffic bump could come in handy right about now, if only for morale-raising purposes: Allison, it goes without saying, thrives on attention.

The question is whether Allison would allow herself to be called "gross" in order to plant an item like this on Page Six. Not normally. But she kind of needs a "Hail Mary" right now, apparently in more ways than one.

With his BastardLife website launched and a book deal (working title: "Sex Across America") under his perpetually unfastened belt, Boulton is all set to complete his transformation into the walking, self-branded embodiment of screwing anything that moves, throughout the country, constantly. Genre would just get in the way at this point, so Boulton decided to quit.

Is there some way you, Neal Boulton, might be able to leverage this moment to inject some comically transparent self-aggrandizement into the celebrity-industrial news pipeline?

"It's been a good run," Boulton told [Page Six]. "Hell, Anna Wintour had to close Men's Vogue - we're still standing."

An absurd comparison of yourself to the legendary editor of Vogue? Our pants are off to you, Mr. Boulton.

(Pic via Queerty)

RapRadar: Elliot Wilson, former editor of hip hop magazine XXL, is launching what he hopes will become the Huffington Post of Hip Hop. Which is just a horrible slogan. Basically it'll be some HuffPo-ish mix of blogging, journalism, and hip hop celebrities writing guest columns. "If Jay-Z wants to express his feelings about Obama, there's not really a forum where he can do that right now," Wilson says. This is false.
Chance of Survival: Not great, but theoretically possible. XXL was a quality magazine. If he can replicate that online, he could build an audience. Problem: XXL already replicated itself online. Problem 2: Audience doesn't mean advertisers. See Vibe magazine, currently.

The Wrap: Ex-NYT correspondent and Gawker opponent Sharon Waxman launched this Hollywood/ entertainment news site thing last month. Bad timing, but hey.
Chance of Survival: Ehhh.... moderate? It'll have to get better. Waxman has some money at her back, which is good. But she has some very entrenched competition in Hollywood. If something happens to Nikki Finke, then... slightly less of a chance of failure.


BastardLife: This is Genre magazine editor Neal Boulton's "pansexual sex & relationships site for ALL men." No idea what that means. Is 'pansexual' different than 'bisexual?' It's a question you may be able to find the answer to at Bastardlife.com
Chance of Survival: As a forum for Neal Boulton's personal musings, decent. As a moneymaking venture, very low. Unless pansexuality takes off as a recession thing.


Alpha Kitty: Atoosa Rubenstein was a big shot editor at Seventeen magazine. Then she left to run this "Alpha Kitty" project. Which, as best we can tell, now consists of her Myspace page and a Youtube channel.
Chance of survival: Ummm.. good? But the chance of making money with this is nil, as far as we can tell. Although to be completely honest I'm still not sure what this thing really is.


The Daily Beast: I made up a little haiku about The Daily Beast, ready?:
Tina Brown glamour
Fancy online articles
No advertising

Chance of Survival: Unless Tina comes up with a brilliant plan to monetize this site, it will be a victim of its launch timing and its utter lack of urgency to come up with a workable business plan. She will burn through Barry Diller's millions, subsidizing many worthy writers in the process, then eventually fold. It will be a nice place to go back to and read the archives one day, though.

[Disclosure: Neal Boulton has owed me freelance money forever, so I may be biased.]

Quadrangle bought Maxim publisher Alpha Media in 2007 for $250 million. These days, it looks like the publication may soon be seized by creditors. One of those creditors actually owns Chrysler, which Rattner will now help the White House oversee — a conflict of interest that may have ruined his chances for a bigger job.

Rattner's investment firm has had lower-profile failures. The hedge fund it started it 2006 was shut in November after posting a 25 percent 2008 loss. The company lost another hedge fund earlier in the year when a group of Rattner's former Lazard colleagues decided they'd rather run the fund on their own than under Rattner, according to the Wall Street Journal's sources.

Following the capital outflows, Quadrangle was left to scrounge for money for a new private-equity fund. You can imagine how that's been going.

So really, Rattner's new job advising Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gets him out of a pickle: He has already announced his departure Quadrangle (he was managing partner and one of four founders).

Chalk the high-powered DC escape up to Rattner's "momomaniacal... social climb[ing]," as one of his colleagues once put it: He raised "large sums" for John Kerry and helped convince 200 business leaders to endorse him; he was a fundraiser ($2 million) and "enthusiastic supporter" of Hillary Clinton. Then he launched a campaign to raise $1 million for Obama from former Hillary supporters.

Friends told Newsweek Rattner had "long coveted" a high-level executive branch job and that he was something of a "hypercareerist." That was anonymously. On the record they "insist[ed] his priority is transforming the eight-year-old Quadrangle into a Wall Street powerhouse." Ha, that worked out.

Given his tight business and personal relationship with Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his purported ability to suppress news about his wife's drunk driving — the DUI was no barrier to an Obama job, as it turned out — perhaps it makes sense that the truth about Steven Rattner is the one you hear on background.

(Picture via Esther Dyson)

Allison, the archetype of internet fameballdom, spends her time "lifestreaming" her every move for NonSociety, the Web startup she formed with friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. Cable network Bravo has a longstanding option, valid through the end of this month, to launch a reality show involving the trio, thus exposing their lives even more completely. (NonSociety had a deal for a pilot, presumably now complete. Pilots are only sometimes made into full series.)

Given her aggressive self-exposure, one might think Allison would anticipate and tolerate critics, even those as uncommonly prolific in criticizing her life as she herself is in broadcasting it. But no; she sees the attacks as dehumanizing, and is glad her ex-boyfriend's pretend boyfriend, Tumblr founder David Karp, was man enough to stand up for her, and all other victims of internet critics. As she told us in an email:

I haven't asked David to take down any sites in a long time, so I don't know where the impetus for this particular purge came from, but I'm thrilled that he has. I am absolutely in favor of ridding the Tumblr community - and the internet in general - of what one of my readers once called "mind cancer." That sort of nastiness is insidious and it will rot communities unless someone says, "This simply isn't an acceptable way to treat other human beings."


There is no reason the internet should remain in its current Hobbesian state of nature. Someone needs to begin the long process of setting basic standards of decency online, and I'm proud of David - as a businessman, but also as a friend - that he and his company have the balls to do so."

Of course, if the internet were less wild and "Hobbesian," and if people and companies got to set the standards by which their critics were judged, the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Scientology and even Time might have shut down blogs like Gawker long ago. And it's hard to imagine Allison — or another Allison — rocketing to fame in such a tame environment. (We'll let you know when we figure out if that's a good or a bad thing.)

(Picture via NonSociety)

After two Minnesota-based publications linked to the Observer profile, some persistent anonymous commenters came out of the woodwork to raise questions about the ambitious blogger's purported background — on the Minnesota website, under the original Observer piece and on our tips email account. Given Sorgatz buddy Lockhart Steele's statement to the Observer that the aspiring Web mogul is "prone to outsized statements," we thought some of the questions warranted further examination.

Did Sorgatz really co-found the High Plains Reader and make $100,000 off its sale?

According to to the Observer, Sorgatz started this alt-weekly "after college" with two friends and cashed out two years later.

Sorgatz, who has positioned himself as the expert on self-promotion, has not referred to himself as a founder of the publication previously — not on LinkedIn, not on Facebook and not in a comment to the MNSpeak discussion thread about the Observer piece. He is alternately "editor," "co-editor," and "editor/publisher."

In his MNSpeak comment, Sorgatz wrote that he started at the publication — as an editor — "maybe a month after it was launched."

Maybe that's why his online resumes list his involvement as starting in 1995 when the paper's Wikipedia entry says it was founded in 1994.

But that doesn't explain why Sorgatz is not listed among the High Plains Reader founders on Wikipedia. And it doesn't explain how he could have started theReader "after college" when this newspaper article indicates he was still a University of North Dakota student in 1997 and even his own resumes state he did not finish school until1996.

Was he a founder of Web Guide magazine? Does such a thing exist? Did he really make $750,000 off of it?

According to articles by the Associated Press and Computer Publishing & Advertising Report, as well as another company's press release, there was a Web Guide magazine in operation at the time Sorgatz has indicated he worked there. It has been described as being started by Dan Beaver, former magazine buyer for Barnes & Noble. It was sold at the time Sorgatz said he cashed out.

Again, Sorgatz does not appear to have been mentioned in the press (based on Nexis searches) in connection with the publication, as a founder or otherwise. On his own resumes, he is "editor," never "co-founder" or such.

It also seems odd that Google can't find any mentions of Web Guide or WebGuide on Sorgatz's oversharey, long-running website. Nor can the site's internal search engine. You'd think if Sorgatz got sorta rich off something like that, he would have mused on the experience at some point.

Did he really buy a condo in an old mansion in Minneapolis?

A comment repeated on both the Observer and MNSpeaks sites claims, "I lived at the Pillsbury house for a few months. We all rented - he did not own it." Sorgatz did not address this statement in his later comments in the same MNSpeaks thread.

The inconsistencies in the Observer article do not prove Sorgatz is a liar. The Observer's Spencer Morgan could have misquoted the press-friendly microcelebrity expert, and indeed Sorgatz has already written, in the MNSpeaks thread linked above, "Oh god, you want an error count? Too many!" It's unlikely, for example, that Sorgatz told Morgan he bought Nintendo Wii game consoles for his nephews when, in fact, he only has nieces.

But it's equally unlikely misquotation and misunderstanding can entirely explain why the Observer's story about Sorgatz is so at odds with the published record.

What's most probable is that the attention-loving fameball took his self-promotion a few steps beyond the boundaries of truth. In the same Observer piece, after all, Sorgatz had no trouble pushing the envelope on discretion, good taste or basic interpersonal decency.

One does not bullshit in a community of pervasive self-publishing — on Tumblrs and Twitter streams, in comments sections and Flickr accounts. Rex Sorgatz, of all people, should know that.

(Photo via Sorgatz's Flickr stream.)

As the attention-obsessed would-be-media-mogul surely intended, today's Observer's profile of him produced a frisson of controversy inside New York's Tumblrocracy before it even hit the street. Is he really dating CNET blogger Caroline McCarthy, as the article implied? Why would he be so callous as to describe his recent ex, former Huffington Post writer Rachel Sklar, as an "exit strategy" from the problem of dating younger women, or portray her as enthralled by the low-grade attention that comes with being part of a blogging power couple?

Sorgatz, who showered the Observer's Spencer Morgan with on-the-record tales of his exploits with young Tumblr girls, courted both the attention and the controversy. It's not clear why: Surely the online consultant and entrepreneur sees what is happening around him. Fellow fameball Julia Allison's reality show deal with Bravo fell through, and her Web venture Non Society is groping for relevance. The television networks are, at last, supersaturated with minor celebrities placed in "reality" scenarios and hardly in the position to bid on more. Either Sorgatz knows something everyone else doesn't about attention economics, or he just can't stop hoarding the stuff

Sorgatz certainly did his best to whip up some drama for Morgan. His Gossip Girl parties, which found their way into Morgan's lede, have been near-desolate on recent occasion. But the Monday shindig bulked up significantly after Sorgatz added this nugget to the invitation:

This time, it's not just an invite, but also a request....

Spencer Morgan of the New York Observer will also be here, because he is profiling me in his "Men of Manhattan" column. (I know, right?) So in addition to coming over and drinking my beer, you have to pretend you really like me.

Having secured something of a crowd, Sorgatz then provocatively mingled his recent ex Sklar with a new squeeze, "Kristen" from the Web show he produces, "I'm Just Sayin'." In fact, the two women ended up sitting next to one another.

Sklar is on the far right in the second-to-last row of people; we're told that is Kristen next to her. The body language is not subtle. (And, yes, that's our very own expressive Richard Blakeley sitting on the couch.)

As if this wasn't enough, Sklar also had to contend with the presence of McCarthy, who as Sklar's relationship with Sorgatz was ending appeared in more and more pictures with scarf-loving Sorgatz on their respective Tumblr and Flickr streams. The two also made prominent appearances together in blogging circles, at "blogger bar" The Magician on the Lower East Side and elsewhere. Rumors that McCarthy had replaced Sklar swirled among friends and put a strain on their relationship.

At the party, post-breakup, Sklar made the mistake of sharing her feelings of awkwardness toward McCarthy in real-time with Allison. Allison, apparently trying to elbow in on Sorgatz's tearmaking, did Sklar the courtesy of quickly summarizing Sklar's text messages in an email to McCarthy, also at the party and soon in receipt of Allison's message.

But Sklar needn't have been worried; McCarthy is said to be seeing Curbed.com publisher and former Gawker staffer Lockhart Steele. Her public flirtation with Sorgatz was believed by friends to serve mutually beneficial ends — McCarthy got to show her ex, Tumblr inventor David Karp, that she had moved on, while Sorgatz got to build on his image as a playboy while passive-aggressively extricating himself from his relationship with Sklar. In any case, McCarthy obliquely denied the Observer's implication she's with Sorgatz on, naturally, her Tumblr.

If the whole thing sounds like an slightly-more-grown-up episode of Gossip Girl, that's because it is, probably by design. The party drama and the McCarthy flirtation, like the Observer piece, is a case-study right out of micro-fame expert Sorgatz's own playbook.

Sklar, by Sorgatz's own admission the more grounded half of the couple, seems to have played an unwitting role in the manufactured drama. "We were a solid couple from day one, and [Sogartz's romp with Tumblettes and a secret blog] was clearly in the past, and so I rolled with it," she wrote to us after the Observer piece was published. "Also, the 'romp' was a 6-month relationship and not some trip through micro-celebrity."

Sklar certainly deserves better than to be called, by her ex in the Observer, "sort of a solution to the problem of a lifestyle that really primarily revolved around 23-year-old Tumblr girls."

Kristen, meanwhile, advances the Sorgatz plot while promoting one of his businesses. Want to find out about the outré playboy's latest conquest? Then watch her Web show!

If Sorgatz wants to be the next Jeff Zucker, this seems like a bizarre way to get there, however many eyeballs his lifestream ultimately attracts. If there's a point to Sorgatz's caddishness, no one has yet deduced it. But plenty of people are content to watch the bonfire in the meantime.

(Top image via Sorgatz on Flickr.)

As far as she's concerned, Lacy had it all, 'round about May: A book (about Web 2.0 companies like Facebook), a Web video show, a BusinessWeek column (and gestalt-changing cover story), a blog and of course a Twitter stream. Then she realized no medium was helping another much.

After about 10 years of "worked evenings, sleepless nights, sacrificed relationships and any kind of work/life balance," the tech pundit just wrote a long essay concluding that becoming a brand is overrated because "I can't pull fans and readers across platforms." Also: "brand that hits people fast usually doesn't last."

Oh, sure, Lacy admits, she's making more money, is better prepared for the downturn, has greater name recognition, experiences "amazing once-in-a-lifetime experiences," and, hell, people even stop her in the street to tell her she's awesome, but not in the right way, you see:

I'm stunned by how many people read this blog, but never go to TechTicker. Or how many people watch TechTicker, but have no idea I write a BusinessWeek column. Or how many people follow me on Twitter, but still think I'm on staff for BusinessWeek full-time. Or— I swear to God— the number of people who know me from any of those platforms and say, "You wrote a book?" ...Whenever I get recognized and someone asks if I'm Sarah Lacy, I smile and say yes, but then coyly ask how they know me. Because I've learned it's different every time, and it's never all-of-the-above.

What is wrong with you internet people? Sarah Lacy is working hard so you can fully appreciate her and you're not FULLY APPRECIATING HER IN ALL MEDIA CONSTANTLY.

At this rate she'll never be culturally immortal!

That's the thing about branding yourself: It gets easier to do all the time, and the potential audience is constantly growing. But you're still on the hedonic treadmill, racing to surpass — or even keep up with — all the competition.

Anschutz, notoriously secretive, made his money in the oil business and through Qwest Communications, which paid huge fines to the federal government for signing up long distance customers against their will and for an accounting scandal.

A few years ago, he was intriguing new media mogul. He had started the Examiner chain of giveaway daily newspapers, which stretches from San Francisco to Washington, DC. And he produced the movie "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" with Disney, eventually grossing more than $700 million.

His well-documented support for Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2 and groups like Colorado for Family Values were often noted but generally not seen as a hindrance.

Maybe they weren't, but something seems to be going wrong: In 2008, a joint movie venture with 20th Century Fox all but ended; the co-founder of Anschutz's film company Walden Media made a surprise departure; and now, reports Variety, Disney is pulling away, declining to finance the third "Narnia" film after the second grossed an apparently disappointing $419 million. Walden, meanwhile, is only making about one quarter as many movies as originally planned.

And does anyone really think the giveaway newspaper business could possibly be going well?

His fall from grace hasn't come as quickly as, say, Sam Zell's, but Anschutz is well on his way to becoming another failed, would-be crossover media mogul. He can always blame the gays!

The Secretary of State ended up with "an emerald and diamond necklace, ring, bracelet and earrings," reports AP — and that was before the end of January.

The box for those gifts was valued at $5,000.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah upgraded Rice from emeralds to rubies, and threw in a bracelet and ring. $165,000 in loot for one trip!

Of course it's just our own oil money, coming back to us. Uselessly, since it will sit in a General Services Administration warehouse, because no one gets to keep the gifts under federal law. What a hilarious way to waste money!

Rice made the best of it, though: She "forgot" until now to disclose a "$170,000 flower petal motif necklace," received from Abdullah in 2005. Ha.

Page Six first reported on Boulton and Wenner last year — that they were running around town together and making out in front of the Time Warner Center. But Wenner denied, and we heard the gossp was all manufactured by Boulton himself — a "weird press play by Neal." Which no one at the time understood. "What motivation would Boulton actually have for this?" a commenter asked.

Someone whispered to New York that Wenner and Boulton were still dating, but the magazine's website didn't see fit to stand behind that story. It's the story that just won't stick.

But Boulton, not at all shy about emailing bloggers, or being quoted, somehow stayed in the news. An "irate lady source" in February sent Queerty two remarkably well-photographed and posed shots of Boulton nuzzled up to her model-perfect body (including the one at top). Boulton protested, probably a bit too much, without actually denying he had sexed the vixen. Did he send, or arrange to have sent, the tell-all email from his statuesque "lover?"

As time went on, Boulton started making direct appeals. In July he sent us a bizarre letter advising women not to flatter themselves that he might be hitting on them in bars, because he's just being friendly. Then we got seemingly random emails from supposed women admirers trying to get in touch with Boulton, and from people claiming to see him leaving MTV's offices (that was him, he merrily confirmed for us, in talks about a pilot, which we never heard about again).

And now, with the book agent deal and the purported reality show, we finally see (duh) what motivation the Genre editor might have for whipping up interest in his WILD and CRAZY "pansexual" lifestyle, "pansexual" being a pointless synonym for "bisexual," presumably plastered on Boulton's website because it sounds sexier and more marketable than the latter.

The endgame is familiar to any fameball, straight out of the Julia Allison playbook: Reality show, book, internet startup. A pedestrian play rooted in already-pedestrian notions of sexual decadence and roleplaying. Neal Boulton, you're boring us.