Granted, Sheila McClear wrote about this last year, Matt Harvey did this at the New York Press back in January, and in what reads less like a party report and more like Heart of Darkness: NYC '09 Edition, Jenna from Jezebel channeled her inner Josef Conrad to dive headfirst into the New and Improved FMF earlier in the week. I would recommend reading her piece, first, but it's kind of terrifying.

But maybe the Times discovered something different in their findings, maybe they found something to like about this entire enterprise. After all, this is the Sunday Styles, a section of the New York Times almost entirely devoted to attempts at instilling an inferiority complex in the hoi polloi. Maybe they saw it through a different, less cynical lens, one that cynics can't permeate.

Or not. Try this on for size:

"From my experience, I've dated lawyers and doctors and they're nice; I just prefer finance," Ms. Yanush said, before applying a fresh gloss of candy-apple-red lipstick in the ladies room. "My girlfriends who are in long-term relationships with finance guys are very happy."

Or this:

Alan Nieves, 24, a derivatives salesman for an investment bank, confirmed that when it comes to who attracts whom, "There's a system in place and that's how it is," adding, "It's the New York scene."

Or this:

A 25-year-old financial analyst who was double-fisting glasses of Johnnie Walker Black, said that identifying yourself as a banker ("dropping the banker bomb" as he put it) had traditionally been a potent lure on the dating scene. "As the recession got worse, the magic bullet lost some of its mojo," said the analyst, who asked not to be named to protect his employer, a private equity firm, from the publicity associated with the evening. "All my paralegal friends were suddenly getting dates and my banker friends weren't." His own social life, at least, did not suffer because of recession, he said, but he still didn't see the potential to meet someone special this night. "Let's just say I'm not going to find my future ex-wife here," he said.

The lovely thing about Times writer Katherine Bindley's report is how hard she struggles with not writing something along the lines of DICKBAGS, MANY OF YOU, especially when she takes to quoting to invitation: "'We are here to announce the balance is restoring itself to the ecosystem of the New York dating community,' the party organizers said on their cheeky Web site." Somewhere, buried deep within the confines of the Sunday Styles editorial bullpen, there has to be a style guide filled with euphemisms like "cheeky" their writers are forced to use in place of designations like "goddamn ridiculous." It's probably a great read.

Meanwhile, in two separate apartments buried deep within Murray Hill, a second or third walk of shame/point of pride is being recounted to a group of well-to-do bankers or fashion workers. Soon, they will marry, and one day, after appearing in the Weddings & Celebrations pages, spring forth children from their loins. And when asked where they met by their children one day, they can point them to this website, and tales of double-fisting Johnnie B. and laughs about lying on the application will ensue. Possibly followed by a moment of very loud, silent disquiet.

Banker Seeks Beauty: Must Be Upbeat (Like the Economy) [NYT]

Doped Race Horses, Ozwald Boateng & Gluten-Free Vodka: Last Night Finance Guys Showed Me The World [Jezebel]

Because even when Mom - the former editor of Vanity Fair, the short-lived Talk, and the current Editor-In-Chief of Barry Diller's latest experiment in revolutionizing information - and Dad Harry Evans - who's been knighted for his services in journalism - try their hardest, daughter Isabelle still find herself at the mercy of the Harvard Admissions Overlords. Observe, from a well-placed tipster:

Tina and Harry have spent the past year wining and dining and campaigning everyone they know (Jon Alter, Mark Whitaker, Mandy Grunwald)—or can get to know—with Harvard connections in order to get their daughter, Isabel, admitted. And where has it gotten the poor thing? First she was wait-listed until the last possible minute, then admitted with a year's mandatory deferral. The so-called "Z list" of shame. Not a good thing to have such pushy parents.

For the record, that's Newsweek columnist Jon Alter, NBC News Senior VP/Correspondent Mark Whitaker, and Democratic political consultant Mandy Grunwald, none of whom apparently have enough grease to get Isabelle Brown her RedCard on demand.

Meanwhile, when she's not busy trying to get her daughter in the door of America's most elite educational institution, she's feeling the pain of the people she's trying to shut down. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz points out a quote from an interview with Brown that ran last week in the Chicago Tribune:

"It's most difficult, I think, for the people who are in their 50s who are part of a big media organization where they've spent most of their lives," Brown said. "They see it all changing around them and there isn't time for them to make the adjustment, or they fear making it."

To be certain, Tina's talking about the media, but when using words like "most difficult," we're talking about people - journalists, writers, etc - who've had it fairly cushy up until this point. And given a chance to opine on the economy, she - like so many other journalists - only sees it through the prism of the media's own economic trauma. A good example? Check out Ms. Schultz's column in which she quoted Tina, entitled "Journalists' own hard luck tales help them tell those of others."

She's too busy kvetching about how "most blogs (are) an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication" to realize how deep her head is up her own ass. This...is infuriating:

Shared experiences nurture empathy, and that's a handy skill when you're capturing in words, pictures and video the essence of another human being. Our privileged, arm's length status from the people we cover has evaporated, and the view from common ground is fueling some of the most poignant journalism in years...One of the greatest challenges for print journalists now is to respond to change while staying rooted in the values that brought us to this profession. We feel more vulnerable because we are, but troubled times can soften edges and open hearts to the suffering around us. We are a country of hurt right now. Home foreclosures, lost jobs, closed businesses: These are hard stories, but they are the biggest stories of our time....Journalists have never been better prepared to tell them.

Yes, because the fact that your job might be in trouble - even though you clearly still have one - definitely brings you closer to, say, the autoworkers of Detroit, whose skill sets have been literally outpaced, outsourced, and deemed worthless. Or low-income workers who were spun by sub-prime mortgages into a vortex of debt that the low-income they started with got them into in the first place (by being put in the position to even take a sub-prime mortgage).

As for Tina, it doesn't sound like she has that much to worry about: when she's visibly campaigning around town enough to the point of, well, us hearing about it, she's clearly got bigger concerns ahead of her than the fate of the economy, media or not.

Journalists' own hard luck tales help them tell those of others [Cleveland Plain Dealer]

We haven't read Andersen's new book, called Reset, but we got a preview in his essay for Time a few months ago arguing that the economic mess that has one in eight Americans behind on their mortgage payments or in foreclosure is actually a good thing because it could herald a "rediscovery of the common good."

Rushkoff makes a similar, if larger, argument in Life, Inc., which makes the case that "the current financial crisis is actually an opportunity to reverse [the] 600-year-old trend" toward corporate domination of the minutiae of our lives.

Awesome. The 33 million people currently relying on food stamps [pdf]—up 18% from a year ago—will no doubt feel better about their plight with the knowledge that they can now fight back against "the branding of the self" that Rushkoff bemoans in our corporate culture. Or that "the meltdown and resulting reset might jar the culture" out of the tendency in "art and design and entertainment" toward "compulsively reviving styles and remixing the greatest hits of the past," which has always bugged Andersen.

This lemons-to-lemonade theorizing is inevitable and ultimately harmless. And both Rushkoff and Andersen are right that stupidity and navel-gazing and gluttony and complacency got us into this mess, and that it would be a good thing to not be stupid and navel-gazing and complacent. But we're getting tired of hearing cultural and economic evangelizing about the upside of the fact that people literally can't afford to eat from well-heeled, comfortable intellectuals whose book parties probably cost more than the median income in a lot of the decimated towns across this country whose misfortunes they are fetishizing as some kind of return to bedrock values. Andersen writes:

It's time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant, to be more artisan-enterpriser and less prospector-speculator, more heroic Greatest Generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based again.... Yes, we must start spending again, and we will. But we've all known people who, having survived the 1930s, never lost their Depression habits of frugality. And so it will be again.

The reason people never lost their Depression habits of frugality is that they saw people starving on the streets, and they were terrified beyond reason that it might happen again. It's true that people learn valuable moral lessons from hardship, but those lessons don't make the hardship a good thing. People learn awful truths in war. That doesn't mean we should have more of them for educational purposes, or that they have an upside.

The problem with this finally-we're-getting-back-to-what-matters analysis is that the most severely hurt victims of this economy never got away from what matters. They were too busy working. Kurt Andersen and his friends might have lost touch with work or nature or reality, but they are going to be just fine, and can afford to look at their lean times as a spiritual journey. Again from Andersen:

[E]ven after the economy recovers, deciding to forgo that third car or fifth TV or imperial master bathroom or marginally cooler laptop will come more naturally.

Fifth TV? Yes, the recession could be a turning point for idiots who had five TVs. They might learn that they don't need five TVs. But Andersen may be surprised to learn that there are vast numbers of people for whom buying the marginally cooler laptop never came naturally, because they couldn't afford it. What lessons do they have to learn from the economic collapse?

Rushkoff's beef goes back to the Renaissance and the development of central currency; he thinks that by not having jobs we can "reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and mostly, to one another." It's a back-to-the-land-style argument, a call to rid ourselves of the abstractions of the postmodern economy and focus on the actual economic life in our neighborhoods. He was on the Colbert Report last night:

We can stop outsourcing our investment to Wall Street, stop outsourcing to banks and start investing in people we know, businesses that we start ourselves rather than faux businesses on the Forbes 400.

Again, quite reasonable. But coming from someone who describes himself as a "media theorist by trade," it's hard to swallow. We wonder how Rushkoff would make a living if we all stopped buying books from corporations and started investing in our friendly neighborhood media theorist. Probably about as well as the 16 percent or so of the population that doesn't have a job right now, or is underemployed, or has given up looking for a job because they're too busy reconnecting to one another and not eating.

Elkhart used to be "the RV Capital of the World," and now, oddly, no one in the world wants an RV, and so Elkhart County has the highest unemployment rate in the nation. Obama's been to Elkhart twice already, during the campaign. He lost the city to both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, but now they're all totally psyched to hear him, because they all heard he's bringing with him some of those "government handouts" we used to give to shiftless lazy minorities but that we now need to rescue hard-working Americans suffering a run of bad luck (thanks either to evil bankers or minorities flipping houses or something, maybe ACORN?).

So Obama's going full-on campaign mode trying to sell this stimulus bill, with his appearance in Elkhart today, his primetime news conference tonight, and a Florida trip tomorrow.

So maybe we'll watch on Fox? We really hate Rick Sanchez! And, hah, right now Fox is interviewing Michael Steele about how obstructing passage of the stimulus is their victory plan for 2012. Just like how Democrats made us lose the Iraq war so they could win in 2008.

12:11 Oh, good, Evan Bayh is there. Obama is talking "folksy" again, he is totally back in campaign mode.
12:14 Obama totally didn't forget about poor unemployed bitter white Indiana people during his two weeks in office. FYI.
12:16 The politics of failure have failed! This is your first applause line, the bit about how Obama won the election and that means Republicans should fucking bend over and take it.
12:17 "To put Americans back to work, doing ther work that America needs to get done." That is a really weird explanation of a stimulus bill.
12:18 Here is a list of jobs! Jobs making jobs! This is not of one his "inspirational rhetoric" speeches, this is one of his "I am a Democrat and I promise you all health care and jobs" speeches. Clinton-style. There is an applause line about COBRA!
12:21 Now we are sending "thousands of Hoosier kids to college", so they can win the basketball and inspire us.
12:22 Gah, what the hell is so wrong with "government jobs," anyway? Especially if the government is paying people to do useful things around the country? Too many benefits? Now the President is giving shoutouts to local attractions like... an overpass. Everyone is fucking psyched about that overpass.
12:23 Obama would like Chicago to steal Indiana's WIND. Also Obama would like Indiana to produce some damn energy for once instead of just using all it, all the time, and giving back nothing but corn and CO2.
12:25 The fat guy with the bolo tie behind Obama is pretty great. The requisite military people look bored as hell. Jokes about how crappy Washington is always get a laugh!
12:27 Everyone wants to work hard and be rewarded for working hard and let's create jobs and help families and turn this economy around THANK Y'ALL VERY MUCH WHOOOO ECONOMIC RECOVERY it's question time!!
12:30 The questions at the town hall haven't been screened! The Bush era is over! Haha also Obama is going "girl, boy, girl, boy," because he's at a school we guess? First question: will the money go directly to Elkhart, in, like a big pile maybe? This question gets the first "LOOK" of the day from our President, who explains that there will be a website.
12:33 "Elkhart" sounds a little bit like "al-Qaeda." Why are they creating jobs in al-Qaeda? WE KNEW IT. Here come the people who don't actually have questions, they just want to talk. This guy hopes all the money goes to people without jobs, and not to banks. This isn't the TARP, this is the stimulus. Hahaha then Obama's mic went out?? When you give a tax cut to working families, they spend it on coats and cars. Rich people just save that money, because they are better with their money, which is good for them but our economy is built on spending way beyond your means, and frugal rich people hate America. Obama patiently explains that we have to give some money to the banks so that they can lend money to people who want to buy RVs.
12:39 No one will go to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers dime!! Hah we finally get some crazy questions. This one got the lady booed, because she mentioned Sean Hannity?? We're not even sure which appointment this crazy lady was upset about, one of the tax cheats. Obama is all "we have these great ethics rules which really screwed us over because there's no one qualified who is also ethical." Wait actual quote: "With respect to Sean Hannity, I did not know that he had invited me for a beer, but, you know, I will take that under advisement." Hah. "But I'm always good for a beer." Whooooo beer!
12:39 What about judges retooling all the mortgages? Eh, sure. Obama has ONE HOUSE. Haha why is he zinging McCain now? Because McCain is doing his "pork pork earmark pork" thing to the stimulus? Is it just a campaign reflex? South Side of Chicago! I have one house!
1:00 That was a really boring question. Here is a question about protectionism. America has the best workers in the world and they're so good at working! Tax breaks for companies that don't go to China or whatever! Also education! (Ok maybe this is a violation of liveblogging etiquette but right now we're watching this.)
1:05 Haha a nine-year-old wants to know what Obama will do to help our schools. Obama just finished his stump speech on rebuilding our schools, and he says, "James, I just finished talking about that." And then he repeats some of his talking points, all of which are way over James' head, probably. He should've just promised that he'd get James' class a new guinea pig, or something.
1:06 Ok god bless everyone bye!

A “special security alert” posted by USAJOBS says “certain contact and account data were taken, including user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data.

But there is good news: "The information accessed does not include resumes." So no one will, like, call your references. This isn't change we can believe in! What happened to the "new politics"!

Was your federal job application data stolen? We'd like to hear from you! Please send us an email with your name, user ID, password, and basic demographic data!

For days, until a CIA officer raped some women, Drudge headlines were all about how the stimulus bill will fund STD prevention and, uh, birth control. (Well, not anymore!) Looks like it's all about stimulating something other than the economy, right?

What it's actually about stimulating, of course, is THE CULTURE WARS. Rush Limbaugh is relevant again, yay! The "spending too much money we don't have" argument against economic stimulus doesn't work because a) the GOP just spent 8 years doing that and b) no one besides the ideological Republicans care? This isn't a trillion dollars going to CORPORATE FATCATS, it's going to, like, everyone! And everyone would like this money, please! So the only way to galvanize support for obstructionism is to fan those dying flames of sexual puritanism. Obama will teach your little girl how condoms work and then she'll... not get pregnant? Which will save you money, as Nancy Pelosi pointed out, which got her in trouble.

And now liberals are starting in on the ol' "like it or lump it" argument. We won the election, so what we say goes! There's something so... uncouth about that sort of thing. Oh, sure, we all say we wish our liberal leaders were hard-nosed political hatchet-men who got things done like we used to think the Republicans were, but it's so unliberal, isn't it? So Barack Obama is working very hard to make his bill palatable to Senate Republicans. (House Republicans are basically shit out of luck, which is why they're being the most annoying, at the moment.)

And, oh god, it's all feeling like Clinton again, except with someone way better at managing Congress in charge.

Anyway Barack Obama is going to TAX AND SPEND our way out of this, and he will TAX you to SPEND on ABORTION and FLAG-BURNING.

As we all know, New York Magazine is particularly ill-equipped to navigate this terrible new depression. But the Best of New York must go on! Still, you may notice a bit of a difference in good and services deemed "best". We'll let editor Jon Steinberg explain, in an email he sent earlier today:

Think about the most fun you've had this year and where you had it. Think about the hardware delivery service that brought you a coaxial cable in the middle of the night when you were hooking up your new flat-screen. Think about the people and services who saved you a ton of money on your apartment/car/birthday party/speaker system/vacation. It's okay to have some expensive stuff in the mix, but it has to be proven as amortizable; ie, that $3,000 mattress that is not only super-comfortable but will last you at least 30 years. Be creative!

Yes, and nothing says "creative" like spinning a $3,000 mattress as somehow economical in any way! What sort of amortizable purchases should you submit?

• $1,000 hoodie with two front pockets for storing coupons.
• $500 haircut that you could photograph and ask a cheaper stylist to recreate, in the future.
• Expensive baby crap you could use on a second child maybe?
• $300 chair that you could burn for heat, should it come to that.

Get your suggestions in by next Wednesday, freelancers!

"No one I know has a job anymore," Tina says. Oddly she is not talking about the idle rich. She has discovered that this recession thing has hurt people with formerly cushy media jobs! She has coined a kicky new term for this terrible new situation of "working harder for less" that everyone else in the nation has been dealing with for a generation: The Gig Economy. It's also called "freelancing," if you don't like kicky new terms.

Of course she knows that poor people have been dealing with this since before she invented color photos of celebrites in high-brow magazines—Mrs. Sir Harold Evans is not out of touch with the little people!

"To people I know in the bottom income brackets [ha ha ha! -ed], living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years."

AND

As noted above, the folks at the bottom of the greasy pole have been living with the anxieties, uncertainties, and indignities of Gigwork (it used to be called piecework) for a long time. Now that people nearer the top are learning firsthand about the wonders of “individual initiative” and “self-reliance,” a little more sympathy—maybe even solidarity—with those the meritocracy dismissed as losers may be in order. Maybe having to trade that first-class cabin for a smaller one without a porthole will alert some of the erstwhile winners to the fact that everyone's in the same boat.

Yes, and she commissioned a poll to study the dimensions of this boat. She commissioned the poll from Mark Penn! So she probably paid a trillion dollars for it, and now we'll all get emails from Michelle Obama asking us to please donate to poor Tina Brown. The poll shows a hot new demographic group of people with educations who weren't handed cushy jobs along with their diplomas.

In short, this recession is different from all the others because it is truly hurting the well-off the hardest, which is also the subtext of the fucking Bernie Madoff story. People making and saving enough to have million-dollar retirement funds bilked out of their imaginary profits! Tina Brown freelancing! Soon we'll all have to move out of our brownstones and penthouses and into the Thunderdome.

One thing everyone agrees on: The current economic contraction, which began a year ago, will be the longest on record since the Great Depression. The optimistic scenario, voiced in the New York Times, is that it will end by the middle of 2009, as the housing market recovers and the government pours money into public works. That will put the recession at 18 to 21 months. Even playboy economist Nouriel Roubini, the professional doomsayer who installed a wall of vaginas in his personal misbegotten real-estate venture, thinks that the worst-case scenario is a recession that ends by December 2009 — 24 months. Consumers are resilient, economists say, and love nothing better than earning money and spending it.

But that's a rather U.S.-centric forecast, amid a globalized economy. (Who knew the halls of economics departments were filled with such isolationists?)

There are, even today, sectors of industry which make physical things. So old media, I know! The business is called manufacturing, and its forecasts are abysmal. A strengthening dollar, predicted as the rest of the world suffers economically, will hurt manufacturers' exports. And weak foreign markets will hurt many of the technology giants which thrived on overseas growth.

So could the recession last through 2010? Quite possibly. But it's a scenario no one's contemplating — even the most bearish of economists.

(Photo via the New York Times)

Well, not really quiet, exactly. But these days Fuld, wife of villainous Lehman Brothers CEO Dick, does request a little white bag in which to carry her $2,225 cashmere throws out of the store, rather than the traditional look-at-me orange sacks the store is so known for. How demure! (Or, you know, shameful.) This is a whole new trend, The Daily Beast reports, with rich ladies all over town opting to, oh mercy God yes, still spend the money, but also to be classy about it and not flaunt they shit. It's called "secret shopping"! (And strangely, this report doesn't carry a byline, which means someone at TDB wants to keep their investigation a secret, too.)

"People are feeling guilty and they’re feeling confused and they’re feeling like they didn’t earn their money, especially within the financial community," said somebody from a marketing research house called the Luxury Institute. Aww, sad and confused and guilty, but not sad, confused, or guilty enough to stop spending money. It's like taking the hood ornament off your Mercedes and being proud of yourself.

It's too bad there isn't some way for Kathy Fuld, whose hubby did a really good job of putting many, many people out of work, to like, you know, give back or something. Someone should set up organizations through which people with money, especially folks who don't deserve it, like the Fulds, can give some of that money to people who need it more. Since nothing like that exists though, she'll just have to bury her sad guilty feelings under a mountain of three thousand dollar scarves and white paper bags.

Bair was appointed by George W. Bush to run the FDIC, and her term ends in 2011. She's a Republican, but she's well-respected and liked by everyone on both sides of the aisle. She's been running the efforts to rework mortgages and keep people in their homes, and she's all for "helping Main Street in addition to Wall Street," and lots of liberals had hoped to see her maybe get a bigger role in an Obama administration. Here is what Barney Frank said about her:

“I think part of the problem now, to be honest, is Sheila Bair has annoyed the ‘old boys’ club,’” Frank said today. “To some extent, bank regulation and mortgage foreclosure have made a situation where we have several regulators up in the tree house with a ‘no girls allowed’ sign — and it’s aimed at Sheila Bair - - who’s been really good.”

Wait a minute—Republican who took on her own party and the 'old boys club'? Sheila Bair is an actual maverick. A real-life one, not the kind that is Mavericky based only on superficial identity-based personality traits! Why does Geithner want her gone?

Apparently Geithner "clashed" with Bair over aid to Citigroup, a position she was goddamn right to clash with him over because that particular bailout was a mess. But it means she's "not a team player" and it also means we're worried about the Obama economic team again.

A number of Wall Street types—speaking to Times DealBook columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin on the condition of anonymity because the recession is actually their fault—say Geithner is baaaaad. Banking industry experts agree!

“We have only two things to say about Tim Geithner, who we do not know: A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers,” said Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics. “Throw in the Bear Stearns/Maiden Lane fiasco for good measure,” he said.

“All of these ‘rescues’ are a disaster for the taxpayer, for the financial markets and also for the Federal Reserve System as an organization. Geithner, in our view, deserves retirement, not promotion.”

Well yes it but seems like Hank Paulsen was the one who invented some reason for being either unwilling or unable to "rescue" Lehman (or both? he seems to have switched from "we let them fail on purpose" to "we couldn't have saved them" because he's a bad, bad Treasury Secretary). In fact it seems like the New York Fed Position is one of limited powers! What's more worrying is that Geithner is another damned Rubinite, trained by evil Robert Rubin.

But American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner, no fan of Rubin, is cautiously optimistic about the many Rubinites who'll soon be in charge of the money.

In fairness, adults are not merely tools of their patrons. In recent months, Larry Summers has disagreed with Rubin on the scale of the needed stimulus. Tim Geithner is for far more regulation than Rubin. Jason Furman, though suggested by Rubin for his campaign post of economic policy director, actually spent more of his career working for Joseph Stiglitz than for Robert Rubin. Peter Orszag has done a fine job as director of the Congressional Budget Office, and is not averse to large scale public spending.

He, too, would also like to maybe see a Joseph Stiglitz in the White House, but as we all know, the cratering ecnomy has turned even the moderates into crazy radical New Dealers.

And Berkeley Economist/blogger Brad DeLong seems pleased with this Christina D. Romer appointment, as she is an expert on Great Depressions and how to not have more of them.

Of course basically no one knows what is going on, except that January 20 can't come soon enough.

Shea is a 69 year old veteran of the Santa game, and though he used to make bank, he won't this year:

[Shea] is expecting to earn around $3,000 this year, down from $30,000 two years ago - barely keeping up with cleaning and replacement costs for his $900 costume.

"It diminishes my 'ho, ho, hos,' " he said.

FAO Schwartz told the poor guy "no thanks", and other potential employers like the Manhattan Mall and Time Warner Center have also cut back. Even familiar nonprofit Volunteers of America has canned their chimney boxes campaign for donations that it has done every Christmas since forever. The recent spate of canceled corporate holiday parties hasn't helped matters. Jersey City Santa Glen Charlow hasn't booked a single gig, meaning he'll have to focus on making money as a graphic designer. Might want to try Hannukah Harry before sinking that low, Glen.

Where the Hell is Santa, Mommy? [NYPost]