"We're building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010," Williams told the Times. Instead, the couple moved into a pre-built modern Victorian earlier this year.

When news surfaced earlier this month that Williams and his wife had bought a Noe Valley home, we wrote that our best guess was that the house was an interim mansion. Why else would the couple be "selling one house, buying a second and building a third?"

After all, Williams' new Noe Valley house was finished and put on the market in October 2008, more than three months before Williams said in the Times that he was building his own house. The deed transferred to Williams this past April, according to property records, and since then there has reportedly been some interior remodeling.

Williams wrote in to tell us that he's not juggling homes: "We were building a house." No more.

We've updated our original post.

(Pic: by JD Lasica)

Love posted a long, rambling, incoherent screed to MySpace last year that seemed to say Adams owed her money for production of his album Rock n Roll. Adams responded indirectly and cryptically at the time. But now Adams has decided to set the record straight, after Love last week posted another barrage on Twitter, writing, "anytime 'ole Ryan... wants to see his bills, he can, I'm right here" — and after we erroneously said Adams was Love's "ex-boyfriend" when we reported that barrage,

Adams' publicist sent us the following statement from the singer:

"I have never had any romantic, personal or financial involvement with Courtney Love. She is confusing me with her ex, who produced my Rock n Roll record, which was financed solely by Universal Music."

Courtney Love confused about her commitments and losing track of all her money? Do you really expect us to buy that?

(We've updated the original item.)

In short, I follow TechCrunch on Twitter, so it does not show up in my list of suggested users. I did do some digging prior to my post to find out if everyone was presented with the same Suggested User List, and even confirmed with someone else that the user was not on that person's list, but obviously should have dug deeper in fact checking.

Original, now retracted story here:

Twitter's Suggested User List has been controversial lately, since it's tremendously valuable yet tremendously mysterious. Well, the microblogging startup just cleared up one thing: Cross Twitter, and you're off the list.

As of just yesterday, TechCrunch was on the so-called SUL, and founder Mike Arrington has blogged that the list position can generate 10,000 new signups a day. Fellow entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has even offered Twitter $250,000 for a slot.

TechCrunch is now off the list, one day after very controversially publishing internal Twitter documents it obtained from a computer hacker. Twitter originally said its list was determined by factors like whether an account has "fairly wide or mainstream appeal," but yesterday the startup hinted in a blog post that TechCrunch, whose appeal is well documented, might have made itself an exception:

...publishing these documents publicly could jeopardize relationships with Twitter's ongoing and potential partners.

There's no question that Arrington's ethics — and TechCrunch's integrity, by extension — were widely attacked outside of Twitter yesterday. Posts calling him "a very sad excuse for a man" and "SCUM" set the tone.

But by apparently wielding its star-making list as a weapon, Twitter just makes it a bigger point of discussion. Disaffected early adopters have been grumbling for months; one, blogging pioneer Dave Winer, predicted the Arrington situation back in March:

I do think the company should have done this much more carefully... And the people who got the push have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money... What if a reporter were critical of Twitter in a piece she wrote, would Twitter revoke her status?

For all its technical deficiencies, Twitter ended up scoring a PR victory from its hack attack, because it looked to many like the victim of an overeager publisher. Now it risks snatching defeat from the jaws of that victory, by looking like a bully. It's apparently a risk the company is willing to take; Arrington does have a remarkable talent for infuriating people like that.

According to the correct Andrea Rincon, "Clinton me ofreció dinero por sexo." We do not speak Spanish, but we are pretty sure we get the gist of that!

Apparently Rincon charged Bill $1,000 dollars (US) for the dance, and then came the offer of "dinero por sexo."

This is how Google translates the last bit of that story:

His performance lasted five minutes and included a shower on stage. However there was no total nudity.

We apologize for the error! Also: why is she wearing Matt Drudge's hat, and is that why he hasn't picked this story up?

[Pic via Perfil]

The first person to actually do this was, of course, Imus producer Bernard McGuirk. Even better, it was in the context of a hilarious routine involving a cardinal who speaks in a comical pretend Irish accent, which allows him to "get away" with saying "outrageous" things that "we're all thinking" but wouldn't say aloud because of the "PC police." And the segment began with that hilarious salsa music the Mexicans listen to, in their cars.

We apologize for the error. In the future, when we suspect someone has been the first to make a racially tone-deaf joke about a prominent minority figure, we will make sure to check the Imus archives before reporting it.

Saylor was keen to point out he has lost about 30 pounds in recent years. We used the most recent picture available on Getty Images, shot at a June 2005 party for Capitol File Magazine. Saylor, a longtime bachelor and almost-as-longtime careful-groomer of his media image, helpfully sent along a more svelte shot, included in the before/after spread above.

Saylor also notes he does not own a Gulfstream G4, the vehicle Six had him taking to Cannes. That makes sense: he fell off Forbes' billionaire's list in 2001, after losing a record $6 billion in one day, and has yet to return, so a plane priced at around $15 million would probably be too rich for his blood. (Although his data-mining software company seems to be awaiting delivery of several planes; it has reserved three registration numbers with the FAA.)

Saylor's full correction follows below. Given his reported penchant for nine-hour indoctrination sermons, we applaud its efficient brevity and are less frightened of future communication.

And here's Saylor in full-length slender glory, just to show we appreciate his new look:

indieWire and the other outlets that picked up the story misconstrued the timeline of the events, making it sound like Nathan Lee, the film critic whose review was censored, didn't know about the alterations before the story went up. That is not true: he knew NPR would only run a bastardized, censored version of his review, without the names "Larry Craig" and "Charlie Crist," when they informed him of this fact a day after the piece was supposed to go up. At which point Lee asked that his byline be removed and a disclaimer attached.

That seems like a relatively unimportant detail, considering that the larger point—that NPR is proving the film's argument that media outlets are complicit in the hypocrisy of closeted conservatives—but it was apparently worth it to NPR's management to keep this story alive, so the record has been corrected.

And this is still the record: despite plenty of speculation on the sexuality of random pop culture figures, NPR refuses to mention that Larry Craig—who was arrested for soliciting sex from a man in a public restroom—might be gay, in the context of a review of a film about how media outlets refuse to mention that lots of people who legislate against homosexual rights are secretly gay, themselves.

Here is some material from the film Outrage, about how those repressed closeted gay Republicans are totally great at immoral filthy gay homosex.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly included entrepreneur Stephen Bing as a participant to testify before a grand jury.

Someone's lawyers called a certain major newspaper! Bing is always quick to 'correct' unflattering stories about him in the press.

So let it be known: scuzzy rich real estate heir, developer, and major Democratic party fundraiser Steve Bing will not testify to the grand jury about how he hired criminal wiretapping private eye Anthony Pellicano for some sort of matter related to his messy paternity case with Elizabeth Hurley while Pellicano was secretly actually working for billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who was paying Pellicano to figure out that Kerkorian's ex-wife's daughter was actually fathered by Bing. For the record!

The AP obviously wanted some good easy-to-understand pithy quotes from economist types, this year, to round out their list, because the economy has cratered and no one understands what's going on. So they listed two from Krugman:

10. (tie) "Cash for trash." — Paul Krugman discussing the financial bailout, New York Times, Sept. 22.

10. (tie) "There are no atheists in foxholes and there are no libertarians in financial crises." — Krugman, in an interview with Bill Maher on HBO's "Real Time," broadcast Sept. 19.

The problem, as Krugman immediately pointed out, is that he borrowed the "atheists in foxholes" line from Jeff Frankel and the second line is not even a "quote," it's a catchy rhyming saying that can't be attributed to anyone.

And so now the AP has issued its correction. Paul Krugman, not actually worth quoting.

The real scandal is that both quotes were tied for number 10, which means it wasn't even a proper top ten list. Where is your correction of that, Associated Press? They even stuck in an extraneous third "tenth" quote from Donald Luskin, making it a "Top 12" list, and therefore useless as a piece of year-end filler journalism. Shame.

I mean, McCain has been really good about painting Obama as this lightweight, using the word "celebrity" as a pejorative. They don't want to have a boomerang effect. They don't want that to come back on Sarah Palin, and people say, yes, she looks good in a bikini clutching an AK-47, but is she equipped to run the country?

Kurtz never corrected Ogunnaike, on either the fake picture or on the even more absurd suggestion that some critical mass of people think the VP candidate looked good in it.

Next on CNN: Whether Palin alienated conservative voters by faking her own pregnancy.

[Reliable Sources]

Before it had the 2008 games sewn up, China planned to bid on then using a September start date. But this would collide with NFL coverage in the U.S. and thus dampen ratings, as occurred in the 2004 Olympics in Sydney. NBC, which already had TV rights to the 2008 Olympics, urged China to consider moving the date.

So China proposed a mid-August start date in its official bid, and won.

But it turned out that date interfered with the U.S. Open, meaning tennis stars would skip the Olympics, meaning more ratings pain.

China looked at the $894 million in NBC money it had already deposited into one of its banks and decided to accommodate one last change request from NBC, to August 8. Americans looked at the price of gas and the lack of money in their bank accounts and decided to stay home and watch the Olympics rather than go out at night or on vacation. Ratings soared and NBC was very "lucky" The End!

[Times]

Same story with the Hillary Clinton editorial, where we also noticed comments had closed.

At the Times, you see, a human screens every comment, filtering obscenity and, when need be, emailing potential corrections to editors. Since there are only so many moderators, comments on any given story are eventually closed. In the case of Gould's article and the Clinton editorial, comments were closed less than 24 hours after the story went online. Fast! In other cases, it might take a couple of days to shut down comments.

Our source knew of no cases of comments being turned off based on the content of the comments.

It still seems a bit absurd that the Times would take pride in stoking an online discussion when it doesn't have the staff to manage that discussion. It is also self-defeating of the newspaper to rob paying print subscribers of the ability to comment on a story just because it was released early online to freeloaders. But it's hard to get too outraged at a decision to cap comments at around 700. Any comments beyond that number are really only going to be read by New York magazine writers trolling for story ideas.

"Mel and his wife Robyn clearly saw a woman in crisis and wanted to extend themselves in any way possible," the unidentified friend told the Daily Mail. There are no expectations, there is no agenda. It's simply an act of human kindness, one neighbor reaching out to another." Aw! Britney has a new friend! [UPI]

Ryan, what's up, this is Jason Preston calling. Umm, I'm calling on behalf of, I guess the column or whatever in Gawker.com, I guess you sent something in saying you saw me on the street today with a whole bunch of shit.

First of all, I just had my gym bag, that's all I had, a little, small, little Louis Vuitton gym bag.

And number two, my boots, they are $2,0000 fucking [unintelligible brand] boots, brah.

And three, as in the words of Lil' Kim, you should get your facts straight or Shut Up, Bitch, because you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

Preston later said someone had just handed him my cell phone number and told him I was the tipster, and that I should "ignore the text message," which is probably even better but has yet to arrive.

"We confirmed this story last night with an impeccable source inside the NYPD and we stand by our reporting. Almost immediately after the tragic passing of Mr. Ledger, Ms. Olsen’s attorneys began emailing us threatening letters. As has been well reported, there were a number of calls to Ms. Olsen from the masseuse before the NYPD arrived on the scene. We would find it strange if Ms. Olsen were not questioned at all. The New York Post will not be pressured and we find it odd that the chiefs at the NYPD appear to be terrified of 4-foot-11 inch, 90-pound Mary Kate Olsen.”