Jefferson City, MO police say that 15-year-old Bustamante confessed to the gruesome murder of 9-year-old Elizabeth Olten, whose throat was slashed and who endured multiple stab wounds; that Bustamante planned the crime in advance; that she hid the body; and that, as the Associated Press summarizes, she did it "without provocation because she wanted to know what it felt like." What's more, Bustamante apparently recorded some of her more disturbing thoughts and actions on social networking sites:

On a YouTube profile viewed by The Associated Press, which has since been taken down, Bustamante listed her hobbies as "killing people" and "cutting." A year ago, Bustamante posted a video to the site in which she appears to intentionally shock herself on an electric fence near her home, then goads her two younger brothers into doing the same.

Alyssa's MySpace and Facebook profiles are locked, but we managed a few glimpses of profiles under cutesy handles Alyssaheartsyou<3 and ramen_noodles_w00t on MySpace and her girly full name, Alyssa Dailene Bustamante, on Facebook:






Like most teens, Bustamante posed for profile pictures that aimed to communicate something about herself. The message is alternately run-of-the-mill and grim. Did the adults in Alyssa's life catch the red flags? Few details about Bustamante's home and school life have emerged, though Fox News reports that Bustamante had been in and out of mental health care facilities:

Juvenile officer David Cook testified that Bustamante has received mental health services since September 2007 after she attempted suicide. She had a 10-day stay in the mid-Missouri Mental Health Center after the attempt, and has received mental health services from Pathways Community Behavioral Healthcare in Jefferson City since.

Cook said Bustamante takes Prozac for depression and also received services for mood swings and self-harm. Cook said Bustamante has a history of cutting herself, but said that there were no indications she was homicidal.

Bustamante has been in police custody since she led authorities to Olten's body on Oct. 23, and was certified this week as an adult so she can be tried as one. 9-year-old victim Elizabeth Olten is remembered as a happy child who loved animals and playing dress up.

TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington began writing his high-profile posts exposing the misleading ads carried by Zynga on October 31. Four days later, according to documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Zynga began issuing shares as part of its latest $15 million round of financing that included firms like the gold-standard Silicon Valley shop Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (past investments: Google, Amazon, Netscape, etc.), as PaidContent points out.

Of course, it took until Nov. 6 for video to emerge of Zynga CEO Mark Pincus admitting that some of the ads his company ran were "horrible." But we'd venture to guess that Zynga's investors, now into the startup for at least $54 million, would still have gone forward with their investment even that video emerged earlier. They care no more about Zynga's murky origins than they did about those of Zynga's chief clients like MySpace (born from a spam and spyware operation) and Facebook (which paid $65 million to settle claims it was founded on stolen technology). In Silicon Valley, the sins of the past are regularly washed away by infinite promise of the all-important future.

(Pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Amid withering press from TechCrunch and other outlets, the Zynga CEO has finally removed scammy commercial offers from his company's online games, like Mafia Wars and Farmville. That's nice. But maybe the whole scandal could have been avoided if he'd taken a less skeptical take on his Harvard Business School ethics class. From his 2006 blog post about the class:

The school had this bullshit 3 week class called 'ethics' which we all took together at the outset of the program - guess it was to make sure we all had at least heard the term a few times and might feel more comfortable even using it...

Pincus goes on to tell how his amoral, investment-banker classmates defended a banker who left a sick Indian man behind to die in order to finish climbing a Himalayan mountain the banker had long wanted to conquer. Pincus accused his classmates of moral bankruptcy and became a black sheep, he says.

He was also aghast when a fellow student got off with a slap on the wrist after he was caught stuffing the ballot box in an election to head the school's Finance Club. Pincus thought he would be expelled or at least suspended for a year.

I'd soo love to know where that kid's career went and what he's doing today. He must be a major leader as he soo gets our system.

Pincus ended his blog post on an optimistic, pro-ethics note, saying that "this century's newest success stories" like Google, Bill Gates and eBay "are about authentic people taking responsibility and serving all stakeholders," i.e. acting ethically, donating money to charity, etc. Despite this conclusion, Pincus soon found himself on a darker path; he was soon doing "every horrible thing in the book to... get revenues right away" at Zynga, he told fellow entrepreneurs at a mixer earlier this year.

Said mixer wasn't the first time Pincus gave up a sleazy vibe; check out the tweets below from entrepreneur and former Valleywagger Alaska Miller. Apparently Pincus' ethics were derailed some time after he wrote that "authentic people" are the bright future of American business. It's hard to know whether to the blame that stumble on Pincus' obvious cynicism toward his Harvard ethics class — or on his failure to cling to his cynical conclusions more tightly through the years.

(Top pic: Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Sacramento-based Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for people who faced "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars.'" The firm, which said it has launched an investigation into such scams, specializes in class action suits, among other areas.

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch has posted a series of articles on the issue of sleazy revenue models for online games, exposing the practice of sneaking mobile data subscriptions and pricey "learning CD" packages past players trying to earn online "points." Mafia Wars and Farmville creator Zynga gets a third of its revenue from such "commercial offers," while Facebook in turn gets 10-20 percent of its money from Zynga, according to Arrington.

Zynga has yanked some of its ads; Facebook, in turn, has suspended one of Zynga's smaller games. But there's evidence this issue could have been addressed much sooner. TechCrunch found video (below) shot this past spring in which Zynga's CEO said he "did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away."

That sounded bad enough when it was reprinted on a tech blog; imagine how it's going to sound in court.

(Top pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, possibly calling his lawyer, by Joi Ito.)

• As earning seasons reporting continued, NewsCorp came out on the winning side of the ledger, with profits up 11 percent in the past quarter with the picture for broadcast turning around. "The best results we've seen in seven quarters," is how Rupert Murdoch described the broadcast numbers. The company's dark cloud in the cheer: MySpace, which is failing to meet the deliverables in its deal with Google. "With MySpace, we are in a state of transition," was how NewsCorp's CEO described the once mighty social networking site's search for a new raison d'etre. And you know how those states of transition go online...[Variety]

• Taking those numbers with others from this earnings season, The Wrap is ready to call it a "media rebound." [The Wrap]

• Just when he seemed to be getting a head of steam on a good post-Oscar win bout of paralysis and indecision, one of Hollywood's finest traditions, director Danny Boyle has cut the party short by announcing his next film. And what could be a more obvious story to tell than 127 Hours, the true tale of a hiker trapped under a boulder who eventually cuts his arm off to escape? [Variety]

• The troubled pre-season of The Tourist may now have a A list team attached. Johnny Depp is in talks to star opposite Angelina Jolie in the film. Earlier star Sam Worthington and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck both removed themselves from the project over "creative differences." [Variety]

• Continuing the Jackson watch, the movie has thus far brought in $125 million internationally. [The Wrap
]

• Disney has settled the lawsuit brought against it by the makers of the Luxo Jr. lamp that has become the Pixar trademark. Rather than celebrating the celebrity brought to it by its high profile association, the Swedish company that manufactures Luxo sued for trademark infringement after Pixar included copies of the lamp in special editions of the Up dvd's, saying Pixar's unauthorized use of their product would "cause devastating damage to Luxo and dilute the goodwill which Luxo has built up." [Hollywood Reporter]

Sterling's seemingly meandering and occasionally infuriating talk at the annual Reboot digital culture conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this year attracted some notice, originally, but deserves a wider hearing, if only for his contextualization of Steve Jobs and Nicolas Sarkozy as gothic figures and his advocacy on behalf of expensive beds. Luckily, protoblogger Dave Winer recently re-uploaded and linked the talk.

Observers of the social networking wars should listen to Sterling's rundown on "favela chic," excerpted above. Rupert Murdoch, familial overlord of MySpace parent News Corp., is cast as the "remote, distanct, old-school Brazilian tyrant," while MySpace accounts are likened to "huts." Who knows: Maybe when you lose your job, an anonymous space in News Corp.'s online hellscape might start sounding a lot more fun than the prim, proper — and all-too-accountable — playground that is Facebook.

(Sterling pic: Daniel Barradas)

The Valley fad of social network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

• "Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
  
• "Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

There's an entire thriving "ecosystem" devoted to these sort of "deals," the sort of thing that in a different context might just be called a "crime ring." It's a profitable network, at least for the people at the top: Arrington estimates Facebook might be taking in $50 million per year from Zygna alone.

So, social networks are basically turning in to just another snakeoil sales channel in the mold of late-night 1-800 number commercials. Which sucks not only for the marks who've been duped but, ultimately, for Facebook's investors, since taking this sort of easy cash reduces internal pressure to come up with some sort of truly innovative revenue stream.

Not to mention what it does to user trust: Who's going to want to hand over their credit card information or even cell phone number to the likes of Facebook amid all these scams? (Answer: People who passed their "IQ test" with flying colors and a useless $10/month subscription.)

MySpace CEO and would-be savior Owen Van Natta, the studmuffin hired away from Facebook, told the Financial Times he's not gunning for his ex employer any more:

"Facebook is not our competition," he said. "We're very focused on a different space."

Van Natta added that MySpace it will focus on its strength: Music. MySpace has become the default Web host for independent rock bands, and recently purchased music software company iLike.

MySpace wasn't always so blasé about social networking, the company used to have Facebook in its sights. It was barely two years ago that Van Natta's predecessor Chris DeWolfe got an urgent phone call from Peter Chernin at MySpace's parent company saying, "I need a plan for dealing with Facebook in two weeks." This led, according Julia Angwin's book Stealing Myspace, to a strategy for dealing with "the Facebook challenge head on," presented at a Merrill Lynch conference.

"I realize every person in tis room wants to ask me about Facebook, and, frankly, I want to talk about Facebook," [Fox Interactive Media president Peter] Levinsohn said.

But these days MySpace has just one third of Facebook's users. No wonder the company is singing a different tune.

It's just not a well advised one. Instead of competing with a money-losing internet company headed by a twentysomething college dropout, MySpace will now be taking on Apple (cash hoard: $30 billion) and Google (annual profits: $5 billion, operator of YouTube and soon to be a retailer of MP3s). Sounds like a great plan.

In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase... I congratulated him on the acquisition. "Now," he said, "we're in the stalking business."

Later in his Vanity Fair column, Wolff recounts how Murdoch asked the founders of Google "Why don't you read newspapers?", gave "a walleyed stare" during all conversations about Web news and tried to beat Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to death with his cane.

Kidding; even after buying MySpace, Murdoch was over the moon for Zuckerberg. He invited the founder to speak at a News Corp. executive retreat, huddled with him throughout dinner — sparking obvious jealousy in MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe — and soon declared people were "all going to Facebook at the moment" rather than MySpace. All this according to Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace.

The point is, Rupert Murdoch has always kind of hated on MySpace, cruelly, in public.

(Pic: Murdoch and MySpace CEO DeWolfe at the opening of MySpace's San Francisco office in Oct. 2007. Getty Images.)

The FBI set up a sting to catch Finton in the act of trying to blow up a courthouse, as that is basically the pattern of most of these terror stings: the Feds find some disaffected and incredibly idiotic Muslim youth and provide him with a target and make-believe bombs and then arrest him when he tries to detonate these make-believe bombs that they got him, outside the terror target they helped him pick out. It is usually more than a little bit ridiculous.

Federal officials allege that on Wednesday, Finton drove a van containing what he thought was explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the Paul Findley Federal Building at Sixth and Monroe streets.

He got out of the van, locked the door and got into another vehicle driven by an undercover FBI officer and drove away. Within a few blocks of the federal building, Finton made a cell phone call to remotely detonate the purported bomb," officials said.

He was arrested immediately after he attempted to detonate the "device."

Yes, indeed. Finton told the judge that he worked part-time in the kitchen of a local "fish and chicken restaurant." And look, here is his MySpace!

It is not actually all that interesting, except that he certainly seems to be friends with a lot of immodest ladies. I can see their necks! And hair!

Oh, and there are a bunch of kind of tragic MySpace comments from someone who seems to be Finton's niece. She does break the news that Finton's been to jail before, and that afterward he cared more for his Muslim brothers and sisters than his "really family."

Also, according to what appears to be his "about me" section, he's a big fucking homo who enjoys filling your life with his ass gas: "Hello my name is homo ray i fart on people." In addition to social flatulence, he wants to meet your mom so that he can "fuck" her. So romantic! And here we thought all alleged psycho killers were freaks.

Back in March fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir sued Love for libel, invasion of privacy, infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract, and intentional interference with Simorangkir's business—the fashion label Boudoir Queen—as a result of Love's misspelled and unpunctuated rants on the social networking sites—namely saying that Simorgank stole a bunch of clothes from her.

Love and her lawyer have filed a motion to strike the suit. [Note: Page Six reported on her brief on Saturday, which we missed because we were fighting through the hordes at the Barneys Warehouse Sale.] Why? Not anything have to do with free speech, but because Simorgankir is racist, homophobic drug fiend who used to be a prostitute. Oh, well, that makes it OK then. Say anything you'd like, Courtney.

The juiciest excerpts are below, but here is our favorite part:

Simorangkir repeatedly asked me both to partake in and to procure cocaine, Percoset, and other illegal and perscription drugs for herself and her husband. I told Simorangir that my "hard-partying" days were in the past and I declined to use any of her and her husband's drugs.

Screw what she said on Twitter, this is the real defamation. We still don't know what this has to do with the shit she talked on the web, but it does make for a fascinating read. Just wait for the countersuit the Love legal team has in the works.

Plenty of people will be paying attention to this suit, not only because Love is crazier than a meth addict in a fun house, but because it will have an impact on future lawsuits about what people can and can't say about others over the internet. In England, they're already throwing kids in jail for cyberbullying. Damn, Courtney, maybe that move to London isn't such a good idea after all.

Oh, Courtney, you haven't put out a record in five years, but you still manage to provide us with endless entertainment.

iLike became something of an icon for a certain class of startup: Built on social networks, fast-growing, unprofitable, advertising supported. The company's impending sale to MySpace at a fire-sale price could hardly be a bigger wakeup call to these fellow makers of software "widgets."

The company was once valued at $53 million, back when Ticketmaster bought a 25 percent stake in late 2006, according to the Seattle Times. iLike amassed a total of $17 million from Ticketmaster and other investors like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former AOL exec Bob Pittman. Now it's negotiating to sell for just $19.5 million, All Things D reports, and $6 million of that is contingent on retaining certain employees in coming months.

It's quite comedown. But it's easy to see how iLike became a media darling and a hero to other makers of widgets. In the late spring of 2007, iLike ported its music recommendation service to Facebook, and in the process spiked its user base dramatically, to 15 million from 3 million over six months. In one week just after the Facebook launch, four venture capitalists asked CEO Ali Partovi (pictured) to lunch, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported; the company reportedly added close to 200 servers over the course of the summer.

After retaining insidery Silicon Valley flack Brooke Hammerling, iLike saw its praises sung widely in the media (emphasis added):

• Wall Street Journal, June 2007: "'Somebody's going to end up being the Facebook music service,' [co-founder Hadi Partovi] says. 'It's either going to be us, in which case we're made, or it's not.'" (By the time Patrovie gave this retrospective quote, iLike was by far the dominant music service on Facebook.)
• Billboard, July 2007: "The smart money says someone will acquire iLike, and soon. The company's social media discovery capabilities are a natural extension to any digital music service, particularly iTunes."
  
• BusinessWeek, July 2007:"'Widgets are a fundamentally important idea,' says Vinod Khosla... who has invested in two widget makers, Slide and iLike. 'I believe it has the potential to create big billion-dollar winners.'"
• Forbes, October 2007: "Says Khosla [Ventures]'s David Weiden: 'Widgets are the next kind of media network.'"
• USA Today, November 2007: "The company... has become an overnight sensation... Dave McClure, an angel investor in Silicon Valley, wouldn't be shocked if iLike... and others eventually go public."

Revenue was presumably slow in coming, though, because by fall of the following year iLike was said to be trying to sell itself and Ticketmaster wrote off half the value of its investment. Now investors are basically trying to break even with the MySpace sale. The music and advertising businesses have their own unique problems, but startups in other hot sectors, like iPhone apps, should beware: The excitement can dissipate as quickly as it inflates.

(Pic: Niall Kennedy)

Young Brown should take a look at 37-year-old Evan Williams' biography. The Twitter co-founder worked at Google for a year and a half, witnessing first-hand how a total lack of focus — Google branched out wildly from search— is no barrier to massive profits. Then Twitter happened only because Williams was aimless enough to abandon the original startup from which it sprang, Odeo, just as he had abandoned the original plan of the company behind his last smash hit, Blogger.

Williams is the perfect embodiment of the Silicon Valley ethos that business plans are oppressive things, to be deferred as long as possible.

(Pic: Williams, by Joi Ito)

You can still use Facebook dating apps, as AllFacebook.com points out, but those usually want to make you pay money eventually. Of course, it's not like random profile searches are the best avenue to a romantic liaison. But the prim change to Facebook's search system fits neatly into the social network's uptight culture: First it was only for Harvard students, then Ivy Leaguers, then college kids; to this day, your profile is, by default, shielded from the general public and even most other Facebook users. (We asked the company's flacks for comment and have yet to hear back.)

While Facebook has been defined by the nerdy engineering culture of Silicon Valley, and of founder Mark Zuckerberg, competitor MySpace was started by a spam and spyware company, promoted itself in seedy nightclubs, hosted events for aspiring models and eagerly recruited Tila Tequila away from Friendster as an early member. Though owner News Corp. is struggling to turn the site around, it must take some comfort in the fact that Facebook is as prudish as ever.

(Pic: Helgasm on Flickr)

The video clip above, from YouTube, is grainy, but TechCrunch's Mike Arrington assures readers it's in the final movie. I hadn't seen the film myself, unaware it touched on social networking, but Arrington writes that MySpace takes up a solid five minutes of the movie.

The treatment is brutal. Early in the clip, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson asks Sandler if he actually uses the product. The star's reply: "No, no no. I fuck girls, Tom. I don't have time for that." When he goes on stage, the comic greets the MySpace crowd as "nerds" and then trashes their users: "They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life." .

Sure, MySpace's competitors are insulted, too. But companies like Silicon Valley-based Facebook are fighting hard to avoid Hollywood; Facebook trashed Ben Mezrich's book about the company, The Accidental Billionaires, and by extension the Aaron Sorkin movie based on that book, calling it inaccurate.

But MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, close to Hollywood, and seems to have a better handle on the big picture: Being on the silver screen, in any context, means you're culturally relevant. Why not embrace the opportunity to make your virtual community a lot more real? (Via TechCrunch.)

• Most Talented Person Ever Justin Timberlake and his girlfriend Jessica Biel are having relationship issues. Celebrities! They're just like us. Seriously. They are just like us. If Justin Timberlake can't make certain relationships work, nobody can! That has to be comforting. The difference being that if I were Justin Timberlake, I would just dance a bunch and then go get wasted at a bar and hop on the keys and play "Seniorita" until I find some random drunkass girl to take home with me - not to sleep with, just to show up with - and piss Jessica Biel off and be like, yeah, that's right, I'm still Justin Timberlake, what. of. it. But this is why I write for Gawker on weekends and he is Justin Timberlake, because he'd probably never do that, or if he did, it'd be far more vindictive and awesome than just bringing home some drunk girl from Pianos who will probably just puke on my shoes. Sigh. One day. [NYDN]
  
  
• Beef of the Week: Michael Bay Vs. Megan Fox. Fox argues that Transformers 2: Robots Go Smoosh isn't about the thespians so much as the giant robots breaking everything ("I don't want to blow smoke up people's ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting."). Bay disagrees! "Nick Cage wasn't a big actor when I cast him, nor was Ben Affleck before I put him in Armageddon. Shia LaBeouf wasn't a big movie star before he did Transformers — and then he exploded. Not to mention Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, from Bad Boys." Okay, except, Cage had done a bunch of stuff before 1996's The Rock, including 1995's Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won an Oscar. Affleck also won an Oscar for Good Will Hunting pre-Armegeddon, and was pretty great in Chasing Amy. Will Smith had Fresh Prince and Martin Lawrence had Martin long before Bad Boys. So, while they weren't Michael Bay stars, they were probably well on their way, regardless. Either way: damn, Gina! [US Weekly]
  
  
• And on the other side of the universe, pretty much through the Stargate of celebrity relationship issues, Gary Coleman's wife freaked out and trashed his bedroom. She was arrested on some kind of "fucking with Gary Coleman" statute they voted into law in Utah, I believe. Now, there's nothing funny about domestic violence no matter who it happens to, but: she's 5"5 and 23 but looks like she's 12 to his 4"8 and 41. Gary's pullin' em young! They met on the set of this Mormon movie (also starring: Clint Howard, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Fred Willard) reconciled on Divorce Court - that's still on? Jesus. - and now, here they are. [NYDN]
  
  
• Liza Minelli's manager has some serious mob ties. I know, I know: a bunch of you are going to be like BURYING THE LEDE! and I kind of am, here, but come on, it's not like it's unexpected. Also, how is the She-Ra of New York Theater Geighs somehow tied to mobsters? Could these two worlds be any further apart? Back through the Stargate. Also: money! [Page Six]
  
  
• Megan Fox went out for dinner with Zac Efron and all these celebrity tabloids are like OMFG we just don't get her, but really, are you surprised? The comprehension of complex relationships and friendships that often get blurry in grey areas is far beyond your average tabloid consumer, assumes the average tabloid writer. Maybe she just likes a variety of dinner companions, you know? I do. [E!]
  
  
• Ron Perelman, Diddy, Jerry Della Femina aren't throwing down on their infamous parties this summer. Femina and Perelman canceled them all together, Diddy's taking his "White Party" to L.A. where wearing white really isn't that big of a deal because those freaks have sunshine most days, whereas we're not ever getting a fully legit summer. You know climate change in New York is bad when you begin to miss the faint smell of aged piss every time you take the Subway in July. Oh, yeah: he's teaming up with Ashton Kutcher to throw down in LA. Strange? [Page Six]
  
  
• Rihanna's awesome: she inked up her tattoo artist (name: "Bang Bang") and two of his tattoo artist friends. She gave them umbrellas with a capital "R" underneath it. [E!]
  
  
• Bar Refaeli did some kind of Victoria's Secret shoot with Aerosmith. Guess who was wearing the panties? Come on, guess. If your answer was "Tom Hamilton," you're wrong. [Egotastic]
  
  
• There was some kind of freaky Twilight convention for fans of the series where they decended on this small Washington town to figure out where the characters of the books - not even the actors of the movie, but the characters of the books - took a shit or put out a cigarette or whatever. Even Stephanie Meyer was like, all y'all are nuts, and then she counted a bunch of her Vampire Duckets. Twilight fans are so weird. It's understandable if you're a Harry Potter fan; at least then you get to go to Foggy London Town and play with magic. Twilight fanatics are just a bunch of sexually repressed fetishists. Sorry, it's true. [NYDN]
  
  
• MySpace Celebrity Tila Tequila is writing amicus briefs now or something. She's still trying to convince people she's a lesbian, I guess. [NYDN]
  
  
• Mischa Barton was probably doing blow in the bathroom of some club and someone's surprised. [NYDN]
  
  
• I didn't really care about the Jonas Brothers before - and I still don't, really, at least not until one of them bounds out of the closet or Bonus Jonas starts a West Coast Gangster Rap supergroup consisting of him, Junior Mafia, The Game, and Mack 10 - but apparently one of them is marrying some nice girl from Jersey who's a "former hairdresser." This is kind of great if it isn't a carefully orchestrated stunt by Disney PR. Even if it is, the kid's finally going to get laid with the "legal" removal of his purity ring. Everyone wins. [NYDN]
  
  
• Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag are still assholes. [NYDN]

Says TechCrunch:

MySpace has been holding a number of meetings for staff... during which they've referred to the recently terminated employees as "fat". Unfortunately, some of these "fatty" employees have been present at these very meetings - the company has kept a number of terminated employees onboard through the duration of their contract...

And if that weren't bad enough, workers' final paychecks will bounce, incurring a bank fee and possible overdrafts, since MySpace screwed up its calculations and put a stop payment on the drafts. Hopefully you didn't deposit yours too quickly!

It's a good thing MySpace's business doesn't involve brokering sensitive relationships or allowing people to communicate clearly with one another.

For this, Anderson will earn $500,000 a year for two years, Business Insider hears. He also needs to be an "ambassador," for MySpace, which sounds very much like a non-job:

As a part of the deal, [MySpace CEO] Owen [Van Natta] and new News Corp digital media boss Jon Miller asked Tom to stop coming to the office..."He'll have little decision or involvement with the product," says a source.

Of course, Anderson will continue to be everyone's default MySpace friend and will presumably continue to show up for all kinds of exciting parties. He's just not getting tens of millions of dollars for it anymore, having been demoted to six figures, and won't be mucking with MySpace's "strategy" of being a zombie social network. An economy like this requires certain sacrifices.

More brutal honesty from the official statement (emphasis added):

"MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today's marketplace," said Jonathan Miller, News Corporation's chief executive of Digital Media... "I believe this restructuring will help MySpace operate much more effectively both structurally and financially moving forward. I am confident in MySpace's next phase under the leadership of Owen and his team."

The sort of talk may rattle employees, but it should hearten investors: without this sort of sober and honest thinking, Van Natta (pictured) doesn't even have a prayer of turning around his social network to surpass his nemesis and former boss Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook.

(Pic: Dan Farber)