An upset tipster forward us a Mediabistro job listing for a customer service coordinator at a "Day Spa and Hair salon in Midtown East" New York. "Experience selling beauty products is a plus," but there is absolutely no media aspect to this job. Said tipster complained to Mediabistro and got back the following email:

Hey, Mediabistro: How about carrying listings for some fast-food jobs, too? "Many individuals" who are registered at Mediabistro may be interested in learning the basic skills of that profession, as well.

We can already imagine the MB seminar on those gigs, taught by some sage veteran journalist: "If someone says they want fries with that, check it out. You need three sources to confirm!"

The newspaper last week said "we do not see any violation of our rules" in Albo taking a free vacation sponsored by the consumer publication Thrillist and the airline JetBlue. But since providing that statement to Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovici, the Times had second thoughts, launched an investigation and has now axed Albo's twice-monthly "Critical Shopper" fashion column, according to Daily Intel.

Albo is a travel contributor, specifically barred under freelancer guidelines from accepting travel junkets, and even posted a tweet indicating he "felt gross" about the trip. So our old friend The Underminer should have anticipated some blowback. After all, it's a junket, plain and simple — a fundamentally scuzzy thing. But given that even Albo's superiors couldn't make sense of the rules, a simple ban on further travel writing would have been less embarrassing for everyone involved, without giving up much of anything in terms of conflicts of interest.

(Pic: Albo, by Irina Slutsky)

It's not like there's any shame in aiming for a book deal right when you start your blog. As the New York Observer puts it:

These days it seems more and more like people start goofy Web sites practically counting on seeing their stuff between two covers.

If someone's going pay $20 for a bound collection of stale weblog posts, they might as well be yours. Here are some tips for living what seems like the new American Dream:

1. Focus on a hot technology like Twitter or iPhone apps - nothing scares the publishing industry more than a platform that basically makes it irrelevant.

2. Intimidate this shit out of people with your sheer Internet randomness. This worked well for "I Can Has Cheeseburger" and "Chuck Norris Facts," two websites old people do not understand at all.

3. Racial commentary. (Well, it worked for that site about white people — Park Slope's Blognigger still seems to be waiting on his book deal.)

4. Be this guy. (You're next, Bonerparty. The world is watching.)

5. Three words: Stalk Patrick Mulligan: The editor who acquired "Texts" for Gotham, Patrick Mulligan, is like the Ari Gold of Tumblr-to-book deals, responsible for more of these deals than almost anyone else out there: Chuck Norris Facts, I Can Haz Cheezburger, Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle and GraphJam.com the novels are all his doing.

Words of Wisdom from Patrick:

"Not all websites make great books," Mr. Mulligan said in an email. "You have to be confident that you can curate the material in such a way that it still hits its audience while also taking advantage of the book medium. For the books that I've worked on… my aim is that the person in the bookstore who picks up a copy will fall in love with the material the same way as someone who stumbles onto the website."

See you in hell Mulligan.

If Huffington were typing up her own entries, she'd probably be doing so from one of her beloved BlackBerrys. Instead the posts are coming from TweetDeck, an application available only on Macs and PCs (not the 'Berry).

Between that, the adroit use of URL shorteners (Huffington is not known among her staff as a particularly tech savvy Web mogul) and the distinct lack of typos, it seems a safe bet Huffington is running her Twitter stream through the same HuffPo editorial pipeline that producers her columns, books and TV talking points.

The only question is which unfortunate editor has to add this particular task to his portfolio of random Arianna chores.

Plath gassed herself at home in 1963, after sealing Nicholas and his sister Freida Hughes off in the room next door. Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had recently left her for Assia Wevill, another poet's wife, and Plath was struggling to make ends meet amid a harsh winter. Writes the Times of London in its excellent obituary:

Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.

In March 1969, six years after Plath's death, Wevill gassed herself and her four-year-old daughter in a suicide apparently modeled on Plath's.

Nicholas Hughes has recently left his post at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks to make pottery in his home studio. The evolutionary ecologist had been battling depression "for some time," according to his sister Freida Hughes. From her statement:

His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.

If the grisly deaths of Plath and Wevill sparked questions about the propensity of poets toward suicide, Nicholas Hughes' death highlights the ongoing debate over how genetics and suicide might be linked; the expert quoted by the Times emphasized the importance of "what's happening in the here and now" over any biological factors.

Hughes reached the age of 47 and became a professor, having clearly found at least some of the emotional shelter his mother wished on him. She wrote of him in Nick and the Candlestick, "You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn."

[Times of London]

(Image via)

Rich was laid off as assistant managing editor of Portfolio.com in January; by March she was, the New York Times reports, going stir-crazy "living on top of myself" in a 12-by-17-foot West Village studio, where she practices yoga, runs the recession blog she started and, we're guessing, plans few outside excursions to restaurants and bars and so forth, since that costs money.

The Times hooked Rich up — lucky her! — with a designer who figured out how to make her studio significantly less miserable for $326, in part by moving her desk closer to the window from a "gloomy and depressing spot" in back, and by pairing the desk with a chair that was the right height.

Which sounds kind of "duh," but judging from the before-and-after pics, the feng shui makeover did make the place significantly more pleasant. Now Rich has "a new apartment" to be poor in, and a few more months of sanity. Which these days is a real victory even for those who have a job.

That figure covers copyright claims for past alleged infringement by Google — the search engine had to scan the books to add them to its special book search index — but not revenues authors can hypothetically earn if they opt into special deals with Google. Under the special arrangement, authors would get a cut of revenue from advertising sold next to Google "previews" of their books, and a cut of sales of special editions (e.g. online, library printing, etc.).

Authors have the right to opt out of these moneymaking schemes, and they would be wise to do so: Google Books overlord Ramsey Allington is said to be an unqualified train wreck of a manager, and Google failed at a similar sales effort for online video.

The Authors Guild didn't bother with such details in an email (see below) to members, nor did it explain how a purported $125 million settlement only includes $45 million in author and publisher payments; it offered instead a rosy summation of the lengthy settlement agreement.

If authors had any doubts about the weak and declining economics of their profession, their guild's crowing about such a paltry payout should put them to rest.

Critics in England and parts of the U.S. Los Angeles were none too kind to O'Neill's 2008 novel Netherland. The work was shut out of the National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle awards.

But the New Yorker loved the novel, about a family's downtown life in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack, and now O'Neill gets the $15,000 PEN prize. A movie deal and national cricket surge can't be far behind; buy your sets now, hipsters.

Fashion writer Glenna Goldis has gone public, posting to her Tumblr the sad saga of her attempt to get the $700 she was promised for two pieces she wrote for a Nov. 16 Observer Style insert. Spoiler: She's still stiffed.

But she's been a valiant pest! Here's what she learned along the way:

• Style editor Nancy Butkus was told to pay only $22,000 of $29,000 in invoices for the section. "What I'm being asked to do is immoral," she told Goldis.
• Managing editor Jesse Wegman said no one who worked on the section had been paid. He first called it a "budget screw-up," then later "unconscionable."
• Observer Media Group president Bob Sommer, who is blamed for the mess, just took a job flacking for the New Jersey Devils. It is unclear if his duties there will include blocking contract workers from getting the money they are promised.

The Observer was also stiffing people two years ago. So screwing over freelancers is a grand ole Observer tradition that should obviously be retired, but will probably continue forever. Sort of like "Sparrow."

One tipster told us that Plenty has had trouble paying writers for some time. There's a whole discussion thread on Mediabistro about the magazine, with messages from three and four years ago.

Mark Spellun started Plenty in 2004, and by one contributor's reckoning burned through about $100,000 per issue, or about $2.5 million in total. The money likely came from the Spellun family's real-estate empire, this person figures, given that ad pages were allegedly never sufficient to pay a single employee.

Could Mark Spellun's father Arnold, chairman of Plenty parent company Environ Press, pay the magazine's disgruntled former editorial staff, like the group of illustrators we're told is banding together to hire a lawyer and go after the magazine? Maybe not. Real-estate empires are not what they were even a year ago.

But if the principals at Environ Press still hope to catch their share of the anticipated tidal wave of spending on green technology and infrastructure sometime in the next decade, they would be well advised to treat their ecosystem with care right now, inconvenient though it may be.

Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Following this is more drinking, of wine, from Bono's "hole-in-the-wall" cellar, which we're sure is totally working class and rock n' roll and so forth and not at all plutocratic. Also, five uses of italics , an impaired segue from "miles" of desert to "Miles Davis," plenty more material for Jeff Bercovici to mock, and several song recommendations that we totally tried to find in the iTunes Store.

Eh, maybe. The two Street Team members we heard from were certainly happy about the money. One called it "a nice gesture on MTV's behalf." Another called an MTV executive a "class act" in the comments section of last week's story on Viacom's apologies. (There are several new comments there from Street Team members.)

But it's a safe bet that MTV is planning to seek more money from the philanthropic foundation that sponsored its 2008 election "Street Team" of citizen journalists, the Knight Foundation. Paying bonuses could help mitigate the fallout from how it handled the last $700,000 grant, unapologetically (until the end) withholding paychecks for weeks or even months.

Plus there's the PR benefit of doing right by screwed-over charity workers.

We'll grant that the $500 was a praiseworthy act of decency. But we also won't begrudge anyone who refers to the payments as "interest" rather than "bonus."

And, hey, is MTV paying any of the non-Street-Team freelancers we were hearing from as recently as ten days ago? If you have any news, email us.

Puzo wrote into the Godfather a character named Johnny Fontane, whose career is assisted by the mob several times, most infamously in a scene where a Hollywood shot-caller awakens to find the head of his beloved horse in bed with him. Fontane was widely believed to be a stand-in for Sinatra.

Sinatra was not happy, and Puzo knew it: At Elaine's, the proprietress asks Sinatra is he would like an introduction to the author. He objects, as Puzo anticipated.

But the author was eventually dragged into an introduction, literally, by an apparently drunk millionaire buddy of the singer's who ignored Puzo's objections

On the way out the millionaire started leading me toward a table. His right-hand man took me by the other hand...

‘I’d like you to meet my good friend, Mario Puzo,’ said the millionaire.
‘I don’t think so,’ Sinatra said...
I was trying to get past the right-hand man and get the hell out of there... The millionaire was actually in tears.
‘Frank, I’m sorry, God, Frank, I didn’t know, Frank, I’m sorry…’
I always run away from an argument and I have rarely in my life been disgusted by anything human beings do, but after that I said to Sinatra, ‘Listen, it wasn’t my idea.’
...He said, and his voice was almost kind, ‘Who told you to put that in the book, your publisher?’
...Finally I said, ‘I mean about being introduced to you.’ Time has mercifully dimmed the humiliation of what followed. Sinatra started to shout abuse. I remember that, contrary to his reputation, he did not use foul language at all. The worst thing he called me was a pimp. I do remember him saying that if it wasn’t that I was so much older than he, he would beat the hell out of me. What hurt was that here he was, a northern Italian, threatening me, a southern Italian, with physical violence. This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone. It just wasn’t done.
Sinatra kept up his abuse and I kept staring at him. He kept staring down at his plate. Yelling. He never looked up. Finally, I walked away and out of the restaurant.
My humiliation must have showed because he yelled after me, ‘Choke. Go ahead and choke.’

That last quote sounds exactly like what one would expect Sinatra to yell after someone he's just told off, actually. It's kind of perfect! Writers may not get the respect of singers or filmmakers (Sinatra was actually nice to Francis Ford Coppola, even though the Godfather film included the Fontane character), but they do tend to get the last word.

The Daily Show promotes the book which funnels free labor to the blog which supports that $100 million valuation Huffington just scored, and a vanishingly small percentage of the people involved in the food chain are getting paid.

Now that little racket would make for a good how-to book. Begrudgingly admire it in action in the clip above (including the best bit of the backstage stuff!).

UPDATE: Twitter pretty much hated her. Which is kind of beside the point: None of you nerds was going to write/slave for her anyway!

Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed's account of three generations of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.”

Fiction: Peter Matthiessen took the Fiction Award for "Shadow Country," about a sugarcane farmer and outlaw suspected serial killer.

Poetry: Mark Doty's "Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems."

Young People's Literature Award: "What I Saw and How I Lied," Judy Blundell.

2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Maxine Hong Kingston.

2008 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community: Barney Rosset, publisher, Grove Press and The Evergreen Review.

An entertaining little video from GalleyCat:

Seen recently on Craigslist, a heartfelt entreaty:

"Sigh. I knew I should have stayed in advertising.

So really, I was assigned a story for a (non-smut) mag to watch and rate two people having sex. None of my friends will do it—and I don't think I'd want to see that anyway—so here I am, trolling Craigslist's casual encounters with the hopes of finding a normal, heterosexual couple who would be willing to get it on in front of me.

The couple will be completely anonymous in the story (unless they WANT to be ID'd/photographed), and I will not be participating nor doing this to get my rocks off. After all, I am a professional journalist...who isn't paid nearly enough.

Ideally, you and your partner will be somewhat new to boffing each other and not total exhibitionists, although at this point, I'll take what I can get. Also, I'm looking to set this up for Monday or Tuesday night, if possible. And I WILL expect to meet somewhere in public first, so I can rule out whether you're the kind of people who might want to chain me up in your rape room and anally violate me with my tape recorder. (Please don't be.)

So wanna screw in front of a reporter? Holler."

This scribe needs your help people! Get naked and make news. Likely, this is for either a "Talk of the Town" or a Time Out sex column. What do you think? Any guesses? More importantly, who's in?

[Craigslist]

There's also Penguin Group's "Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger," which pushed the boundaries of the genre and is now in its second printing.

And there's so much more! Let's just have a list:

• It's Disgusting and We Ate It! True Food Facts from Around the World and Throughout History (Simon & Schuster)
• The "Butt" triology, which includes "The Day My Butt Went Psycho.... the epic tale of a brave young boy and his crazy runaway butt," is up to 1.2 million copies. (Scholastic)
• Getting to Know Your Toilet: The Disgusting Story Behind Your Home's Strangest Feature (Capstone Press)
• Wicked History: Leopold II: Butcher of the Congo (Scholastic)
• Wicked History: Mary Tudor: Courageous Queen or Bloody Mary? (Scholastic)
• The "Captain Underpants" series, Scholastic, 37 million copies in print.
• Oh, Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty (Workman Publishing)

Sure, this might seem like a corruption of children's reading, the youth equivalent of a celebrity magazine or (*cough*) gossip blog. But it's actually a good thing that kids are encouraged to look at reading as entertainment and useful information rather than as homework. Better they think of books that way than as esoteric, rarefied or snobbish. The boys with aptitude for more advanced material will surely demand it.

To those who would argue otherwise, well... FART! Bwahahahahahaaaa....

[WSJ]