It's not clear what they were trying to gain or who they were trying to serve by the stunt. Even at Fox — which repeatedly used the horror anyone felt that day as an excuse to push all sorts of ill-fated policies — they spent the morning airing live pictures from the memorial service at the Pentagon. So did CNN.

MSNBC did this last year, too. Even posting a news quiz on their site to see how much info you were absorbing. All we learned — before we quickly turned the channel — is that this is a dumb tradition that MSNBC ought to stop.

First of all: Fresca. Come on. It was LBJ's favorite soda! He was not a chocolate milk man.

Second of all: "24-year-old LA lawyer." Ugh.

And thirdly: we just failed the Millionaire audition last week.

In what is probably a violation of ABC's game show audition policies, our mother signed us up for a Millionaire audition against our knowledge, emailing us after receiving a confirmation from ABC.com and then shipping us a copy of The World Almanac 2009.

And because we do not like to disappoint out mother, we schlepped out to West 66th last Friday afternoon. And we stood outside of one of ABC's many buildings on that street, in the oppressive heat, with a couple dozen 50-year-old ladies from Westchester, cantankerous retired men from all over the tri-state area, a couple mooks in from Scotia, and three or four tattooed young folk participating either as a sop to mothers who think they've always wasted their prodigious talents or because it would be funny.

The ABC employees eventually ushered us into a classroom with an unmarked door leading directly to the street, where we learned how incredibly terrible old men are at going through metal detectors. They have literally hundreds of pockets, in their old man trousers and shirts and coats, and each one of those pockets is filled with assorted things they've collected during their 70+ years on this earth. They spend ten minutes emptying these pockets of their paper clips, LifeAlert pagers, money clips, Buick keys, buffalo nickels, bits of twine, pocket knives, and Nazi gold, and then they still set the alarm off, either because their hips are made of titanium or because they forgot they're keeping some tin for the war effort in their shirt pockets. It was hot, and we were slightly hungover, and standing outside waiting for these old men did not make us happy.

But it did give us some time to chat with the old ladies! They were a more fun-loving bunch, though none of them have had anything to do with all the hours in the day for 30 years now. Which is why all the old ladies have auditioned for Millionaire multiple times. And not just Millionaire! One lady told a story that began "well, when I was on Hollywood Squares..." and who knows if she meant Paul Lynde Hollywood Squares or Whoopi Goldberg Hollywood Squares or even Shadoe Stevens Squares.

Once we finally sat down the two fresh college grads organizing the audition waited out the old guys still at the metal detector by asking us if anyone had traveled far for the audition ("62nd street," said an old man) and then one of them got into a flirty argument with the mooks from Scotia (she was from Troy) and once it became dangerously like the first day of camp or maybe rehab the test finally began.

Here's how the audition works: you sign up, you are sent an application with lots of pre-interview questions about whether or not you're an ABC employee and how you would convey an interesting but not too out-there personality during a four-second conversation with Regis, and then you show up and take a multiple-choice test. Your score on the test determines whether or not you move on to a super-quick interview with a producer, and that interview determines whether you will end up in the contestant pool. Once you are in the pool, they can call you up to be on a syndicated taping tomorrow, or never.

The old ladies who've auditioned a hundred times warned us that the test was hard. We didn't believe them! We did well on the SATs and the ACTs. Taking multiple-choice tests is precisely what years of urban public schooling taught us to do! And it wasn't that hard, honestly. But we still sucked.

It's a 30 question multiple choice test and you have ten minutes to complete it. It was not that difficult. It was a smidgen of pop culture and simple math, and the rest was maybe Thursday Times crossword puzzle subject matter and difficulty. We only completely guessed on two questions, and gave educated guesses on maybe two more. But we failed. And then everyone who failed (at least 80% of the crowd) was very quickly hustled out of there.

We were never told what the passing grade actually is, but from now on, whenever we find ourselves knowing, without lifelines, the answer to every single damn question on Millionaire, and we watch some idiot contestant struggle, we will feel even worse. And we are a disappointment to our poor, long-suffering mother. At least Leitch got the chance to lose on actual TV.

Anyone who's walked around Williamsburg lately can see the painful signs of a busted bubble. New developments sit virtually vacant. New building constructions have stopped cold with the landscape of the area littered with semi-constructed buildings. We already knew things were bad, but we had no idea that things were this bad.

With sales across Brooklyn down a staggering 57 percent from a year ago, Williamsburg, with its high density of new construction, has taken on an ominous disposition. Walk down virtually any block and you'll come across an amenity-laden building that sits nearly empty: relics of a moment in history that seems, increasingly, like a fever dream.

Most unsettling are the cases of the developers who seem to have vanished, leaving behind so many vacant lots and half-completed buildings-eighteen, to be precise, more than can be found in all of the Bronx-that large swaths of the neighborhood have come to resemble a city after an air raid.

All over the city, overleveraged developers have seen their projects stymied by the recession, but the highly speculative nature of what's happened in Williamsburg stands out as exceptionally dramatic and misguided-New York's version of the collapsing exurban "boomburgs" in Florida and Arizona.

Oh but wait—This is only the beginning!

Part of what makes the present situation so dire is that it is still in the early stages of unfolding. There are already about 400 new apartments on the market in Williamsburg, and additional condos are completing construction every month. According to a study (Real estate broker David) Maundrell released last month, 2,818 new apartments will have hit the market by the end of this year, with another 2,766 projected by the end of 2010. On top of this, Fannie Mae, the country's most dominant home-mortgage lender, recently implemented a policy requiring that buildings be 70 percent in contract before guaranteeing mortgages, thus delaying the moment when a developer can stop covering the taxes and common charges on a finished project.

The writer of New York's massive piece, David Amsden, took some time to visit a few of the new developments in the neighborhood.

I made my way to a building called Warehouse 11, on the corner of Roebling and North 11th Streets. Marketed by David Maundrell, the building has 120 total units (plus the requisite yoga center, playroom, parking garage, 24-hour concierge, gym, and communal sundeck). While the model apartment seemed an appealing enough place to live, there was something generally off about the building as a whole: Despite having been on the market since early 2008, only 30 percent of the units were in contract, and it was clear that construction wasn't complete. The list prices, too, were significantly higher than comparable products, as if the developer had not been informed about the current state of the economy. A few weeks later, I noticed the front doors of the lobby had been padlocked shut. The process of foreclosure had begun.

Looking at the bright side, we suppose all of these vacant new developments will lead to some awesome squatting opportunities for the hipster looking to enhance his or her hardcore street cred. We look forward to having our tips line flooded with ridiculous Williamsburg hipster squatting stories for years to come!

The Billyburg Bust [New York]
Pic via Look At This Fucking Hipster

A story in Monday's New York Times details the horror.

Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements.

"They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?' " Mr. Illades said. "There is a bubble bursting."

The economic crisis and the subsequent scaling back of hipster financial lifelines has also had a detrimental effect on the real estate market in Williamsburg, long the province of people who work diligently to cultivate the look and smell of vagrants living in boxcars laced with excrement while residing in lavish loft apartments.

Ross Weinstein, a managing partner of the Union Square Mortgage Group, has worked with hundreds of Williamsburg apartment buyers in the past two years.

"A lot of the money came from family," he said. "That piece, it's gone for a lot of people."

In the boom years, Mr. Weinstein said, 40 percent of the mortgage applications he reviewed for buyers in Williamsburg included down-payment money, from $50,000 to $300,000, from parents. About 20 percent of the applications listed investments that gave the young buyers $3,000 to $10,000 of monthly income.

Mr. Weinstein has been advising two brothers in their late 20s who wanted to buy a $700,000 apartment with $250,000 from their parents. But their parents' investment portfolio has lost so much value that they now can give only $50,000. Since the brothers make about $45,000 a year each, they are now shopping for a $500,000 apartment.

For the love of God how will these hipster brothers ever get by in a crappy $500,000 apartment? We demand that King Obama bail out the hipsters! How else will they have enough floor space for all their hipster bros from LA to crash when their band is in town to play a CMJ showcase at The Charleston? How else can they throw parties without a vacant, darkened room designated specifically for coke-snorting and sloppy blowjobs? You don't really expect them to use their bedrooms for such things, do you? This is America, dammit!

If worse comes to worse, perhaps the hipster brothers can subsidize their income with Sesame Street location fees?

Parents Pulling the Plugs on Williamsburg Trust-Funders [New York Times]

The New York Observer says that the place was locked down because of an extra 38 people found in the club on Friday night. They also note that the Bea's owners, Matt Abramcyk and Paul Sevigny, owe the city some $23,000 in unpaid fines for construction violations.

For his part, Sevigny tells BlackBook that there will be a "Free Beatrice" party at some point this week, because the glassy-eyed tiny wanderers who like to sit in the dark basement and feel cool and fucked up will not let their beloved Beatrice, their "living room," sit idle and empty. BlackBook also floats the rumor that Kate Moss's (or former Page Sixer Chris Wilson's) bloody nose was the reason for the shutdown.

Whatever the case may be, it's a tragedy for the entire City of New York, which relies heavily on the Beatrice to each night safely stow away some 125 of its most fucking annoying citizens, so the rest of us don't have to deal with them.

So your exotic pet might be a wonderful companion, but without thousands of years of domestication getting your back, it might get pissed for no reason and maul your girlfriend. No one told the crazy chimp lady.

Well, people probably did tell the crazy chimp lady. But she didn't really care! The crazy chimp lady was on The Today Show to explain that she treated her chimpanzee Travis like a human child, and it could drive! Her husband and daughter are both dead, the crazy chimp lady is alone in the world, and she would've done it all again.

"Everything was destroyed - all of Stevie's memorabilia, photos, musical instruments, history, clothing, furniture, everything," said our source. "It's all gone. It was his main residence and he is utterly devastated. Stevie's had to put his tour and appearances on hold while he deals with this." Wonder's personal rep couldn't be reached and a rep for his label, Universal Motown, declined to comment.

Brutal. Wonder is currently on tour in Australia and New Zealand, where he'd face postponing eight shows indefinitely while attending to the disaster. Failing a mournful, Nolte-esque encomium for the torched belongings today on HuffPo, we'll piece together an inventory as details trickle out. Heartfelt Defamer condolences in the meantime.

UPDATE (9:20 a.m.): TMZ now notes: "Contrary to news reports, Stevie Wonder's house did not burn down in the L.A. fires. He just called to say it's bulls**t." So who tipped Page Six? Liz Rosenberg?

UPDATE (12:45 p.m.): Wonder's representative issued the following statement to Reuters: "I'm grateful to say that my house was not burned down in the fire. I extend my sympathies to anyone who may have been touched by this horrendous event." Us, too.

• Blaze Victim [NYP]

· Passenger Andreas Zedini, 34, of Italy, died at Ventura County Medical Center. Firefighters had to pull him from the wreckage.
· Avary was arrested on suspicion of felony driving under the influence and was booked into Ventura County Jail before he posted $50,000 bail.

This all amounts to a triple-decker shit sandwich for one of the founding fathers of the legendary Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. At this point we're just praying that Mrs. Avary pulls through OK.

• 'Pulp Fiction' co-writer arrested after fatal crash [LAT]