With the inevitable recession-inspired legalization of marijuana in mind, Print magazine asked some design shops to propose packaging ideas for legal weed. And they agreed, because they love drugs! Click through for a good one, and a bad one.

Floundering Conde Nast has hired McKinsey & Co. to help them "rethink" the way they do business, which usually involves layoffs. Not to worry, Conde Nasties! Our worldly readers will help you survive this trying time.

Richard Gasquet is a professional tennis player who was suspended in May after testing positive for cocaine. But now he's been reinstated, thanks to one of the most thrilling Positive Drug Test Excuses of the 2009 season!

The hot new idea among people who think about "journalism," and the sanctity thereof: let's ban linking, on the internet! Let's also ban wheels, in order to save the horse industry. Let's also ban talking about things!

NYC's "Fashion's Night Out" stimulus plan: "[Stores] are being asked to stay open, as late as midnight, and to throw parties that will be open to the public." Will they also give out money? [NYT]

Brian Tierney, the boss of the recently bankrupt Philadelphia newspapers, vowed last week he would "never close" the Philly Daily News. But he never said he wouldn't desperately rebrand it to save a nickel!

Sometimes the scent of desperation just rolls off the newspaper industry in great waves. The Dallas Morning News, like every other paper, has not been doing well. Their new strategy to get back on track: "a free, one-section version of the paper for home delivery aimed at nonsubscribers who are short on time." Ha, they're not short on time, they just don't want to read your stupid paper! The free version will go to "affluent" neighborhoods. So the company will pay to produce a dumbed-down version of its own poorly-selling paper and deliver it, thereby cannibalizing its own declining circulation and giving a big "fuck you" to not-wealthy readers all at once. It just might work! [DMN]

Because some stories are nothing but blatant cries for condemnation, we're going to allow our disgust to swing around 180 degrees so that we support this idea: A Park Avenue plastic surgeon is offering a $500,000 package deal that includes a summer house rental in the Hamptons, and all the plastic surgery you want! "Within reason," of course. He's also throwing in a chauffeur, personal chef, and a nurse to tend to the surgically wounded. And tickets to the hottest parties, to show off your healing scars! This development is... a good thing.

The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity."

Starbucks is set to begin selling a "smoother" - read: non-burnt - cup of coffee at all company-owned locations this morning. CEO Howard Schultz told the Journal the new roast is meant to "reinvent brewed coffee." Ah, so now properly roasting your beans makes you a revolutionary. That must be why the press release calls this day "historic" and the roast itself "historic." What could possibly be more hyperbolic than that? Oh, right, a brainwashed barista on StabucksGossip.com saying this will save the lives of children. I almost forgot!

As part of its brave new plan to stop hemorrhaging money, Starbucks went out and bought a company called Clover that makes coffee machines. These Clovers cost $11,000 each, and brew one cup of coffee at a time. We're not math whizzes or anything, but at that rate, those better be some good fucking cups of coffee. So the New York Times sent a coffee connoisseur to taste seven kinds of beans from the new machine, and he came to the stunning conclusion: not even a magical $11,000 gadget can make burned coffee beans taste good.