A new study alleges that men produce a lot of sperm because it's so hard to knock a woman up, Slate reports. Given the fact that they're always cheating, as well as having babies that aren't Really Yours, you cuckhold. On the flip side, Lori Gottlieb advises The Atlantic's female readers to, "Settle! That's right... Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go." You know, how Rachel should have settled for Barry on Friends, she points out. Wait, what?

Michael Dell is adding one more bronco to his stable, email backup service MessageOne. The company is ho-hum — boring enterprise software; the founder, not so much. That's because his last name is also Dell. As in Adam Dell, Michael's younger brother. That's not the only part of this deal that's staying in the family: The $155 million addition will kick $12 million back to Michael, who invested in MessageOne. He says his profits will go to charity. Adam will walk away with $1 million, and the brother's parents, another $500,000.

If you think it's hard for you to get a date, think about how much harder it would be if you were a busy politician, leading a busy, important life! Apparently, office-dropping doesn't help, according to famously single Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-Brookly/Queens). "Doesn't work," he told City Hall News. (That's not what we hear! He was rumored to be dating slinky Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, but quite vigorously denied it).

"If people no longer consider CNET or Gamespot authoritative and unbiased they will no longer visit. We do not wish to alienate our losers for some shitty, negligible ad buy." — commenter cheradenine, who claims to work at CNET in ad sales, on how much the company values its audience. [Valleywag Comments]

A recent piece on Yelp written for San Francisco magazine by one Karen Solomon roughs up the local-reviews website, but Solomon's critiques are mostly on target: The site's audience is insular and dominated by Bay Area residents; it has struggled to expand to other cities and define a business model. Just one small problem: San Francisco magazine reviews local businesses. In between throwing lavish parties, Yelp runs a website which lets its users do the same. So the two compete, at least in theory.

Well that didn't take too long. In an online statement today from editor Tony Ortega, the Village Voice announced it has separated itself from art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, whose direction of two commercial art fairs was raised yesterday by a blogger as a possible conflict of interest.

ArtsJournal blog 'Modern Art Notes' has a well-argued post today alleging that Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune's position as co-director of two major art fairs is an inherent conflict of interest. "The arrangement puts a Village Voice art critic in bed with a major art market player," Tyler Green writes. He makes two significant points-that Viveros-Faune's work in the Voice has the power to advance the commercial prospects of artists he's got a business interest in and more disturbing, that by ignoring an exhibit, he has a good chance of squelching its success. Determining who might have been wronged by the one-time Roebling Hall gallery-owner's conflict would be pretty much impossible. Does any of this matter?

A fictional character on The L Word, Megan Swisher, was named after power-lesbian couple Kara Swisher, the AllThingsD blogger, and Megan Smith, a vice president at Google, Mombian readers note. Not mentioned: That Swisher serves on the board of OurChart.com, a lesbian social network tied to the show, a fact she prominently discloses. [Mombian]

Buried deep in Ken Auletta's magnum opus on Google in the New Yorker: Half of Apple's board of directors are either Google board members or senior advisors to the company. Is there a better example of Silicon Valley's inbred power circles? The overlappers: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Genentech CEO Art Levinson, both on Google's and Apple's board; and Google advisors Bill Campbell, the chairman of Intuit, and Al Gore, the former VP turned venture capitalist, both of whom serve on Apple's board. One wonders how Apple manages to have a board meeting these days, given Google's broad reach into markets of interest to Apple, like cell phones, online video, and Web applications.

At first glance, Miguel Helft's New York Times profile of Chris Sacca, Google's former "head of special initiatives," reads like a puff piece. But then I realized how cutting it was. Scrounging for an actual accomplishment by Sacca, Helft can only point to Google's piddling Wi-Fi network in Mountain View. Sacca, who plans to become an investor in startups, then downplays the one advantage he has: connections to Google. "My actual preference was to not take too much money from Googlers, as it could prevent selling some companies into Google," says Sacca. Right. Like that's ever stopped any Googlers before.

Disgraced former police commish Bernie Kerik is probably gonna wish he'd spent a couple fewer of his millions of "security contracting" dollars on platinum-infused mustache wax, as it looks like he's going to have to get a third lawyer to defend him against the government's charges that he's a corrupt asshole. Kerik apparently told Kenneth Breen to lie to federal investigators about the mobbed-up contractor who paid for renovations of Bernie's Bronx apartment, and now they want Breen to take the stand in the trial and conflict-of-interest etc. etc. Kerik "faces up to 142 years in prison if convicted," which means he could still swing the Homeland Security head job once he gets released during the final term of America's Cyborg Tsar Giuliani.

Kerik lawyer may not represent at trial [NYDN]

Dead startups, lying CEOs, and disgruntled, unpaid employees seem to follow Michael Arrington wherever he goes. He doesn't cause them, but he sure seems to attract them. First there was Edgeio. Now, the latest is online-storage company OmniDrive, a startup which the conflicts-embracing TechCrunch editor invested last year. Nik Cubrilovic, OmniDrive's founder and CEO, disputes the assertion that it may be time to put the company on deathwatch. Former employees disagree, pointing out that it's in a crowded market of bigger players, is beset by technical problems, and rumored to have lost its CTO. What's the real story?

Despite the fact that her husband is a partner for a firm that represents DoubleClick, FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras will not recuse herself from the Google-DoubleClick merger case, she announced today. I, however, am happy to recuse myself. But nobody's asked. [Beyond Binary]

Two consumer advocacy groups say FTC chairman Deborah Platt Majoras has no place judging the merit of their privacy complaints stemming from the proposed merger of Google and DoubleClick. Majoras's husband, John M. Majoras, works as an antitrust lawyer at Jones Day. DoubleClick is a firm client. That's a conflict of interest, say the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

Hoosier-powered search engine Chacha is turning to an unlikely source to fund its already cozy deal with Indiana University. Chacha is introducing Google AdSense ads to the university's search results. ChaCha already features both Google and Yahoo ads as sponsored links, on its public search, but until recently IU had a strict policy against advertising:

BusinessWeek is trying to call a halt to Larry and Lucy's wedding! We get that Google is killing your print-ad sales. We get that being dependent on Web searches for, say, half of your traffic or whatever scares the bejeezus out of you. But really, mainstream media, this is a low blow — trying to put a pause on marital bliss with a conveniently planted scare story on billionaire prenups?

In every startup's life, before it can go public, there's a ritual called the roadshow. NetSuite, an online-software company backed by Larry Ellison, may begin its run as soon as Thursday, having filed an updated prospectus with the SEC detailing its plans to issue shares to the public. The total: As much as $99 million from the sale of 6.2 million shares. One unlikely buyer has already put his money in: Salesforce.com board member Craig Ramsey, who bought $3.5 million from company CEO Zach Nelson and founder Evan Goldberg. Silicon Alley Insider reports that Ramsey's son works at NetSuite, but the purchase is still curious. Also playing the field: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who put money into Goldberg's NetSuite and Benioff's Salesforce.com.

Yesterday, Fox Business Network interviewed an "online shopper" named Peter Perweiler who turned out to be the marketing director for the National Retail Federation. The NRF says it organized a media event so reporters could interview "real" shoppers. Silicon Alley Insider got one explanation from the NRF. We got another, very different explanation, from Fox News.

Fox Business conducted "man-on-the-street" interviews for "Cyber Monday." (Note: I want to gouge my eyes out when I hear that ridiculous name, myth or not.) The object? To see if people really were shopping online more. Let's not even get into the question of why Fox thought they'd find people shopping online if they were interviewed on the street. Even so, a Fox reporter found Peter Perweiler at the ESPN Zone in Washington, D.C.

Google cofounder Sergey Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki, cofounded and helps run a company called 23andMe. Since Google conveniently invested in 23andMe earlier this year, repaying a loan Brin made to the company, Google shareholders might want to keep a close eye on it to make sure everything is on the up and up. But according to this video from AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, there is no reason to worry. 23andMe is well on its way to answering the public's raucous demand for a service which will provide customers a way to find others who share their genetic traits. Traits like distaste for cucumbers, Wojcicki explains here. All this for only $1,000.