Yahoo's board has called Microsoft's on-and-off pursuit of their company "erratic." Not that their behavior's been that straightforward, either. But could there be more to the imbroglio than Jerry Yang's founder ego and Steve Ballmer's desperate grasping at relevance on the Web? Blogger Usman Latif has a theory: It's all about "'361," a patent Yahoo obtained when it bought paid-search pioneer Overture in July 2003. The patent covers the basic business model of letting advertisers bid to place ads against keywords — the heart of Google's multibillion-dollar revenue engine. Latif's thesis: Microsoft doesn't want Yahoo's people, products, or market share; it just wants to get its hands on this patent, so it can use it to knife Google.

So. The bad Countrywide-related guy who just 'resigned' from the Obama campaign? He was at the Bilderberg conference, that fun meeting of the secret shadow government. And he's connected to sooo many other organizations that plot the global food crisis and control the churches, like the Brookings Institute and the University of Minnesota. We learned so much from this informative widget, courtesy Animal. We've embedded it after the jump.

What do Thrillist, New York Magazine, HuffPo, Nikki Finke, Time Out, satirist Andy Borowitz, the New York Observer, Elizabeth Spiers, MediaBistro, NBC, Jossip, The Economist, and Jared Paul Stern all have in common? They are all afraid to cover the Bilderberg/NWO meeting in D.C.! This according to the emails received by those people (and many, many more!) admonishing all involved for failing to report on the secret shadow super-government currently meeting to plot terrible things in D.C. Thankfully, one media outlet wasn't afraid of these powerful kingmakers: Slate. Oh, wait, but what is Bilderberg and why is it evil?

Oh, poor dejected Dan Rather. Dumped by his network, left out of self-congratulatory media parties and solitarily pursuing a vanity lawsuit. Well, at least he has the gab fest of that is the View. Today, he got to pontificate about the election, as well as explain his conspiracy theories about why he was fired from CBS. Joy Behar even called him a "sex god." About four minutes in, Barbara Walters asks Rather about his lawsuit, and Rather gets all Howard Beale-lite. His paranoia got our paranoia going. What personal vendetta is Barbara Walters pursuing by asking Rather about his crazy suit? Did ABC News bigwigs tell her to bring up the case to hurt CBS News? Was 9/11 an inside job? Video after the jump.

In the brotherhood of gossip columnists, there is or at least used to be an unwritten rule: don't go after the personal lives of rivals, because they can always retaliate. So why would the New York Post's Page Six publish sex chats between corpulent blogger Perez Hilton and one of his online admirers? (Yes, he has them, amazingly.)

The US government would maybe like to spruce up the network of existing interstates that runs from Texas to our Canadian border. The state of Texas, meanwhile, is looking into constructing a multi-lane freeway that would stretch from Laredo, on the Mexican border, to Arkansas. Naturally, this means that the American government has sold us out to foreign interests, dissolved our sovereignty, and allowed the shadowy "North American Union" to begin work on a vast "NAFTA Superhighway"—several football fields wide!—that would destroy our borders, and our rights, for good. This conspiracy theory, quite popular among the more extreme cranks of the far-right and libertarian movements, was brought to our attention by the tireless work promoting it done by respected economic commentator Lou Dobbs, of CNN.

The Washington Post introduces us to the delightful Paranoia, circulation 15,000. It's been around since 1992, but they try to keep a low profile because of... well, you know. The magazine's two editors "attempt to publish a 'provocative, unpredictable mix' of conspiracy theories," and they "try not to have a house conspiracy style." What's inside?

The chemical explosion or fire or what have you at News Corp.'s midtown office building "is now under control," according to reported announcements from the city's Office of Emergency Management. "There are no safety concerns at this point," reads an email to employees of a neighboring building, detailing OEM's report. "All the evacuated floors in the impacted facility are once again populated. Incident closed." Is that the same as saying "conversation over"? Because we're still kind of wondering what someone was doing stirring around 30 gallons of "unidentified utility chemicals" in the first place.

NY Press's Matt Elzweig thinks that subway love dreamfinders Patrick Moberg and Camille Hayton's rise to quasi-fame has something to do with Jakob Lodwick and Julia Allison's 'connections to Gawker.' "There's an implication that because of your ongoing relationship with both Gawker and Patrick Moberg, that you may have had something to do with the 11/5 and 11/6 items on Gawker about Moberg," he wrote to Jakob on 11/26, in a chain of emails that, in the spirit of "Hey, I tried," Matt saw fit to include in today's cover article. "Did that connection (between you and Gawker) have anything to do with its reporting on the Moberg story? Did Gawker learn about the video and/or Moberg's website directly from you? (If not, how do you suppose they did learn about it?)" Huh?

You may want to ask yourself something in this, a week that represents the first expansion of "Daylight Saving Time" since 1987: Why do Clorox and 7-11 and Modell's and the all-powerful potato and oil lobbies want so desperately to make it dark in the morning for longer? Media outlets randomly report that we save either "10,000" or "100,000" barrels of oil a day on the "Daylight Saving" system, a number that is completely made-up, as neither Australia nor the U.S. has ever seen a reduction in energy use—and a simulation in Japan projected a rise in electricity use. The U.S. itself sees a rise in gasoline use during "Daylight Saving."

While the campus is in full uproar, Columbia University is refusing to give the NYPD security videotapes of the office of Madonna Constantine, an African-American professor who found a noose hanging on her office door Tuesday morning. The police began asking for the footage yesterday, but Columbia administrators have turned them down, forcing the police to seek a court order for the tapes. An odd choice for the school to make. Two explanations come to mind!

One of the more bizarre stories this weekend concerned the death of Carol Anne Gotbaum, the daughter-in-law of New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum. On Friday, on the way to rehab in Tucson, she arrived late to the airport in Phoenix and demanded to be allowed to board her flight. She was arrested for disorderly conflict, cuffed, and placed in an airport holding room. Half an hour later she was dead.

Here are some of the crazed rumors we've heard about the Vanity Fair story that John Connolly is writing about alleged financier-perv* billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, of whom it is alleged that he retained a procurer of underage girls. Oh my God, we heard that Bill Clinton came into 4 Times Square and told Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter that this expose of Epstein must not run and of course Graydon folded like a paper doll. And also we heard alleged former Epstein alleged friend Ron Burkle is Danny A's backer on every club he opens and Burkle does that to harvest pretty young things then flies them to L.A. and allegedly sells them to Epstein and alleged movie-producer Steve "Bing Laden" Bing and it is this cabal of partying hedonists that has prevented the piece from running! And also we heard that Prince Andrew (the one who divorced Fergie!) and the royal family interceded, promising to shut down Graydon Carter's restaurant The Waverly Inn if this piece runs and that is all why it has not seen the light of day yet!

There's long been speculation that University of Illinois student and New York mag intern James Kurisunkal is getting some kind of outside help with his socialite website Park Avenue Peerage—speculation that James has always flatly denied. Lately, though, the suspicions have been renewed!

Was the production team behind last night's Emmy awards oversensitive or just incompetent? During three separate incidents, the camera cut away to an overhead shot and killed the sound. While a case can be made that cutting away from Sally Field's anti-war polemic was probably for the best (she went on and on), and that it made sense to pull back from crazy Katherine Heigl as soon as she mouthed the word "shit," what in the world was Fox thinking by interrupting Ray Romano? Guy couldn't say something offensive if he tried. Unless, you know, you find banality offensive.

Serge Becker's nightlife portfolio includes the perennially hip Joe's Pub, the now-closed Area, and the snooch-magnet Bowery Bar. Recently his properties have expanded to include virtually all of the Lower East Side hotspots: Club 205, La Esquina and the Box. The last week has been a tough one for Serge. The Box was raided and shut down (temporarily, we hear) and now word comes in that La Esquina too was raided and closed, due to its complete and utter illegality! As the Post noted, the Box raid occasioned an exodus of celebrities onto the asphalt jungle of Chrystie street. It could have gone worse. The fuzz could have found the mountains of cocaine that went into the eightballs that reportedly are included with table service. And all agree that the raid on La Esquina—it lacked a certificate of occupancy—was inevitable. But two's a trend, and it makes us suspicious. What—or who—is behind Becker's troubles?

"Suze wrote a book called "Getting Over John Doe." It is stupid. But one night in Miami, Mel Brooks drunkenly hit on her so she parlayed her silence about the episode into his putting a blurb on the back cover," writes a tipster. Gee, you mean that Mel Brooks doesn't really think that the Glamour editor's book, whose cover copy promises that it will "give you some Zen with men," is "A must read ... loaded with poignant charm and surprisingly good humor"?

If you're the type that found Rosie O'Donnell's explanation of her departure suspiciously tidy (i.e., that she only wanted a one-year contract, while ABC demanded that she be locked up for three more high-rated years of headline-grabbing feuds with media-shy billionaires, public disclosures of mental illness, and the lingering, delicious tension from the possibility that a simple argument could end in Elizabeth Hasselbeck's on-air strangulation), the NY Post offers up an alternate story: Rosie (pictured here delivering a vicious head-butt to her hated boss) is quitting the show after failing in a behind-the-scenes putsch to oust Barbara Walters. Confused by competing theories, O'Donnell's devoted fans have taken to the Ask Ro section of Rosie.com to try and sort through the mess. A selection: