We hear that Google's Christmas party, which was held at a pier in San Francisco last year, will be at Shoreline Amphitheatre this year, a short hop from the Googleplex. Want to attend? There's still a chance. Last year, your best bet to get a date to the Google bash was by trolling Craigslist. This year? We suggest you use Facebook's ad-targeting system to aim your message directly at Google employees. "siliconsallywag," whose ad is shown here, has already beaten us to the punch. If you want to follow her lead, you've got not one but two shots at it.

We've reported on everyone else's holiday gatherings. It's only fair to spill about our own, don't you think? It's tonight at Valleywag uberspecial correspondent Paul Boutin's impressive sky-palace. The dress code is "rockstar," so expect Paul to be wearing his Armani sunglasses, Owen's hair to be extra pointy, and Nick Douglas to be in a suit and tie. You want in? IM me with a story I can use for my last hurrah before I shuffle off this bloggy coil and move to a respectable publication. Cheers!

Miss your chance to catch the Digg Christmas dinner yesterday? Turns out Digg founder Kevin Rose will host another holiday bash tonight, this one for the folks at Revision3, his other startup. "They're having 2 of them. A Rev3 and a Digg," one source says. So what, Revision3 gets the leftovers?

We hear that Yahoo is hosting its holiday party tomorrow night at the San Mateo Expo Center, conveniently near the Bay Meadows racetrack, where Yahoos might have better luck cashing in than with their stock options. Last year's entertainment was American Idol reject Chris Daughtry. This year?

We love a challenge. Supposedly Digg, Kevin Rose's news-discussion site, is having a party in San Francisco tonight. But we haven't pinned down the location. What is this, some top-secret rave? If you find out where it is, or just want to send in a report from the scene afterwards, drop us a line.

Tonight, celebrate Wikipedia, replicants, and videobloggers in an orgy of self-congratulation.

Did you get your pass to the Google Holiday Party? We understand. Email can be so unreliable. A helpful tipster saved us the trouble of digging through our Gmail spam filter to find our invitation. Don't know if we'll crash the December 12 event at the Googleplex. If it's like past parties, expect a room full of tiresomely cheery Google flacks and a drive-by appearance by Larry and Sergey. If you do get any founder face time, watch out: They'll likely bore you to tears with an explanation of why they call Web applets "gadgets" instead of "widgets." Not that you could use any of that conversation anyway, since the event is "off the record." Still want to go? After the jump, the full detail of the exclusive holiday soiree.

Options, the parody Steve Jobs novel, has totally surprised those of us who expected a throwaway. It's 248 mostly hilarious pages, with a tight story line and a protagonist who evolves credibly. You can read my enthusiastic review in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, where it's the business book of the week. But more important is this teaser email from Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, where author Dan Lyons will appear Thursday evening.

We're getting live reports on who's making it past the velvet rope at Google's New York party. The bash, held in Google's West Chelsea offices at 76 Ninth Avenue, has already kicked up a fuss. Google's controlling-but-not-that-bright PR people have tried to limit the guest list to consumer and fashion reporters, figuring they'd be more likely to critique the buffet and less likely to ask pesky questions about the search engine's business practices. So far, they've had mixed results. Here's who we've heard has showed up so far — and who's been barred at the door.

A double birthday party for GigaOm biz-blogger Om Malik (pictured with operations manager Joey Wan) and Spark PR founder Donna Sokolsky fogged up the glass patio walls at Jack Falstaff on Friday. I happened to be at the bar, hoping to catch dreamy god-mayor Gavin Newsom doing paperwork again. After the jump, the best overheards.

John Perry Barlow, pictured, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and one-time roommate of Valley bad boy Sean Parker, threw a party Saturday as a benefit for The Center for Sex & Culture. It's too bad this invitation arrived late, because the party sounded like a doozy, with the promised attendance of "Famous porn stars, infamous porn stars, and miscellaneous sluts." Does anyone who went have a report? And pictures please? The long, insane, and hilarious invitation after the jump.

• Friday: Anyone heading to Facebook board member Peter Thiel's posh VIP gathering Friday night? Let us know how it goes.

The crew from Uncov, the sarcastic self-styled anti-TechCrunch, wants to attend TechCrunch20. That, of course, is the conference where TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington will bless us with 20 demonstrations of the hottest new startups. Uncov's editors say they want to ask the hard questions we all suspect won't be posed to Arrington's handpicked favorites. But attendance, alas, isn't free. Each ticket costs $2,495. So the "bunch of poor startup founders who write a marginally popular blog that doesn't have any advertising on it" are having a hard time making ends meet. If you don't want Uncov absent at the TechCrunch20 "jerkoff," you can make a donation. So far, they have raised a whopping $185! So they need your support.

Yahoo announces their Web 2.0 Summit party, for con guests only. (We'll see if it's crashable.)

How to crash a bash:

Facebook posted a flyer for NYU users on its web site, reading:

• Sources say venture capital firm Bridgescale is throwing a party for over 100 people at the Quadrus conference center on Sand Hill Road.

Valleywag has an invitation to spare and one to beg. The spare isn't quite an invite to the Future of Web Apps summit, but to a related dinner on the 14th at TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington's Atherton home. Say what you will about the man, he's hospitable (just ask his two live-ins). And you could sup with tech notables like WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Dogster founder Ted Rheingold, Odeo founder Evan Williams, and Yahoo researcher (and plasticbag.org blogger) Tom Coates. The invitation is probably not transferable, but we'll see if we can beg the organizers to let you in.

Sarah Meyers' video proved that this weekend's TechCrunch bash in Menlo Park really was a hoity-toity invite-only affair. But how exactly did this interloping vlogger get into the party, and how was she kicked out? We asked her.