Hey, a camera phone photo of Chelsea Clinton partying at Bump, where she hung out as part of her whirlwind weekend tour of Philadelphia gay bars! Could this be one the breathless photo-ops mentioned in Sunday's story? Maybe the one where an excited woman announced that she'd grabbed the former first daughter's ass? Probably not, as it looks like there's not another woman for miles in this shot. But still. It is a photo of Chelsea Clinton surrounded by drunk homosexuals. [Previously]

If Robert De Niro's appearance at last night's Meryl Streep tribute in New York is any indication, all those haters who ridiculed the actor's agency switch last week might have another thing coming. To wit: De Niro killed. In a cruise-ship comic kind of way, perhaps, and filing through a fistful of index-carded one-liners, but still. This guy may yet pull down $20 million a picture if his timing keeps up, and he wasted no time soliciting his former co-star Streep to join him — if only someone at CAA would return his calls. Zing! Catch our exclusive video and a few more outtakes from De Niro's repertoire after the jump.

Click to viewIn journalist/blogger Daniel Radosh's upcoming Rapture Ready, he investigates the parallel universe of Christian Pop Culture. It's kinda like regular pop culture, except holier and with slightly worse production values. He says the music's not as bad as you think, but from the looks of this EXCLUSIVE VIDEO, the TV is sublimely ridiculous, if a bit, uh, totally offensive. It's from a TV show called Bibleman, which airs on Trinity Broadcasting Network. In this installment, Bibleman takes on a smarmy talk show host named Sammy Davey, who happens to be an embarrassingly exaggerated Jewish stereotype. Sammy Davey—played by a man in a ridiculous Jewfro wig doing an impression of Martin Short doing an impression of Jerry Lewis—totally ambushes Bibleman, the Christian superhero who apparently doesn't fight evil so much as appear on talk shows to explain why bad things happen to good people. (Hint: because New Yorkers are Jews who don't believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.) The whole thing is basically Randy Newman's "Rednecks" come to life, with Bibleman in the Lester Maddox role. Click through to read an explanatory excerpt from Rapture Ready and to watch the the astounding clip.

Free directory assistance has a price after all: $175 million. That's the price we hear Jingle Networks is trying to get for its 1-800-FREE-411 service, which gives free business listings in exchange for playing ads. Google, Microsoft, and AT&T are all preparing bids. But a source who has looked at Jingle's numbers say it will be lucky to get full price: "It's maybe worth $90 million." By late 2006, Jingle had raised $60 million; we hear it's since blown through that, and taken on debt besides.

We hear Michael Arrington is in advanced talks to acquire VentureBeat, a smaller tech blog which, like Arrington's TechCrunch, is trying to expand from the niche of covering startups. When Arrington issued a rant about the dangers of tech blogs raising venture capital, it was easy to dismiss his talk of a blog rollup as drunken fantasy. Arrington's concern: That his competitors, by raising money one by one, would make it financially impossible to assemble a "dream team" of bloggers. But why on earth would anyone accept a lower valuation just to be part of Arrington's team? Arrington, we're told, has tentatively secured venture backing from Eric Chin of Bay Partners, a longtime business associate. That would give him the capital to buy up at least some of his rivals.

So you read the New York cover story about the mess at high-falutin' private prep school Horace Mann, but maybe you wanted more. Maybe you wanted to meet the faces behind the names. You are in luck, kind reader. With help from SECRET GAWKER SOURCES we found photos and bios for two of the anonymous rich assholes who gave the story its depressing color—the wealthy trustee mom whose daughter inadvertently engineered the whole scandal, and "Jeffrey Robbins," the Young Republican anti-Max Fischer who rose from liberal-baiting history class gadfly to misogynist class president. After the jump, meet the leaders of tomorrow!

The New York Observer, the fancypants pink paper read by the city's liberal elite, is about to roll out some changes. The two major ones: its cover price is going up to $2, and it's starting a full-on book review section, called the "Observer Review of Books," or "ORB." Recently laid off book reviewers of America, rejoice! This represents a big bet by the paper that its rarefied audience will be willing to pay more money for more literary coverage—and that the publishing industry, skittish as it is, will be willing to pour enough ad dollars into the Observer to make the new section viable. The NYO is no exception to every other print media outlet these days, in that it's trying to find a way to make its (vital) print product financially viable in the long term. Given all the papers across the country that have slashed their book review sections in the past year or two, it's not a bad niche to try to fill. This info courtesy of Observer President Bob Sommer. Contacted for reaction, former Gawker chief and current NYO gadfly Choire Sicha said—direct quote— "!!!."

Supermarket baron, secret Radar owner, extortion claimer, and broheim supreme of Bill Clinton, Ron Burkle, is getting slammed by his former mistress on a video posted to Youtube Friday. "Antiques dealer" with a shady past Chevyn McClintock-last seen claiming that Burkle can't screw-greets viewers from, she says, "The very same beach and spot where several Clinton fundraisers were held." She then goes on to say that she's gone ahead and called the Feds on Burkle and Bubba. Then she talks about hookers in a way that could get a person disappeared real quick.

Word floating around Defamer HQ has Newsday movie editor Pat Wiedenkeller and veteran critics Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour accepting buyouts that would end their tenures at the Tribune-owned tabloid effective March 28. The critics reportedly accepted their packages by a deadline last Friday; Wiedenkeller has been on the way out since earlier this month. It's no golden handshake, either, with one source telling Defamer the buyout deals topped out around 33 weeks salary, a fraction of remaining vacation days and less than a year of benefits.

High-class prostitutes are no different than any other women trying to get male attention. Here's Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the 22-year-old hooker who slept with Eliot Spitzer, putting on a free girl-on-girl dance show in a restaurant a few months ago. Ashley, known to the New York Governor and other clients as Kristen, is the girl on the left. Thanks, N, for the cameraphone clip. (Incidentally, this is a sign of a new era in trashy journalism. Ashley has left a much wider trail, in web pages, amateur music, and video footage, than characters in the sex scandals of earlier decades.)

Andrew Morton wrote in his best-selling biography of Tom Cruise that the Hollywood star was prominent in the hierarchy of the Church of Scientology. Of all of the author's claims, it was the one that most enraged the sect: "Insinuations that Mr. Cruise is second-in-command of the Church are not only false, they are ludicrous," the Scientologists maintained. "He is neither 2nd or 100th. Mr. Cruise is a Scientology parishioner and holds no official or unofficial position in the Church hierarchy. Claims to the contrary are offensive to both Mr. Cruise and the Church." But if Cruise was merely a humble parishioner, why in Xenu's name did the sect spend six figures to celebrate his birthday in 2004? In a video obtained by Gawker, watch Scientology chief David Miscavige lead the sect's most famous follower into an extravagant celebration of the Hollywood star on Scientology cruise ship, Freewinds. Cruise's entrance is, of course, to the theme music from Top Gun, one of the movies for which the actor is best known, or was, until he took up his new role as evangelist for the bizarre Church. After the movie clips are played, and the bands perform, Cruise exclaims: "This is incredible... It's the best birthday ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, and I mean ever!" We agree! The best moment: watch Cruise in a duet of Old Time Rock and Roll, demonstrating the dance moves we first saw in Risky Business, the picture that made his name. He was so young then; and we, thankfully, knew so much less about him. VIDEO»

YouTube began testing HD last fall. Now it's here. Sort of. A tipster nabbed this screenshot of a YouTube video which gives the use the option to "watch this video in higher quality." We tried it out and took screenshots from the same frame in the video. Comparison shots, below.

AUSTIN, TX — Randi Jayne (née Zuckerberg) and Revision3 COO David Prager have done it again. She rewrote "Roxanne" as "Rock Band," an homage to the popular Harmonix videogame; Prager, though he didn't pair up in front of the camera with Jayne as they did in iPhone parody "Doncha," helped produce the video. In the clip below, Robert Scoble, Digg CEO Jay Adelson, Facebook fanboy Dave McClure, and media raconteur David Spark headline. They play undistinguished louts who, by playing the game, transform themselves into real rock stars. The backup singers include Jayne and Rana Sobhany, a marketer who's planning a SXSW party tonight at Six Lounge. The video:

Automattic, Matt Mullenweg's blog-tools startup, is readying an upgrade to its WordPress software this week. Anil Dash of Six Apart took the occasion to let WordPress users know they can upgrade to his company's Movable Type instead. It's a move straight out of Oracle's handbook. But Mullenweg freaked out, calling the post "desperate and dirty." Dash responded by charging Mullenweg with "slander." Some are under the delusion that this nerdfight is about software. It's not. It's about money.

A tipster sent us this year's Cisco employee survey. It's 55 questions of "strongly disagree / disagree / neither agree nor disagree / agree / strongly agree / don't know" goodness. Strictly speaking, employees aren't "required" to fill out the survey, but they are strongly encouraged to do so. Welcome to the Fortune 500. If my boss sent me this nonsense, I'd circle "don't know" for every question.

When Ronn [sic] Torossian, the incompetent superflack and 5WPR CEO who reps characters ranging from softcore porn king Joe Francis to nutty televangelist Benny Hinn Ministries, sued his former HR director Melissa Weiss last week, he was using a classic PR tactic: getting out ahead of the story. Ronn alleged in his suit that Weiss helped an employee leave 5W, thereby violating her contract. But Weiss has her own side of the story: that she was fired because she protested extensive, ongoing labor violations at 5WPR. What we know—because we have the evidence—is that on Friday, Ronn sent Weiss an email threatening, "You will pay for the rest of your life for trying to ruin my business." The subject line read, "YOU STUPID CUNT."

Jeff Merkey, a former Novell chief scientist, has issued a statement accusing Jimmy Wales of extortion. Merkey says that Wales offered him "special protection" for his Wikipedia entry in exchange for a "substantial" donation to Wales's Wikimedia Foundation. After Merkey withdrew his donation over concerns that the funds were being mismanaged, he was banned from the site for "frivolous and unsubstantiated claims." Merkey's not the only one: Rachel Marsden, Wales's ex-girlfriend, has privately threatened Wales with a lawsuit over what she claims are hostile revisions to her Wikipedia entry which began after they broke up. While they were together, Wales promised Marsden swift action on edits so he could "continue fucking [her] brains out." After the jump, Merkey's statement and Marsden's email.

Before it suddenly wasn't, CEO Jim Safka's plan to save Ask.com was to turn it into a search engine for midwestern women. According to a pair of tipsters, he explained his idea to employees by using this clip of Marge Simpson Googling herself.

Catherine Houser, MTV Networks Executive VP for Human Resources, sent an email out to 5,000 MTV employees alerting them that because "the computer of one of our MTVN colleagues was compromised.... files containing some confidential information about you were illegally accessed by someone outside the Company." Hope you weren't using that Social Security number and decent credit rating, sport: "The personal information that was accessed included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and compensation data." Now some criminal knows how much you don't make! How many of the affected were among the 1,000 permalancers bumped up to staff in January, we wonder? Full email with all the grisly details attached. Pray for rock and roll.

5WPR CEO and shouty flack Ronn [sic] Torossian has filed a lawsuit against Melissa Weiss, his recently departed HR director, for helping a 5WPR employee look for another job. Let's make this clear: While Weiss was in charge of 5W's human resources department, the suit alleges that she was simultaneously helping a 5W account executive look for a job with another firm. The evidence consists of several emails between her and the other (now former) 5W employee, Maureen Lynch. Lynch tells us the suit is "a complete lie" and that the emails are unrelated. We have a call in to Weiss' attorney. On one hand, it's understandable that Ronn wouldn't want HIS OWN HR DIRECTOR—who was hired just last month—steering employees towards the competition. On the other hand, what would it say about life at 5W if that actually happened? From a PR standpoint, it may have been wiser to keep this quiet. Oh well! Ronn is seeking $360,000 in damages on each of three counts in the suit. After the jump, the smoking gun (?) emails that make up the evidence.