Controversy's been a-brewin' around Andrew W.K. and his "true" identity. Though it seems the man may be the *NSYNC of partycore, the end is valuable enough... so forget about the means!

Internet mogul Arianna Huffington thinks female sadness is a growing problem, so she's brought on a blogger to teach women how to "live richer, more purposeful, and, yes, happier lives." And he's a man, so he really knows his stuff.

Karl Gerhartsreiter pretended to be various important people that he was not for many years, married a woman, had a daughter, and when the wife found out he was a con man she divorced him. So he kidnapped the girl and fled Massachusetts. Naturally, this is all the wife's fault.

Despite being total bullshit, the idea that you can "cleanse" your body with days-long juice fasts persists. If a new story is to be believed, Cleanse Mania is affecting rich women and fameballs alike.

The "Dating a Banker Anonymous" girls, who quickly became America's least favorite gold diggers when the NYT profiled them last month, now say that they were just playing around! But this doesn't absolve them, no:

Hey everybody, turns out this clip was doctored, so please make a note: "John Gibson never compared Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum." Okay? [HuffPo]

Listen up, Mary Rambin and all other poor suckers who believe that magical herbal detoxes, fasts, or colonics will somehow "cleanse" your system of "toxins": they don't, okay. So stop buying them. Jesus.

Professional loser Mark Penn—the strategist who can tell you exactly how to become disliked by each individual microsegment of the population—has a new book ad WSJ column. Let's talk about how stupid it is:

Yesterday we (and others) pointed out that "magician" David Blaine is a big fat cheater, because his current death-defying stunt—hanging upside-down in Central Park for 60 hours—involves hourly ten-minute breaks. As one commenter put it, "I'm going to eat a thousand hard-boiled eggs, but I'm only going to eat one a day for a thousand days, because otherwise I might get sick." Yes, that about sums it up. Blaine's flack said there was never any claim he would hang for 60 consecutive hours. Really? You couldn't tell that from his fawning media coverage: Today, the half-ass nature of Blaine's stunt is being pointed out across the UK, in India, and domestically. But did America's prestigious media outlets bother to point out the very germane fact of Blaine's hourly breaks when they initially reported on his stunt? Let's see: The AP (no mention of breaks):

It's already been thoroughly documented that all the really funny pictures of Sarah Palin that you saw on blogs or anywhere else are just unpatriotic Photoshop forgeries. Everybody, including CNN, was fooled at first, but now nobody believes anything unless they personally snap it on a Polaroid. It's not just idiots screwing around, as you may have suspected; it's an important political trend, demonstrating that "average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons." PBS says so! That happens to be true, though. Elections have turned on far less exacting smears than these. Why are Palin and McCain so much more popular Photoshop victims than Obama? 1. More liberals are good at Photoshop, and 2. Photoshop Obama and watch how quickly you're accused of racism. It's a dangerous game. In the spirit of civic education, a composite of some of the best remixes that the Republicans have inspired:

It's not entirely surprising that the PR firm that misspelled the online signature of the guy they were trying to impersonate has now been busted for ineptly trying to blame an unidentified "intern" for everything. Bumbling disaster of a publicity shop 5WPR posted, in the name of a rabbi, fake blog comments about a sweatshoppy kosher slaughterhouse. When busted, senior vice president Juda Engelmayer blamed an unpaid 5WPR intern who he refused to name. Now, news service JTA is severely undercutting this explanation by reporting it traced one of the fake comments to Engelmayer's home (in part by matching the internet address of a comment to the internet address of an Engelmayer email). Whoops! Hard to blame interns at the office when the stuff is coming from your own pad. How are you going to explain this one, Juda?

Incompetent flackery factory 5WPR has admitted to the internet sock puppetry we covered yesterday-posting fake comments on a blog on behalf of a client. That client, by the way, is a kosher slaughterhouse called Agriprocessors, which has long been under fire for workplace safety and immigration law violations. 5W CEO and paragon of employee satisfaction Ronn [sic] Torossian told The Forward that an investigation is underway to determine who's responsible for the fake comments. But even though Ronn is a friend to Israel, he already has a Rabbi scared for his own safety. Shame! Incompetent shame:

Hey everyone it's the happiest goddamn day of the year! You probably read as much in your local paper? According to a scientist—a scientist!—June 20 is the happiest day of 2008. He uses a mathematical formula to prove it! With science! Look, here is the equation: O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He. The scientician who developed this formula is named Cliff Arnall. If that name is familiar, it may be because you read him calling January 22 the saddest day of the year. In 2007. And 2006, and 2005. The story runs, twice a year, like clockwork, in newspapers across the US and the UK. All because a quack psychologist is more than happy to sign a check from some corporation and then attach his name to a press release. It's the happiest day of the year for newspaper editors desperate to fill a news hole on a summer Friday! [Mind Hacks]

Today brings wild fake-person news from the land of big hair and Neiman-Marcus: A woman named Elizabeth Albanese became head of the Dallas Press Club (ooh, a press club! How quaint) and used it for her own nefarious ends, such as awarding herself several coveted (in those parts, apparently) "Katie Awards" for outstanding journalism over the course of several years. This, even though she worked for the Bond Buyer and wrote "dull and forgettable stories on municipal finance," according to the Dallas Observer, which has the great blow-by-blow account of how she handed out the Katie Awards at random and used the Press Club's credit card to pay for her personal vacations. Also, she'd been arrested a couple times before and told everyone she went to Harvard Law School, even though she hadn't graduated from high school. Which of course raises the question: What took the Dallas journalists so long to catch on?

WWD, your go-to source for Cond Impostor news, reports that the net is closing:

Remember back in May, when we told you about the woman running around pretending to be Jane fashion director Kusum Lynn? Well, according to WWD, Lynn caught up with her impostor at a recent party for Gucci, and... it turned out to be a dude. A dude with a history of impersonating Conde Nast employees. How'd it all play out?

So we caught up with our old college friend Ben while we were on vacation last week, and he excitedly informed us they'd he'd recently made it onto Overheard in New York. He'd been in New York and hadn't called? No, Ben explained, it was actually Brian's story; Ben thought it would be good for Overheard and so submitted it. Brian lives in New York now? No, Ben continued, Brian lives in Florida. So how did Brian's story, not-actually-overheard in Florida by Ben, make it onto Overheard in New York. "Oh, said I heard it in Central Park." Ben smiled.

Alert! Alert! Security breach! Someone who is not a Conde editor potentially getting perks of the sort reserved only for Conde editors!

• The art you've always wanted: A sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth. On a bearskin rug. And "the crowning of baby Sean's head." Where would you find such a thing? In Williamsburg, of course. [Send2Press]
• This week's Times correction of the week: "An article in The Metro Section on March 8 profiled Donna Fenton, identifying her as a 37-year-old victim of Hurricane Katrina who had fled Biloxi, Miss., and who was frustrated in efforts to get federal aid as she and her children remained as emergency residents of a hotel in Queens. Yesterday, the New York police arrested Ms. Fenton, charging her with several counts of welfare fraud and grand larceny. Prosecutors in Brooklyn say she was not a Katrina victim, never lived in Biloxi and had improperly received thousands of dollars in government aid." People are so nit-picky these days. [NYT]
• AC 360 finds a new scourge to campaign against: The evil practice of puppy smuggling. [CNN]
• There are dates that end well and dates that end less well. And then there are dates the end in night court. Even worse, without Judge Harry T. Stone. Yikes. [CourtTV]
• Is this for real? Who knows. But it would seem that Mobile, Ala., residents found themselves a leprechaun on St. Patrick's Day, according to the local NBC affiliate. [YouTube]