In these days of Kool-Aid and poverty, we all dream of easy, dirty money. That's why a violent gang of Eastern European jewel thieves called the "Pink Panthers" are the new darlings of the media!

Today is Emily Brill's birthday! Take a moment, if you would, to reflect back on what the young media heiress has accomplished in this past year: inspired by a mean Gawker post, she founded her very own blog, triumphed over disease, traveled to distant lands, posed provocatively, wore her pearl necklace, stood resolutely with Sarah Palin, and finally became the Ultimate Narrator. Quite a time. She's celebrating today by going to FAO Schwarz to "pick out two animals," then maybe going to a blowjob party. Click through for one more fun picture of Emily in devilish party mode. We salute you, Ms. Brill:

If you're working for a client-service business that's facing serious uncertainty because of the crumbling economy, the last thing you want is a stressed-out CEO. So you'd be grateful for a boss like Kevin Roberts, the CEO of massive global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who's written a long blog post about his recent refreshing five-day luxury vacation at Elizabeth Hurley's favorite Thai spa. The Classic Cleansing diet and daily massages really helped him get some perspective on his employees' crumbling 401(k) plans:

Barney Frank is now the recipient of two lengthy, glowing magazine profiles—though each in magazines aimed only at his constituents. One is Moe Tkacik's Boston Magazine piece, and the other is in The Advocate, which also gives Frank the cover. Unless you are a right-wing dick convinced that black people buying houses is what caused the economic meltdown, you will only love Barney Frank all the more more upon reading each.

Here is Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, the man who won the election for John McCain, doing a bizarre ad of some kind for some sort of outfit that will charge your grandma money to hook up her digital tv converter. Listen, we gave you some easy advice on how to leverage your ever-diminishing fame: get to plumbing! So why this? Because of national security.

If only he could travel back in time to avert this catastrophe! After remarking that the only people who watch Heroes live are "saps and dipshits" who haven't figured out how to operate a DVR, show creator Tim Kring is apologizing for his remarks becoming so public. "It was a boneheaded attempt at being cute and making a point. Instead, it turned out to be just plain insulting and stupid." Wait, we're sorry: that was actually his attempt to explain season two of Heroes. [SyFy Portal]

With Heroes currently undergoing a ratings tailspin that even a concentrating, constipated-faced Milo Ventimiglia can do nothing about, one would think that creator Tim Kring would be trying to hold onto whatever fans he had left. Not so much! The Washington Post reports that at a recent Creative Screenwriting panel (where Kring attended solo sans two of the promised guests: Heroes executive producers that NBC recently fired), Kring complained that the Heroes downturn was less his fault and more the fault of people who actually sit down in front of the television on Mondays at 9pm (8pm central):

· CBS's Monday night sitcom lineup won the night, with How I Met Your Mother earning a season high. NBC saw modest gains, too, except for Heroes, which matched last week's series low of 7.6 million. Bring back the slovenly puppeteer! His powers to enact drama-class exercises were kick ass! [THR] · The King of Kong and Four Christmases director Seth Gordon is attached to Universal's Suicide Squad, about a Kentucky Derby heist. [THR] · Cosby brought him here, now it's time for Obama to do some TV landscape changing of his own: NBC is developing a sitcom based on the book Making Friends With Black People. "It seemed like a good opportunity to strike while the iron is hot," said author Nick Adams. Sounds like a great idea. [Variety] After the jump: Whoa. Whooaa.· Warners is producing Control-Alt-Delete, a high-concept spec described as Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure meets The Matrix. [THR] · Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is stepping down from his post. Farewell, Jerry Yang. We hardly knew ye. [Variety]

Before the premiere of this fall season, NBC head Ben Silverman liked to brag about the extensive movie star outreach he'd done to populate his shows: Selma Blair in Kath & Kim! Christian Slater in My Own Worst Enemy! Sadly, Kath was poorly received, Enemy has just been axed (alongside another show called something like Project Lipstick, we think?), and the rest of the fall lineup is skidding out like Silverman's Knight Rider retread. You might imagine, with all this broadcast carnage, that some of it might be Silverman's fault. Nuh-unh! protests Page Six:

Ashley Todd, a crazy woman who carved a backwards 'B' on her face for some reason that almost made some sort of sense a few weeks ago, is apparently bumming around Pittsburgh hanging out at the Barnes & Noble. She's presumably stuck in Pittsburgh—perhaps the wrong side of Pittsburgh!—because she's still undergoing that mental health treatment the judge sentenced her to. [Wonkette]

How's this for a cliffhanger: ratings for NBC's Heroes have dropped precipitously this season, leading to the firing of two producers, an Entertainment Weekly cover story asking whether the show can be saved, and now, a NY Times article that lays the blame on Jeff Zucker, Ben Silverman and show creator Tim Kring. According to the media frenzy, Heroes has suddenly undergone a drastic creative plummet in its third season. Here's the thing though: the show? Never that good!Sure, when Heroes premiered in 2006, it had a couple of things going for it, namely: freshness, a good villain, and a series of wicked, show-ending cliffhangers. Still, the problems that EW and the NYT are citing in the current season were with Heroes from the start. The show has always had too many characters, and even in the first season, many lacked a compelling reason to be there. That season was clogged with storylines (like the yawn-inducing travails of narrator Mohinder) that practically demanded to be fast-forwarded through, and the revelation that the show's writers were assigned separate plotlines in each episode instead of writing full scripts on their own is only partially to blame for the show's whiplashing segues. Eventually, the more interesting characters were saddled with so many powerful abilities that they needed to be repeatedly incapacitated to move the plot along, causing heroes like the time-jumping Hiro to become annoyingly extraneous. Also, the acting is, uh... well, just watch this clip. Yeah, it's at least campy, but in a "best show on the Sci-Fi Channel" kind of way. Actually not even that, because they have Battlestar Galactica. So maybe in a "third or fourth best show on the Sci-Fi Channel" kind of way. All we're saying is that if a show is desperately hanging onto an actress like Ali Larter, it won't exactly be burning up the Emmys. Heroes doesn't need to be saved — it's always been like this. Sometimes, when the shock of the new wears off, reappraisals like this can occur (in much the same way, America has finally come to grips with its embarrassing Life is Beautiful phase). Don't head to Heroes expecting great acting, skillful plotting, and emotional resonance. Enjoy it for what it is meant to be: a showcase for Milo Ventimiglia to take off his shirt.

How do you know when campaign season is over? Maybe when the boldest idea of the week comes from film and TV critic Marshall Fine, who argues today for the termination of TV series after one year. Even the hits! (Especially the hits, in fact.) And we might even sign on — with a few exceptions.Fine's logic is exactly that: literal and emotionally detached from the enduringly riveting qualities of shows like Mad Men, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Grey's Anatomy and a handful of others. But wouldn't the outrage following those and other great programs' predetermined self-destruction after 12 or so episodes would be preferable to their having eventually squandered their legacies on so-called stunt-casting and/or firing controversies? Doesn't going out gracefully a la Rome or The Wire allow for a better fan memory (and presuppose a bump in DVD sales)? Can't we avoid syndication hell with Friends and Two-and-a-Half Men? Yes, yes, and yes, writes Fine, who points to the UK as an example of doing things right:

John McCain's brother Joe got in a bit of trouble earlier this month for inventing the McCain campaign's new justification for losing in red states like Virginia: the part of Virginia they are losing in is not real Virginia, it is "communist country." Joe McCain, 65, is a former reporter who has largely stayed out of the spotlight this year because he's worried he might say something damaging to his brother's campaign. Something like, you know, calling half of Virginia "communist country" or maybe calling 911 to complain about traffic, cursing at the 911 operator in disgust, and then calling back to complain further. It would really be a shame, a hilarious shame, if the recordings of those two 911 calls were released to the local media, and then posted on this blog. Did we mention that he calls back after cursing and hanging up? Click and enjoy! [ABC7]

Having already enjoyed the effects of one defribrillation at the hands of master career re-animator Quentin Tarantino, '70s TV acting icon (with occasional forays into B-movies like Alligator and Disney's The Black Hole) Robert Forster makes another deserved comeback on NBC's sprawling super-power fantasia, Heroes.On last night's action-packed episode, Forster reprised his role as the previously-thought-dead Petrelli family patriarch. Our initial fears that evaporated Oscar chances and a recurring role on Huff had inflicted unspeakable damage upon his physical well-being were quickly put to rest when Forster began laying his hands on various deathbed well-wishers, thereby sucking away their youthful supervitality and melting away the years. (We imagine Joan Rivers employs a similar technique.) In the scene above, his own son—played with convincing, Windex-conducting intensity by Milo Ventimiglia—falls victim to Forster's devious ways, stripping Ventimiglia of all his special gifts, including the one where he pretends to care about Japanese dolphins long enough to get inside some indestructable-cheerleader spanky pants.

From megastars like Matt Damon to Cutting Edge alums like D.B. Sweeney, it seems like every celebrity in Hollywood has an opinion about this November's presidential election. Earlier this week, actress Jessica Alba decided to muzzle herself if that's what it would take to get America to vote (an enticing motivator, though perhaps not as compelling as keeping Diddy out of sight forever). Now, a curiously able-to-speak again Alba has decided to pay it forward, muzzling other celebrities like Heroes star Hayden Panettiere and 90210's Tristan Wilds (is this because he made out with Dakota? Is it?!). Props must be paid to Alba, whose maniacally enthusiastic pitch should probably shoot to the top of her reel. Extra points if she can sew Dane Cook's lips shut next time! The clip, after the jump:

"COPS IN NUDE TASER SLAY", right? That is the headline of the day! Until you, you know, read the story. And it's about the NYPD killing a mentally ill dude with some tasers. He was armed with a fluorescent light and his nakedness, so he was tasered, and he fell from the second-floor awning he was standing on and landed, face-first, on the street, and was sent to a hospital, where he died. "'This is very out of character,' said the building's superintendent, Charlene Gayle, 31." He meant out of character for the dead, naked guy. Not for the NYPD! There is a video of some of this attached because we're ghouls.

The Post is so unimpressed with the new season of Heroes, the show that "was once so thrilling and fun, has become full of itself, its characters spouting crazy nonsense." Like this:

Here is one of the many charming emails your editors have received since we reposted some emails that were hacked and originally posted by Anonymous earlier today, and then called a phone number. Now the "bloggers post their hate mail so you can point and laugh" routine is dead tired, but this one invokes your day editor's mom! "You obviously are too immature to realize that this is a pregnant woman you are bothering. Ask your mom if she approves." We went to your day editor's mom for comment.

Click to viewBoomp3.com Heroes star Hayden Panettiere must’ve wished that she cold use her super powers to make a parking ticket disappear over the weekend. Panettiere assumed that the parking enforcement officer must’ve been stalking her, because Panettiere could've swore that she had a couple of minutes left on the meter. Panettiere then wondered if she would be able to cover the cost of the ticket. Inch by inch, Panettiere removed the ticket from the envelope and was stunned to discover a thirty-five dollar fine. Panettiere said, “Looks like I have to sell some stuff on Craigslist to cover the cost of this one.” [Photo Credit: X17] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

The plan was for Track to be the good kid in the Palin family. The athletically-named son of VP nominee Sarah Palin—who's set to ship out soon for Iraq—was portrayed as a symbol of patriotism on stage at the Republican Convention. But did he only join the Army to escape a life of drugs and crime back in Alaska? The newly famous enlistee gets the full investigative treatment from the Enquirer —which always saves the best stuff for the print version. Which we now have in hand! The young man has partied with some very talkative people. So: while Track was watching his mom enthrall the nation, was he really daydreaming of mainlining sweet, sweet Oxycontin and playing "master" criminal back home? We quote: Track is portrayed as the biggest bad boy in Wasilla. A serious drug problem, vandalism, theft, and partying are his main pastimes, allegedly. Which really wouldn't be that remarkable if the Republican party wasn't holding him up as, you know, a role model. If true, this would make the Palins a caricature: the country family with a pregnant teen, son on OxyContin, and a mom desperately trying to present a respectable face to the world. And failing. And honestly, everyone: the Enquirer does not represent the media elite. So the liberal media should be safely insulated from the backlash on this one. The best quotes from the Enquirer's story: