Everyone in the Australian ad industry is a drunk cokehead! Well, not quite everyone. But according to new survey, "Asked if they knew of work associates who had an alcohol problem, only 7 per cent of those working in media agencies were able to answer 'no.'" Thirty-six percent of the Aussie ad industry said either "yes" or "possibly" when asked if they drink too much. And a fifth said they've used drugs at work. This raises four very important sociological questions:

Semi-anonymous street art star and obsession of ours Banksy is opening his first official show in New York. Huzzah! And man I gotta tell you, it's weird. "Bizarre animatronic displays packed in a tiny downtown storefront" weird. All those rat murals he put up recently were just a teaser for his new, strange hobby. After the jump, check out two videos of his odd show in action—and, more tipster photos of a mysterious dude who could conceivably be Banksy!

Google's official advice for boosting a website's presence in Google search results has been the same for years: "Have other relevant sites link to yours.” The search engine's original PageRank formula was based entirely on which pages link to which other pages — a mathematical analogy to real-world reputations. But Google has removed its original rule from the latest revision of its Webmaster Guidelines. Why?Brian Ussery, who noted the change on his blog, is a professional search-engine optimization (SEO) consultant — he helps website owners raise their Google rank. Ussery thinks Google has "a renewed emphasis on rooting out paid links passing PageRank and/or low quality links." Years ago, site marketers realized that they could simply pay "relevant" sites — say, the site that comes up first for "Pacific Heights real estate" — to link to their own sites, boosting their own rank in Google results. When Google employees said, "Have other relevant sites link to yours," they meant "build a site that people who run other relevant sites will consider worth linking to." What they didn't mean was "pay them to link to your crummy site." As Ussery implies, that's pretty much how everyone does business on the Internet now. Google's graph of all the Web's links, once an elegant directory of reputation, has been corrupted by payola. What does Google want? Their guidelines should spell it out: Dear Webmasters, please stop spending your budget buying links. Instead, buy our ads.

Missed opportunity: Current TV founder Al Gore dropped in on the start of Friday's "Hack the Debate" event, a partnership with Twitter. Attendees were invited to post updates to Twitter during the debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. Current flashed selected tweets onto the screen over a live feed of the debate. Wired dubbed it groundbreaking. Social media consultant Shel Israel complained the result was "just a bunch of young people making shallow comments." But either way, where was Gore?After giving a short speech to attendees, in which he praised their efforts to break the "feudal" system of network television, Gore promised "By tomorrow, I'll be on Twitter." Then he left. Come on, Al. How hard would it have been to sign up for Twitter on the spot, then stick around for a few minutes to lob an inconvenient truth or two across John McCain's puss during the opening leg of the debate? Instead, here's the message Gore sent: Twitter is for kids. (Video by Laughing Squid/Scott Beale)

Several weeks ago, a very random assortment of acquaintances in my hometown in Florida started telling me that they'd been approached by a private investigator asking questions about me. The PI's—a man and a woman—had told these people that they were doing a background investigation on me for a job I'd applied for. This was news to me, since I haven't applied for any jobs. So who hired a pair of Keystone Cops to go blundering around my hometown? Funny you should ask! It's not the Feds. And the "job background check" line was a fraud. Furthermore, these PI's were hardly stealthy. They've been randomly knocking on the doors of people like my parents' neighbors, asking what they knew about me. In a small, tight-knit place like my hometown, this was guaranteed to immediately be passed on to my family and to me. Which means that this investigation is either amateurish, or that whoever hired these PI's wanted me to know about it. I think a bit of both. I was back in my hometown last week, and got hold of the business card of the female PI. The next day, she appeared on my mom's street, knocking on the neighbor's doors, in search of...what? Info about my old Halloween costumes? It's hard to tell. I became convinced this wasn't a top-notch operation when this happened: she knocked on the door of my mom's house. My stepfather answered, and she asked if he knew me, and how. "Yes, I'm married to his mother," he replied. This caused the PI to thank him and rapidly shut her notebook and start hustling off. My mom ran out and confronted her, as she was moving away at top speed. The PI allowed that she had a "client in New York" who was interested in me, but said little else. I unfortunately missed this episode, because a video clip would have been priceless. Now: my own personal redemption story is sadly unoriginal. It's a little like David Carr's, but shorter, with fewer drugs, and not nearly as entertaining. It's also not a secret to anyone who knows me, making it pretty poor blackmail material. The practice of turning up at the houses of random tangential acquaintances could really not accomplish anything in an "investigative" sense. So let's call the whole endeavor what it really is: an attempt at intimidation. So who hired these people? I can't say for sure, although the lies they used as their opening lines, along with their weird tactics, have given me some very strong suspicions. The only logical candidate, as far as I can tell, would be someone pissed off at something I wrote for Gawker, and looking to strike back in the sleaziest way possible. (Or maybe I'm wrong and I'm soon to get an awesome job offer!) I'm just a blogger. I don't cover national security or break news of secret business mergers. But the idea that it's okay to hire private eyes as retaliation for people covering you didn't work out too well for HP, for (a much more consequential) example, where it turned into a huge scandal. It's fine to ask questions. But it's a dirty move to go around telling lies in order to ask questions, and hiring a PI is a pretty standard attempt to impose a chilling effect on reporting. Late last week I got the PI, Steven Brown, on the phone. He didn't seem particularly happy to hear from me, despite his innate curiosity in me. When I first asked him why he was using a lie to ask around about me, he said "I don't really know." That made me laugh. Then he said, "Well, it's not something malicious." That made me laugh too. Then he hemmed and hawed and politely declined to tell me who his client is, and eventually got off the phone. But hey, maybe there really is a fantastic job offer out there that I know nothing about? They wouldn't tell me, but maybe they'll tell you. If you'd like to ask the PI's about their work, you surely can: Names: Steven Brown (THE BOSSMAN) and Rachael Singleton (THE RANDOM DOOR-KNOCKER) Website: StevenKBrown.com Email them!: Steve@stevenkbrown.com Rachael@stevenkbrown.com You can call their office!: 904-819-9700 Or call toll free!: 888-299-7574 Or fax them!: 904-826-1071 You can even call Rachael Singleton's cell phone (From her business card): 904-814-4074 If you're in the area, stop by their office (or write them a letter!) at 10604 Quail Ridge Dr., Ponte Vedra, FL, 32081. Here's a map. Rachael Singleton stopped by my town's Historical Society a few weeks ago to look me up, for the "job," of course. She listed her home address on the sign-in sheet as 1069 Ardmore St., St. Augustine, FL 32084. That matches up with this listing for Mary R(achael) Singleton, at the phone number 904-940-1492. She was last seen rapidly fleeing my mom. Steven Brown's claim to fame? He's the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Private Investigating. I suppose I should be proud to have such a worthy follower. Here are some photos of him:

Russian telecom VimpelCom has a deal with Apple to offer the iPhone earlier this month, but it's not on sale in Russia until later this year. So how did Russian president Dmitry Medvedev end up with one? Russian blog Siberian Light spotted him playing with an iPhone — presumably black-market — at a press conference.

Velocity Interactive Group, the venture-capital vehicle of former Fox Interactive CEO Ross Levinsohn and ex-AOL chief Jon Miller, has yet to raise a $250 million fund insiders say they've been seeking for six months and counting. Which is curious. Levinsohn and Miller tried to raise money on their own, but decided to merge with ComVentures, an established VC firm with $1.5 billion in assets under management. "Assets under management" isn't the same thing as "available cash," however. To have a free hand to invest, Miller and Levinsohn need their own pot of money. When will they get it?Now hardly seems like the time. The pension funds and college endowments which invest in VC funds have been pulling back, as of late. And investments in consumer Web startups — Miller and Levinsohn's specialty — are not looking as wise as they were a year ago. If the duo do raise money in this climate, it will be an impressive feat. If they don't? Then their second careers as venture capitalists may come to an abrupt end.

Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller, who floats menacingly over the celebrity media like mist on a bog, has a new web venture in the works. She also has an insatiable thirst for money. And, of course, she has but a tenuous grasp on reality as a whole. Which of these is the explanation for the elusive question: Why the fuck has she spent the last several months writing the same meandering column over and over for increasingly unlikely outlets? It started earlier this summer with her ruminations in Ad Age about Madonna's celebrity conspiracy, Obama's celebrity conspiracy, and Sarah Palin's celebrity conspiracy. What appeal did these columns hold for members of the ad industry? Idle entertainment, we imagine. But now Bonnie's writing for MediaPost, for Christ's sake. About celebrities!

Cray, the supercomputer company once known for hand-tweaked $8 million machines, now ships a $25,000 model, the CX1, that ships with either Microsoft HPC Server 2008 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux pre-installed. Cray claims its Wintel machine "combines the power of a high-performance cluster with the affordability, ease-of-use and seamless integration of a workstation." Computer-aided simulations estimate that founder Seymour Cray is currently spinning upwards of 162,000 RPM in his grave.

Suspected bio-warfare prankster Bruce Ivins may or may not have mailed people anthrax back in 2001, but either way, it's clear that the guy appreciates a good practical joke. Long before the FBI came after him for the deadly spore gag—and before he killed himself during the investigation—the Roman Catholic doctor made clear his desire to be cremated upon his death. However, he apparently didn't trust his wife and son to honor his wishes, so he built a rather clever escape clause into his last will and testament. The will states that if his wife—an anti-abortion activist and former president of the Frederick County (Maryland) Right to Life group—doesn't burn his remains and scatter them to the four winds, about one-third of his estate will be donated to Planned Parenthood. Diabolical! There are few things sweeter than zombie emotional blackmail from the beyond. Just remember, though—the guy may have had a habit of terrorizing people with fine particles of dust, but that doesn't necessarily mean the FBI was right. [NYT]

Once upon a time a guy said he was a ghostwriter for Kanye West's blog, which Kanye denied as outrageous. Yesterday Kanye West was arrested in LA. His blog: updated normally all day. Hm. [Animal]

Computer maker SGI has yet to file its annual report with the SEC. Its excuse: The company is "continuing to work with its independent auditors, KPMG, to help them complete their audit procedures." That's a bit like telling your 3rd-grade teacher that your homework is late because you're still working on it. The company recently laid off 7 percent of its workforce, and SGI CEO Bo Ewald also got a $150,000 bonus that, under the terms of the company's bonus plan, was undeserved.

Text message rates have doubled since 2005, from about 10 cents each to 20 cents today. Senator Herb Kohl (D.-Wisc.), who chairs the Senate's antitrust subcommittee, has asked Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile to explain it to him. "It does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages," the letter says. "Text-messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit." Kohl's suspicion: The four big carriers have increased their prices nearly in sync, suggesting a collusion to wring more money out of the market rather than to compete against one another. Read the whole thing — it's no Series of Tubes. (Photo via Gizmodo)

Oh hey there! On the cover of this week's Entertainment Weekly Fall TV Preview is Gossip Girl, that much crowed-about teenage soap opera about horrendous idiots milling about the Upper East Side of that island across the river from me. You see, it's the buzziest show in a buzz-happy medium, people like gossips and the internet are writing about it and legions of squealing, sexually-awakening girls are flocking to its mop-topped (and bottomed) male leads as if they were sex magnets, and these young ladies mere paperclips. But there's just one little thing, one nagging flaw that the accompanying article has to attend to. If it's so damn popular, why isn't it... popular? Yes! The show gets abysmally low ratings—it was 150th in the listings for last year. The article trots out all the old horses: it's internetting, it's DVRing, it's being secretly downloaded into vaginae nationwide! Which, fine, might be true. But the real answer to this ratings mystery is that the show can't possibly live up to the mind-numbingly loud buzzzz. It's kind of a self-perpetuating animal, this Gossip Girl frenzy. People click and then you write more and then people click more and then you write more and so on and so on until you are nothing but Frankenstein chasing his monster to the ends of the Earth, hoping—mad and frothing—to one day destroy it. I talk about the show like it's my damn job or something (wait a tick!) and I don't even like it! You heard that? I don't like Gossip Girl. I like what it could be, but what it is currently is something like a soggy piece of celery. All bland flavor and diminished crisp. And that's why it gets low ratings! Because it's not good. And no one really, sincerely, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, gives a shit. It's like the election. Errrrbody's all talkin' about Sarah Palin and doing side-splitting parody and all that, but come November 4th ain't but a half of those people who are gonna vote. That's just history! What the CW (the "network" that airs the dreck) needs to do is actually rein in the buzz a bit. It's gotten to the point where you seriously don't need to watch the show in order to have some sort of informed "30 is the new zygote!" with-it conversation. "Oh yeah I totes saw that photo of Blake and Chesterly kissing while Credenza and Toucan Sam looked on. Yeah. What a moment." It's not hard. Let's create a little more mystery, with just the occasional tease here and there. It will make my job a mite bit harder, but the show could maybe attain that level of "oohhh what isss it??" curiosity that other oddities like the original 90210 developed, to great success. (That was before the internet. Sigh. Simpler times.)

We have to say this for the porntastic anonymous American Apparel ad spoofer: he or she is just so god damn aware of the vagaries of pseudoculture that it is impossible not to admire his or her attention-getting sensibility. Unless, of course, this all turns out to be paid for by Dov Charney, in which case you can expect a very sternly worded rebuke from us. So watch out. Today, the personal (wear) becomes political; it's The Assassination of Barack Obama as imagined not by a publicity-seeking artist Yazmany Arboleda, but by publicity-seeking artist "anonymous spoofer." And of course a big dick is involved, for reasons we can't quite understand:

It's been fun while it's lasted, but the monstrous creature that washed up in Montauk, Long Island may have been nothing more than a prop from an independent movie about carnies, and a viral marketing scheme just as everyone initially suspected. There are enough untied loose ends in the hoax storyline to leave open the possibility that the hoax is itself a hoax, meaning the story has now entered a confusing phase where one must carefully sift the professed deceptions from the real deceptions and hard facts from intentional distortions. But one can try. Here's how a hoax would have gone down, according to a theory propagated on a few websites (linked below) over the past few days:

The image on the left is a portrait by UK artist Mister Aitch (which we brought you last week along with several awesome action photos), showing semi-anonymous street artist-to-the-stars Banksy in profile, dressed as the Queen of England. The image on the right is the actual photo of Banksy from which the portrait was drawn. A tipster sent us the full photo-which, as far as we can tell, is not currently published anywhere-which is part of a set of photos taken of Banksy at work in Jamaica in 2004. The much-hyped "only known photo" of the artist is taken from this set. But after the jump, we have two more photos from that set, including one of the mystery man's face in profile:

Hey, um, Martha Stewart-craftswoman, entrepreneur, be-vaginaed insider trading escape goat-is currently appearing in Wal-Mart ads and her left arm is missing. Judging by the above screenshot at least. Where did it go? Lost in a prison shanking? Severed while trying to make her famous Whirling Dervish Spinning Saw Blade centerpiece? Gnawed off by the Montauk Monster?? The world may never know. [Something Awful] Click thru to analyze a larger image. UPDATE: We have video of the commercial (after the jump) and Ms. Stewart's arm is indeed there. This is just trickery! Find the phantom limb at the 13 second mark (timestamp runs backward).

Did you hear the rumor about the Brazilian lottery winner? Supposedly a Brazilian immigrant bought a winning $126 million lottery ticket in Newark, but couldn't cash it in because they were illegal, so they passed it on to somebody else, now rumors are flying from here to South America, and nobody knows who has it, but everybody is so obsessed with looking for it, the media on two different continents is on the case, but maybe the whole thing is false. It's all a product of the ease with which the world communicates in this digital age, as well as a powerful statement on immigrants yearning for the American dream. One new clue is this actual sentence from a KKTV story about the Montauk Monster: "According to the Huffington Post, Gawker has raking in eleven billion page views since the picture came out Tuesday." So aren't we all really "lottery winners," in a way? [NYT]

You thought that the search for new pictures of the mysterious world-famous street artist Banksy had come to an end? It has not! Our earlier shot at digging up photos of the maybe-identified but still unseen artist turned out to (probably) not be him. But! A tipster has sent us a lovely present: three still shots of Banksy in action, taken from a UK documentary filmed in 2000, when he was less obsessive about hiding his identity. We also have two photos of Banksy that were featured in an article in the UK's Squall magazine (now defunct) back in 2000. And for the finale: two art prints that are reportedly drawings of Banksy in profile, dressed as the Queen of England. None are full-on face shots; but this is probably the first time all these rarely-seen images have been collected in one place. Click through to explore. Stills from the 2000 UK documentary Boom or Bust, by filmmaker Si Mitchell: