New York Times Detroit bureau chief Micki Maynard pursued her love of U2 to absurd lengths.

Ultrapretentious startup consultant Chris Sacca got excited about a nude wedding.

Marie Claire features editor Lea Goldman contracted the Blueprint Cleanse flu.

VentureBeat snooper Eric Eldon listened in.

Fast Company writer Ellen McGirt made an obscure Blueprint Cleanse reference, we think.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

The group is ringled by ragingly egocentric former Google peon Chris Sacca. It also includes Twitter CEO Ev Williams; Josh Spear, the "youngest marketing strategist in the world"; and Jake Nickell, the "chief strategy officer" of online T-shirt vendor Threadless. (In Silicon Valley, when board members are not prepared to fire a founder outright, they often give him a meaningless title involving "strategy.")

It's one thing for the Valley's moneymen to maintain the polite pretense that the twentysomething entrepreneurs they fund are brilliant creators whose searing intelligence makes up for their inexperience, naïveté, and general ineptness. After all, if they pretend long enough, they can peddle whatever shlocky website their protégés have cooked up to an even more gullible private-equity investor or mutual-fund manager. 'Twas ever thus. We call this scam "venture capital," and in good years, it is mildly profitable.

Let's review: Williams's company isn't even trying to make money. Spear is a social media marketer — in other word, someone who gets paid to chat with his friends online all day. Nickell clothes the indolent hipsters of Brooklyn.

And Sacca? He's the worst of all. In five years at Google, he never rose higher than the level of manager, despite an assiduous track record of sucking up to CEO Eric Schmidt. People assume that he's rich from having joined Google before its IPO — yet as he once defensively whined to me in an email, he actually isn't. So this is someone who managed to be present at the greatest wealth-creating event of our decade and yet failed to actually make money. He is now advising startups.

For Barack Obama to take these lackbrains' advice when the world needs saving? This is an outrage on the scale of the bank bailout. Perhaps he thinks there's some photo-op value in being pictured with so many young, hip types — proof that as old American industries die, new, Twittery ones are being born. But these companies won't create meaningful numbers of jobs. At best, they'll make some VCs rich by flipping them to some unlucky buyer. At worst, they'll go spectacularly bankrupt. Inevitably, that photo of Obama and the twits will surface as news of their failure breaks. Stop this meeting, someone, before they taint our most perfect president forever!

The horror is, of course, unfolding in real time on Twitter. Avert your eyes.

Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times had her importance recognized on arrival.

Slate's John Dickerson watched an elderly woman triumph over adversity.

Thomas Burr of the Associated Press saw a famous black person who was not Oprah.

Times TV blogger Brian Stelter witnessed a collective cliché.

Ex-Googler Chris Sacca, a lefty blogger, overshared his bowel movements.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

And who can blame them? Google coddles engineers, but it also suffocates them. With the free food, massages, and laundry come a quirky set of in-house technologies and an increasingly bureaucratic, insider-driven culture. A favored clique of Google-IPO lottery winners rule over what's supposed to be a meritocracy. Marissa Mayer, Larry Page's ex-girlfriend, rules with an iron fist over what features see the light of day in Google's all-important search engine.

Google used to pitch startups on the notion of selling to them rather than give a stake to VCs; Chris Sacca, a former Googler expert in peddling empty promises, led this effort. Not surprising that it didn't work out. Google is now getting into the VC business itself — a tacit acknowledgement that it is no longer an attractive destination for startup founders. As an investor, Google gets a look at new technologies and talents. Entrepreneurs get to keep their freedom. Funny, freedom is exactly what Google used to promise the companies it acquired — and what it no longer has to offer.

(Cartoon by Pepper & Salt/WSJ)

• "In my career, I've always swung between the big and the small and it's time for another shift." — Jeff Veen, Design Manager
• "These days, it seems like a lot of the true innovations are made at small startups, which have the benefit of being orders of magnitude times more agile and efficient than a large company will ever be." — DigitalHobbit
• "I wasn't looking for a new job, but a great opportunity fell in my lap that I felt I had to take." — Jess Lee, Google Maps Project Manager
• "The one thing I began to miss at Google as it grows was the ability to be a generalist within the company. In a startup, it is easy and encouraged for folks to wear multiple hats. I used to buy data centers and fiber, manage an acquisition, work on Google Talk, pitch an access partner, receive a dignitary and give a speech about the future of media all in the same week. As a company gets bigger, inevitably, it begins to organize itself vertically and employees are pushed to specialize." — Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives
• "The challenge of creating something new in a space that's so young and evolving was too great to pass up." — Vanessa Fox, Google Webmaster Central Product Manager
• "I'm ready to do something new with a smaller group of people." — Nelson Minar, who created Google's first APIs

(Photo by Sebastian Bergmann)

Paul Kedrosky, the venture capitalist, is uncharacteristically polite on the matter: "The challenge for the Google guys is to demonstrate what value they can bring, beyond making introductions to someone at Google." That's the only reason why any entrepreneur should want to talk to an ex-Googler. That, and the money they got from being in the right place at the right time. What else are they going to do? Give them tips on how to game AdSense?

(Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times)

That Google planned to hire a "director of other" who would engage in similar pointless visioneering while outranking Sacca was almost certainly his formal cue to leave. (We don't know if Sacca was smart enough to take it, or if his departure was cluelessly coincidental.) And to think, this middle manager is now going to advise entrepreneurs on how to run their business. More proof that Silicon Valley is a luckocracy.

If the new guys are so great, though, why stop hiring? Here's a radical idea: Keep on adding new employees, but start ripping out some of the dead wood that's accumulated at the world's most adjective-ridden company.

And with that, I present "Toogle Many Googlers!", a series in which I nominate Googlers who need to be given a gentle push out of the Googleplex. Read on for the first batch of names. Got a nomination? Send it in, preferably with a pic of the victim.

Chris Sacca, Google's "head of special initiatives," with an inflated title and an equally inflated ego, specializes in hot-air projects guaranteed never to go anywhere, and hence, never require any real work on his part. If it weren't for the special halo of protection draped on his shoulders by CEO Eric Schmidt, or so we hear, Sacca would have been given the sack long ago. No time like the present! Congratulations, Chris Sacca: You're the first person Valleywag nominates as one Googler toogle many!

He's already said he's got the world's easiest job. So why not just ease David Lawee right on out of it? With no real background in marketing, Lawee just parrots the same palaver as the rest of the Google gang about how its products market themselves. If they market themselves, bud, why do you have a job? And when he's not reciting those tiresome lines, he brags about how Google's so humble — so humble, he needs to tell you how humble it is five times in a single conversation! David Lawee, if you can take a break from eating humble pie in the Google cafeteria, accept our heartfelt congratulations — you're not just a Silicon Valley Tool, you're also one of Toogle Many Googlers!

It's time for Eric Schmidt to declare victory and move on. Google cofounder Larry Page still talks like a giant dork. But we hear that Page hasn't just upgraded his fashion sense — he's also grooming himself to take back his original role as Google's CEO. As Google's founders grow up, Schmidt's role as Google's so-called "adult supervision" grows increasingly pointless — witness last quarter's unsupervised hiring binge. Declaring himself a surplus Googler will let Schmidt cash out in peace and pursue his real passion: spending time with women who aren't his wife.

Say what you want about the Google hegemony, I'd trust them before San Franciscan landlords and neighborhood overlords any day. Reader Davis Freeberg saw San Francisco nutjobs shanghai a town meeting with Google and Earthlink, meant to bring the city one step closer to city-wide free and cheap wifi plans. He reports below, and adds more at his blog.

So I'm not really into all of the BS politics and normally stay clear of these sorts of issues, but last night I attended a town hall meeting hosted by Google and Earthlink and saw an angry mob rip apart Google and EarthLink over their proposed free WiFi initive.

Maybe I should have known that SF politics could get dirty, but for 2 hours Chris Sacca, Google's Director of Special Initives faced angry angry SF political gadflies who somehow think that Google giving away free internet access to the city will harm them.

After the jump, violence!

One crazy guy, at one point, actually started making threatening moves towards Sacca and had to be restrained when Sacca tried to tell him that his renters wouldn't need to sign special contracts if they want to plug their wireless access card into their home computers. When the guy threatened to block the wifi signals for his renters, Sacca pointed out that he couldn't block the air and the crowd went ballistic.

Political theater or political circus, I'll let you be the judge, but my money says that Google and Earthlink pull out of this deal in a year when the city still won't negotiate a reasonable agreement letting them give away free internet access to their citizens. If the deal does go through maybe the local SF nuts can use Tin Foil to help keep the free wifi signals from communicating with the microchips installed in their fillings.

More from Davis: San Francisco Local Politics Derail Free WiFi Project [Davis Freeberg]
Picture: No Wifi for you [Blaugh]