Washington Post dork Chris Cillizza admitted it.

CNET Newser Caroline McCarthy did not have to see a man about a horse.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback attempted to rent a car from a shoe store.

New Yorker Twitter controversialist Susan Orlean complained about an inanimate object, for a change.

Wired research editor Joanna Pearlstein rapped her job applicants' knuckles with a Twitter-shaped ruler.

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BusinessWeek writer Spencer Ante offshored.

Revision3 videoblogger Veronica Belmont revealed her musical tastes.

Domestic tyrant Martha Stewart apologized.

Gizmodo blogger Matt Buchanan pumped himself up.

CNET video host Natali Del Conte revealed her superhero fetish.

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Erstwhile checkout-line tastemaker Bonnie Fuller found someone who made her seem less loathsome by comparison.

Time writer Karen Tumulty ended up on the wrong side of Texas.

WebMediaBrands mogul Alan Meckler touted his company's stock.

CNET social-media beat reporter Caroline McCarthy subverted the dominant media paradigm.

Bay Area exile Alex Blagg advised Gawker alumna Doree Shafrir, in San Francisco for a book reading, on his former haunts.

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CNET video correspondent Natali Del Conte kicked back.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter was an eyewitness to injustice.

Mancunian editrix Louise Bolotin sang her heart out.

VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon found a benefit to his Facebook obsession.

Fox Chicago anchordame Nancy Loo suffered for her art.

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CNET adorablogger Natali Del Conte forgot her PIN.

Dennis Clark, executive producer of Ryan Seacrest's radio show, had a moment of gay panic.

Broadcasting and Cable's Alex Weprin steeled himself for an encounter with hunkiness.

Vanity Fair online editor Mike Hogan assiduously pursued Internet fame.

Wounded ABC newsman Bob Woodruff sought help from a Twitter veteran.

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The $60 million in lawsuits cover a series of botched deals for art, real-estate and other expensive toys. The root cause, however, as PEHub's Connie Loizos writes, is that Minor has been "living like a billionaire." (Coincidentally, $60 million is also what he hoped to spend on a Gulfstream jet — a deal that he claims fell through because of a lender's misdeeds.)

Minor is contesting all of these lawsuits, and has filed some countersuits of his own. But think about what it says that all these institutions devoted to serving the wealthy are suing the entrepreneur. If they thought there was money to be made with Minor down the road, would they be contesting his dealings in court as opposed to quietly working out a settlement?

What Minor doesn't have, according to at least one lawsuit filed against him: cash on hand. He's being sued by Sotheby's and Christie's for nonpayment of artwork he bid on. Merrill Lynch is suing over a $25 million loan it extended. Silverton Bank, the lender for a Charlottesville hotel, is suing for $10.5 million in missed payments.

Sotheby's says Minor told its employees that he couldn't pay because he didn't have the cash, a charge he testily disputes. In his lawsuit with Merrill, he contends that the investment bank's move to freeze his account forced him to sell other investments at a loss — again, a move he wouldn't have had to make if he had the cash on hand. He also claims Merrill's merger with Bank of America scotched the financing for his Gulfstream jet.

His splurges, chronicled in Portfolio last year include:

• A divorce which cost him roughly half of the $100 million fortune he walked away from CNET with, as well as the $300 million he made as an investor in Salesforce.com.
• An estate in Charlottesville, Va.
• A $15.3 million plantation in Williamsburg, Va.
• A $20 million home in Bel Air, which he's been trying to sell without success; it's now listed at $11.4 million.
• 
  
• A $22 million house in San Francisco's Presidio Heights neighborhood, for which he'd hired celebrity designer Michael Smith to oversee a $15 million makeover.
• A $30 million luxury hotel development in downtown Charlottesville, now on hold amidst a lawsuit.
• A $3 million deposit on the $58.5 million Gulfstream G650 jet.
• A modern art collection, including several works by Richard Prince, whose estimated value runs into the tens of millions of dollars.
• A host of startups under the umbrella of his investment firm, Minor Ventures. One of them, 8020 Media, flamed out spectacularly earlier this year.

The picture that these lawsuits paint is one of an angry dotcom mogul with a vanished fortune who's looking for someone else to blame for his woes. As a riches-to-rags story, it makes for great art.

Self-described "popologist" Lyneka Little took a ride on Ikea's wild side.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, the man responsible for inflicting Kevin Rose's Diggnation on the world, apparently couldn't afford a rental car in L.A.

CNET News oversharer Caroline McCarthy filled us in on her food preferences.

Time columnist James Poniewozik watched CNN Fox News shoutyman Glenn Beck play Jenga on live TV.

Formerly important media person Bonnie Fuller made the Lance Armstrong collarbone-break story all about her.

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No surprise that an Apple flack lied. Under CEO Steve Jobs, the company has made a fetish of secrecy, misdirection, and fabrication. Dowling may have been following orders, or he may have been misled by a colleague himself. (He has not responded to a voicemail asking for comment.) But on matters as important as Jobs's own health, Apple flacks have consistently deceived reporters, and — worse yet — gotten caught.

What still surprises us, though, is how many people are so eager to trust the word of a flack with a shoddy reputation for honesty.

California law requires warning in advance of layoffs of 50 or more employees. But the salespeople in question were split between Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and Austin, Texas, which means the layoff wasn't subject to the layoff-warning rule.

And they weren't that big a deal, either, in the grand scheme of things. Hewlett-Packard, which has offices right next door to Apple, is in the process of laying off some 15,000 employees. Why not acknowledge the layoffs, and point out how small they were in comparison to others? The only reason I can think of why an Apple spokesman would lie about something as minor as these layoffs: Sheer force of habit.

(Photo via Esquire)

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon producer Gavin Purcell hopelessly shopped for shoes.

CNET News reporter Caroline McCarthy stayed focused on the big, important story of the day.

Slate writer John Dickerson exhibited profound laziness.

Meet the Press host David Gregory fell victim to Twidiocy.

Techmeme editrix Megan McCarthy made a joke about Google's nondiscovery of Atlantis.

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"I'm a PC" Apple spokesvillain John Hodgman couldn't decide which brand of speaker wire to buy.

Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller was sorry she wasn't single while hitting the slopes.

AP reporter Phil Elliott wished he'd paid more attention to Tennyson in college.

Wired editor Chris Anderson was mad at himself for hiring the bunch of smartasses who ran a chart just to mock his "Long Tail" theory.

CNET News's Caroline McCarthy wished she hadn't said anything at all.

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When Halsey Minor, the ultraopinionated entrepreneur better known these days for his lawsuits than his business skills, launched CNET in the early '90s, he first had his eye on television. CNET's first website didn't come along until 1995. And he snapped up domain names like mad, names which all but spelled out his ambitions — TV.com, Radio.com, News.com. (Apocryphally, he's said to have bought the latter from News Corp., in a deal Rupert Murdoch must still regret.)

CNET went public in 1996, and its market cap peaked at $12 billion before the dotcom bubble burst. At one point, it flirted with NBC, going into a joint-venture deal to create NBCi, a now-forgotten Web portal. At the time, some pundits imagined CNET and NBC combining — with CNET on top.

Since then, it's been a long slide down. Minor left not long after the bubble popped. When CBS bought CNET this spring, the price was $1.8 billion. (CBS CEO Les Moonves recently said that while he "loves the deal," he wouldn't buy CNET again today at that same price.) CNET executives got roles within CBS Interactive, the new division formed by combining CBS's websites with CNET's — but there was no question who was in charge.

That's become clearer now, with the layoffs. The newsrooms for CBSNews.com and CNET News are said to be combining; CBS is trimming back TV.com, MP3.com, and GameSpot, CNET's entertainment properties. Which makes sense: Why run mainstream news and entertainment coverage out of a backwater like San Francisco, when it can be done properly from New York and L.A.? There's logic to the move, but also a certain sadness, knowing that a fantasy of transforming the media business — a business in much need of transformation — has faded for good.

(Logo mashup by Andrew Mager)

The old adage about money not buying happiness has never been truer. Money makes Minor angry. He is thinking about suing his bank. He's already sued an auction house which helped him buy art. And now he's suing an auction house which helped him sell art. When he's not busy filing lawsuits, he occupies himself by posting enraged comments on blogs.

The latest tussle: Minor is suing Christie's for allegedly failing to return seven Richard Prince paintings he had consigned to them. Christie's says his lawsuit has no merit, and it plans to countersue for $10 million plus legal expenses.

If it follows through on the legal threat, Christie's will join Sotheby's, which is already suing Minor for failing to pay for a set of paintings, including Edward Hicks's "Peaceable Kingdom."

Art makes Minor mad. After a spat with Damien Hirst, he removed several of the artist's butterfly tableaux from the walls of Minor Ventures, his San Francisco startup incubator, leaving fist-sized holes in the plaster, according to Portfolio.

So why is Minor spending money on art instead of making it himself? This kind of rage, channeled into creative endeavors, could command high prices even in a depressed market. His Internet comments are a whole new form of literary oeuvre. His work is fresh, surprising, visceral, and inexplicable — everything the jaded art world desires.

Connie, its such a shame you write such foolish prose. Given how poor your facts tend to be I would have expected you to make it up with words that quietly rolled from one to the next. Instead we get “spending up a storm” which is neither informative or elegant.

Did they keep you on at Portfolio after you wrote your silly, pointless and partially accurate story about me being a “Bad Boy” in Silicon Valley, a place I only see from the air if I see it at all.

Either pump up the prose, or secure some facts like other journalists, but this half fact, half invention in a pedestrian form just isn’t interesting.

Sorry, just one man’s opinion.

I can't wait to hear what Minor has to say about my post.

Former president of Dennis Publishing (Maxim, Blender, etc) Steven Colvin will soon be leaving his year-old postion as head of CNET / CBS Interactive entertainment and lifestyle division (Gamespot, mp3.com, tv.com, Chow, etc). Within the department, Colvin is widely believed to be the "brains" behind Jeff Gerstman's unceremonious canning last December. Just before the firing, Colvin spent hours in a meeting with Eidos attempting to salvage the relationship after Gerstman's negative review of Kane and Lynch. No word on if this departure is volunary or not, but his role is being taken over by CBSi COO Steve Snyder, which might be indicative of hardly-unexpected "restructuring" occuring sooner rather than later. Control of one of the department's largest assets, tv.com, was recently transfered out of the department.

There was also an annoucement today that CNET's extremely generous vacation hours package will be discontinued after this year, sick time hours will be reduced, health care providers will be changed, and benefits cut for "opposite-sex domestic partners", in order to be "consistent with CBS' company-wide poilcy".

On the plus side, parking fees can now be paid pre-tax.

Byzantium Brokerage Services has another 48 photos.

CBS chairman Sumner Redstone walked past him at the Bel-Air Hotel, shortly after CBS bought CNET for $1.8 billion. Minor hasn't been at CNET since 2000, and wasn't involved in the sale. So why would he expect Redstone to recognize him? Nostalgia? Pity? Portfolio reports on Minor's many difficult relationships; he told the magazine that Gateway founder Ted Waitt, formerly an investor in one of Waitt's startups, is no longer a friend. Add to the list of those difficult relationships: Minor with facts.

(Photo by Rob Howard/Portfolio)