It's hard to blame them. Still, some of the pictures compiled by TechCrunch — from Twitter, naturally — have us scratching our heads. Click on any of the first three items in the gallery below to see what we mean.

The mirror in the toilet stall. Bill Farner, who took this shot, is confused about this oddly-located "vanity" mirror's purpose. Can't say we blame him!

The lone "at" symbol on this wall. Wouldn't "@wall" be more appropriate? Or "@couch!"By Ryan King.

The DJ booth in the dining room. It's not just lunch, it's a party! By @caroline.

DJ booth in context (it's in the back). By Bill Farner.

This isn't one of the "weird" things, but it's noteworthy because of the subject: That's Ev Williams' wife Sara Morishige. So this, presumably, is the CEO's own office. Anyone know what the "795" is about? In any case, it's generous of the new mom and longtime designer to handle the interior of her husband's office. That's going to be a crowded wall, judging from the density of what's up so far. By @caroline.

Slate's John Dickerson complained about the "lying on your expense report" part of his job. He's presumably OK with the "have work give you money under false pretenses" part.

The New York Times David Carr, meanwhile, provided some perspective on the terrible ordeal of expene reports.

When she's not having such a rough time, singer Mary J. Blige will look back on tweets like "people always understand estimate my intelligents" and laugh.

Yes, that was really actress Haylie Duff in your spin class.

A sloppy copy/paste job made George W. Bush's cousin sound like a critic of Sarah Palin's recent media appearances.

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

Mayer's union with real estate investment manager Zach Bogue will take place as part of a wedding stretching from Dec. 11 - 13 at the San Francisco Four Seasons, we're told. Mayer and Bogue bring out the competitive overachievers in one another, and the event sounds like an extension of their mutual mania. Even the invitation came wrapped in a heavy red velvet box, said a tipster.

The lengthy wedding should only further Mayer's reputation for aggressive well-roundedness: She was on both the debate team and pom-pom squad in high school, and today her master's degree in computer science makes a geeky contrast to the Oscar de la Renta clothes and fashion spreads in Vogue and Glamour. In keeping with the theme, we'd expect her fairytale weddings to have some geeky twists (laser tag, anyone?). If you have any further details — or better yet, a picture — we'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Added location of the Four Seasons.

UPDATE: We failed to mention that Mayer lives at the SF Four Seasons, in a penthouse, as we've reported previously. So maybe she's having the wedding at home.

(Pic by JD Lasica)

Business Insider has the full, 29-picture photo tour. Google has been outfitting its various offices like this for a while, but it's always an eye-openingly retro experience to actually see the office trappings of the hugely profitable company. Below, find our five favorites, the ones that really take us back to the days of Webvan and Pets.com. We mock, of course, because we're insanely jealous.

The reception area is straightforward enough...

Google takes a systematic approach to free snacks. A less successful dot-com would just have pre-wrapped candy and open/stale cereal boxes and so forth.

"We've hired a substitute short-order cook named David Chang. Apologies in advance if he screws up your lunch."

Of course there are razor scooters.

The requisite exposed brick. Plus a can of of kerosene in case you should ever feel disgruntled. Don't be evil!

Puru Pratap's design to spruce up the Google logo for a day (see below) beat out designs from other Indian contestants. It ran on the home page Saturday and Pratap got a laptop for himself and the equivalent of $2,100 for his school. His counterpart in America, meanwhile, will take home a laptop, $15,000 for herself and $25,000 for her school. Granted, a dollar goes further in India than in the U.S. But $2,100 vs $40,000 is a huge divide.

Asked Shalini Singh at the Indian website TechGoss: "Are we children of a lesser Google?" Maybe. Or perhaps Google is trying to deliver India's kids a lesson in the harsh realities of globalization.

(Pic by Anil Jadhav)

Obama just said the following in China, according to TechCrunch and various other news outlets:

"I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access."

Some of the Twitterati are taking it hard. Just WHO have they been Following??

@netWire "Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters' !!!

@BuzzEdition "WHOA...I thought Obama HAD used twitter...so sad now....."

@Amadeus3000 "I thought he used his account himself in early campaign days.."

@funuhu "Shocking! I am sad."

The rest of us can take solace in the fact that the most powerful man in the world knows he has far bigger issues on his plate than cranking out tweets. The only person who should be embarrassed is his ghostwriter, who is averaging less than two tweets per day. HOPE needs to spread faster than that!

When someone supposedly dies on Twitter, there are nothing but questions that aren't "Is this person actually dead?" Because who gives a shit if they're actually dead. There are issues here:

Do people actually trust Twitter?
Who do they trust?
Why? It's just someone with a Twitter.

But they do! And sometimes, that information is valid, and all it takes is one Tweet for Twitter to be the needle in a haystack screaming to be found. But Twitter, like the people who use it, is weird.

Which would explain part of the answer to the question, What do Kanye West, Lil' Wayne, Rick Astley, Britney Spears, Harrison Ford, Jeff Goldblum, Miley Cyrus have in common with Morrissey? They've all been "killed" by Twitter. But not the other questions they present:

Who starts the _____ is dead rumors? Anyone and everyone! It can be some high school junior, or, as is this case, the New York Times The Moment blog, trying to crowdsource information. If you suggest someone who isn't dead may be dead, you've started a ____ Is Dead meme.

Why did they start the _____ Is Dead memes? For all kinds of reasons! Said high school junior who, bored and stoned in his US Government Honors class, decides that John Bolton, who has a funny mustache, is dead. He can then raise his hand and start a discussion about John Bolton being dead! Or maybe someone hears something and decides that they need to know more, because they actually care about this person's impact in their lives (as is, possibly, the case with Moz and The Moment). But mostly, the impulse to declare someone dead who isn't has to come from a place of mischief. Having to explain that you're not dead, you're just waiting to be seated at Pastis, could be a serious inconvenience for you and your publicist. Or if you're not a publicist or don't have one, a "normal" person who has to go out of their way to call their parents and explain that the stress they just went through was for naught.

What would be considered a "successful" ______ is dead meme?

A+: Getting a mainstream media outlet to report on the death, or rumors of the death. Newspapers, newspaper's websites, breaking news websites or Twitter accounts (like Drudge or BNO), CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, etc. If you can get someone to say something on the air about someone who's dead that isn't dead, without it being a denial, you've done an awesome job.

B+ to B: A personal denial. Get someone to admit that they're not dead through someone who isn't their publicist, either because their publicist's credibility was called into question, or because they weren't picking up the phone when they should've.

B-: A publicist denial. Fucking up a publicist's day isn't nearly as mischievous as fucking up Miley Cyrus' day, but still equally satisfying.

C+ to C-: High-profile news-denial. If a news outlet has to report and quell the rumor, at least you got it out there to the right people.

D+ to D: High-profile gossip denial. These people sort out death rumors professionally, and if yours is smart or obscure enough to make their job tough, decent, but otherwise, you're throwing them something slow and down the middle.

D- Subversive gossip and or news crowdsourcinng for an answer (see above, also, here), but add one grade notch for every 50,000 viewers they get a day.

F: You get re-tweeted a few times. That's it.

So, how do you do it correctly?

1. Pick your target correctly. Find an obscure figure who isn't exactly "popular" amongst Twitter's celebrities. Make sure they're not on Twitter, or Twittering when you put the rumor out there. This would be an example of a "Twitter Death Meme Fail":

They can't Twitter their reaction, and they can't have people with them who could Twitter a denial. A really great pick is someone who you didn't even know was still alive. Marian Seldes would be decent, so would Kathleen Turner, because then, you can get a bunch of insane Broadway gays to start freaking out and asking questions. Which brings us to the second step:

2. Find someone to help corroborate your story. Make sure to find someone with decent cred and mix of followers with mixed interests.

You need someone to breathe on the burning embers to get a flame, right?

3. Stay silent. Don't say anything else, especially when people ask you where you heard that. Tip off a few gossip blogs, or blogs that are in the periphery of gossip and/or news blogs.

4. Wait. Teach a man to fish, he'll be set for life. But teach a man to fish without telling him that screaming "BE CAUGHT, YOU FUCKING FISH" won't help, and he's screwed. Stay calm. Wait for this thing to erupt. Once you've put it out there, unless you have multiple accounts with lots of followers to help corroborate your own story, all you can do is see what happens. You've set a line out there, enjoy the natural course it's going to take. Maybe go for a walk, work out, play with your dog. Enjoy the time you have before you get back to your computer to find out from P-Nasty himself that one of the Baldwin brothers had an aneurysm while grilling tandoori chicken skewers.

5. Celebrate correctly. Twitter provides for all. Once you've successfully "killed" someone via Twitter, you should respect and honor their not-dead-ness with a seance. A Twitter seance. Or, a Tweance.

And there you go! How to kill someone with Twitter, correctly. Now, go out there, and get your death fetish on. And please report back to us with your best results.

Oh, and by the way: Morrissey isn't dead. We think. Nice work.

Amid withering press from TechCrunch and other outlets, the Zynga CEO has finally removed scammy commercial offers from his company's online games, like Mafia Wars and Farmville. That's nice. But maybe the whole scandal could have been avoided if he'd taken a less skeptical take on his Harvard Business School ethics class. From his 2006 blog post about the class:

The school had this bullshit 3 week class called 'ethics' which we all took together at the outset of the program - guess it was to make sure we all had at least heard the term a few times and might feel more comfortable even using it...

Pincus goes on to tell how his amoral, investment-banker classmates defended a banker who left a sick Indian man behind to die in order to finish climbing a Himalayan mountain the banker had long wanted to conquer. Pincus accused his classmates of moral bankruptcy and became a black sheep, he says.

He was also aghast when a fellow student got off with a slap on the wrist after he was caught stuffing the ballot box in an election to head the school's Finance Club. Pincus thought he would be expelled or at least suspended for a year.

I'd soo love to know where that kid's career went and what he's doing today. He must be a major leader as he soo gets our system.

Pincus ended his blog post on an optimistic, pro-ethics note, saying that "this century's newest success stories" like Google, Bill Gates and eBay "are about authentic people taking responsibility and serving all stakeholders," i.e. acting ethically, donating money to charity, etc. Despite this conclusion, Pincus soon found himself on a darker path; he was soon doing "every horrible thing in the book to... get revenues right away" at Zynga, he told fellow entrepreneurs at a mixer earlier this year.

Said mixer wasn't the first time Pincus gave up a sleazy vibe; check out the tweets below from entrepreneur and former Valleywagger Alaska Miller. Apparently Pincus' ethics were derailed some time after he wrote that "authentic people" are the bright future of American business. It's hard to know whether to the blame that stumble on Pincus' obvious cynicism toward his Harvard ethics class — or on his failure to cling to his cynical conclusions more tightly through the years.

(Top pic: Pincus, by Joi Ito)

Writer and radio host Kurt Andersen has, at long last, discovered The Wire, approximately 40 years after everyone else. Luckily his job does not involve being abreast of media or culture, or this would be embarrassing.

Michael Turk, "eCampaign Director" for Bush-Cheney 04, made an abortion joke. Quick, someone make an equally funny comeback involving Congressional pages!

Oprah taught Page Six's Neel Shah the definition of real media power: when you can get the Black Eyed Peas to cut a custom version of their song for your phone-hold music.

In addition to having to cope with looming holiday layoffs, Electronic Arts staffers have been asked to please keep Veronica Belmont physically awake at all times.

You heard Engadget's Joshua Topolsky right, ladies: His cable BRINGS IT. Get freaky with the coaxial!

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

Blogger Ben Casnocha's friend told him, "There is nowhere we are more honest than the search box. We don't lie to Google." That seems to be true, judging from the blunt queries offered up by Google's autocomplete suggestions, which are generated based on other similar and popular searches. In other words, people have asked these actual questions, niftily compiled by Slate:

The suggestions get classier if you rephrase your query to sound more edum'cated. But still disturbing:

Disturbing though they may be, these suggestions are at least anonymous. Anonymous, that is, until Google "suggests" a search to a federal agent that makes him wonder, "Who the hell asked that?" Until that inevitable day, have fun.

NYTPicker found this bio for Pogue on the website for an upcoming tech conference:

So what is a New York Times Visionary, other than something you get demoted to when everyone realizes you're not actually a journalist? That's unclear. Maybe it involves being able to see past the flaws in an operating system, like endless crashes of key software, to call it a "sleek upgrade." Or to call a notebook computer a "slice of heaven... not underpowered by any means" and then later tweet that the same machine is "too slow for Photoshop, video even Word sometimes." Or not! (We've put in an inquiry with the Times and Pogue.)

UPDATE: Pogue wrote us back:

That's definitely not a title I would ever use for myself. (I usually go by
"Consumer Tech Columnist"). And it is, obviously, not a title The Times
selected.

It sounds to me like something that panel's organizer, Warren Buckleitner,
made up, for the sake of more interesting brochure copy. Maybe you should
ask him?

We've corrected our headline accordingly.

• The new medium could rot people's brains and erode cultural standards: "What you'll be seeing: [Ventriloquist dummy] Charlie McCarthy or the [intellectual radio broadcast] Chicago Roundtable?"
  
• The government is making huge new media decisions with far-reaching implications for the future: "Battle in the spectrum... Uncle Sam Looks at Television."
  
• The new medium will impact this old medium: Title: "Movies and Television" Article: "Film companies are watching television development with a careful eye."
  
• The elite first adopters will be overrun by the masses: Title: "Is Television Ready for the Public?" Article "Before the war about 7,000 television sets had been sold... the purcahses were all in or near a handful of cities. among them New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Schenectady, and Los Angeles" Those big-city bastards of Schenectady were liberal elitists even back in the day!
  
• The new medium will usher in a new crop of media lords: "Who Are the Leaders in the Fight?"
  
• The new medium means fun new gadgets (which could get us loads of advertising): Title: "What Kind of Television? War improvements cut costs / Look before you buy / Network possibilities / Buy wisely / Color television"
  
  
  
  Article (emphasis added): "Before you start looking for a receiver, check up on the television station in your area and find out whether its programs interest you...Don't let the salesman double talk you into buying one before it is demonstrated in your home. Who knows, you may be living in a "dead spot" where it is not possible to pick up television pictures. [AT&T has apparently been in the wireless business a long time.]

Somehow we still have movie theaters, radio, books and newspapers decades later. And every one of those sectors is still fabulously profitable and growing. (*Cough*)

[via Brendan Koerner]

News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller (pictured) said at a Monaco media event that his conglomerate plans to block Google (at least partially) within "months and quarters — not weeks... The traffic which comes in from Google... is the least valuable of traffic to us." That's according to the Telegraph, and followed similar comments from Miller's boss Rupert Murdoch just days before.

So why all the noise? Blocking Google is a straightforward process involving simple text files, not a big act of war that requires lengthy preparation.

Maybe Microsoft has offered News Corp. a middle ground between charging for content and leaving search engines entirely. Bing might offer a cut of ad revenue to News Corp. and other content providers in return for exclusively appearing in the Microsoft search engine, former weblog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis recently suggested.

And that idea isn't far fetched. The Associated Press's CEO recently said Microsoft was offering AP many more favors than Google:

Curley said he was negotiating a new partnership with Microsoft under conditions more favorable to the AP and its members...



Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP's demands. "They have said very strongly that they would," Curley responded... "They know how to have a conversation." And what about Google? "I'm not talking about Google," he said. "We haven't talked."

So maybe in the end Rupert Murdoch, the doddering newspaper fetishist, will have the last laugh over Google, reclaiming "his" content revenue... and delivering it straight to Bill Gates and Microsoft. Oh, Rupert.

(Pic by Dave McClure)

UPDATE: This new TechCrunch story about Microsoft's meeting with European publishers confirms that Microsoft's strategy is to ally with the likes of News Corp. against Google: "Microsoft plans to launch an assault on Google's flank, by cosying up to major content providers, especially newspapers, that feel hard done by Google News."

The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

"Go!" creator Frank McCabe is up in arms over Google's "Go"; he's demanded the company change the name of its language so he doesn't have to chage the name of his own programming language, which "I have been working on... for the last 10 years. There have been papers published on this and I have a book."

Not only that, but a journal article on McCabe's creation is still in the top 20 hits for a Google search on "Go programming language" even days after the new language has polluted the results. And that book? You can look at the cover and "preview" much of the content over on Google Books, which appears to have scanned the whole thing in.

Google got two geek gods, Unix co-creator Ken Thompson and operating system pioneer Rob Pike, to design its new language. Maybe it should have enlisted some mere Google-using mortals to polish the language's branding.

[via Slashdot]

Sacramento-based Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for people who faced "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars.'" The firm, which said it has launched an investigation into such scams, specializes in class action suits, among other areas.

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch has posted a series of articles on the issue of sleazy revenue models for online games, exposing the practice of sneaking mobile data subscriptions and pricey "learning CD" packages past players trying to earn online "points." Mafia Wars and Farmville creator Zynga gets a third of its revenue from such "commercial offers," while Facebook in turn gets 10-20 percent of its money from Zynga, according to Arrington.

Zynga has yanked some of its ads; Facebook, in turn, has suspended one of Zynga's smaller games. But there's evidence this issue could have been addressed much sooner. TechCrunch found video (below) shot this past spring in which Zynga's CEO said he "did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away."

That sounded bad enough when it was reprinted on a tech blog; imagine how it's going to sound in court.

(Top pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, possibly calling his lawyer, by Joi Ito.)

Milo Yiannopoulos hopes it's the former; the tech writer and Cambridge University student is coordinating the Nude London Tech Calendar 2010 project to raise money for Take Heart India, a charity that raises money to help bring information technology to blind and disabled students. There's been some chatter that the female participants might be undermining their careers, but they are balanced out by plenty of male participants — mostly startup founders, like the women — and follow in the footsteps of other British women who posed naked for leukemia research

Yiannopoulos said the calendar will go on sale in the next day or two, with a launch party slated for Monday. No word yet on the dress code, but you should probably leave your jokes about "USB dongles" and "back-end systems" at home. Or at least keep them in your pocket until after the second drink.

(Video via Vimeo)

A tipster forwarded us the above video, produced by and starring people who are supposed to be superhuman smarties: Google employees. And yet here they are pulling a Julia Allison. Maybe it's a simple case of geographic envy. Though they're singing about Los Angeles and filming the palm trees outside their office windows, these Googlers are in San Francisco, where the weather is getting damper, foggier and colder as the fall wears on. And the BART's been all full of morotists displaced by the broken Bay Bridge.

Or maybe this bunch just wanted a chance to show off their hip-twirling (especially the guy with the square design on his shirt, who clearly has been practicing in his moves in his bedroom mirror for like days). In any case, we couldn't help but notice a few things about their playground-y office environment:

UPDATE: The Googlers got shy and yanked the video; we've captured it and appended it to the end of the gallery, so you can enjoy the full experience of how workers play behind the Google curtain.

Notice the office fan. Who at the hugely profitable online company has been depriving these poor souls of proper air conditioning? At least they'll have those nifty Google zippered hoodies when the climate control fails them again this winter.

The free drinks fridge is fully stocked; apparently CEO Eric Schmidt was telling the truth about the company's return to growth mode after all!

We can't decide if that huge picture in the background is a cast promo for a late 1990s sitcom, or a picture of everyone in this office impersonating a Friends poster. (It's like we're always stuck in second hear...)

A massage chair, fun! We're not going to ask what the masseuse does behind that privacy screen back there. (Shameful, shameful lipdubs, probably.)

Work it! And when you're done could you mix us a very dry martini from the "lava lamps" sitting on the bar back there? Thanks!

"We're going to keep dancing until we've raised enough money to fix our office's crippling flat-panel-TV shortage! Our storage closets and several feet of our hallway are completely without gigantic flat panel monitors over every square inch and it's very sad. Operators are standing by for your donations."

"And I will keep rapping until there is a third flat panel monitor on this structural support beam, yo."

More evidence of the Googlers' sincere love for singer Miley Cryus and their selfless willingness to be the next internet company to host her ramblings now that she's gone and left Twitter.

It would seem Google lacks those fancy and super-comfortable Aeron chairs that became an icon for the c. 2000 dot-com boom. And it's already undermining the quality of its lipdubs; this account manager couldn't slide smoothly onto the screen, thanks to Google's cheap Office Depot chair.

When you learn to lip-sync more accurately you can be sent to the real LA. Until then, here's the Embarcadero's remarkable simulation!

We're not sure why Googlers got shy and yanked this video off of YouTube; one would think they'd be proud that the company retains a playful spirit despite the three rounds of layoffs early this year. And we've seen far worse lip-syncing! (Well, slightly worse, at least.)

Johns Hopkins photographer Will Shepherdson, who shoots for the News-Letter student newspaper, sent us the above and below pics from the set of the forthcoming Facebook movie (click to enlarge). In the Aaron Sorkin-written film, co-founder and CEO Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, sports such diverse outfits as a light grey Gap hoodie and the darker, logo-less gray hoodie below, also seen in earlier pictures of the filming.

When Eisenberg has his hoodie up and on his head, we'll know that's the scene where he's breaking into the dorm to steal student data while a couple makes out on the sofa.

(Pics: Will Shepherdson/Johns Hopkins News-Letter)

Novelist and journalist Lev Grossman really needs a computer backup strategy. Sounds like a consultation with massive computer nerd Susan Orlean is in order.

Just when CNN's Larry King thinks he understands The Twitter it... does... THIS! Oy.

If you weren't such a psycho about making friends on Facebook, the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro might still be your friend on Facebook.

The definition of Bridezilla: When someone like the Daily Post's Debbie James would rather be followed by "rapist killer" than by your wedding-research Twitter account.

Demi Moore can't wait for you to get your "Being a Terrible Paparazzo in Public" ticket from the police. That's like eight million points on your DMV record, punk.

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