First, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel banned Rachel Glaser from the corporate jet. Now the annoyingly loud talker is out of the corporation. The senior vice president will leave the company in 2008, reports Kara Swisher, who’s an expert on loudness. On her way out the door, Glaser could hold it open for VP of media engineering Bharath Kadaba, also soon to depart. A source told Swisher that Yahoo is just trying to cull its executive herd. Not a bad idea, considering that as recently as September, that pack included 300 vice presidents and several dozen senior VPs. But there’s likely more to Glaser’s departure, at least, than simple economics.

Last we heard of Glaser, departing Yahoo finance exec Mark Rubash told us it would “more enjoyable and rewarding elsewhere” than to take a job which would place Glaser as one of his reports. Rubash was hardly alone, according to one commenter who wrote, “To say Ms Glaser is ‘widely disliked on the Sunnyvale campus’ is being kind.”

Source:Valleywag

Herb Caen’s typewriter is gone from Moose’s, but the recently remodeled North Beach hangout still hosts the beloved columnist’s spirit, I’m convinced. So I picked the spot for drinks in honor of Megan “Leggy McCarthy, our party correspondent who’s headed to some print rag in SoMa. (In Soviet Russia, Wired gets you!) Drinking starts at 4 p.m. Drunk blogging starts at 4:15 p.m. RSVP on Facebook, or just show up with a juicy piece of gossip dripping from your lips.

Source:Valleywag
Today’s most popular headlines are Eric Schmidt, PR side bit have split (1,503 views today), Writer-poaching NYT editor an expert in “techniology” (850) and Leaving PodTech, Scoble finally finds a real job (850). Today’s most discussed stories are Leaving PodTech, Scoble finally finds a real job (8 comments), Facebook’s viral marketing catches a bug (6) and Writer-poaching NYT editor an expert in “techniology” (4).

Source:Valleywag
Barry Diller likes to talk up how New Yorky his Manhattan-headquartered IAC is, but in fact, his most important online businesses are based in California, like Ask.com. San Francisco-area IAC workers are having their holiday party tonight at the Independent, 628 Divisadero St. “Bonus points to anyone who videos themselves gaining entry as Vimeo staff wearing their best American Apparel hoodie and art-skool glasses,” says a Grinch of a tipster.

Bernie Ward, for those of you who don’t listen to local talk radio, is a liberal commentator who won a Scripps award for his investigative reporting on sexual misconduct among the local Catholic clergy. Ward himself was indicted Thursday on two counts of sending and receving child pornography online. Ward’s lawyer claims the former priest made an “error of judgement” while researching a book.

Source:Valleywag

I’m sure TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington was joshing when he threatened “war” on Facebook for hiring away one of his technical staffers. After all, the amount of damage a full-on TechCrunch assault of negative articles about Facebook would inflict on the site’s business rounds off close to zero. Still, even jokingly warning another employer to stay away from “my” employees is a Valley faux pas. Such posturing is seen as a sign of weakness. If you want your tech workers to stay, you just offer them a better deal. Right, boss?

Source:Valleywag

We’ve reported on everyone else’s holiday gatherings. It’s only fair to spill about our own, don’t you think? It’s tonight at Valleywag uberspecial correspondent Paul Boutin’s impressive sky-palace. The dress code is “rockstar,” so expect Paul to be wearing his Armani sunglasses, Owen’s hair to be extra pointy, and Nick Douglas to be in a suit and tie. You want in? IM me with a story I can use for my last hurrah before I shuffle off this bloggy coil and move to a respectable publication. Cheers!

We hear that Yahoo is hosting its holiday party tomorrow night at the San Mateo Expo Center, conveniently near the Bay Meadows racetrack, where Yahoos might have better luck cashing in than with their stock options. Last year’s entertainment was American Idol reject Chris Daughtry. This year?

We’re hearing that Super Diamond, the Neil Diamond tribute band, will be providing the tunes for the Yahoo employees. Rumored opening band The Spazmatics, an ’80s cover band, continues the nostalgic theme. The choice of music — bands hired to rehash songs others created — sings volumes about Yahoo’s direction.

Source:Valleywag

We love a challenge. Supposedly Digg, Kevin Rose’s news-discussion site, is having a party in San Francisco tonight. But we haven’t pinned down the location. What is this, some top-secret rave? If you find out where it is, or just want to send in a report from the scene afterwards, drop us a line.

Did you get your pass to the Google Holiday Party? We understand. Email can be so unreliable. A helpful tipster saved us the trouble of digging through our Gmail spam filter to find our invitation. Don’t know if we’ll crash the December 12 event at the Googleplex. If it’s like past parties, expect a room full of tiresomely cheery Google flacks and a drive-by appearance by Larry and Sergey. If you do get any founder face time, watch out: They’ll likely bore you to tears with an explanation of why they call Web applets “gadgets” instead of “widgets.” Not that you could use any of that conversation anyway, since the event is “off the record.” Still want to go? After the jump, the full detail of the exclusive holiday soiree.

Google Holiday Media Party 2007
Incomprehensible as it may seem, we are just a few weeks away from Google’s annual holiday media fest. We hope you’ll join us for a friendly evening of informal conversation (one that’s off the record) with our PR team and a number of our execs. As always, Google chefs will prepare a great spread along with drinks.

When:
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

RSVP:
Click here to RSVP
by 12/05/2007 *See below

Where:
Google, Slice Cafe, Building 40
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Click here to see map

*Your invitation is non-transferable. If you can’t attend and want to suggest a colleague in your place, you may do so on the RSVP form.

Options, the parody Steve Jobs novel, has totally surprised those of us who expected a throwaway. It’s 248 mostly hilarious pages, with a tight story line and a protagonist who evolves credibly. You can read my enthusiastic review in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, where it’s the business book of the week. But more important is this teaser email from Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, where author Dan Lyons will appear Thursday evening.

Date: Oct 30, 2007 5:06 PM
Subject: Kepler’s
To: fakestevejobs
I will be hosting you at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park CA. this
Thursday. I just wanted you to know I have someone special from Apple
Computer coming to introduce you, and his name is Steve as well.

Omigosh! Oh wait. This is going to be Steve Wozniak, right? Still. We’ll be there.

A double birthday bash for GigaOm biz-blogger Om Malik (pictured with operations manager Joey Wan) and Spark PR founder Donna Sokolsky fogged up the glass patio walls at Jack Falstaff on Friday. I happened to be at the bar, hoping to catch dreamy god-mayor Gavin Newsom doing paperwork again. After the jump, the best overheards.

The boss text-messaged me instructions to report on who was there and who wasn’t, but to me all business reporters and publicists kind of look alike. I could only confirm that the lanky guy whom several partygoers mistook for Digg founder Kevin Rose, complete with bedhead and horizontal stripey-shirt, was Not Kevin.

Besides the hacks and flacks, any event south of Market Street includes a few self-styled “startup CEOs” who’ve yet to hire a single full-time employee. Happily, one turned out to be Kyle Shank from Uncov, the cruelly funny site that aspires to be the anti-Techcrunch. (Memo to Kyle: Trade the 1997 orange shirt for some basic black. Sorry, kid, but if you give tough love, you get tough love.)

Overheard

Your name’s Melody? Wasn’t she the drummer for Josie and the Pussycats?

Working at home means you can drink whenever you want.

You guys coming outside? You know, around the corner, you know? Look, we’re going to smoke some weed, are you in or out?

(Above: Donna Sokolsky and my wife laugh at the boys.)

As the party wound down, I followed Om out the door in pursuit of another photo. He refused. “I don’t want to be the story, I want to be the guy telling the stories,” he said. “People keep trying to make me the story. It’s a problem.” Fact check, Om: In the also-ran media world of San Francisco, you resigned from Time Inc. to go blogging. A year later you’re doing better than most of those who stayed behind. You’re a story. Cope.

(Photos by James Yu and Joey Wan; used by permission)

We hear that Chris Shipley and the rest of the Demo conference team are coming down hard on companies who violate their exclusive contract. A tipster “has it on on good authority” that one presenting company has been “yanked off the stage” at tomorrow’s fall Demo conference in San Diego, because it demo’d its wares at Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis’s competing TechCrunch40 conference last week. No surprise there: The whole point of these startup-demonstration conferences is to show something new, and an already-launched product won’t make the cut. But Shipley’s crew is being especially tough: We hear that the company isn’t gettting its $18,000 entrance fee back either. So who is the culprit? And did they make the main stage, or did they lose out on Demo just for debuting in TechCrunch40’s also-ran DemoPit? If you know anything more, fill us in.

Source:Valleywag

John Perry Barlow, pictured, the former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and one-time roommate of Valley bad boy Sean Parker, threw a party Saturday as a benefit for The Center for Sex & Culture. It’s too bad this invitation arrived late, because the party sounded like a doozy, with the promised attendance of “Famous porn stars, infamous porn stars, and miscellaneous sluts.” Does anyone who went have a report? And pictures please? The long, insane, and hilarious invitation after the jump.

^

<(o)>

/_ _\

–> B a R L o W F R i e N D Z —–>

<This is one of a series of occasional outbursts to people I like.
Please let me know if you’d rather not receive it. But you’ll miss
some great parties if you un-subscribe…

I do try to keep this list to actual friends - by that I mean folks
who might bail me out of jail - or, at the least, people I’ve met and
liked instantaneously. Some of what I report here is too personal to
be of general interest. Nevertheless, please feel free to forward or
post elsewhere anything you think merits wider distribution. I’m
responsible for these words, but I don’t claim to own them.

If this broadcast feels impersonal, I hope you will remember that
individual responses generally elicit personal replies. And even if
I’m sometimes too swamped to write back, I delight in hearing from

you.>

——————————> ——————-> ——–>

SAN FRANCISCO BARLOWFRENZY TONIGHT (SATURDAY, SEPT. 22) FOR SEX! & CULTURE!

Okay.

For some of you, there has been such a prolonged silence from this little outpost on the electronic frontier that you might have thought I’d died, or taken vows, or taken it on the lam, or gone completely over to the hard stuff.

Moreover, there are likely some of you who had no idea until just now that you’d been placed on some guy’s spam list and are wondering where the hell you might have met the below-signed. (Hint: Drugs, on your part, could have been involved; possibly you were on the Island of Manhattan; most likely, the sun wasn’t shining. Or something. Maybe I just liked your smile. I’m pretty arbitrary.)

Or! Possibly! You are more closely engaged with me and my general condition and know that somewhere between Jerusalem and Burning Man, the spondylolisthesis that long has threatened to unmoor my spine from its appointed seat atop my sacrum finally broke the last little vertebral latches and slid forward enough to make it so that I can no only walk as though I were drunk even when I’m sober.

I can, and probably will tell you many more dire tales around such matters but screw that. And I do mean literally.

BECAUSE! TONIGHT! SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, ON THE OCCASION OF THE VERNAL EQUINOX AND BECAUSE I BLOODY WELL FEEL LIKE IT, ESPECIALLY NOW THAT I TEMPORARILY CAN’T DANCE:

I will throw a BENEFIT in San Francisco on behalf of

THE CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

What better time to encourage a free-ranging carnal nature in all my fellow incarnate beings that at a moment when my own potential ability in this regard seems slightly up for grabs? I mean, seriously folks…

I’ve always been pro-choice in practically every single extent (with, of course, due consideration for the Buddha/Christ/Vishnu/Prophet/Zoroaster/Etc. regard for compassion to all sentient beings, etc.), but scarcely has wild option meant so much to much to me as it does just now when I might find myself in somewhat sketchier communication than usual with zones south of my heart.

NEVERTHELESS!!

TONIGHT

I Present You An Opportunity

To Throw It Down For

THE CENTER FOR SEX AND CULTURE

So That Even If The Worse Should Happen

Following Two Impending Spinal Fusions

AND

OLD BARLOW NEVER GETS ANY AGAIN,

*YOU* STILL WILL!!!

AND

IN ANY WAY YOU LIKE IT!!!

So:

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

AT TOAD HALL

210 CLAYTON STREET (TOWARD FELL FROM HAYES, JUST NORTH OF THE PANHANDLE)

FROM 8:00 UNTIL THE COPS COME AND STAY

I WILL SPONSOR A BARLOWFRENZY THAT WILL FEATURE:

*LAP DANCES WITH DOCTORAL CANDIDATES

*LAP DANCES WITH BEAMING ILLITERATES

*NUBILE OPERA

*STRIP POLKA

*TOURETTE’S KARIOKE

*SPIKE-HEEL SPRINTS WITH PARIMUTUEL BETTING

*MYSTERY BOX AUCTIONS

*BLINDFOLD ADVENTURE TOURS

*FAMOUS PORN STARS

*INFAMOUS PORN STARS

*MISCELLANEOUS SLUTS

*RACIST/ANTI-FEMINIST/CLASS-IST/AGE-IST/ABLE-IST/UNGIFTED-IST JOKES

*UNSPEAKABLE PRACTICES

*UNMENTIONABLE ACTS

*LARGE SEQUESTERED SPACES, INDOORS AND OUT

*MANY HAPPY AND SURPRISING OPPORTUNITIES TO BE GLADLY RELIEVED OF YOUR CASH

ALL FOR GOOD FUN AND A WORTHY CAUSE!

(MOREOVER, no animals will be harmed without their explicit consent.)

In case you think this is all just fun and games, we are deadly earnest as befits us here in the Bayarean Smugbelt. The Center for Sex & Culture is no fucking joke.

It is, in fact, the winner of two Best of the Bay awards. They know how to throw a sex party (not that claim this will be one), teach how to have multiple orgasm in one easy lesson, broker peace and freedom between dykes, leather daddies, pie-fighting ballerinas, and cultists of whatever hue.

If you’re in favor of sex or in favor of culture, or better, both, as I am, then I hope you’ll favor the Center with a donation whether the door or tucked into the lingerie of one of our winsome cultural attachés.

OK? All ist klar? Of course it is. Just as Nursie likes it.

The usual BarlowFrenzy principles apply — BYO everything. Consume it all or take what’s left with you lest my surrogate parents spend blank days wandering among your ruins. Leave no trace and take no memories.

If you’re not in San Francisco, which you probably aren’t, and you know someone here that you think I’ll like and won’t be too freaked out by the possibility of Tourette’s Karioke, pass this on to them. I do ask for two somewhat embarrassing exceptions to this principle:

First, please be merciful about inflicting truly excruciating pervs on us just to test our limits — I know, I see the paradox — but some shit just ain’t right, if you know what I mean…

Second, try to limit the number of odd-smelling persons about my own age who really must tell me about that cool time they were backstage with Jerry. The aromatic combination of unself-aware conservatism, over-delayed dentistry, cheap weed - and hell, how can I say this? - changing schedules for one’s own diapers that were as slack as they’d been for the kids back in in the commune…. Well, it kinda made me wonder the other night in Mill Valley if closing the Sweetwater Saloon wasn’t ok after all. Please don’t send us too many of these. I’ll be grateful when they are.

Other useless advice: Carpoodle. Parking will be as it often is in San Francisco. Nevertheless, I have magical parking karma that I can brag about it without screwing it up. I really do. Some of it might rub off on you. Try your luck along the Panhandle. Tell the Parking God that Barlow sent ya.

Or you could just take a bus, Gus. The 21 Hayes , 33 Stanyan, 43 Masonic, and 71 Haight buses will get you close. You could be one of The People for a change.

I know. I know. Sounds like a heap of trouble. But just remember that for a modest donation to the Center for Sex and Culture, you could find yourself later tonight murmuring such words as these:

“I am blind, I am deaf, I am crippled, I have no sense of smell nor taste. All I have left to me is touch, and, BABY, I LIKE THE WAY THIS FEELS!!!

Whatever. I think it’s probably worth going out of your way to attend. But that’s me. Come. Bring lots of unmarked bills, carry no ID, wear dark clothing, and be prepared to gone for at least three days. Trust me on this one. You will be glad you did. Come.

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