Marilyn Manson feels called upon to recall Lindsay Lohan, her penchant for changing clothes and why she went blonde, while hosting AOL’s Top 11 Countdown.

Memo to Manson: music, not comedy.

Reporters and editors are rushing about as the music stops — but at least 15 people who took the buyout and will be left without seats on Friday at the LAT.

Metpro director Efrain Hernandez will become the L.A. Regions editor, while New Orleans-based reporter Ann Simmons will return to L.A. to work G.A. for the California section.

LA Observed as the full story.

Tabloid tv is too important to be left to amateurs, as in the case of NBC Dateline’s To Catch A Predator fiasco. Tabloid Baby, who knows whereof he speaks, says:

There’s always the pain-in-the-ass producer who thinks ethics is something other than a county outside London and points out all the horrible lapses in morality and judgment the show thrives on.

In the case of Dateline, which is bad tabloid television, meaning tabloid television done by people who are schooled and indoctrinated in the constipated world of elitist network news and take all the wrong surface traits of tabloid, make it all look and sound respectable while presenting really shady product, the producer has a point.

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Courtney Love has convinced punk shoe brand Dr. Martens to drop their ad campaign featuring her dead husband, Kurt Cobain. Corbis licensed the images to Saatchi & Saatchi for the campaign, and in the UK, didn’t need publicity clearance from deceased celebs. Translation: Love didn’t get paid. Tony Pierce grilled Kate Stanners, the Saatchi account exec. about the ads.

Love, whose good taste is legendary, complained that the use of Cobain’s image without permission is despicable.

Selling off his childhood possessions is not.

Use of Cobain’s music in CSI:Miami is not.

The ringtone contest is not.

Kurt Cobain, who shot himself in 1994, earned over $50 million last year.

While we’ve not always agreed with Nikki Finke, her latest post is a work of genius, if only for her skill with Google Images. Never have so many people looked so dreadful–and with good reason.

Writing about NBC’s cozy deal with Ben Silverman, Finke pins Jeff Zucker to the wall, writing:

Who are they kidding? This sweet arrangement of letting Ben have his cake and eat it too is unworkable. And NBC knows this based on very sour past experiences.

If bodies are buried anywhere within the 30-mile zone, she’ll dig ‘em up.

Seth Stevenson dashes off an over-wrought piece in Slate about The Starter Wife, that mini-series that’s hyped to high heaven. The headline reads:

Soap Opera: How Pond’s infiltrated The Starter Wife writers’ room.

First, there’s no “writers’ room”. There’s a team, Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott, who’ve also written Rapunzel, The Runaway Bride, and others of this genre. Writers’ rooms are a staple of weekly sitcom production.

Be that as it may, Stevenson wrings his hands over the nefarious influence of Ponds, the moisturizer people, over Gigi Levangie Grazer’s deathless novel. Stevenson really, really hates these personal care brands–remember his Dove rant? At least Messing’s bony enough to not inspire his invective–although India’s thin, and he hated India.

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Lindsay Lohan’s Q-Rating is Way Down: But her exposure is — sigh — as high as ever.

A Little Latin Love: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is going to endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton today at UCLA.

We’d Love To See Her Job Description: We have no idea what covering daytime television for the LAT would entail, but lately it seems that Matea Gold’s job is simply to watch The View and write about it. Hey, LAT, need someone to cover the Daily Show?

Sony’s launching an online Jeopardy game that basically encourages cheating. The Jeopardy! Google Daily Challenge lets online players use Google to search for an answer to a new question posted daily. Participants are automatically entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win $100 daily or a $25,000 grand prize.

Winning is thus based on how well the player can match Google’s ideas of answers.

Jeopardy! Executive Producer Harry Friedman says “America’s top-rated quiz show provides the answers and the web’s number one search engine helps you find the correct question.”

So, will the TV program change format to let us watch people type in search terms? Snore.

Maurice, Lord Saatchi has an op-ed piece in the Financial Times that’s a model of fatuous windbaggery. Allegedly, the advertising mogul is writing about Google’s data collection system, but who can tell?

In 900 words, he quotes or cites:

Orson Welles (scorpion/frog fable)
Unilever founder (half of advertising wasted)
Viscount Rothermere (newspaper/bath water parable)
Newton (physical laws)
Freud (Law of Ambivalence)
Henry Ford (faster horse quip)
Aristotle (natural law and perception)

So much collective wisdom, so little sense. His point is that while Google’s

systematic, logical computation can lead the advertiser into an earthly paradise of universal enlightenment

people don’t always respond in logical ways, so relying on data alone to eliminate unncessary advertising won’t work.

If Saachti paid for a minion to write this, his money was wasted. If he wrote it himself, his time was wasted. And this from the man who gave the world “The world’s favourite airline” and “Labour isn’t working.”

Internet mudslinging is under attack, according to Patti Waldmeir, the legal columnist in the Financial Times. Citing a recent lawsuit involving Roommates.com, she notes that free expression is hampered by a ruling from the 9th circuit Federal appeals court in California. The court found the site liable for discrimination because the it asked online questions that provoked discriminatory responses (like “no straight roomies” or “no drama”).

Heartened by this news is DontDateHimGirl.com “victim”, Todd Hollis, a Pittsburgh attorney, who lost the first time, but is re-filing his case. In court papers, he says the site is liable for anonymous postings that claim (untruthfully, he says) he a) has herpes b) has multiple children and c) “wears dirty clothes”.

The Federal Communications Decency Act protects website owners against liability for the defamatory, libellous and otherwise harmful postings, but the Roommates.com ruling could change that–and the whole spirit of the internet would be lost.