from Vanity Fair's profile of editor Judith Regan:

10. Few employees have lasted more than a year. Those who have--such as editorial director Cal Morgan and managing editor Cathy Jones, who are married to each other--"have no central nervous system left," says one ex-staffer.

9. While she professes no personal right-wing leanings ... close friends roll their eyes--"She's to the right of Genghis Khan," says one.

8. One former friend described the chaos Regan creates around herself this way: "Judith is the sort of person who insists you stay with her, and then you arrive and find out that her ex-boyfriend is also staying in the same room, and there are no sheets, so you have to go buy them, and she tells you to get the best ones and she'll pay you back, and then she won't and she'll say, 'I've noticed that you let people take advantage of you.'"

7. Many staffers--and other colleagues--had epithets according to their sexual orientation or ethnicity: "I was the lesbian cunt," says one former competitor. "Then there was the black cunt." When she got mad, people were called "fucking retards" and "fucking idiots"; if she got really mad, she'd accuse people of being either "fags" or "on drugs" or, preferably, both.

6. "She is," says a woman who has worked happily for other demanding bosses but lasted with Regan less than a year, "a destroyer of souls."

5. Regan ... kept photos of herself dressed as a man around the office, and has been known to shout "I have the biggest cock in the building!"

4. She left topless photos of herself in a table drawer in her office; she also stored voluminous records for her divorce in a closet where anyone could peruse them--and some did.

3. Her enemies, who are legion, say she is (as one former friend put it) "the highest-functioning deranged person I've ever known."

2. At one point Regan told this particular editor, "I'm on so many hormones I could hump the doorknob."

1. When Arsenio Hall lost his talk show in 1994, she campaigned for the slot. "When [a Fox executive] finally told her she wasn't getting the job, we all heard her screaming in her office. 'You know why? Because he has a small dick, and he's afraid I'm going to eat it. And then I'm gonna eat his testicles. Then I'm going to eat into his body cavity ... ' It was the most incredible thing I'd heard. But this was my first job out of college. I remember thinking, Huh, maybe this is the way things are in media."

The Register's headline: one day short of a Christmas carroll. Anyone remember, was The Nightmare Before Christmas scored?

Amazon.com suffered an embarrassing outage earlier this week, but promised customers that problems with its IT systems had been rapidly fixed. This claim, however, has come under closer scrutiny from Amazon users in the UK, US and Canada. Many members of Amazon's Seller marketplace say the company has been suffering from long-standing problems during the peak holiday shopping season. And, to the dismay of Amazon PR, the company's IT staff agrees with the sellers.

Your editor may have slashed your favorite sentence, but consider the alternative: Hollywood just slashed God and the Church from Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, citing "the possibility of perceived anti-religiosity." Or, as director Chris Weitz (About a Boy, American Pie) put it, "there may be some modification of terms."