Updates: Playboy CEO Threatens Seppuku; plus SF SPCA, Conde Nast, Levi Johnson & More

• As a follow-up to my post a couple days ago on the troubles at SF SPCA, I wanted to share this short story from CBS5 TV news in San Francisco. It's just more reporting on the mess at that organization.
• I'm just thinking that it must not be much fun to work at Conde Nast these days. After their recent magazine closures (supposedly the last), now they're doing layoffs at one of the surviving mags.
• Meanwhile, The New York Times provides a visual aid for people trying to comprehend what a smaller Conde Nast could possibly mean in this crazy, upside-down world, *sob sob sob*
• A while ago I reported the most important news in the history of the world, or at least in the annals of the Sarah Palin saga: The father of her grandchild is going to pose for Playgirl (presumably the web site, since it stopped publishing a print Playgirl magazine a year or so ago). He's apparently been working out, and his lawyer says that the photo shoot is a foregone conclusion.
• Playboy CEO Scott Flanders, who's apparently been doing the rounds of the business press, is quoted by Reuters as saying, "Over my dead body will we quit producing the magazine in print." Though threatening to commit seppuku helps address fears (which we can now largely begin to ignore) that the magazine would be deep-sixed, it doesn't tell us more about a report in the Chicago Tribune that the publication could be radically down-sized.
• I hadn't intended sex to be a common theme of much of this list of updates, but it's turning out that way. Anyway, the Los Angeles Times reports that Hugh Hefner does write down his own tweets for Twitter -- but he doesn't tweet 'em himself; one of his girlfriends actually retypes them so they can be read by his more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. That's kind of like someone who recently called us to let us know they had just sent us an e-mail. But hey, at least he writes his own tweets.
  
• What the heck: Finally, because so many people seem to be getting caught with their pants down in prostitution and womanizing news, I figured I'd share this story from Times of India about a Tamil journalist arrested in a prostitution sting. Or wait, how about this minister in Nicolas Sarkozy's government who wrote in a book about his past experiences picking up young (just how young seems to be under dispute) male prostitutes in Thailand -- oh, and the minister just happened to be a vocal supporter of Roman Polanski. It starts to make David Letterman seem downright grandfatherly. Keep your pants on, folks.
  

Magazine News Roundup: Levi Johnson, Creepy, Gay GOPers, Obamas on Covers, & More

Oh, what a week in magazines!

• Levi Johnson, the father of Sarah Palin's granddaughter, wrote an article in Vanity Fair that manages to surprise us even more -- and we thought we were immune to further Palinalia.
• Oh, and Levi Johnson is reportedly going to pose nude or semi-nude for Playgirl (presumably for its web site, because it ceased printing issues last year).
• Meanwhile, "actress" Linday Lohan has turned down nearly $1 million offered to her to pose nude for Playboy.
• The Obama takeover of America's publishing industry continues. One of the Obamas will be on covers of a number of Rodale magazines, including the newly launched Children's Health. President Obama will be the cover man of Men's Health's October issue. They will not be nude.
• Print magazines are dead, eh? Then why did a record 75 new titles launch in August? Huh, Mr./Ms. Smarty-Pants?
• Disgraced South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's wife Jenny does a tell-all in the September issue of Vogue. And it doesn't look good for him.
• Also, bad-boy Sanford is being tipped as the culprit behind rumors that Andre Bauer, his lt. governor and fellow Republican, is gay. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure this out: If Sanford is behind it, he's pretty clearly trying to scare off the easily-scared conservatives in the state government from forcing him out of office, because his position would then be filled by the presumably unfit-to-redecorate-the-governor's-mansion Bauer.
• Dark Horse Comics launched its new comics-size edition of former magazine-sized comics magazine Creepy. It's got all-new material; it's still continuing to publish its excellent hard-bound reprint editions collecting all of the original Warren Creepy magazines (and separately the Eerie magazines).