By Hype Stalker

The latest issue of Vanity Fair did its part to fuel the Halloween fright fest just past by flashing nightmarish images-via-text of an 83-year-old Sumner Redstone (Viacom) swimming around his opulent mansion nude, eating lunch nude and, yes, shaving nude. So Tom Freston screwed up by not buying MySpace, eh? Well upon closer inspection the article indicates that the botched deal was more about Redstone’s pissing match with Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) than about truly understanding the power of social networking. Pee pee in the pool anyone? 

Vanity Fair also did a pretty bang-up job on its Art Issue, hitting the streets roughly around the same time W magazine released its own. While both VF and W went heavy with name dropping—Kehinde Wiley (famous for gaying-up the hardcore hip-hop homies with extended pinkies and ornate flower arrangements in his paintings) and Kristin Baker (so much sexier than her art, her acrylic spattered skivvies are likely to be framed and sold to the highest bidder sometime soon), W successfully won the Art Issue battle with an incredibly well done DVD (included in the issue) that detailed the making of its main photo spread by Richard Tuttle and Mario Sorrenti. Now if some upstart artist could just swipe the ever-present Cheshire Grin off Jeff Koons’ face, the art world could finally exhale. 

Wa-wa wee-wa! According to the UK’s Daily Mail, Sacha Baron Cohen may be sued by the previously nameless village folk he ridiculed as “Borat” in his new film. According to the report, Cohen and his crew stayed in luxury accommodations during filming just outside the impoverished village of Glod (a village located in Romania, not Kazakhstan) and suited up each morning for another round of making fun of the residents who thought they were taking part in a real documentary. Funny. Ha. Ha.

“60 Minutes” reporter Ed Bradley once told Charlie Rose, “What you do as a reporter is not to put yourself in [the story] …” Wise words … In the wake of Bradley’s recent death, The New York Observer took aim at Mediabistro’s Dylan Stableford in a post titled “White Semi-Professional Journalist Calls Pioneering TV-News Titan a ‘Pimp’ for Having Been Black on TV in the 1970s.” The Observer writes, “Stableford, 29, is more taken by the fact that Bradley was wearing a ‘vintage’ sportshirt, unbuttoned—a ‘pimp’ style, in the 21st-century blogger’s estimation.” The next day Stableford (who just weeks ago proudly posted a “FishbowlNY Exclusive” detailing the launch of the website “N—gerSpace”) scrambled to explain himself with a post titled “What I Meant By Ed Bradley’s ‘Pimp Years’,” in which he writes, “Judging from my inbox and voicemail today, it seems that my choice of words may have offended some readers of this blog … On the word ‘pimp’: To me, it is an endearing, descriptive term that I often substitute for ‘cool’ when I need an extra kick to it …” As they say, if you have to explain the joke … 

Later, Nick Denton’s new gals at Gawker gleefully piled on writing, “Mediabistro: Still for Sale! ... Now it seems as though Mediabistro is trying to convince everyone that they’re also a Web 2.0 company, even though, well, they’re not. Oh Laurel [Touby]. LaurelLaurelLaurel. When will you ever learn?”