Since her first 10 Most Fascinating People special, a hodgepodge of politicos, celebrities, and persons of note that included everyone from the Archduke Ferdinand to Sarah Bernhardt, Barbara Walters annual compendium of the year's most spellbinding personalities has only grown more essential and, dare we say it, fascinating.

Look, I don't care if you don't care about Vimeo founder and recent firee Jakob Lodwick or his girlfriend, Star Editor at Large Julia Allison. This is funny, and for now it's my job to let you know about stuff like this. Okay? Sooooorry.

Those few of you watching the commercials during Desperate Housewives last night might have been buoyed to spot Williamsburg hipster feeding trough Marlow and Sons, the home of the world's worst hipster date conversation ever. It was in a commercial for an SUV called Edge. So now it is confirmed that Marlow & Sons is where all the hipsters with $30K to drop on a SUV go for oysters and artisanal American cheese. Related: We hear that the creative director for J. Walter Thomspon, the ad firm that produced the spot, quit today!

Congratulations, Eidos: You're officially off the hook. Responding to rumors that CNET fired GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann for slamming a game heavily advertised on the site (check out the highlights in the above clip), spokesperson Sarah Cain told Joystiq, "We do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers." We doubted that CNET would toss away its credibility so readily.

Until we saw this clip from Larry King Live last night, we honestly had no clue how hard Johnny Carson made things for our secretly favorite Dancing with the Stars contestant, Wayne Newton, who couldn't pull on a single, sequined polyester outfit and launch into song in a Las Vegas floorshow without having the late night despot crack some crass joke questioning his sexuality. (And later, he claims, finagling him a spot on a Mafia's Most Wanted hit list.)

The startup has released a Star Trek-themed search toolbar for Web browsers. Every search made through the toolbar means a donation to the production of Star Trek: New Voyages. The fan series is better-produced than the original series it honors, but it cranks out episodes at a glacial pace: three episodes in as many years.

If you found yourselves camped in front of the TV last night watching Kathy Griffin's latest stand-up special, Straight to Hell, and wondering what it is about the comedian that sends her loyal, mostly gay audiences into hyperventilating fits of laughter over an act comprised of mostly warmed-over showbiz insider gossip, perhaps the above video will help:

The only offense we see is that his words were much harsher than his written review. Gerstmann called Kane & Lynch an "ugly, ugly game" and characterized the developers as "lazy," but he still gave the game a 6 out of 10 score. Some choice quotes from his video review:

Of course Tequila's been a hit on MySpace for quite some time now; she says she accepts 10,000 to 20,000 friend requests a day. I'm not sure who Facebook's most popular member is — Scoble? I know you just can't wait for the first episode of A Shot At Love With Robert Scoble.

Carrot Top, the real-world Batman villain created when a mild-mannered comic fell into a vat of radioactive toxic sewage at the Acme Oversized Props factory, was captured coming out of Fred Segal yesterday by TMZ cameras. They caught him again later that night with a massively bemeloned woman on his arm, providing onlookers a bounty of huge produce the likes of which one can typically only find at a Blue Ribbon presentation ceremony of the County Fair.

When I read Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's deposition in one of his pending lawsuits with the founders of ConnectU, who claim he stole the idea for the social network from them, my first thought was, "Did anyone at Microsoft read these before investing $240 million in Facebook?" Zuckerberg is at his worst in these transcripts — by turns arrogant, befuddled, condescending, and obfuscating. And then it hit me.