NICK DOUGLAS — The upcoming D Conference, run by Wall Street Journal columnists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, has an accompanying web site called "All Things Digital. Is it worth visiting? Well, I don't know about the written articles, because I don't read. But I watch video. Someone pointed out the "Digital Daily" video, in which some unnamed (and by that I mean I didn't check) guy delivers tech news and tries to be videoblogger Ze Frank. But he is not at all Ze Frank. (And trust me, through my videoblog Look Shiny, I've become an expert on trying and failing to be Ze.) And instead of simply cutting between stories, the editor stuck in a loud fanfare that BLASTS at you, leaving you dazed enough to keep watching the next item until the next BLAST. His latest episode is after the jump. Brace yourself.

Rosie O'Donnell is leaving 'The View'. What does this mean to the man, and wo-man, on the street? We dispatched The Assimilated Negro and Julia Allison's Personal Director of Photography to find out.

All-Baldwin Friday Morning continues here at Defamer with the above clip of the alienated, shouty dad's highly anticipated appearance on today's episode of The View, a segment so exhaustively previewed in the media that its actual broadcast was doomed to anticlimax. Still, even if we feel we've read every obligatory, publicly contrite word before, our role in any celebrity's televised Redemption Tour is to patiently listen and nod along as if we're hearing it all for the first time, lest crisis managers decide such desperation moves have lost their effectiveness and deprive of us future talk show mea culpas.

This morning's eagerly anticipated episode of "The View" featured Alec Baldwin, who showed up in vague-contrition mode. While kind of sorry about the things he said to his daughter's cell phone, Baldwin mostly used the appearance to launch into the world's longest lecture on parental alienation and the intricacies of the legal system as pertains custodial rights. It's a good PR plan: Bore people into forgetting what you did in the first place. Anyway, as the above clip shows, Baldwin is about forgiveness. Specifically, he forgives the people who left mean comments on his website. ("AlecBaldwin.com," he helpfully reminds.) Important takeaway: Sure, he might have yelled at his daughter to watch out for a car or come out of the ocean, but he has never yelled at her like he did on the phone before. Which is probably why that infamous voicemail message started with "Once again..." Also, Kim Basinger sounds like a pain in the ass.

At some point during American Idol's recent blockbuster-pimping Shrek-tacular, in which DreamWorks mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and incomprehensibly accented sidekick Antonio Banderas consumed a puzzling amount of screen time in plugging their upcoming animated product, virtually every one of the show's millions of teenage fans probably found him or herself wondering, "Hey, who's this awkward little bald man trying to sell me on a movie I'm going to go see anyway?" Slate's Kim Masters claims to have solved the mystery: Katzenberg was supposed to drag Shrek star Justin Timberlake onto the show, but perhaps still feeling a little dirty from whoring himself out for a duet at the Grammys, the singer escaped the country, avoiding the promotional duty. All in all, we're pleased that's the way things turned out; had Timberlake shown, we might've been denied the wonderful moment (at about 43 seconds in the above clip) when Katzenberg—just moments after showing off his Oscar—somewhat bitterly remarks that the Idol hopefuls are achieving their dreams much faster than he did, stopping just short of adding, "But, you know, hard work and stuff like that takes a lot of time. You can't karaoke your way to running a studio. Just sayin'."

A familiar voice, and then a synthesizer [Bwog]

As mentioned yesterday, Bill Clinton made an appearance on "The Rachael Ray Show" to talk about the childhood obesity epidemic. Clinton knows all too well the perils of poor eating habits, as he mentions in this clip. And yes, fast food can be dangerous, and sometimes that message—mmmmmm, IHOP's Stuffed French Toast Treasures!

Many hardworking newspeople face the risk of serious injury—or worse!—in the line of duty. Take Westchester-living Medill graduate Arnold Diaz, your favorite Fox 5 Senior Investigative Correspondent. The violence visited upon our local courageous consumer reporter is so stunning we had to share it with you. Shame, shame, shame. Shame on all of us.

We know of only one way to cope with the crippling grief that's overcome us since Rosie O'Donnell's announcement that's she's abandoning the indentation on The View's couch she's so ably filled over the past year: pretending it's not happening by filling up our front page with fresh clips of her moving image. Shortly after breaking the hearts of millions of daytime talkshow viewers, O'Donnell trumpeted a huge get for the show she's leaving behind: Noted angry-voicemail-leaver Alec Baldwin will join the ladies on Friday* for a Celebrity Parenting Summit, during which topics of interest to famous parents, such as "alienation," "media strategies in prolonged child custody hearings," and "barnyard animals to which one should not compare one's daughter, even while under extreme mental duress," will be discussed. This, we suspect, will be the kind of appointment viewing we've come to expect from the O'Donnell-led Golden Age that will soon be coming to a close.

If you're like us, you woke up at two A.M. last evening (well, this morning) with the inexplicable fear that you had suddenly developed rectal cancer, and the only thing that could soothe your worried self back to sleep was the dulcet stuttering of Fox News's Andrew Levy trying to read from a piece of paper. If you're not like us, though, then you may have missed last night's "Red Eye" on Fox. A shame. Toward the end of the show, the willowy presence of our Emily Gould delivered an impassioned response to arch-nemesis Jimmy Kimmel. We pretty much spend our days resisting the urge to do physical damage to Emily, but even we've got to say this is kind of great.

Yes, yes, it's true. Rosie O'Donnell—Ro, plain Ro in the morning, light of our lives, fire of our loins, our sin, our soul—is ending her tenure at "The View." While this is a time of deep sadness and mourning for all of us, we want to focus on the good things—those precious memories clutched closely to our breast—that Rosie accomplished on the show. Farewell, sweet princess. You were too beautiful for this world. Drop us a line when your new show takes Ellen's timeslot.

Excuse us while we go have a little cry.

The course of cackling-hens-sitting-on-a-couch-and-clucking-about- current-events history has been irrevocably altered: Rosie O'Donnell has just announced that she will not be returning to The View next year, a decision she blames on an inability to reach acceptable contractual terms for her daily involvement in the show. (Insiders reveal the impasse was reached when ABC's legal department flatly refused to install a button on the set that would deliver a paralyzing electric shock to longtime nemesis Donald Trump's genitals each time it was pressed.) We know that your initial response to this sad news is to rush through your house or place of business and smash all the mirrors you can find, then use the jagged shards to carve "ROSIE" on the underside of your forearm, but take heart: she will be dropping by occasionally to guest host and deliver special reports, and, when the spirit moves her, just to choke that skinny bitch Hasselbeck a little.

[Note: We moved the video after the jump because of its annoying tendency to autostart each time our home page was reloaded.] While Alec Baldwin has yet to publicly comment on the leak of yet another troubling phone call, we expect that he'll address this newest parenting controversy on his website shortly, explaining that everyone who knows him privately knows what he's endured over the last several years in his custody litigation, and knows that there are certain people who will go any any lengths to embarrass him, disrupt his relationship with Dora the Explorer, and prevent him from sharing in her many wonderful animated adventures.

Following yesterday's leak of that troubling Alec Baldwin voicemail, the world was placed in the uncomfortable position of trying to determine which famous parent is the worse role-model for the impressionable Ireland, the one screaming into the phone, or the one who apparently wants their child custody battle played out in the tabloids. At least one former associate of the onetime couple has now made his choice and gone public with his feelings, bringing his trademark brand of vigilante justice to an already ugly and complicated situation.

The Assimilated Negro and Richard Blakeley take to "the street" to get that all-important New York City random-person viewpoint on violence in high schools, fear of Asian Americans, and exactly what's wrong with America.

Until today, our only glimpses of Hairspray—a worthy follow-up to The Producers in the category of "good movies turned hit Broadway shows turned crappy, likely-to-flop Hollywood musicals"—have been sparse. There was this promotional still of John Travolta suffering from what appeared to be an advanced case of steroid-induced facial-bloat, another unsettling snapshot of a bare-legged and bewigged Christopher Walken, and a 50-second "teaser," if you consider an announcer rattling off an endless list of names you didnt know and/or care about a tease. But with the release of the movie's full-length trailer on the internets, many of our curiosities about the movie are finally satisfied. Questions like: "Does this movie want to be the next Grease?" (Yes!) "Do we want to see it?" (No.) And, "How does Travolta look in a foundation garment?" (We torched out eyes with a cigarette lighter and a bottle of Aquanet.)

In the interest of providing some closure for yesterday's controversy over the meaning of American Idol judge Simon Cowell's much-disputed eye-roll, we feel it's our responsibility to spotlight this follow-up clip from last night's broadcast, in which an entire segment was dedicated to exonerating Cowell of all charges of insensitivity levied against him by the sensationalist media. As anyone can clearly see in the pciture-in-picture replay [Ed.note—But where are the synchronized timecodes?] of the incident (the impatient can skip directly to the 2:48 mark), the innocent host was lost in conversation with the fascinating Paula Abdul and thereby unable to offer any outrage-inviting reactions to the contestant Chris Richardson's tribute to the Virgina Tech fallen.

America, it seems, has spoken: Sanjaya Malakar, whose rendition of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" rendered little girls completely paralyzed with tears of existential terror and whose final performance of "Something To Talk About" will likely drive Bonnie Raitt back to the bottle, will not be your next American Idol. At first, it may be difficult to watch this clip of Ryan Seacrest casting a tear-soaked Malakar out of Karaoke Eden, but know that his supreme sacrifice was for Idol's greater good: his dismissal represents the restoration of this grand competition's dignity, and with the distraction caused by the myriad conspiracy theories about the pitchy, pony-hawked incubus's continued success finally removed, it can again focus on its noble mission of deciding whether The Girl With No Neck, Bat Boy's Slightly More Handsome Older Brother, or The Guy Who's Hypnotized Simon Cowell Into Believing That Beat-Boxing Is Somehow Cool deserves to be temporarily installed atop the pop charts following the show's season finale.