Here's my last round of layoff horror stories: my own! So, let me just say, as I eeeease out of the office: About a month ago, worried for some reason I couldn't place...

Herman Rosenblat's whimsical concentration camp apple-tossing love story has been exposed as a lie—now, not only is the book cancelled and movie "rewritten" as fiction, but the already-published children's book is being pulled from shelves.

Robert Jaffe, a VP at Cohmad Securities who hooked up Palm Beach socialites to Bernie Madoff's awesome investment scheme, was a fashionable gentleman—"at one time named [high-end clothier] Louis Boston’s best customer," reports WWD. Now?

We love to ingest smoke the old-fashioned way: straight into our lungs. Second-hand smoke will do in a pinch. But third-hand smoke? What kind of smoking hysteria is that?

The maybe-fake Holocaust memoir we told you about—by Herman Rosenblat, who says he married the girl who tossed him apples over the fence when he was a boy in a concentration camp—has been cancelled.

Aspiring senator Caroline Kennedy might want to hire a vocal coach in addition to her PR help. Today's NYT headline reads "As a Candidate, Kennedy Is Eloquent but Elusive," but the accompanying audio clip says:

Chick lit is tired! We predict Xanax lit in 2009. In this week's Modern Love, we learn the perils of what happens when a breast-cancer patient cops an unauthorized Xanax in the waiting room before a biopsy.

It was almost a national nightmare: Obama wakes up to find himself powerless. Cheer up—the electricity in Oahu, Hawaii, where he's vacationing, should be restored by tomorrow. Plus, he got special treatment:

Uh-oh: it's the brand-new blog of Lindsay Lohan father/religious fanatic/jailed DUI-er Michael Lohan. Don't hope for gossip, however: "let me say that this website is NOT about Lindsay or Samantha."

Radar magazine died a particularly gruesome death in its third iteration: bought by AMI, its website was gutted and replaced by a terrible Zombie Radar. Now, print mag subscribers received one last insult via postcard:

Even Christmas was a disappointment this year. Can we move on to 2009 already? This week, it was the holi-daze!

It's amusing to watch retailers squirm and cry about disappointing holiday sales. What part of "we don't have money" don't they understand? That's what happens when you balance an economy on consumerism and debt!

Anything homemade or stolen, as predicted? Anything howlingly inappropriate? Did people totally cheap out this year and use the economy as an excuse?

Did anyone receive a new calendar for Christmas? (I got a puppy one.) Perhaps you received the Sarah Palin 2009 calendar—it's the #1 most popular "Office Product" on Amazon!

Sadly, suicides (and pet deaths) rise during the holidays. John Costelloe, the actor best known for playing Johnny Cakes on the Sopranos, was found dead in from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

Obama attended a private memorial service for the grandmother who helped raise him, Madelyn Dunham, in Hawaii. He and family members scattered her ashes in the Pacific. They weren't alone: the trusty paparazzi came along, too!

Catlike singer Earth Kitt has died at 81, of cancer. Born on a Southern cotton plantation, she got her break when she auditioned for a dance company on a dare.

That's it from us today. We're taking tomorrow off and will be back up and running on Friday. Have a wonderful Christmas/Fourth Fifth Day of Hannukah/Thursday.

When you get laid off, you have to give people a new way to get in touch with you. Now we're regretting that, unlike Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, we never became an "accidental Facebook slut."