Tom Mesereau tells us Robson is flat-out lying when he says this is not about money, saying, “Why call yourself a creditor if it’s not about money.”  TMZ broke the story … Robson has filed a belated creditor’s claim with the MJ Estate.

Mesereau says Robson was grilled by the prosecutor in the 2005 criminal case and was unwavering.  He says it’s simply unbelievable that the truth didn’t surface when Robson was on the stand.  Mesereau says Robson is an intelligent guy who has volunteered statements in and out of court, defending Michael.

As for the money … Mesereau tells us, “Everyone knows this Estate is well over a billion dollars and growing.”

For the record, it’s not at a billion bucks yet, but the Estate has made hundreds of millions of dollars and it will probably hit the billion dollar mark
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ATC has a close relationship with Karam, a rising young playwright. Artistic director PJ Paparelli co-wrote columbinus with Karam before arriving at ATC, and made his Chicago directing debut in 2008 with Karam’s Speech & Debate. ATC produced a revised and expanded version of columbinus earlier this year, which it now says will tour to Boston’s ArtsEmerson in September with O’Sullivan and Ravelson in the cast. A remount of Speech & Debate is set to open at ATC next week. Sons of the Prophet, about a Lebanese-American family, will run January 31–March 9.

ATC’s season will also include the perennial It’s a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play (November 22–December 9), a subscriber-only radio-play version of The Wizard of Oz (November 8–10) and the previously announced “revised and restored” production of the musical Hair (April 25–June 9). Paparelli will direct all four shows in the season.

Teatro Vista also announced its two-show season, its first in residence at Victory Gardens. Eddie Torres will helm the world premiere of White Tie Ball by Martín Zimmerman, who joins the company as a playwright in residence. Ensemble members Marvin Quijada and Gabriel Ruiz will appear in the piece about a pair of brothers (September 6–October 13).

In a departure from Teatro Vista’s tendency toward new plays, Ron OJ Parson will direct an all-Latino cast in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (April 11–May 18), featuring artistic director Ricardo Gutierrez as Eddie and company members Christina Nieves as Catherine and Sandra Marquez as Beatrice. Both shows will be mounted in Victory Gardens’s upstairs Richard Christiansen Theater.

Authorities have charged 75-year-old James Parham and 66-year-old Cheryl Chaney with possessing drug paraphernalia and maintaining a drug nuisance at the Vincente Tibbs Senior Citizen Building in Englewood.

Detective Capt. Timothy Torell tells The Record newspaper Parham also admitted providing prostitutes to some of his younger neighbors.

Police also charged 54-year-old Selma McDuffie, who has been suspended as a school crossing guard, with having a crack pipe.

Chief Arthur O’Keefe tells the newspaper residents were essentially prisoners in their own building.

The Englewood Housing Authority manages the 152-unit property, which serves the disabled and low-income residents who are 62 years and older.

In short: Dunder Mifflin was a disaster as a business. And that was the reality that haunted the show — the underlying truth that created a lot of the tension always lurking for the characters. The show never would have worked if it had been set in a fast-rising Internet start-up or even a stable industry.

There are many ways in which the Dunder Mifflin business model made no sense whatsoever. It is a retailer of office paper, which is the ultimate commodity, something that companies want to buy at the lowest possible cost. Yet Dunder Mifflin pairs this low-margin, commodity product with an expansive sales force. The Scranton office alone had four or five salespeople at any given time, calling on clients and working new leads.The entire business seems premised on the idea that a personal touch and better service will be enough to make up for prices that are higher than at Staples or Office Depot. It’s more likely that the office managers in charge of paper procurement at Scranton area businesses would be more annoyed by the constant harassment from their paper salesman than pleased by the enhanced service. If you’re selling a complex product essential to certain business operations, like software or key manufacturing equipment, it makes plenty of sense to have a large, talented staff of salespeople and customer relations experts. But this is just … paper. Dunder Mifflin sells a commodity, but it’s staffed like it sells something unique.
Then there’s the overhead. If Dunder Mifflin somehow found a way to make the paper work as a high-touch, sales-intensive business, it would still need to keep expenses as low as possible. But this company has a tremendous burden of white-collar staff who draw salaries but do not directly drive sales. It obviously has to employ a branch manager — Michael Scott, and later Andy Bernard — because somebody has to be in charge of the sales force. But almost every other position at the Scranton branch is hard to justify.
There are three people in the accounting department (Angela, Kevin and Oscar), but bookkeeping should instead be centralized across all Dunder Mifflin’s branches. Why does an office of maybe 20 people need its own human resources person? The answer, of course, is that the managers have been walking human resources disasters. But that’s a reason to get new managers, not to employ Toby Flenderson as a full-time HR guy. Kelly Kapoor technically was in charge of “customer service” all those years, but shouldn’t that be the salespeoples’ jobs? What in the world do Creed (in charge of quality control) and Meredith (supplier relations) do all day? Darryl Philbin was promoted from running the warehouse to a white-collar management job in season six, but it was never clear why they needed yet another manager in this small office. Pam managed to give herself the title “office administrator” in the seventh season, despite all those other people already in place to administer the office. And, somehow, this is the only office in America where callers still have to go through a full-time receptionist to reach someone, rather than call the person directly.
That’s not even the end of it. In the early seasons of the show, this regional paper company that sells a low-margin, commodity good in markets like Scranton, Utica and Buffalo, located its headquarters not in some anonymous office park in one of those cities, but in . . . Midtown Manhattan, home of some of the highest rents on earth!
Add to all that, Dunder Mifflin, of course, is in a declining industry. As Michael Scott’s memorable slogan put it, “Limitless paper, in a paperless world.” It would be one thing if all this staffing were designed to accommodate future growth, but there is no reason to think that there’s any growth to come.David Wallace, the chief financial officer of this monstrosity of a company, came across as one of the few competent leaders at Dunder Mifflin. But he runs an operation with staffing and overhead horribly ill-suited to its business model.
That is the greatest mystery of Dunder Mifflin. At a time when its business model would have, in reality, been collapsing upon itself, the company had remarkable stability. Most of the workers who appeared in the premier episode nine years ago were still there trudging along this week, ensuring that the people of Scranton could get their precious paper. In a modern workplace of constant churn, that may be the most unrealistic aspect of the whole show. But it is also what made this fictional company in a drab town in a boring business the stuff of great television for nine years.

All day, every day.

My favorite companies were the ones that didn’t enforce the California labor law that required a maddening 30-minute lunch break. Obligated to work 8 hours, I wanted to show up at 9 am and to leave precisely at 5 pm, maximizing my precious minutes of post-work, pre-sunset surfing.

But some supervisors forced me to take the 30-minutes of unpaid lunch, so I’d sit alone in a charmless cafeteria, reading Los Angeles Times articles about the Lakers’ latest playoff run and swearing to myself that I’d somehow find a way to avoid ending up like the middle-aged people around me. It wasn’t that I was bad at the work. Doing things quickly and competently was the best way to pass the time, and I always received positive evaluations. But before I ever had a fulfilling white-collar desk job, I couldn’t quite conceive of one, and assumed that everyone around me was also doing banal, mindless work. Spend a month filing forms in a windowless room, two weeks calling homeowners whose refinances didn’t go through because your employer messed up the paperwork, and a month in a wobbly chair with a cubicle mate who listens to Dr. Laura Schlesinger aloud. You’d dread a lifetime of office jobs too, even if deep down you knew that you were lucky to be employed, and not in a coal mine or a slaughterhouse.

Under fluorescent lights nothing looks as good as it ought to.

Today, I know lots of people at white-collar desk jobs who find their work meaningful, fulfilling, or remunerative enough that it isn’t quite unpleasant. I get lost in my own work in a way I couldn’t have imagined at 19 or 20. But I know from experience that a lot of U.S. office jobs are existentially terrible.

And I know I’m not alone in thinking so, for The Office came to America in 2005, and like the film Office Space before it, it immediately resonated with a broad cross-section of the U.S. mainstream who knew “that kind of job” — due to a past stint, if they were lucky, or because they faced something resembling it every day. Michael Scott, as played by Steve Carrell, may have been the comedic anchor of the show. But Jim Halpert was its everyman. Confronted with the crazy antics of the boss or the absurdity of a co-worker, he’d turn to the camera and raise his eyebrows as if to say, “Seriously?” With good humor, Jim survived each day at Dunder Mifflin. And if he could, so could we: even the worst job held out the opportunity for moments of levity, unexpected connections with co-workers, even love, if the right person came along.

On Thursday, when The Office broadcast its final episode, it had long since become something different. The office mates had ceased being mere co-workers. With time and proximity, they’d begun to interact like a family. Frustrations were tolerated out of loyalty and tender affection as much as collegiality. As that happened, it no longer seemed as if it would be so existentially awful to work at Dunder Mifflin. During some episodes, it almost seemed fun. There may be a poignant lesson in that arc: that ultimately, it’s people that matter and give life meaning. But it holds out a false promise for many office workers for whom finding a family at work is fantasy.

They need a reminder that they aren’t alone in thinking work sucks. Stanley has assured them of that every week for 9 years.

Who’ll remind them now?

Perhaps we can get the unlucky office workers of this moment through one more week by offering what the early seasons of The Office did: a glimpse into a world that resonates with their own.

Misery loves company.

So what’s the worst job that you’ve ever had, whether white collar or otherwise? What’s the most absurd office situation to which you’ve ever been party? Who is the most colorful character you’ve encountered at work? How did you make it through every day, or how are you still making it? Does it get better, like it did on The Office? Email your stories to conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com and I’ll publish the very best, without your name unless you ask me to include it.

I may even get in on the fun myself*.

Just know that it exists and that it was filmed sometime after August, and that you will never experience its grandeur. Despite the fact that it would definitely be the sexxxiest thing that has ever existed in the whole entire universe.

I will give you a moment to cry softly to yourself.

Stodden told E! Online that the tape is a “solo performance” and not even on her computers, saying “Hackers, don’t even go there cause you’ll find nothing.” You hear that, hackers who desperately want to feast their eyes upon the sheer majesty that is Courtney Stodden sexing herself? You will not find anything, so don’t even try.

As for what is on the tape? ”I don’t want to put any images in people’s mind; I’m gonna leave it up to you guys to think what you want,” says Stodden, wistfully imagining that most people are fond of visualizing her Plasticine face whilst they pleasure themselves.

When asked about her plans to pose for Playboy, Stodden said that she hasn’t sent them any pictures yet, but that she has posed recently for a UK magazine and believes it is possible to do naked pictures that are also classy and tasteful. Like this one, where she got nekkid with a fake corpse.

Last Winter break, a few months after “Thrift Shop” came out, RadioActive’s Varun Dhananjaya got a text from his friend Zhi. They’re both juniors at Interlake High School in Bellevue. Zhi asked: “Hey. Wanna go thrift shopping?”

Varun was surprised. He hadn’t painted Zhi as the thrift shopping type. Zhi could usually be found at school wearing an Abercrombie jacket and designer jeans. As it turned out, he had never been thrift shopping before.

“It was definitely inspired by the song ‘Thrift Shop’ by Macklemore,” said Zhi. “The music video looked really fun and I thought maybe I would try looking for some clothes to wear. Some of my grandparents’ clothes maybe.”

For the longest time, Varun remembers coming to school and seeing kids in expensive clothes from Nordstrom and Abercrombie and hearing them talk about how expensive their clothes were. Now he sees kids in unique sweaters, vests and scarves that they found thrift shopping, and he hears them bragging about how cheap their clothes are.

Listen to Varun’s report to find out how Eastside teens have been scouring thrift shops for the ridiculous outfits made famous by the “Thrift Shop” video — and why that rubs some thrift shop aficionados the wrong way. This spring, KUOW hosted an after-school workshop for high school students in partnership with Rainier Scholars at the 2100 Building in South Seattle. It was part of our youth radio program, RadioActive. Five youth producers spent 10 weeks learning what it means to be a radio journalist. They created powerful stories about subjects close to their hearts. Listen to RadioActive stories here and stay up-to-date with RadioActive on Facebook.

Today’s announcement means that search results on TheFind will be further personalized using the shopper’s online purchase history that is stored in their email account. When shoppers link their inbox to Slice – a tool that uses information from electronic receipts in your inbox to create fun and useful consumer applications and experiences – TheFind can now provide those users with even more relevant shopping searches using an ever more powerful set of data.

“Slice provides shoppers with a powerful tool that gives them more insight and control of their online purchases,” said Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind. “Through this partnership, consumers will see immediate results in the form of a shopping search experience that is instantly tailored to their own tastes and preferences. This unique, state-of-the-art, enhanced level of personalization with search as the centerpiece, has not been seen before in the world of shopping.”

“From the beginning, our goal at Slice has been to empower consumers by helping them make better use of their own shopping history,” said Scott Brady, CEO and founder of Slice. “This collaboration with TheFind lets people to make smarter buying decisions based on what they’ve done in the past, which makes the entire shopping experience a whole lot more intuitive.”

The integration is already underway and is expected to make its debut with the highly anticipated launch of TheFind’s new iPad shopping experience, scheduled for release later in Q2. Following the iPad app’s launch, TheFind plans to integrate Slice across all its web, mobile, and social properties.

About Slice
Slice uses information from electronic receipts in your inbox to create fun and useful consumer applications and experiences. Its popular flagship app, Slice, provides a simple way for consumers to manage all of their purchases, organize receipts, track shipping, take advantage of price adjustments and improve their shopping experiences. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Slice is privately held with funding from DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Michael Birch, FLOODGATE, Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt) and Rick Thompson. For more information, visi

About TheFind
TheFind’s patented search, browse and discovery technology is expanding the eCommerce landscape through social, mobile and tablet commerce innovations. With an index of more than 500,000 stores and 500 million products, TheFind is the largest shopping search engine in North America and the only comprehensive shopping experience. TheFind was founded in 2005, venture funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures and is a San Francisco and Silicon Valley-based company.