(Photo: Flickr/RobertScoble)

Morin needs a Mophie Path founder Dave Morin, he of popped collar fame, did a Q&A with Vanity Fair about his mobile habits. Among the gems revealed is the fact that Mr. Morin boasts a "custom-designed, one-of-a-kind bespoke app" that he built to communicate with his assistant. Guess gChat is too gauche?

But our favorite moment came when the Facebook mafioso revealed that he also has a newfound solution for the fact that his iPhone is always running out of battery. Instead of buying a battery pack or carrying around a charger like everyone else, Mr. Morin has opted to shlep around a second iPhone. "I have two iPhones, one for day and one for the night," he told VF. "When the day phone runs out, the night phone takes over. I never have to worry."

Cool. Cool cool.

NSFWCorp Big week for ex-TechCrunch writer and rabblerouser Paul Carr! He relaunched NSFWCorp and mailed 5,000 copies of a print edition of the site. He also scaled new heights in his commitment to transparency. Witness: Conflict NSFWCorp, a gallery of all of NSFWCorp's backers. Interested parties can buy a "room" in the House of Carr. Prices start at $3 and reach as steep as $1,400, with the top slot already filled by a generous $600,000 in funding from Vegas Tech Fund, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh's investment firm.

In a poetic twist on transparency in journalism, the first room at the top contains an illustration of the firm CrunchFund, including a rather svelte-looking Michael Arrington, a man famous for his conflicts of interest.

Gosling Parker Economically conscious walking Internet meme Ryan Gosling was recently spotted looking dashing in his Warby Parker frames. The company humble-bragged about the royal sighting on its Facebook page earlier this week noting that the frame is the "Preston." We share their exuberance. This is one piece of clothing we don't mind seeing him in.

Reboot that Ho? One hit wonder (#realtalk) Soulja Boy earned that coveted @Windows follow on Twitter. He tweeted "oh hey windows look at my be cool pic," along with a screenshot of the golden moment. What's next? A commercial with Soulja waxing poetically about his swaggy Windows-powered phone?

https://twitter.com/souljaboy/status/317682776788856833/

Living on the Edge On his Tumblr today, LivingSocial cofounder and CTO Aaron Batalion announced that he’s leaving the company.

"After much soul searching, I have decided to leave LivingSocial to pursue some new ideas. No new adventure to announce yet, just a urge to go create… that there is more to do."

That’s probably a hard pill to swallow for investors who ploughed $100 million into the company last month. Guess that makes tomorrow Schadenfreude Saturday for the roughly 400 staffers the company laid off last November.

(Photo: NSFW Corp)

In case you haven't been keeping up with the antics of rapscallion writer Paul Carr since he dropped that resignation bomb on TechCrunch last year, here's a little refresher: After accusing his former editor of being a man without hap, Mr. Carr migrated across the tech blogosphere to PandoDaily, where he and his charming British accent cohost a video series called "Why Isn't This News?" with the ever-righteous Sarah Lacy.

A few months ago, Mr. Carr did one better than just questioning others' news judgement. He founded his own online magazine: NSFW Corp. Mr. Carr raised a mid-six-figure seed round to launch the site, which describes itself as "the future of journalism, with jokes."

"Everyone says they want to cover stories that aren't being covered," Mr. Carr told Betabeat when asked about NSFW's mission. "We want to cover stories that are probably being quite widely covered, but are just not being covered that well. So things like the Iraq War. It's not like no one heard the war is going on. There's a lot of opinion in Blog Land, but there aren't that many people that know what the fuck they're talking about. So I think the big thing for us is to know what the fuck we're talking about."

Mr. Carr seems to have learned a little something about monetization from covering starry-eyed startups for all those years. Acerbic daily dispatches from the site's growing editorial staff sit behind a $3/month paywall. Mr. Carr told Betabeat that NSFW has already picked up 3,000 subscribers since July, who pay for the privilege of reading dogged journalists like Mark Ames, who co-edited the gonzo muckraking paper The eXile with Matt "Vampire Squid" Taibbi.

(Mr. Ames, who is helming NSFW's election coverage from Salt Lake City, recently outed Planet Money's Adam Davidson for some ethically murky coverage related to the show's corporate sponsor, financial conglomerate GMAC--now Ally Financial.)

Yesterday and today, Mr. Carr announced a number of other notable hires. Military columnist Gary Brecher, better known as "The War Nerd," will come out of retirement to pen a regular column for NSFW. Brecher is actually a pseudonym for author and essayist Dr. John Dolan. The "War Nerd" column was first launched in The eXile, where "he predicted that the Iraq War would go badly over time—and was vindicated, much to his neocon detractors’ grief," Mr. Ames writes in an introductory blog post, describing the style of the column as "cheerful nihilism."

"He's very funny as well," said Mr. Carr said of Mr. Dolan. "So he manages to take these very often harrowing and grotesque sort of situations and turn them into very very readable and interesting copy. The first column he's doing for us is basically--since he's been away for a few years--a kind of wrap up of where we are with all of America's various wars. It takes you through Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Pakistan region and also to Syria," he explained, adding, "It's just very readable even for those who have no real interest or appreciation for the minutiae of foreign policy. You come out of the other end feeling like you're a genius."

Leigh Cowart and James Kotecki, who have already been contributing to NSFW, were also promoted to full-time editorial roles. Mr. Kotecki is now a Political Correspondent, and Ms. Cowart is the magazine's Science and Sex editor.

Mr. Carr cited Mr. Kotecki's pieces for NSFW covering the political conventions as another example of improving on lackluster or limpid reporting. The young Mr. Kotecki is perhaps best known as the kid who got convinced Ron Paul (among other political figures) to submit to an in-person interview from his Georgetown University dorm room.

"Everybody, everybody was at the conventions," said Mr. Carr. "David Carr wrote a great column in the [New York] Times where he interviewed reality TV producers and said, 'How could you make the coverage of these conventions interesting?' And the producer from 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' said: I would just find the youngest kid you could find who was of legal drinking age and say, take me the parties. It was sort of irritating because we'd already decided that was our strategy."

NSFW sent Mr. Kotecki to cover "the weird fucked up stuff," that happens around the main event, Mr. Carr explained. "He spent one day just driving around getting stoned with this guy who used to be Glenn Beck's radio cohost. James is not at home with smoking weed in a pickup truck with Glenn Beck's cohost," he explained with a laugh, "but James is like, 'No I'm a journalist, I have to do this.'"

It's the same impulse that prompted Mr. Ames to opt for Salt Lake City over Washington D.C. to cover the election. "He was like, 'No, I want to go to Mormon country. I want to live in Salt Lake City.' If Romney wins, then suddenly Salt Lake City--everybody's going to be in it. But right now it's just Mark in the car he just bought, driving around meeting weird people. He's getting crazy amazing stories because no one's on the lockdown. No one has heard of NSFW in Salt Lake City."

To add the radical atmosphere, NSFW also publishes "Desknotes" alongside many of its pieces, which offers the readers candid insight into the back-and-forth of the writing process, starting with the pitch.

All of this sounded awfully high-minded for a former tech blogger, especially during such a self-congratulatory week for the industry. Shouldn't he be disrupting something or other at the TechCrunch conference? "I'm kind of giving the conference a bit of a wide berth," said Mr. Carr, who does some tech writing for NSFW, but is careful not to limit the site's audience to just the tech world. "I always find it a bit weird. It's like let it go, you don't work there anymore. I just can't see the appeal of walking around the thing and people going, 'Oh hey, you used to work here, but you don't now and yet you're still here.'"

Ms. Hornstein (Photo: Facebook)

This week, the world was introduced to Shirley Hornstein: an ersatz entrepreneur who Photoshopped and name-dropped her way through Silicon Valley. For at least a year and a half, Ms. Hornstein has been trading on flimsily fabricated connections to powerful tech investors, startups, and celebrities--always depending, as TechCrunch first reported, on the optimism of strangers.

"She told people she had the authority to approve up to a $1 million investment from Founders Fund. That was her line," an investor from Los Angeles who recently moved to San Francisco told Betabeat, recounting the time Ms. Hornstein cajoled a pair of young entrepreneurs into pitching her on a Saturday, convincing them on Sunday that she had already heard back from the board with good news.

The fact that Ms. Hornstein's roommate was TechCrunch community manager Elin Blesener also helped "legitimize her," the same investor added.

For more credible (or at least Google-able) proof of her position in the tech world, there was this blog post Ms. Hornstein wrote on Women 2.0, which has since been deleted, touting her connections to Founders Fund and Dropbox. It opened with an anecdote about that time she got angel investing advice from Marissa Mayer.

Image doctored by Ms. Hornstein (top), Original image (Photo: TechCrunch)

As part of yesterday's exposé, TechCrunch revealed that Founders Fund filed a legal complaint against Ms. Hornstein in December for her "efforts to improperly trade in on Founders Fund's good name and reputation," leveraging, in particular, a made-up friendship with Sean Parker.

The startup world's collective schadenfreude at Ms. Hornstein's unstable nest of lies could be chalked up to a guilty conscience. "Seems like everyone is besties with Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley," Warby Parker's Lane Wood wrote in defense of Ms. Hornstein. "Someone went to the same party, took a photo and regaled their friends about how 'down to earth' person X was or how Person Y is just as much of an ass as all the rumors say."

Betabeat has spoken to multiple sources, however, who say that Ms. Hornstein's deceptions may have been more egregious than exaggerating her social status or professional network. They allege that Ms. Hornstein is also responsible for repeated credit card theft. The incidents occurred both in her personal life and at at least one startup where she was employed.

We obtained screenshots (posted below) of receipts for two airplane tickets and a monthly BART pass, as well as gChats and emails from former friends of Ms. Hornstein's, all related to fraudulent charges worth thousands of dollars that she made by allegedly stealing her friend's credit card numbers.

That alleged theft first occurred during a trip to Vegas, where Ms. Hornstein also accumulated other debts she has yet to repay, including the cost of a hotel room, as well as a last minute ticket to a Cirque du Soleil show for former TechCrunch writer Paul Carr. Ms. Hornstein alleged the two were dating, which is patently false. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Carr never materialized at the show. He would turn out to be the second bold-faced name Ms. Hornstein claimed to be involved with. First, she told acquaintances she was engaged to NHL player Ryane Clowe, with her public tweets to the star confusing even sports fans on niche hockey forums.

Betabeat also spoke to a reputable source within the Silicon Valley tech community, who alleged that Ms. Hornstein committed a similar theft--using a company credit card, this time--to steal thousands of dollars from her employer. That source, who only spoke under condition of anonymity, did not want to name the company, but based on the timing of the theft, we were able to confirm that the incident happened at Giftiki, a small startup that lets you pool your money to buy better gifts, which was acquired by LaunchRock earlier this month.

"[Ms. Hornstein] got access to company credit cards and actually bought things at charity auctions in the thousands of dollars," said the source. As a marketing consultant, "she was given the credit card to buy some refreshments and so forth because they were doing an event. She retained the credit card information and used it on her own behalf." The company and its investors threatened to prosecute Ms. Hornstein if they weren't repaid, but Ms. Hornstein repaid the debt. Her employment was subsequently terminated. "I can corroborate the fact that she was stealing," the source added.

After Ms. Hornstein left, the startup still declined to prosecute for fear that it would reflect poorly on Giftiki, perhaps assuming that once caught, she would be too scared to try again. "The problem," said the source, "is that she just raised her head somewhere else and created more problems."

Ms. Hornstein did not respond to repeated requests for interviews from Betabeat. But the more closely you look at her fragile "house of cards," as one source put it, the more it seems to evoke the familiar tropes of Startupland, distorted through a funhouse mirror.

Self-described builders, doers, and world-changers make skepticism a dirty word if you're "one of us." Safe inside the virtuous bubble, everyone is willing to lend a hand, only latching on to Ms. Hornstein seemed to drag companies down. Rubbing elbows with newly-minted millionaires fosters a sense of possibility and promise, yes, but also pressure to match that overnight success or be left behind. In a rapidly striating sector, no one wants to look like they're on the bottom rung.

Giftiki was operating out of RocketSpace, a coworking spot in San Francisco that also temporarily housed Zaarly, a peer-to-peer marketplace app based in Kansas City. Prior to working at Giftiki, Ms. Hornstein worked at Zaarly as a marketing consultant. (Although she gave herself a promotion to "head of operations and community," in that since deleted Women 2.0 post.) The source said someone from Zaarly tried to warn Giftiki about Ms. Hornstein, but Zaarly cofounder Eric Koester said he had not heard anything to that effect.

"She was with us for 51 days," Mr. Koester said, adding that no fraud occurred during her brief tenure. "It wasn't a long stint and there was nothing mischievous to report other than it wasn't a good fit."

Ms. Hornstein, sources said, invariably brought up her Founders Fund connection within a few minutes of meeting someone. Often, she also mentioned being one of the first employees at Dropbox, the popular cloud storage service. Nearly every source we spoke to mentioned the longstanding rumor in Silicon Valley that Ms. Hornstein also allegedly stole from Dropbox during her time there. In the comments section on TechCrunch's post, Jose Miguel Castello, owner of Don't Retail, wrote:

"Hopefully one of Dropbox's employees in the know will share the story about how Shirley used Dropbox's paypal account to pay for several thousand dollars of her own expenses?"

However, we were unable to track down any evidence to support that claim and Dropbox has not responded to inquiries from Betabeat.

Ms. Hornstein, her friends said, employed the same tactics she used to dupe startups in her personal life--promising parties at Sean Parker's house or Founders Fund's ear for a potential idea. Lily Himmelsbach, director of operations at Let's Gift It, a gifting startup based in New York, first met Ms. Hornstein at a party in the East Village. The two later overlapped at Zaarly.

During a business trip for Zaarly in Kansas City, Ms. Hornstein went through the elaborate ruse of breaking up with Mr. Clowe--the NHL star, whose giant engagement ring she had been wearing--crying on the phone in her hotel room for hours. As Ms. Himmelsbach later learned, there was no one on the other end. "I think she's a good and well-intentioned person, but she's deeply troubled and needs to get help," Ms. Himmelsbach said.

The investor from Los Angeles, who mentioned Ms. Hornstein's standard $1 million Founders Fund line, said he first realized "Shirls" wasn't who she said she was during an elevator ride up to a party at the San Francisco home of a mid-level Google employee. Ms. Hornstein went on and on about Mr. Clowe, not realizing that the NHL player was married engaged to and had a child with the investor's ex-girlfriend.

Unfortunately for Ms. Himmelsbach, she and a group of friends did not realize the extent of Ms. Hornstein's dissembling until that trip to Las Vegas. Ms. Hornstein told the group that she would surprise them by dropping in on their vacation. Once Ms. Hornstein arrived, however she claimed the hotel wouldn't let her book a room with a foreign credit card. (Ms. Hornstein had identified herself as a German national.) The group let her stay in an extra room they had booked, with the promise that she would pay them back.

The day after that Cirque du Soleil show, Ms. Himmelsbach returned to her room to a missing credit card and a note from Ms. Hornstein saying she had to rush back to San Francisco for an emergency board meeting. When Ms. Himmelsbach checked the charges on her card from Las Vegas, there was a purchase for a monthly BART card in San Francisco made near the airport. Michael Herzog, who was also on the Las Vegas trip, found an even more troubling charge on his corporate card, which he still possessed: a ticket back to San Francisco, purchased in Ms. Hornstein's name. Her landing time coincided with the purchase of the metro card.

When Ms. Hornstein was asked about the missing credit card via gChat (a portion of that conversation is screencapped below), she responded, "shit I hope it wasn't in my stuff somehow," later adding, "but I did somehow have michael's id that next day so i dunno haha."

Last October, Ms. Hornstein announced a trip to New York City via Facebook. Sure enough, there was another flight charge on Mr. Herzog's card, this time to New York, booked in Ms. Hornstein's name. (He did not cancel the card because of the number of other services it was already synched up with.) After being confronted, Ms. Hornstein confessed to the theft, but still has not paid back the debt or responded to the email (below).

gChat conversation between Ms. Hornstein and Ms. Himmelsbach

BART receipt via Ms. Himmelsbach

Email from Mr. Herzog to Ms. Hornstein

Despite these alleged thefts, Ms. Hornstein's record is relatively clean, although not spotless. Running Ms. Hornstein's name through the civil records of the California Superior Court in San Francisco turns up three results: the Founder's Fund suit, which TechCrunch has covered in detail, as well as two other cases.

One is a collections suit, filed in March 2011. It's fairly straightforward, alleging that Ms. Hornstein failed to pay off an $1,869.43 debt on a Bank of America credit card. In October, the court ruled that Ms. Hornstein must pay up, but the trail goes cold in December 2011 after the collections agency is serve her with a summons.

The small claims complaint is similarly penny-ante in scale, but perhaps more indicative of what was to come. On October 28, 2009, a Lisa Di Santo filed suit against Ms. Hornstein, accusing her of breaking a contract to sublease her apartment to Ms. Di Santo--then refusing to return $1,400 in pre-paid rent. In the complaint, she alleges:

"Shirley broke our contract and has refused to refund the rent money that i paid to her, up front, in the amount of $1,400.00. Cornelia is her mother, who is the cosigner on her lease , with whom i have had numerous conversations with. My first communication with Shirley was 8/26/09 and the last time I heard from her was 9/26/09."

In February 2010, the court ultimately ruled in Ms. Di Santo's favor. A source who asked for anonymity told Betabeat Ms. Hornstein once said, "My parents are really worried and my mom wants me to come home."

Why, we asked Ms. Himmelsbach, did she think Ms. Hornstein targeted the tech sector? "Maybe because it's not that hard to get into and once you're in, it's pretty easy to climb the social ladder," she responded. "Unfortunately she wasn't building anything except a fake product, which was her life."

Ms. Himmelsbach pointed out that the startup sector is also remarkably collaborative. "I've worked in a couple different industries and I've never met people who are so willing to lend a hand, saying, 'Grab a cup of coffee, let's go talk.' It can be a total stranger. I think everyone is open and maybe that's to our disadvantage. I mean it's just kind of a wake up call to go, hmm, who else is as full of shit as this @Shirls character."

Kelly Faircloth contributed reporting to this article.

We will continue to pursue this story as it develops, so please reach us by email with any information: tips@betabeat.com.

A Space Age airline with a Dark Ages reservation system.

Update at the bottom with a statement from Virgin America.

We reported on Virgin America's technical difficulties back in November, after a switch to a new reservation system left some users out on the tarmac. Customers encountered weird glitches when they tried to view their accounts or book a flight, and the customer service line was overwhelmed with inquiries. At the time, the problems had been ongoing for a month. And we thought that was bad. Virgin America customers are still running into glitches three months later.

PandoDaily's Paul Carr wrote about it. Random other people with blogs wrote about it. Even though Virgin Atlantic America (see disambiguation) told Mr. Carr the service would be fixed by mid-February (first week in December was what they told us), customers are still complaining of errors.

"The cool music in your airline restrooms and purple lighting are no compensation for poor management," writes S. Neil Vineberg, a San Francisco marketer who claimed in February that he has not been receiving confirmations by email and is told wait times are 58 minutes to 1 hour and 14 minutes when he calls customer service.

Ironically, yesterday saw the announcement of Virgin Digital Help, a new personal tech support service in the U.S. under the Virgin umbrella brand for "web and email issues, computers, smartphones, viruses– anything digital." Prices range from $30 per fix to $15 per month.

"We love our digital lifestyles, but sometimes the stress of dealing with technology that is confusing or failure-prone is just too much," says a press release. "That’s why Virgin... announced a new service, Virgin Digital Help, to support the growing number of US consumers who feel overwhelmed by the ‘digital stress’ associated with their increasingly complex digital lifestyles."

Perhaps Virgin Digital Help can help the next time you try to book a flight and getting booted out halfway through the process. Tell them you're experiencing some acute digital stress.

UPDATE, 6:00 p.m.: Virgin America sent this statement:

We are a U.S. owned and operated airline and Virgin Group is a minority investor -- so we have no direct affiliation with the newly launched digital help company (or with Virgin Atlantic).

Although the majority of issues are now resolved and our website is operating at normal capacity, as you note, a sub-set of users continued to experience web issues related to our reservations switch into February, mainly related to issues with Elevate account logins. We currently have an average 5 minute hold time on our main reservations number. As you may recall, during the reservations switch in the fall we waived all change fees and offered 5000 Elevate points (the equivalent of a free flight) by way of further apology to those guests most affected. In addition, we continued to reach out on an individual basis to guests with refunds, credit files and point credits depending on the issues experienced.

She notes further that "reservations systems switches are a one-time occurrence for most airlines, involving the knife-edge migration of millions of records during live operations. For past examples, see: http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/cutover-nightmare-the-challenge-of-it-transitions-343571/ Most recently, United initiated a similar switch this month, see: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/05/uk-united-idUSLNE82401120120305."

*Refresh, refresh, refresh.*

Those of you who hopped on a plane without Wifi Friday evening can be forgiven for not keeping track of what AllThingsD's Kara Swisher described as "pure twaddle wrapped in ridonkulous grandstanding." First came TechCrunch writer Paul Carr's lively public resignation letter. That was followed by newly-crowned TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld's equally public resignation acceptance. And then, to pile it on, TechCrunch writer MG Siegeler offered a semi-private anti-Huffington IED because hey, it's no fun if you can't play too.

Digg's Kevin Rose compared all the adolescent drama to "a LiveJournal page," so put on some emo jams and join us, won't you, as we flip through the pages of TechCrunch's Burn Book. And, yes, for the most part, you'll find it at the same URL where the professional tech blog used to be.

I BLAME ERICK

When Betabeat last left the "Housebabies of Silicon Valley"--nothing brings out Ms. Swisher's playful side more than a moving target, apparently--Mr. Carr had just j'accused! Mr. Schonfeld of cutting "a side deal with Huffington to guarantee him the top job once Mike was gone," rather than "making a stand for the site's editorial independence from The Huffington Post."

Considering the fact that Mr. Carr published his missive attacking Mr. Schonfeld, exposing internal power struggles, and potentially damaging the future of TechCrunch on TechCrunch, once again, we're baffled by how Mr. Carr defines "editorial independence," except as letting Michael Arrington get exactly what he wants all the time--in this case: picking his successor. "The irony is that had Erick stayed strong for just a few days, he’d would have been appointed interim editor anyway, with Mike’s blessing," writes Mr. Carr, before changing his tune a few paragraphs later, "The notion that a Silicon Valley blog should be run by a guy in New York is just ludicrous."

Unfortunately, Mr. Carr buries perhaps the most disturbing revelation:

Not three days after his appointment, Erick made his first ethics disclosure as TC’s new editor — insisting that Mike had played no part in the selection of TechCrunch Disrupt finalists. Bluntly put, that was not true — as Mike had to clarify in the comments…

“Erick… Please be careful making statements on my behalf. And remember that reader trust is what matters. You shouldn’t say “he was not involved in the final selection of these companies” just because it sounds nice. Since it isn’t true, you shouldn’t say it at all.”

One of these two men is your new ethical champion, Arianna. The other one is the guy you fired.

Considering the number of startups that hype "We came from TechCrunch Disrupt" as part of their origin myth, we fail to see how the guy that influenced a competition, but disclosed it gets crowned the ethical winner. Sorry folks, no champions of reader trust here.

Some viewers took umbrage at the high-minded Hunter S. Thompson epigraph that led Mr. Carr's post. On TechCrunch writer Robin Wauter's blog (yes, Mr. Wauters too dipped a toe into the morass, if only to shake off the slime) an anonymous commenter wrote under the name "r8ndom":

"Do readers actually pay attention to bylines? I see all these adjectives being thrown, like "phenomenal" and "amazing", like it was Ernest freaking Hemingway writing, but to me all articles look the same - a paragraph on some company, couple of paragraphs on what they do, obligatory screenshot, and a wrap-up clarifying who the investor is and where the founders came from."

Betabeat begs to differ in this instance. Consider, if you will, Mr. Carr's jaunty usage of the word "hap" to skewer Mr. Schonfeld:

"He’s just — what’s the word? — hapless. He is a man utterly devoid of ‘hap’. Hating him for being expertly played by Arianna Huffington is like hating a baby for crying on a long-haul flight. He doesn’t understand why people are mad at him, he just wants to be fed."

I BLAME PAUL

It may strike some as odd that Mr. Schonfeld felt obligated to publish his acceptance of Mr. Carr's resignation letter on TechCrunch. But let's remember, people, this is a company where an employee that has been fired threatened to quit by sending a ransom letter, so it's probably crucial to make someone's employment status clear.

Mr. Schonfeld dismissed Mr. Carr's allegations as the delusional ramblings of a wandering freelancer and claimed himself champion on "editorial independence":

"Paul’s resignation post reads like the brave stand of a man of principle. But the truth is that Paul doesn’t really know what he is talking about. And he certainly doesn’t speak for TechCrunch. He is not even a full-time employee. I tried to reach out to him and was hoping to have an honest conversation about his future (or lack thereof) at TechCrunch. Instead, he blindsided me with his post by publishing it as I was boarding a plane."

Then he explained his decision not to take down Mr. Carr's post:

At any other publication, Paul would have been fired long ago. And his post would be taken down. But I will let it stand. When Paul was hired, he was promised that he could write anything and it would not be censored, even if it was disparaging to TechCrunch. I will still honor that agreement. Paul likes to groan a lot about TechCrunch’s supposed loss of editorial independence. Yet he cannot point to one instance where he was blocked from saying what he believes on TechCrunch, and I am not going to start to do that now.

Somehow, this made TechCrunch commenters very angry as they imagined how Saint Arrington would have done it differently. Sadly, Mr. Schonfeld lost the high road by calling Mr. Carr a "misinformed coward" on Twitter for posting while he was about to board a plane. But no one paid attention to the "coward" part for long as the whole discussion devolved into the strength of Mr. Schonfeld's Wifi signal considering he tweeted aboard the same flight.

As TechCrunch top commenter Charlie Joslin wrote, "I assume these people have each other's emails and phone numbers so this could be easily solved that way." One would think, Charlie, one would think.

I BLAME ARIANNA

It was Saturday by the time MG Siegler decided to pile on. Mr. Siegler titled the post on his Tumblr "What Needs to be Said." On Twitter, Ms. Swisher edited the headline to, "What Needs to Be Said if You're the Emperor of Me-Me-And-Also-Me!" Adding, "FYI, Rupe doesn't call us much, cuz we're adults" in response to Mr. Siegler's nagging curiosity over why AOL hasn't contacted him personally about the matter.

"Also the truth: AOL has not reached out to me once in this entire situation. You’d think they might care about something like that. Evidently, they don’t. I’m not losing any sleep over it, but it’s curious."

"Obviously not, right? I mean obviously he hasn’t given it a second thought about why AOL hasn’t called him, which is why he’s writing about it," explained business writer Dan Lyons.

After giving his one-word verdicts on his colleague's version of events, "I found Paul’s post tactless. And I found Erick’s response inappropriate," Mr. Siegler unmasked the real enemy, pointing the j'accuse finger further up the food chain at Ms. Huffington:

"There is exactly one person to blame for all of this — and her name is not Erick."

Mr. Siegler also managed to reassure concerned readers about TechCrunch's future . . . by comparing it to banks with toxic assets:

"But TechCrunch is also too big to fail. One way or another, it will live on. Try as hard as AOL might, they can’t totally fuck it up. That’s just the truth."

I BLAME SHAKESPEARE

In a brilliant little takedown, Mr. Lyons wonders if these dudes haven't been watching too much Henry V:

"M.G. also reassures his readers that “no matter what happens,” he’ll be fine. Maybe so, but the worlds of technology and journalism will never be the same! How fitting it is for this band of courageous hacks to go out in a blaze of glory. Burn with fury, oh poets of the Valley! Rage against the dying of the light! Long after you are gone the world will remember that once — yes, once, in a different time — there lived men like you, brave giants who strode the earth with swagger and fuck-you attitude, who feared not the wrath of their corporate overlords, who turned defiant faces upward and bit — yes, bit, with sharpened teeth — the hand that fed them, who stood loyal beside their King and Leader and refused to break ranks when surrounded by the enemy, vowing instead to fight to their last breath.

This — yes, this! This glory, this wonder! This was Camelot! This, my friends, was TechCrunch."

Mr. Carr

Flabbergasts! New York-based TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld, newly-named editor in chief of the site, has been accused. In a glorious resignation post, TechCrunch writer Paul Carr pointed a finger at the New Yorker: "While Heather, Mike and other senior editorial staffers were making a stand for the site’s editorial independence from The Huffington Post, Erick cut a side deal with Huffington to guarantee him the top job once Mike was gone."

This information came from Mr. Arrington "and was later corroborated by more than one other person close to the situation," Mr. Carr told Betabeat by email. "I don't really want to say much more than that."

Mr. Schonfeld appears to be on an airplane at the moment and did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Mr. Carr let loose the dirt on Mr. Schonfeld and AOL content overlord Arianna Huffington in his farewell post.

"The curious thing is that Erick knew everyone at TechCrunch supported him, at least for the interim role. And yet when Arianna called, he answered. Mike and I spoke at the time and he gave me his take on the deal: “at the point Erick began negotiating with Arianna instead of standing firm with the rest of us, he became nothing more that Arianna’s pet. All hope for independence with him at the lead became lost”. (Mike asked me to keep our conversations confidential until the situation was resolved.)"

...

"In this situation, though, I think [Ms. Huffington] screwed up badly by allowing her growing personal animosity towards Mike — and, let’s be clear, this fight was almost entirely personal — to rule her head, ejecting Mike completely from the company he founded and installing his polar opposite as a puppet editor."

...

"I really can’t over-emphasize how much Mike, as an editor, made writers feel like he had their back."

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"Do I have another job already lined up? The answer is no. Once I hit 'publish', I’ll be without a regular writing gig for the first time in five years. This is both terrifying and exciting in equal measure. Sometimes you just have to hurl yourself off the cliff and see if anyone tries to catch you."

We're really gone and done it now!

Woo boy. If our head wasn't spinning, this might actually be funny. It's been less than 24 hours since Fortune or the New York Times reported (to keep things lively, there's even some debate around who broke the news) that Michael Arrington would be launching a $20 million venture capital and almost every player involved has offered conflicting stories about how they expect this to unfold, including, earlier this afternoon, one of TechCrunch's own bloggers.

Will Mr. Arrington still be able to write about startups now that he has an financial inventive to help them succeed? Is blogging even journalism? Was it a good idea to name your VC fund after your news outlets about startups? Depends on who you ask!

AOLHUFFPOINGTON SPOKESPEOPLE

The first official word on what Mr. Arrington's new role would be came last night from Mario Ruiz, a spokesperson for the Huffington Post Media Group who told various outlets that Mr. Arrington would no longer have an editorial role at TechCrunch, but that he would still contribute as an unpaid blogger. (Apparently AOL is willing to give him a mouthpiece to potentially promote his investments, but they've drawn the line at paying him for it. Good to know.) “He will continue to write, but his editorial role is over,” Mr. Ruiz told the New York Times.

AOL spokeswoman and SVP Maureen Sullivan, who reports directly to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, offered a very different perspective, which might be why Fortune's Dan Primack wondered if Mr. Ruiz might "currently be in a time out." Ms. Sullivan told the Times today:

“Michael’s role has changed. He now works within AOL Ventures. He’s becoming a professional investor. He is no longer involved in editorial." It didn’t change overnight,” Ms. Sullivan added. “It’s just very important to be really clear about the exact specifics.”

Sadly, however, the specifics are still in flux. Ms. Sullivan told AllThingsD's Peter Kafka that Mr. Arrington's relationship with TechCrunch is "still to be determined, and it’s important to make sure that Arianna [Huffington] is super comfortable with that relationship … I think that everyone is going to be very careful that there isn’t influence on coverage.”  Later she called Mr. Kafka back to offer more clarity, such as it were, saying, “Michael is now a professional investor working for AOL. He will have no editorial control.”

By Business Insider's account, Ms. Sullivan also said that AOL is not comfortable with the notion that CrunchFund would use TechCrunch as an way to access deal flow.

CRUNCHFUND INVESTORS

Mr. Kafka wonders if, perhaps, investors who plunked down money in a fund named after the blog were hoping to hear something different regarding deal flow:

"Hear that, CrunchFund investors? The guy you are handing $20 million to won’t be able to influence the way TechCrunch interacts with your companies, your investments and your potential investments. Is that what you signed on for?

According to Reid Hoffman of Greylock, one of CrunchFund's investors, in fact, he signed up for something quite different, telling Kara Swisher:

“Techcrunch will get some real deal flow from entrepreneurs that we would otherwise not see, because they have established a prominent position as the SV/Tech industry information feed. As many tech entrepreneurs read it — both within Silicon Valley and globally — and view the information news feed to be their target for announcing themselves to the world, Crunchfund will have access to deal flow to these diverse and early stage companies. Some of these companies will be the kind of early stage companies with billion-dollar potential that Greylockinvests in.”

Fortune's Dan Primack also smells bullshit, tweeting, "AOL is full of crap. Using TC as access point for dealflow was always part of crunchfund biz prop, which aol knew about for a while." Mr. Primack also pointed out, via Twitter, "Worth noting that Crunchfund was already scouting for deals before all this broke yesterday, in partnership of sorts w/ AOL Ventures."

MICHAEL ARRINGTON

Mr. Arrington didn't tow the company line when he went back into investing this April (forcing AOL to issue him an exemption to the employee code of conduct) and he's not towing it again. The noted, um, let's say iconoclast, told the Times that his new title will be TechCrunch's founding editor and writer, contradicting both claims that he won't have an editorial role and that he's now operating under AOL Ventures. Then he added this little gem:

“I am TechCrunch and TechCrunch is me. There’s no way around it.”

TIM ARMSTRONG

Mr. Armstrong, CEO of AOL, also offered a different take on things that his own people. Yesterday, he told the Times that TechCrunch would hire a new managing editor, but that Mr. Arrington would (a) still be involved with the blog and (b) that he would report to Arianna Huffington, whose current title is editor-in-chief and president  of The Huffington Post Media Group. EIC certainly sounds editorial to us, but Mr. Armstrong seemed to indicate that TechCrunch's exceptionalism gave them yet another pass, telling the Times' Claire Cain Miller yesterday,

“TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards. We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch, which is different but is transparent about it.”

Mr. Armstrong also made a distinction between AOL Ventures and CrunchFund, claiming that they would operate separately. As for this incredibly muddy ethical ground, Mr. Armstrong said Ms. Huffington was fine with it, adding that together she and Mr. Arrington had worked on standards (no doubt exceptional ones) for the site.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

You're still with us? Oh, good. Here's where it gets comical.Ms. Huffington, currently traveling in Brazil, still found the time to throw another wrench in things. She told David Carr that Mr. Arrington is "no longer on AOL's editorial payroll and would have no editorial role," says the Times. Perhaps that's why Mr. Arrington, who may or may not still be working under her, said he wait to hear more before offering a statement:

“I have no idea what AOL’s final position on this will be,” he said. “I look forward to hearing it. I’ll respond once Arianna has made her last statement.”

TECHCRUNCH BLOGGER PAUL CARR

That leaves TechCrunch employees who will neither benefit from the CrunchFund possible windfall, but nonetheless have to deal with the ethical black mark on their coverage. Mr. Carr's response to Mr. Armstrong's notion that TechCrunch operates outside traditional journalistic standards? "For. Fuck’s. Sake."

"Apparently the business side of AOL sees absolutely no ethical problem with a TechCrunch-affiliated fund. TechCrunch, after all, is a well-respected brand in the tech community and, as such, it will attract some pretty amazing deal-flow and, as demonstrated by the list of partners involved, some high profile investors. From AOL’s point of view, calling it anything else would be a waste of a business opportunity. Far from wanting to ring-fence Mike’s investment activities from TechCrunch’s editorial output, Armstrong and others are actively encouraging the conflation of the two."

The ending to this meandering tale? TBD.