Gadabout, the Details mag blog for the modern man-about-town, says Facebook is for pansies in general, but if you’re “pokin'” you’re dead to them:

In a few short years, Facebook has leaked out of the college dormitory like some rare tropical disease and has begun infecting grown men in disturbingly vast numbers. The fastest-growing demographic among Facebook’s 64 million users is those over 25. More than half of MySpace’s 110 million users are older than 35. The hosts, once infected, exhibit a tendency to “superpoke” each other, hyperventilate over friend counts, and share their thoughts about the latest episode of The Hills with hundreds of near strangers — behavior normally associated with teenage girls, not men in the middle of their fourth decade. Somewhere tonight, a man with a successful white-collar career and a family who needs his attention will log on to his MacBook to see who “trout-slapped” him and left him a “zombie hug” — hypnotized by the soft glow of the LCD screen into thinking his online popularity has some kind of bearing on his life.

My problem isn’t with adults on Facebook, though I am beginning to feel like anyone over age 35 needs to get off MySpace already. I know many completely rational grown men who are on Facebook who eschew all the poking and stick to more manly pursuits like Scrabulous and, uh, the vampire thing. Keep ahold of yourselves, gentlemen. [hat tip, Baud]

One guy you’re unlikely to find on Facebook is Jerry Blavat, The Geator With The Heator/Boss With The Hot Sauce — it’s all about personal connection with this guy. Jason Fagone does a deep hang with the 67-year-old ‘Yon Teenager and comes up with a classic piece for PhillyMag. Capsule version: Do not piss off Frankie Avalon, kid.

PREVIOUSLY: Citizen Mom chats up the Geator at XPN

BY AMY Z. QUINN Straight from the City Paper to Phillywood, Duane Swierczyinski tells me his novel The Blonde may be headed for the big screen. Actress Michelle Monaghan has optioned the rights to film the 2006 sci-fi thrilla, and we could easily see her playing the titular badass babe with a killer kiss. Though who plays Jack Eisley, the bitterly almost-divorced journalist? And will we find out through on-location shooting where that effed-up masturbation club really is? Here’s the official announcement:

Film rights to Duane Swierczynski’s THE BLONDE, about a soon-to-be-divorced young father who is poisoned by a beautiful woman at an airport bar, and told if he wants to live, he must stay by her side for the next 12 hours, optioned by “Mission Impossible: III” and “Gone Baby Gone” co-star Michelle Monaghan, with screenwriter Paul Leyden attached, by Angela Cheng Caplan on behalf of DHS Literary Inc.

Nosy Questions And Shameless Name-Dropping After The Jump!
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AZQ: I’m thrilled for you. So, how much? You know I have to ask.

DS: The priests at North Catholic taught us that it was sinful to speak of such things.

But I will say that most options are on the very modest side; the purchase price is what matters, and that only happens when the cameras start rolling. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

AZQ: And what happens now?

DS: Well, Paul Leyden is busy writing the screenplay. We met a while back and killed a whole Sunday at Triumph Brewery, talking about the book and movies and stuff. It was a blast. Though I think I’m still slightly hungover…

One funny thing: Paul’s a former soap star — he played “Simon Frasier” on AS THE WORLD TURNS. We had him over for dinner one night, and later the news got back to my mother and sisters. All of whom, it turns out, are big AS THE WORLD TURNS fans. They were like, “You had WHO over for dinner!?” It was like I had Barack Obama over for burgers, and didn’t tell them.

But I’m really excited about checking out Paul’s screenwriting debut. He co-wrote THE FACTORY, which is filming now with John Cusack in the lead role. It sounds fantastic.

AZQ: Have you met with her, and if so, can you see her playing Kelly White or do you see her more interested in producing or whatever? And who plays Jack Eisely, now that Owen Wilson’s too busy with Marley & Me?

DS: I haven’t met with Michelle, but we’ve talked on the phone. And yeah, I think she’d be the perfect Blonde. I’ve been a huge fan ever since KISS KISS BANG BANG, one of the most underrated movies of the past five years.

No comment on Owen Wilson. Though maybe his brother is free?

— Amy Z. Quinn

BY AMY Z. QUINN OK, so you didn’t hear it here first — Dan Gross broke the news this afternoon that City Paper editor Duane Swierczynski resigned today. We heard this Friday afternoon, when the Swiercz spilled his plans for a full-time leap into noir fiction (The Blonde‘s in paperback, there’s very preliminary talk of a movie) and Marvel Comics and over noodles and tea, then promptly swore me to secrecy. Never let it be said your Paperboy doesn’t know the meaning of “off the record.” For the record.

Anyway, dude certainly seemed like a guy who’d made up his mind about things, no small challenge when you’ve got two small kids, an at-home wife, a mortgage and no more time to split between the day job you keep because you need to and the side jobs you do because you want to.

Still, he wasn’t quite sure if he was ready to pull the trigger, but I can’t say I was surprised to hear he went into work this morning ready to tell the staff he was leaving. I mean, I gotta tell you — getting up from the table to discover CP publisher Paul Curci sitting two tables behind us did smell like a sign from God (assuming that signs from the Almighty smell like duck noodle soup).

“I did feel like it was time,” he told me today. “And I feel good about it, and I knew at some point I’d have to choose and hopefully I’ll be able to leave on the most positive note possible.” His last day is next Friday.

Well, we’re all about positivity, and churn can be a good thing for everyone involved. Mazel tov, Swiercz, and you too, Brian Howard. It’s about time.

Over at the Inquirer, Sunday Image section editor (and newlywed!) Chris Gray is leaving for USA Today, where she’ll be the travel assignment editor. No word on who’ll be dragooned into editing “Chick Wit” once she’s gone.

NEW YORK TIMES: RAWALPINDI, Islamabad — An attack on a political rally killed the Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto near the capital, Islamabad, Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto was fired upon before the blast, and an official from her party said Ms. Bhutto was further injured by the explosion, which was apparently caused by a suicide attacker.

At least a dozen more people were killed. “At 6:16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Ms. Bhutto’s party who was at Rawalpindi General Hospital where she was taken after the attack, according to The Associated Press.

Hundreds of supporters had gathered at the rally, which was being held at Liaqut Bagh, a park that is a common venue for political rallies and speeches, in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to the capital. Amid the confusion after the explosion, the site was littered with pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the asphalt, and shards of glass were strewn about the ground. MORE

DAILY MAIL: Benazir Bhutto moments before she was assassinated
RELATED: Arlen Specter is in Pakistan, was scheduled to meet with Ms. Bhutto tonight
PREVIOUSLY: Fear Of A Woman

Two men were shot – one fatally – last night in Powelton Village, police said. The shooting occurred just before 11 p.m. at 40th and Green Streets in West Philadelphia. A 26-year-old, shot once in the abdomen, was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was pronounced dead a few minutes after midnight, police said. The homicide was the city’s 370th this year. The other man, 45, was in stable condition at HUP with a gunshot wound to the left shoulder. Another man was critically wounded this morning in the 100 block of West Thelma Street in Feltonville. Just before 1 a.m., the 36-year-old was shot once in the head, police said. He was taken to Einstein Hospital, where he was listed in critical condition. No arrests have been made in these shootings. [via INQUIRER]

RELATED: Nearly one in four area workers who died on the job last year was murdered, the highest proportion in the nation, the Labor Department reported yesterday. By contrast, in the New York and northern New Jersey area, one in seven who died on the job was a homicide victim. “This is part of a larger picture,” said Temple University associate professor of criminology Philip Harris, who studies crime in the region. “It’s parallel to the gun-homicide picture.” In 2006, 89 workers died on the job in the region. Of them, 22 were homicides. And of the 22, 17 died in shootings.

From Today’s Metro, where Quizzomeister Johnny Goodtimes holds forth on some Philly wrestling matches he’d like to see:

Philebrity founder Joey Sweeney vs. Phawker founder Jonathan Valania in a Hipster Death Match: This match disappoints promoters, as the hipsters think that this whole idea is “lame” and, after entering the ring, just exchange shrugs and discuss some crappy band.

Actually, I’m pretty confident that any fight between those two would involve some girlie slapping, soft weeping, a blurry Photobucket slideshow and at least one smoke break. And the entire evening ends with Jill and Ruthie ditching them to go for drinks. –AMY Z. QUINN

Amen, Bill.

Today’s Lesson: If you can at all avoid it, try not to call the audience “monkey cunts.”

From the BBC:

Amy Winehouse [pictured, right, at the Electric Factory this past spring] was booed by fans as she delivered a shambolic set on the first night of her UK tour in Birmingham. The singer also dedicated a song to her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, who is being held on remand pending charges including GBH. During the show, the 24-year-old told the crowd: “To them people booing, wait ’til my husband gets out of incarceration. And I mean that.”

Shortly after the show ended, one disgruntled concertgoer described the “shambolic” performance to PerezHilton.com thusly:

In short, she was fucking terrible. She was very very drunk, she made various rambling references to her ‘husband’ (even going as far to threaten audience members who booed with him) and worst of all, it looked like she was wearing those bloody ballet pumps again. Many audience members booed, and people were continually walking out. She referred to us as ‘monkey cunts’ at one point, and she forgot the words to most of her songs.

PEREZHILTON.COM: Wino Fans Finally Ask The Musical Question, “What Kind Of Fuckery Is This?”

BY AMY Z. QUINN Supporters of Texas Congressman and longshot GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul raised $4.2 million in 24 hours in a loosely-organized fund-raising push they’re calling a “money bomb.”

Speculate, theorize, stereotype. Only one thing is clear: the Paulites, the loyal, organized, Web-savvy supporters of Rep. Ron Paul, know how to raise money online, and 37,000 Paulites set a record [Monday] by hauling in more than $4.2 million in 24 hours. That’s the most money raised online by a candidate in a single day. A Paulite came up with the fundraising idea, a few more Paulites joined in and set the date for Nov. 5, Guy Fawkes Day, a symbol of rebellion in British history, then the “money bomb” effort spread virally.
Context is crucial here. Sen. John McCain, who placed second in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, raised $6 million last quarter. But that took three months. [via WaPo On The Trail]

Paul, who was against the Iraq War before anybody even thought of having one, advocates immediate withdrawal of American troops and is popular among returning Iraq vets. In the second quarter of this year, he raised more money from military contributors than all the other Republican candidates combined.

The Paulites — which kind of make them sound like an order of cloistered nuns, but whatevs — next plan a money bomb on Dec. 16., anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, and this time, they’re shooting for $10 mil.

In one day.

It isn’t just Mitt Romney who should be concerned by this — Democrats should be mindful of the fact that ending the war now is the key issue that has spurred Paul’s “Revolution.” His impeccable anti-war stance threatens to give lukewarm Republicans a reason to stick with the party a little longer, and if he runs on a third-party ticket, he could be a spoiler for everyone involved.

The war in Iraq was sold to us with false information. The area is more dangerous now than when we entered it. We destroyed a regime hated by our direct enemies, the jihadists, and created thousands of new recruits for them. [via RonPaul2008.com]

CNN.COM: Ron Paul Talks To Wolf Blitzer About The Money Bomb

BY AMY Z. QUINN We know how it is: so many words to read, so little time to surf for free porn. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you, freeing up valuable nanoseconds that can now be better spent ‘roughing up the suspect’ over at Suicide Girls or what have you. Every Thursday we pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer you towards the gooey caramel center of each edition. Why? Because we like you.

ON THE COVERS

CITY PAPER: Anecdotal lead on story about the failure of Wi-Fi Philadelphia reveals that service is really good in the middle of Spring Garden Street. Myself, I’m partial to the signal strength I get while sitting in my car on N. 3rd Street in Old City waiting for the Boss to wake his ass up, but ssssshhh, don’t tell anybody.

Even the most plugged-in can’t plug in. Back in mid-October, City Councilman Frank Rizzo said he went to Love Park with his laptop “to enjoy a few minutes of relaxation.” But the Web-savvy politician had difficulty connecting, even with the support of the city’s IT team. He resolved the problem using “a combination of our city IT people, who then engaged EarthLink, and a representative of EarthLink eventually had to straighten out some of the glitches.”

Satisfyingly dense story, lots of talk of backhauls and routers and nodes (Oh my!), that suffers only from feeling soft in a week where there was so much breaking news to be had. The reason the failure of Wi-Fi stings so much has to do with the fact that the challenges of getting the wireless signal inside apartment buildings and other densely-populated urban landscapes worsens the digital divide it was meant to cure.

PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: A few weeks back in this space, I criticized PW for promising a “cross-section of Philadelphians” weighing in on the Geno’s English-only flap but delivering a fairly predictable list of community activists and other familiar faces. This week, PW comes correct with a story that seems to have started out being about violence in the city in general but quickly became a reflection by real, live, average Philadelphians, on the murder of Ofc. Chuck Cassidy:

I used to live in Center City. I work in the city, but at nighttime I’m not comfortable. I saw somebody get shot in my old neighborhood. A guy was running down the street, and a dude just shot him for no reason. My next-door neighbor said, ‘Do me a favor—give me a ride. I have to go get my aunt.’ So I took him to Southwest. He goes into the house; I hear boom boom boom. He comes out, points the gun at me, and says, ‘Take me home,’ with a couple bad words. I took him home, and I went right to the police station and reported it. I was like, ‘I’m out. Done.’ That’s when I left.”

That was from a plumber named Jim who later quit the city for DelCo. Another guy says it simply: “If they shoot cops, there’s no telling who they’ll shoot next.” A Dad says that while he’s none too happy to see one son headed for the military, “I’d rather him over there than out here.” Parents talk about the lack of respect for senior citizens, for authority, for anything that they see in young people these days. Finally, a roofer named Mark lays it all out:

“Officer Cassidy’s out there protecting the earth, and he got murdered. These people don’t have a spiritual life. They don’t have respect for anybody. This is getting to be a deadly city. The devil does terrible things to a mind. The devil can destroy a person.”

INSIDE THE BOOK:

PW: Debbie Harry’s looking for a man who’s “not afraid of me,” to which we say join the club, sister. I’m grateful for this story about David Terry aka Aqueduct, because hopefully it will stop the unconscious mental word association that kicks when I hear about this band and makes me think Aqualung instead. Yikes. Kia Gregory on the city’s gun crisis.

CP: To be honest, wi-fi’s a been-there, done-that kind of topic and I wish the story about the PPA scofflaw who made a cool $1,200 by letting them auction off his crappy car had been the cover, but I guess they have news editors for such things. There’s a trio of winning entries from the First Person Memoir Writing competition, and Two Minutes with a founding member of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against The War.

WINNER: PW, by a scofflaw

Looks like Mike Nutter’s about to be upstaged on his own Election Day — but we have a feeling he won’t mind. In fact, it might be a good diversion from the long, soggy hours before the polls close at 8 p.m.

Suspected cop killer John “Jordan” Lewis may have been arrested in Miami rescue mission at around 7 a.m. Sounds like the dumb kid stayed there Monday night, and someone recognized him shortly after the Miami news began running his photo this morning. Assuming it’s him, we’ll just say we’re thankful nobody else got hurt.

And maybe we’ll hope it signals some kind of change in how Philadelphia stories will end — without gunplay, and without the bloodshed the entire city assumed was coming.

MYFOXPHILLY.COM: Cop Killer Suspect Arrested in Miami

MIAMI HERALD: Cop killer suspect may have been found in Miami

[Photo from SunSentinel.com]

[Graphic from Artists Network]

“Why even Dracula will be there!” — The Shaggs, “It’s Halloween”

WASHINGTON (AP) — NASA has agreed to search its archives once again for documents on a 1965 UFO incident in Pennsylvania, a step the space agency fought in federal court. The government has refused to open its files about what, if anything, moved across the sky and crashed in the woods near Kecksburg, Pa., 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Traffic was tied up in the area as curiosity seekers drove to the area, only to be kept away from the crash site by soldiers. The Air Force’s explanation for the unidentified flying object: a meteor or meteors.

Eyewitnesses said a flatbed truck drove away a large object shaped like an acorn and about the size of a Volkswagen bus. A mock-up based on the descriptions of local residents sits behind the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department. UFO enthusiasts refused to let the matter die and journalist Leslie Kean of New York City sued NASA four years ago for information.The agency has turned over several stacks of documents which Kean says are not responsive to the request, an argument that U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed with. MORE

RELATED: I Crashlanded In Kecksburg Pa. And All I Got Was This Stupid Acorn Monument