According to a Telegraph report, Mirren was dressed as Queen Elizabeth II when she took to a London street and yelled at the performers outside the Gielgud Theature in Westminster. It was reported that her language was quite strong as she demanded the troupe quiet down. She was reportedly also accompanied by Rufus Wright, who was also costumed in character as Prime Minister David Cameron, making the entire spectacle seem rather bizarre.

Mirren and Wright are currently starring in The Audience, a play in which Mirren, playing the queen, meets with British Prime Ministers from the 50s on. The play debuted in February and Mirren last week was awarded an Olivier Award for her role as the queen. Mirren also won an Academy Award for best actress in 2006 for playing Elizabeth II in the movie The Queen.

According to the Telegraph, the drummers were part of a parade promoting a music festival called As One in the Park.

If not, check here.

Anyway, TNT knows drama. That’s their catchphrase. In order to prove that drama can strike anywhere, they’ve released a sequel to that viral ad. “On a cold winter’s day, we placed the famous red button somewhere in a Dutch shopping street,” says TNT Benelux.

Check it out:

Of course, the film’s impressive cast is another reason to give this particular show some attention. In addition to featuring “Lost” alumni Terry O’Quinn and the lovely Vanessa Williams, the program will feature Dave Annable, Rachael Taylor, Robert Buckley, Mercedes Masohn, Helena Mattsson, and Samantha Jade Logan. Although those names don’t mean anything to me, I’m sure someone out there is excited about their participation in the ABC production.

At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, several individuals got a chance to see a screening of the show’s pilot. If their reactions are any indication of the show’s actual worth, then this could be one of the dramas to watch this fall. Keep in mind, of course, that these opinions come straight from the folks in attendance, so their positive remarks may have something to do with the fact that they were at freaking Comic-Con. Excitement has a way of clouding one’s judgment. I’ve been there many times myself. However, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

“his was a good concept. The cinematography looked cool and the play on history [with] the occult was cool. I’d recommend it [to fellow Lost fans] because [O'Quinn] still has that same style of acting,” one person said after the screening. Another added, “I liked Terry O’Quinn. It wasn’t really that frightening, [but] there were definitely things [in the pilot] that I want to find out more about, and hopefully I’ll watch the rest of it.”

Of course, not everyone was overly impressed with the show’s sexy supernatural offerings. “It’s a little slow for me. I’m not really engaged with the mysteries at all or the people. I kinda don’t care. [The acting] was fine. I mostly saw it for Terry O’ Quinn; he did okay. [The character] is no Locke, though,” one spectator commented.

“666 Park Avenue” will air Sundays at 10pm EST on ABC.

Thief of Thieves centers around Conrad Paulson, a thief trying to get out of the game in order to reunite with his estranged wife and son. In order to make amends, he begins to use his only skill set to steal exclusively from other thieves. Hence, Thief of Thieves. The comic is only in its third issue, but both #1 and #2 sold out there first day of release. No word on #3 yet, which was just released yesterday along with a second printing of #2.

Producers David Alpert and Chic Eglee from The Walking Dead will produce the new show. Eglee was previously an executive producer for Dexter before joining up with AMC. He will also be working on FX’s drama “Powers”, based on the same comic book company Thief of Thieves and The Walking Dead are under: Image Comics.

“Much like ‘The Walking Dead’ brought horror to television in a unique and groundbreaking way, I feel ‘Thief of Thieves’ can do the same thing for heist stories, showing the humanity of all the characters, including the criminals,” Kirkman said in a statement.

“AMC recognizes the limitless ideas generated by the comic industry. Their dedication to bringing ‘The Walking Dead’ to life as a TV show has been key to its success and I’m excited about the potential of ‘Thief of Thieves’ to reach similar levels of success.”

Kirkman, who launched the Skybound off-shoot of Image Comics, had four best sellers on the New York Times bestseller list from graphic novels in 2011.

“Working with AMC has been a tremendously positive experience and I’m looking forward to continuing and strengthening our relationships there,” Kirkman added. “And I can’t neglect to mention I’ve been dying to work with Chic again since we wrapped on ‘The Walking Dead’ Season One.”

I am looking forward to seeing this show, but does anyone else think the premise is just a rip-off of Dexter, only for thieves? They couldn’t even come up with a title that doesn’t describe the whole series. It would be like calling Dexter “Killer of Killers”.

Turner Broadcasting just launched their new TNT cable channel in Benelux, the European region comprising Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. On the heels of this launch, they’ve also just unveiled a ridiculously fun viral ad campaign that shows just how quickly drama can escalate.

Courtesy of TurnerBenelux:

To launch the high quality TV channel TNT in Belgium we placed a big red push button on an average Flemish square of an average Flemish town. A sign with the text “Push to add drama” invited people to use the button. And then we waited…

So, the residents of this “average Flemish town” pushed the button. And chaos ensued. Check it out below:

The new high-def TNT channel (telent channel 561) brings the region popular series that we Americans should recognize like Men of a Certain Age, Smallville, and Friday Night Lights. Drama indeed.

According to some comments on YouTube as well as some on reddit, it looks like this advert was shot in the small town of Aarschot, which sits in the province of Flemish Brabant in Flanders. The town has a population of around 28,000.

Also, speaking of reddit, this video might have already spawned a new meme. Some users have already screencapped and commented on unimpressed ginger kid, first seen at about 0:41 in the clip.

Part of the plan was to have TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington as well as fellow CrunchFund partner and current (sometimes) writer for TechCrunch MG Siegler jump (and stay) on as contributors – a plan that apparently went awry on Monday. According to a post on PandoDaily by Founder and CEO Sarah Lacy, Arrington and Siegler are out at the new site after shareholders voted to yank Arrington as a director.

As of Monday, April 9 the shareholders of PandoMedia voted to remove Michael Arrington as a director. Given the change in relationship we feel it’s inappropriate for CrunchFund’s partners Michael Arrington and MG Siegler to continue contributing to PandoDaily. We thank MG for his many stellar contributions to date and Michael for his support in the early days of the company.

The announcement was abbreviated and they disabled comments on the post. There hasn’t been anything more from PandoDaily’s end on the matter.

But Arrington and Siegler both posted about the move, and they seem to agree on a root cause: their participation in TechCrunch Disrupt.

Here’s what Arrington had to say on Uncrunched:

This wasn’t a complete surprise to me, the company notified me last week that they weren’t happy that I and MG Siegler (my partner at CrunchFund) were going to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt this coming May.

Part of the reason that I’m speaking at Disrupt is that I have a contractual commitment to do so as part of my break with them last year, which Sarah knew about before our involvement in Pando. But MG and I are also speaking there because we still love TechCrunch. And we both speak at many other conferences as well.

Siegler echoed this on his blog:

Lots of questions about the PandoDaily situation. To be completely honest, I’m a bit surprised by how this went down. I think Michael’s response is appropriate.

The problem seemed to be us participating in TechCrunch Disrupt (and I assume more Michael than myself since I’m still a TechCrunch contributor). But we both speak at a lot of conferences. And I view it as valuable that we speak at a wide range of conferences.

Both Arrington and Siegler also mention that they think PandoDaily has potential to succeed, even though neither will be a part of it. At this point, nobody seems to be shocked by any drama that comes out of this bunch:

The New York Times ran a piece yesterday with the headline “Huffington Gains More Control in AOL Revamping.” In that article, Brian Stelter says that part of the “revamp” at the top gives the technology, business development, marketing, and communications departments to Huffington. She’ll oversee those, but advertising sales unit “will remain inside AOL ‘at the moment.’”

Stelter goes on to say that the reorganization will increase Huffington’s power:

The changes appear to give Ms. Huffington more authority within the closely watched media company, where her title is president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group. She will continue to report to Tim Armstrong, the AOL chief executive, whose contract was extended last week to run through early 2016.

Ok, great. Except Business Insider just ran a piece that says Huffington has actually been demoted. They quote a “source close to AOL” that says Huffington has actually seen quite the opposite – a “narrowing” of responsibilities. According to BI, “Huffington no longer has oversight over TechCrunch, Engadget, Moviephone, Stylist, AOL Video, or, most importantly, AOL.com.”

So what’s the deal here?

Business Insider’s source theorizes that the reason for the NYT article has everything to do with the announcement of NBC News’ Lauren Kapp as the new global strategy, marketing, and communications head at The Huffington Post.

According to the theory, Kapp, who shares a relationship with the NYT’s Stelter, got that story up in order to get ahead of the real story – that Huffington had lost authority.

The source close to AOL executives tells us that leadership at the top doesn’t mind stories like the one placed in the New York Times today.

It certainly is a more friendly story to AOL HuffPo.

For his part, Stelter has addressed the BI piece on Twitter. In response to being asked if he’d seen the BI story, here was his reply:

The drama runs deep with this group. We’ve followed the Arianna Huffington/Michael Arrington/Tech Crunch saga since AOL bought the Huffington Post a year ago. Recently, Arrington went on a tear, calling Arianna Huffington a “touchy psychopath” and saying that she loves “f*cking with TechCrunch in her leisure time.” If BI has it right, they wont have to worry about her f*cking with them anymore.

“I was reminded of Bing today during a depressing conversation with a former coworker who soldiers on, nobly, in That Great Darkness,” he writes in the intro.  “Though it’s been several years since I left, I still remember Bing as the time when I most despaired for Microsoft’s future.”

“Bing is a madhouse.  The inmates are running the asylum, and it’s rotten to the core…” the post continues. “And I’m not talking about the product.” He then adds, “Bing is solid. But it doesn’t matter because nobody cares.”

He goes on to discuss company politics and how the Bing team is “filled with overly politicized people pursuing Machiavellian schemes to forward their career ambitions.”

And he does indeed go on about it.

In a status update on Facebook, Su said, “This blog post about Bing took me three years to write. Though I felt it needed to be said, loyalty to my past coworkers prevented me from speaking openly. Enough of those former coworkers have now been crushed by The Machine that I must speak out.”

While the whole thing is just the viewpoint of one engineer, he is getting a lot of feedback on the post. Interestingly, some of that feedback seems to reflect the sentiments expressed by Su. In a Facebook comment, Maria Sommerfield writes:

I called my girlfriend who works for MSFT in a different department to find out why exactly my husband could be so miserable at work at one point. OMG, Maria he is at Bing, she said. I hear it is a nightmare over there. Fortunately he is over at Google now. Being the nice guy he is he has never once said anything bad about those Bing drama, but I always got my man’s back and I remember. All’s well that ends well and he is loving working for Google.

Ramesh Vyaghrapuri commented:

I left the company way too late. All the way back in 2003, there were horror stories from all over the company (so I don’t think Bing was *special*) but most employees preferred complaining behind doors and letting it be.

The lack of transparency *is* the worst thing that can happen to a company. Now, there was no transparency even in 1997 and things worked fine. But lack of transparency makes it a *stable* setup that a few rotten apples can’t destroy all the good work done by people before them.

Microsoft employee Rangan Majumder wrote:

Very candid post, Philip. Most of the folks you speak of are gone from Bing for at least a year. Bing is not perfect but honestly it is the least politically driven team I’ve worked on in Microsoft. Bing has been about metrics and bottoms up decision making from the beginning. In fact, it has to be, otherwise it doesn’t scale and won’t succeed; doing the right thing for the user always takes first priority. Sure there are people who are ambitious career wise, but those who don’t do the right thing for the user don’t last. I know I have ex-coworkers from Bing who work in Facebook Seattle now with you; did they really feel this way about the team?

In the comments of the post itself, an anonymous poster writes, “Thanks for writing this. Along with most people in my group at Microsoft, I’m looking for a job. I can’t wait to write my version of this story. It’s not just Bing. The Microsoft I loved is gone.”

It’s worth noting that as Su is a software engineer at Facebook, Bing and Facebook have a pretty strong partnership.

Last week, Bing launched its version of personalized search in “Adaptive Search”. Watch our recent interview with Bing’s search director Stefan Weitz here.

More here and here for some background.

A year ago when it was revealed that AOL would be acquiring TechCrunch, a big deal was made about how TechCrunch would continue to operate as it always had, free from editorial oversight by AOL. That would mean TechCrunch could say whatever nasty things it wanted to about AOL and get away with it.

Arrington writes in a fresh post, “As of late last week TechCrunch no longer has editorial independence. Some argue that the circumstances demanded it. I disagree. Editorial independence was never supposed to be an easy thing for Aol to give us. But it was never meaningful if it shatters the first time it is put to the test.”

It does still appear to be editorially independent enough to let air all of this internal turmoil for the masses, including this very post by Arrington, so I guess that’s something.

According to Kara Swisher at All Things D, who has been very vocal about her disdain for the whole mess, says that Arrington has reached out to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to try and buy TechCrunch back. She says her sources say that he would have to pull together the funding to do so, and that things are currently at a “stalemate”.

In Arrington’s post, he proposes two options to AOL:

1. Reaffirmation of the editorial independence promised at the time of acquisition. Given the current circumstances, that means autonomy from Huffington Post, unfettered editorial independence and a blanket right to editorial self determination. To put it simply, TechCrunch would stay with Aol but would be independent of the Huffington Post.

2. Sell TechCrunch back to the original shareholders.

“If Aol cannot accept either of these options, and no other creative solution can be found, I cannot be a part of TechCrunch going forward,” signaling that this could be his last TechCrunch post.

Amid Drama, Blognation Is Kaput

In short, it’s a total mess.

Sam Sethi, CEO and founder of Blognation blames TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. Arrington, and lots of other people, blame Sam Sethi.

Bad Blood

Sethi worked for Arrington as editor of TechCrunch UK until December of last year. Sethi left TechCrunch on bad terms after he posted a negative review of LeWeb, a French conference. Arrington denies he fired Sethi, but had asked him to delete the review because of a conflict of interest involving a competing TechCrunch conference.

The founding of Blognation was to follow, and so was more bad blood between Sethi and Lee Wilkins, whom many credit with developing the idea for the company. Arrington says Sethi "booted" Wilkins, who lives in Romania, from the project, and that at one point the conversations got so heated between them that Sethi threatened to fly to Romania to "rip [Wilkins'] head off."

Wilkins went on to set up a similar blog network called MyKinda, which launched last month.

Show Me the Money

Earlier this month, Blognation editor Oliver Starr dropped a bombshell full of dirty laundry about his experience with Sethi and Blognation. In a post published both on his personal blog, and at the Blognation site (subsequently deleted), entitled "An Open Letter to Sam Sethi," Starr reports that he and other Blognation writers had not been paid since launch.

Also in the post, which spans 3,000 words and gets more emotional as it goes, Starr alleges Sethi repeatedly lied about forthcoming payment as well as venture capitalist funding. Starr describes Sethi’s behavior as fraudulent, criminal, and even psychotic.

"You made promises that people took to the bank and then you defaulted on them leaving everyone that trusted you to face the consequences," writes Starr. "I am not kidding when I say that there are people on Blognation that probably won’t have a Christmas thanks to believing in you.

"There are people that are going to be late on car payments and there are people that are going to have to think twice before they go to the dentist because they are out some $10, $20 or even $30,000 dollars of income that they were expecting, for which they HAVE A CONTRACT and for which you have an obligation because you told us that you had the money when in fact you never really did!"

A Blognation Editor Dies

Sethi responded in the comments section of a TechCrunch article that Starr had been asked to leave Blognation in November, implying the post was in response to that. Sethi also stated that a round of funding was about to be closed and that everyone would be paid:

"Marc Ochant [sic] and I spoke on Sunday when he blogged about Facebook. Marc along with the other editors are aware of the situation regarding the delays we have had in funding as they are in direct contact with the VC on our “private” backchannel.

"Just for the record EVERY editor has a contract and will be paid in full prior to Christmas."

That post was made on the morning of December 5th. Marc Orchant, whom Sethi says he spoke with Sunday, had a massive heart attack that same morning, and was reportedly unconscious through at least the 5th. Orchant died December 9th.

Though he’d be hard pressed to prove a correlation, Arrington suggests the stresses of nonpayment contributed to Orchant’s heart attack.

Sabotage or Royal Screwup?

Yesterday, Sethi announced that Blognation was kaput and that he would put the network up for auction, but not before accusing Arrington of sabotaging the company for fear of competition. Sethi blames Arrington for scaring off investors by publishing confidential emails and a "leaked" terms sheet from British investment firm Secora three days before signing.

While Sethi admits in the post that he’d lied to Blognation editors, he claims he was forced to because of Arrington’s FUD campaign to keep him from securing funding. The leaked terms sheet, he says, came from his email account and that Scotland Yard would be investigating who accessed it.

At this point, though, it’s rather difficult (nigh impossible) to determine what’s true and what isn’t from Sam Sethi. The Mobile Jones blog, which reported the Blognation shut-down a day before Sethi posted it on his blog, also reported on December 9th, that Sethi had apologized to Oliver Starr, admitted that he hadn’t fired Starr, and that he impersonated one of his blog editors to leave a comment on TechCrunch.

At stake here now would be sheer credibility, and at this point, Sethi’s credit has run out.