“I said, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ ” Baldwin remembered. “I saw it as network scumbags trying to fuck you around. Zucker, I like”—Jeff Zucker, now the president and C.E.O. of NBC Universal, was then running NBC television—“but everybody who works for Zucker I have reservations about.” He added, “If the show does succeed, it’ll be something of a fucking miracle, because NBC hasn’t done a fucking thing to help this show at all. This show is the red-headed stepchild in the lineup. They’ve gone out of their way to wring the last drops out of ‘My Name Is Earl’ and ‘Scrubs.’ Those shows are done! They’re cooked! Yet they do a one-hour episode of ‘Earl’! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” (Jeff Zucker told me, “Alec brings to ‘30 Rock’ a level of comedic excellence that is unparalleled in network television.”)

Then, this snapshot of the actor at home:

“In East Hampton, I’m a nudist and I eat meat,” Baldwin—a vegetarian—had said before my visit, expanding on the idea that he lived a quite different life on Long Island than he did in New York. “I shoot deer with a bow and arrow. I smoke the deer meat and eat it every morning with my eggs and toast. I am a homosexual. I listen to rock music, loud.” We had met at his house. Baldwin was wearing sandals; his shirt was untucked. There was nobody else at home.

Though it has been said about VP candidate Sarah Palin that her ability to wrangle four (five?) kids proves her worth as a candidate, we reserve our respect for Palin doppleganger Tina Fey, whose ability to wrangle Alec Baldwin is truly Herculean. He is a great, brash bear of a man whose pain we feel acutely; after all, a world without Jack Donaghy is a world where we would all be at home alone.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Why Me? [The New Yorker]

DID Alec Baldwin dump CAA this week because a video posted on FunnyOrDie.com showed Dora the Explorer listening to his infamous phone rant against his daughter, Ireland? The Web site is the creation of Adam McCay [sic], Chris Henchy and fellow CAA client Will Ferrell.

"Baldwin asked CAA to take it off, and they did not," said one source. But others say Baldwin is angry at CAA be cause it still reps ex- wife Kim Basinger. Baldwin's rep, Matthew Hiltzik, told Page Six: "Three-year-olds everywhere are upset that Dora the Explorer and her friends are being dragged into this."

We commend Hiltzik for stopping short of publicly blaming Basinger and her lawyers for leaking the Dora voicemail to Funny Or Die, but the regrettable situation has still been hard on the impressionable young explorer; ever since this ugliness was exposed last Friday, Dora has demonstrated a marked lack of enthusiasm for undertaking any new adventures, preferring to spend her days locked in her bedroom and sobbing to Boots the Monkey and her talking backpack, unable to understand why Mami and Papi have to scream at each other all the time.

• BLAMING DORA [Page Six]
• Previously: The Agent Dance Special Alec Baldwin Edition: Actor Leaves CAA [Defamer]

We turn to CNN.com's cherished Story Highlights box to get us up to speed on exactly where we stand in the public celebrity-parenting clinic currently being offered by Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger: The actress, says her rep, did not release the voicemail (which they'll also have you know was not sealed under a court order, as previously claimed by Baldwin), a strategic denial that clearly sets up embattled daughter Ireland for the eventual fall. (Under the the duress of cross-examination in their next custody hearing, we expect her to crumble and reveal she chose TMZ for the leaks because she loves looking at video of Scarlett Johansson falling down.) To our knowledge, Baldwin has yet to issue a counter-statement detailing the parental alienation he feels as a result of this latest Basinger volley.

BONUS! After the jump, yet another voicemail mash-up, a meme we expect to continue until every last movie and TV clip involving a female and a telephone has been exhausted:

• Basinger: I didn't leak Baldwin phone message [CNN.com]
• Previously: First Inevitable Alec Baldwin Mash-Ups Arrive! [Defamer]

Following yesterday's leak of that troubling Alec Baldwin voicemail, the world was placed in the uncomfortable position of trying to determine which famous parent is the worse role-model for the impressionable Ireland, the one screaming into the phone, or the one who apparently wants their child custody battle played out in the tabloids. At least one former associate of the onetime couple has now made his choice and gone public with his feelings, bringing his trademark brand of vigilante justice to an already ugly and complicated situation.

• Vicki Vale's a bitch! Alec Baldwin berates his daughter [YouTube]
• Celebrity Custody Battle Fun Time: Alec Baldwin's Leaked Voicemail Tirade [Defamer]

"In the best interest of the child, Alec will do what the mother is pathologically incapable of doing... keeping his mouth shut and obeying the court order.

The mother and her lawyer leaked this sealed material in violation of a court order. Although Alec acknowledges that he should have used different language in parenting his child, everyone who knows him privately knows what he has been put through for the past six years."

It's like we're all now in the middle of a really ugly child custody hearing! Fun! If you decide to skip the voicemail but feel like participating in an activity that approximates the unpleasant feelings you'd probably experience by listening, we recommend that you scour YouTube for video of some kindergartners stomping on a wounded duck. That did the trick for us.

• Alec Baldwin's Threatening Message to Daughter [TMZ]
• Alec Baldwin Responds To Voicemail Leak [Access Hollywood]

A recent eBay auction reminds us that it wasn't so long ago that there were no internets with which to conveniently disseminate unsubstantiated rumor and heresay. In this 1989 fax fished out of a dumpster outside David Hockney's Santa Monica studio, a "DIRT ALERT" reports that:

JOHN WATERS TOLD ME LAST NIGHT
HE WENT OUT LAST SUNDAY WITH JODIE
FOSTER & HER "DATE" KIM BASSINGER TO
DYKE NIGHT A[T] PALLETTE, AND THEY WERE/ARE
DEFINATALLY "TOGETHER". Poor KELLY McGILLIS IS HEARTBROKEN!

While there's certainly no way to test the veracity of such a scandalous statement, it is interesting to note that 1989 was the year Basinger left the man she had been married to since 1980, makeup artist Ron Snyder-Britton. (She'd marry Alec Baldwin 4 years later.) It seems to us that if she were going to tip her toe into Sapphic waters, the perfect time to have done so would have been moments after breaking free from nine years of unsatisfying, heterosexual matrimony. It further follows that Foster, who was still riding a man-hating career high from her Oscar-winning performance in The Accused, would provide a sensible choice of A-list, female companionship.

• David Hockney Rec'd Fax John Waters Jodie Foster Gay [eBay via CityRag]