If you don't know about Dan Lyons, here is a quickie roundup: he's a pretty funny writer, used to be senior editor at Forbes, now writes for Newsweek, and got fame and glory for having a parody blog called The Fake Steve Jobs, where he pretended to be Apple CEO (pre-fake heart-attack, one assumes?). Got that?

Now Lyons has his own blog, cleverly titled The Real Dan Lyons, which is under Newsweek's jurisdiction, because they've made him take down several posts where he railed against Yahoo's PR for promising him that CEO Jerry Yang wasn't going anywhere and that the Google/Yahoo deal was going through.

And now of course Yang is axed, and Google got some intense cold feet about buying up another search engine in this economy.

Whoops! Luckily, this is the Internet, so even though Lyons was forced to remove his post, it was reprinted elsewhere. So how does the fake Steve Jobs really feel about Yahoo's lying flack?

And Chairman Roy Bostock says it's the right time for this to happen. I only wish you could have been on the phone for my conversation just — what — a month ago, when the same Roy Bostock swore up and down to me that Jerry Yang wasn't going anywhere because he was absolutely the greatest leader the world has ever known. "Nobody knows this company better than Jerry Yang," said Roy. "Jerry is the right person to continue to lead Yahoo." Roy also insisted that Yahoo did the right thing by passing up Microsoft's offer, even though the stock now stands at one-third the price Ballmer had offered to pay. See that story here. I'd never dealt much with Yahoo before, and I was stunned by their PR operators — they're really an unsavory bunch. During that same reporting this crack team of lying sacks of shit put one of Yahoo's attorneys in Washington on the phone to tell me, over and over, the true "inside story" of what was going on with the Google deal, which was, he informed me, that the deal with Google was a sure thing, definitely going to happen, no way in hell is the deal not going to happen, there are no real objections from the regulators, they're fine with it, the objections from advertisers are not an issue, blah blah blah. Then that deal fell apart. And now Jerry Yang is out on his ass. The take-away: Do not believe a word that Yahoo says. Ever.

Heh. If it was us, we would have referred to Yahoo's PR team as "lying flacks of shit." But it's hard not to feel for Lyons: first he gets screwed by the PR people, than by his own magazine that forces him to nix the post: wouldn't want there to be too much bad blood between Newsweek and Yahoo, god forbid!