As Jon and Kate Gosselin's marriage has slowly self-destructed, Kate is finding that the brand she has so carefully built is under attack. A children's clothing line that she produced with Healthtex is on hold, and her latest book, Love in the Mix: Making Meals into Memories, has been sidelined while she and her husband work out their divorce.

Reading through articles about these speedbumps, it's hard to miss the barely-concealed glee that underlies the reporting. Over the past few months, bashing Kate Gosselin has become a popular sport in America. By now, even people who haven't seen the show know that Kate can be disturbingly stern with her kids, that she is mean to her husband, and that she is greedy when it comes to snatching up the freebies of quick cable fame. Pundits have endlessly attacked her weight, her behavior, her child-rearing, and her hairstyle, until it seems that Kate isn't so much a person as the heart of a cottage industry in verbal brutality.

In an effort to increase its flow of late-night customers, 24-hour restaurant chain Denny's is using an interesting new marketing technique: corporate branding with famous rock stars.

This move makes a lot of sense. After all, Denny's has always had something of a Dr. Jekyll/Mister Hyde personality: during the day, it's the go-to place for old folks to hang out, and the perfect spot for a family to fill up after church. In the sunlight, it's all that is wholesome and decent.

After the sun goes down, however, Denny's transforms. Somewhere around midnight, it becomes the haunt of night-crawling vampires, looking for sustenance. Along with competitors like Waffle House and the occasional IHOP, it is the perfect place for all-night-studying, all-night-partying people in their late teens and '20s to catch a decent, consistently-prepared meal.

It's been a pretty amazing week for snack foods. In addition to delivering nacho cheese and big, crunchy flavor, Frito Lay's Cheetos and Doritos brands have also been offering a hearty helping of domestic warfare and illicit sex.

No, this trend isn't part of a new prize promotion, although it is worth asking what, exactly, the company has been putting into its snacks. In Shelbyville, Tenn., for example, one of Frito Lay's products apparently inspired a couple to go face-to-face in a battle royale. Their weapon of choice? Cheetos.

Yes, Cheetos. The little orange squiggles of corn, oil, and fake cheese are, apparently, a major incitement to violence. According to Cpl. Kevin Roddy of the Bedford County Sheriff's department, 40-year-old James Earl Taylor and 44-year-old Mary S. Childers were involved in "a verbal altercation" that escalated until the two were hurling puffy cheese crunchies at each other.

When one thinks about debt collectors, names like "leech," "bloodsucker," and "pit bull" immediately dance from the tongue; for those lucky few of us who have occasionally received wake-up calls from the bill man, the terms get even more emotionally fraught and foully descriptive. While cannibalism is obviously a somewhat extreme response, regular social calls from creditors can help one see the wisdom of Hannibal Lector, who proudly bragged of eating a census-taker's liver with "fava beans and a nice chianti."

In the current economic situation, affection would likely be the last response that a bill collector could expect from a client. However, this is exactly what a collector in Victorville, California got on Wednesday when she knocked on a customer's door. The collector, a car saleswoman, came by to pick up a payment when she noticed that her customer had missed the pay date.

In 2003, The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act was instituted to ensure that American soldiers who were sent to combat positions overseas wouldn't be financially penalized upon their return. For Leon Batie, however, it looks like a year spent in a mud hut in Afghanistan may have cost him his businesses and credit rating.

The South Dallas/Fair Park Trust Fund, which helped Batie start his business, is the kind of community-based improvement group that conservatives and liberals can both get behind. From the liberal side, the program is designed to help revitalize a low-income minority community. Conservatives, on the other hand, can take heart in the fact that its support takes the form of low-interest loans that are offered to new business owners.

In many ways, Leon Batie is the perfect bipartisan poster boy for the program. An African American man who lived in the community, Batie took out a $50,000 loan to open a Subway sandwich shop in the heart of South Dallas. Fueled by that success, he opened two more franchises, receiving another $25,000 in loan money along the way. His stores did quite well, and the fund lauded his success in promotional materials and newspaper articles.

As the recent economic downturn has sent unemployment skyrocketing, it has also highlighted several problems with the American way of work. While many jobs once carried a host of cradle-to-grave benefits, it's gotten harder and harder to find work that provides basics like health care, dental care, and cost-of-living increases. Moreover, this trend seems likely to get worse. On one side, universal health care could, potentially, decouple work from health insurance; on the other side, the growing popularity of consulting or freelance work means that many once-common benefits like vacation seem likely to become a thing of the past.

With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that many people are dreaming about the kind of jobs that their parents had. If you're one of these people, you can take heart in the fact that, while rare, full-benefit jobs aren't quite dead. Granted, you might have to learn how to kill mercenaries, take care of college-age kids, or make beds on a moving ship. However, if you're willing to look far -- and perhaps put up with a lot of travel and adventure -- we may have the perfect job for you.

And so, without any further ado, Walletpop presents 17 jobs that you can run away to right now!

Over the past few years, many hospitals have begun making a concerted effort to improve the quality of their food offerings. In the beginning, this was intended as a move to improve patient health. After all, while a patient who doesn't eat will probably not improve, it's hard to get excited about most hospitals' questionable culinary choices.

However, as the trend continued, many hospitals discovered that good food was a worthwhile perk for their employees, and could help with worker morale. Further, the easy access to quality cuisine made life a lot easier for families and friends who were visiting loved ones.

While the recent economic boom may be most famous for its expensive restaurants, outrageously priced vacations, and insanely high corporate bonuses, its ultimate symbol may well have been cocktail culture. While beer remains the plebian quaff of choice and wine is popular with a more staid crowd, mixed drinks demonstrated energy, excitement, and expense. For many a sophisticated clubgoer, there was nothing more impressive than an experienced bartender, bottles flipping in the air, producing a crisp Mojito or a sweet Cosmopolitan.

Of course, as with so many boom fetishes, cocktail culture had a lot of smoke and mirrors. Bottle service -- which basically involved buying massively inflated bottles of booze and quaffing them with pals -- was more about flashing wealth than about enjoying the finer things. After all, who in their right mind really pays a 1000% markup on a bottle of Grey Goose?

Neiman-Marcus, suffering from plummeting profits over the last year, has announced a major change in its marketing approach. Rather than positioning itself as a price-is-no-object retailer, it will now begin offering lower-priced goods and promotional marketing events. By doing so, the company hopes to attract some of its cash-strapped former customers who currently are flocking to discount retailers.

Neiman-Marcus isn't the only top-tier store that has recently decided to take this approach. As the past few months have demonstrated, the main problem with über expensive retail is that its key assumption is flawed. Many companies have spent years under the misapprehension that a department store can stay in business by solely appealing to obscenely wealthy customers.

In an interesting move, Burger King has decided to take fast food where it's never gone before...into the produce aisle!

This move, while strange, is not all that surprising. Once upon a time, restaurant-branded foods were limited to occasional offerings like Cafe Du Monde's chicory coffee or deep-frozen White Castle sliders. However, over the past few years, clever marketers and thrifty consumers have combined to make restaurant foods a major presence in grocery stores. From Taco Bell's chunky salsa and dinner platters to Starbucks' bagged coffee and chocolate truffles, branded goods have made restaurant foods cheaper, more convenient, and -- in the case of Taco Bell -- less likely to contain E. Coli.

Given the growing success of these products, it's not surprising that so many companies are making use of supermarkets. However, while Starbucks is expanding its offerings with a branded coffee ice cream and California Pizza Kitchen is hawking flatbread melts, Burger King is in a somewhat difficult position.

Most of its signature dishes aren't an easy fit for the grocery store. As White Castle's sliders demonstrate, burgers don't react well to long periods in the freezer, and the King's fries are mediocre under the best of circumstances. One can only imagine how they'd survive a few months in a frost-coated plastic bag.