Alec Baldwin has had a long and interesting road since the infamous voicemail message with his then 11-year-old daughter Ireland. He’s long been a vocal advocate for father’s rights in the divorce system, and it was pretty clear he had reached his breaking point long before that call. Baldwin recently published a book called “A Promise to Ourselves,” talking about his divorce from ex-wife Kim Basinger and the frustrating struggle to maintain a relationship with his daughter Ireland.

Baldwin goes off on the tabloid media, specifically attacking TMZ, who he clearly still holds a significant grudge against. He said he was so depressed after the voicemail scandal that he was deeply suicidal for three weeks.

Baldwin had been trying to reach his daughter, then 11, but “she was off for spring break with her mother and her phone was turned off for 10 consecutive days … This had gone on for years now and … when the beep came, I snapped. [Harvey Levin, TMZ’s editor] seemed to be that breed of tabloid creature that realized an almost sexual level of pleasure from ruining other people’s lives.”

“He has created TMZ as the updated receptacle of … trash,” Baldwin writes. “He leads a cadre of self-satisfied twentysomethings who jump like rats from public relations sinking ship to sinking ship.” The release of the tape caused Baldwin to become suicidal, as he and the agoraphobic actress had been fighting in court over their daughter for six years.

“Driving up the Taconic Parkway, heading to an inn in the Berkshire Mountains, I began to think about what little town I would repair to in order to commit suicide. What semi-remote Massachusetts state park could I hike deep into and overdose there? When I returned to New York, the thought of jumping out the window of my apartment was with me every night for weeks.”

Thinking of Ireland, he resisted, thankfully. “I love my daughter with all my heart,” he writes

Amy Poehler is spreading her small screen wings and flying away. She says she will take a break from “Saturday Night Live” after the November election to give birth to her first child with husband Will Arnett .

“It’s gonna be really hard — Boyz II Men hard — to say goodbye to yesterday,” Amy says in the new issue of Men’s Vogue. ” ‘SNL’ was dangerous, late-night, last-minute and star-studded, but like any good drug, you need to know when to put it down.”

And it gets worse, or better, depending on your point of view. She’s not coming back to “SNL” after maternity leave. Instead Poehler is preparing to star in her own NBC series from the executive producers of “The Office.” At least we have that to look forward to. It reportedly is not the spinoff of the Office that is also coming.

And there’s always Poehler’s animated kids’ show “The Mighty B!” in which she portrays overachieving Honeybee scout Bessie Higgenbottom. We have yet to tune into it, but we may have to now.

While we don't normally talk about the financial markets, it's worth noting the Dow was down over 500 points today. Lead by the Lehman Bros. bankruptcy and continuing mortgage crisis, the 4.4% loss was the biggest since 9/11. Here's the story from a much better source than me; bloomberg.com.

U.S. stocks tumbled, pushing the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to the steepest drop since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s bankruptcy and declining commodities increased speculation that credit-market losses and the economic slowdown will worsen.

Stocks erased more than $600 billion in value as financial shares in the S&P 500 decreased the most since at least 1989, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. American International Group Inc. sank 61 percent and Washington Mutual Inc. decreased 27 percent. Concern the U.S. is heading for a recession pushed oil lower, prompting a drop in energy stocks, and sent General Electric Co. down 8 percent.

 

Is it January yet?

On Dannielynn’s second birthday, Larry Birkhead opens up in the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now, about raising Anna Nicole Smith’s little girl and shares with Us his own family album of their time together.

“When I take pictures of her she likes looking at them just like her mom did,” Birkhead tells Us.

“Some days I think she looks just like her,” he says of the tot, who who turned 2 on Sept. 7.”