If you've been poking around the celebrity websites lately, you likely saw that shapely Gossip Girl star Blake Lively might be willing to strip naked for Playboy for 2.5 million dollars. Of course, this"rumor" was almost immediately debunked, leading to a two-day orgy of free publicity for Ms Lively, in which she not only didn't have to take off her clothes, she didn't have to do, well-  anything.

We are not so cynical around here to suggest that the entire story was created and denied purely for the publicity, which is why we are unafraid to tackle a similar breaking news story, mainly that Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers, the co-authors of The Werewolf's Guide to Life: A Manual For The Newly Bitten will not be posing nude for Playboy either.

Duncan put the final kabosh on the idea in a blog post, specifically this one, written for truTV's Dumb As A Blog, where he works as a writer.The rumors were initially fueled in an email written by Powers, who wrote: "I'd do it for five grand, and final approval on the airbrushing." But why would Playboy magazine even want to publish naked pictures of two men whose claim to fame is writing a handbook that sci-fi blog io9 called "a must-have for fans of fur and fangs, (and) you don't need to be obsessed with werewolves to be charmed by its impressive thoroughness and oddball humor?" 

We're not really sure, we didn't call them. Of course, I didn't see an official response from Playboy on the Blake Lively thing either, so I think we're cool.

In other breaking news, other Dumb bloggers Susie Felber and Tara Lipinsky also have no plans to pose for Playboy, a story we will go into in greater detail the moment they too have a project to shamelessly plug anything develops.