Meredith Vieira announced her departure from “The Today Show” this morning, leaving Matt Lauer to co-host the nation’s top morning show with Ann “Good Morning Good Morning” Curry.

“This is a difficult day for me,” Meredith said in an emotional announcement on TODAY Monday. “I’m going to try to hold myself together here. But after months of personal reflection and private conversations between my family and my friends, I’ve decided to leave TODAY in June. [MSNBC]

Vieira will remain at NBC in some capacity at NBC News, but she’ll always be remembered best on “Today” as “whatsherface, you know, the one who replaced Katie Couric?” And also for the time she hit on a Navy pilot and announced that she was “an old, horny woman”:

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Meet the Roberts family. They appeared on “The Today Show” for some Oprah-style wish fulfillment after the patriarch died while serving in Afghanistan. But before that happens, young Keegan Roberts disrupts his mother’s teary-eyed interview by making faces at the camera and dancing all crazy. I’m sure a lot of people will find that adorable, but it just makes me sad. It’s like, “Hey soldiers, if you get killed overseas, your children are gonna dance on national TV.” That’s f*ckin’ dark, man.

[BuzzFeed]

I didn’t really want to address this story, because I don’t think swearing on live TV is all that interesting, but this 13-year-old dropped a couple of C-bombs on this morning’s episode of “Today.” I guess the bigger story is that some teens/tweens were sending nasty text messages to each other, and it resulted in a young girl getting horribly beaten. And this girl, a supposed accomplice, talked to Meredith Vieira about it, not even realizing that “c*nt” is the kind of word you can’t say on TV (or write on a blog with pantywaists for advertising partners).

I hate to be the old man yelling “Get off my lawn!” but I’m kind of terrified by how much kids know these days. I don’t think I learned how to use the word “c*nt” effectively until my late teens or early twenties (I was a late bloomer). When I was thirteen, my main hobbies were algebra and wishing I was taller, and I used a keypad on a telephone with a cord to dial my friends’ phone numbers from memory. GRAH! GET OFF MY MY LAWN!

Anyway, the video is below, but it’ll probably get pulled because that’s how NBC rolls. If that’s the case, you can watch it at Gawker TV.

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Kirstie Alley went on the “Today” show this morning to promote her new reality show (“Kirstie Alley’s Big Life,” pictured above) and talk about how she’s losing weight thanks to this new diet of hers, which may or may not be a front for Scientology (Alley is a Scientologist herself). And when Meredith Vieira aked Alley about the allegations, Alley went on a rampage through downtown Tokyo.

Vieira asked Alley directly whether the “Organic Liaison” diet program is connected to Scientology. “It’s such bullsh….” Alley started to say, before Vieira interrupted and stopped her from finishing a barnyard epithet…

“It’s not true. It’s not true,” Alley told Vieira. “I’m the top executive. The address in Clearwater is my accountant, and he’s a Scientology Jew.” [MSNBC]

That account differs from one email I got, which claimed that Alley swore repeatedly, and that NBC’s attempts to bleep her out were “largely unsuccessful.” The edited video below doesn’t help out any, but it does give you 11 minutes of Kirstie Alley. So really, we all lose.

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We all stopped watching “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” years ago, and that’s a damn shame, because Meredith Vieira is the sexual harassing-est game show host since Richard Dawson groped his way around “Family Feud.” In this spectacularly awkward clip featuring a Navy pilot in summer whites, she does everything short of grinding on his leg and reaching into his pants. It’s a good thing YouTube hasn’t developed smell-o-vision, because otherwise your computer would reek of red wine and pheromones (Vieiromones?) right now.

In conclusion, Meredith Vieira thinks “Cougar Town” is a really good show.

[Blog of Hilarity]