* Irony alert: Have Silicon Valley VCs lost their appetite for silicon?

* Lindsay Whipp: All Japan wants for Christmas is Kentucky Fried Chicken

* Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London opens flat, European shares extend gains and the Nikkei retreats.

* Philippe Espinasse: An unwelcome focus on the greenshoe

* Long live loopholes: NVCA gloats over its carried interest tax win

* Josh Gordon: Content marketing lessons from the year’s top tweet

* Motoko Rich: Temporary workers are looking more permanent

* Matthew Ingram: Painful or not, Yahoo is doing what needs to be done

* Fun fact: You are 6 times more likely to be killed by a pig than by a shark

* Peter Henning: What the new insider trading charges mean about the investigation’s direction

* Overplayed: Facebook shares sell on secondary market at a $56 billion valuation. Remember, none of the buyers have any internal financial data. As such, don’t expect these private market valuations to be mirrored by Facebook’s (eventual) public market valuation.