Champagne wishes and caviar dreams are now but a memory for billionaire shareholder-activist Carl Icahn, who lost about $125 million today by selling off 16 percent of his ever-losing stake in Yahoo.

The sale of 12.7 million shares at just under $15 a piece is a far cry from the hopes that the famously prickly Icahn had when he started his quest to bring about change and riches for himself by investing in stock of the turmoil-plagued Internet giant in 2008.

As it turned out, he came to Silicon Valley, he saw, he did not conquer.

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Okay, BoomTown arrived late to Yahoo’s media event to show off its “open” strategies across its properties (I had a most excellent excuse in that it was my youngest son’s very first day of school).

So it was kind of jarring to hear Yahoo Media Group head Scott Moore talk about an email demo about adding social elements that had preceded his presentation, which he had not seen himself.

“I always think of the media properties the sexy [part of Yahoo],” said Moore. “But that kind of made mail sexy.”

Sexy email! Yahoo is saved!

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All Yahoo needs now is for former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to show up and start recounting votes.

It could happen, given all the crazy characters who have been drawn to the much-beleaguered Internet company like a magnet, in 2008.

It’s almost as if there is a voodoo curse on Yahoo and, so, you didn’t think the digital gods would let it have more than one weekend of good news, did you?

No, they will not, it seems.

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There is a mini-tempest brewing over how shares were tallied in the Yahoo annual meeting last Friday, specifically around whether a group of votes withheld by one of Yahoo’s major shareholders was not counted, counted incorrectly or even voted incorrectly by the investor.

According to sources close to the thinking at Capital Research & Management, the proxy committees for its two large funds that hold a significant stake in Yahoo recommended last week that they withhold votes specifically from CEO Jerry Yang and from various board members, such as Chairman Roy Bostock, to register disappointment with their performance.

Thus, sources said, the investment fund has approached outside vote tabulator Broadridge Financial Solutions, a Lake Success, N.Y.-based financial services company that does securities clearing and processing, about whether those votes were correctly counted.

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Could Ross Levinsohn and Jon Miller reinvent Yahoo? What about OpenTable’s Jeff Jordan? Or various and sundry Google or Microsoft execs?

It could happen.

That specific scenario of putting someone like the two former Internet execs in charge of the troubled Web giant is one of the many being bandied about, as Yahoo shares tumble and the company heads toward a potentially ugly annual meeting everyone involved desperately wants to avoid.

In fact, Yahoo’s board and major investors are talking today about various options for the company, including Yahoo’s receptivity to a sweetened deal with Microsoft and also other ways to pull the asset-rich company out of its stock doldrums.

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