Here are the numbers that help you keep down that first cup of coffee of the work week:

An FYI: We haven't taken the day off—even when the shackle chafes and the ball gag starts to taste like copper, Nick Denton gives no quarter. Our umbilical connection to the internet has just returned after the last couple of hours of "vacation." Regular posting will resume immediately.

According to the AP, burglars broke into Paris and Nicky Hilton's home in the Hollywood Hills Wednesday and helped themselves to some of their fine, designer items. A source told US Weekly, bastion of celebrity criminal reporting, that the thieves made off with "a laptop computer, several designer purses, video tapes and photographs of Paris Hilton...with ex-boyfriend Nick Carter." That list sounds about one camcorder short of the "Official Paris Hilton Make Your Own Amateur Sex Video Kit," but maybe that was left behind. Everyone should immediately begin monitoring the internet for video evidence of Nick Carter's vaunted staying power, so ably publicized today in the NY Daily News.

—Sure. this court document is old, but it's been making the rounds again. And we find it's very difficult to get bored of a story about Jack Nicholson refusing to pay a hooker.
—Paris Hilton's mystery bruises disappear mysteriously at Wed. night's T-Mobile party. Is this the power of make-up or mutant celebutante healing powers at work?
—Extreme Celebrity Narcissism Watch: Catherine Zeta Jones dresses her baby in her old clothes, apparently trying to clone herself. They'd dress the kid in Michael's hand-me-downs, but they were making clothes out of wood back then, and that tends to chafe infant skin.
—Colin Farrell probably wants nothing to do with Angelina Jolie so soon after Val Kilmer's been there.
—And we want to take a second to give LAist editor Tom Berman a chest-bump, a high-five, or whatever is the preferred gesture for saying goodbye. He's off to pursue "an opportunity in the political realm." We just hope they dust the guy for fingerprints once the pols have their way with him so the appropriate parties can be dealt with after the fact.

Thanks to our new batch of sponsors, who have generously saved us from picking nits out of some studio head's poodle. For information on advertising on this fine entertainment product, see this page.

The LAT reports that Vincent Gallo's self-congratulatory monument to non-simulated, cinematic oral sex has been taken down from its perch above Sunset Boulevard—because it's gotten too much publicity. And the LAT somehow construes the billboard's removal as it having "backfired." Let's see...the gigantic image of Gallo getting blown over the Strip let the entire world know about The Brown Bunny, a micro-budgeted indie film whose previous claim to fame was Gallo's cursing of Roger Ebert's colon, and both the NYT and LAT did stories on it before "too much publicity" caused the ad's removal. We think the only backfiring may be that Gallo will probably never get another blowjob without a thorough check of the room at the Motel 6 for a digital video camera.

We're not exactly sure what this Craigslist post says about the sizzle on Nelly's career, but an online ad for party-pals doesn't sound good. The ad's headline identifying the rapper as "Hip Hops [sic] very own Nelly" also sounds a little too much like a sandwich board outside of the Golden Nugget telling gamblers Nelly's inside handing out free drink tickets. Hey, this is the internet age and rolling up outside Joseph's or White Lotus in a stretch H2 and loading up on ass may well be the "old n' busted" approach, what do we know? We think The Eminem invented rappity-hop.

Rick James has died, according to ET Newslink. Out of respect for the "Superfreak," Defamer will not go around yelling, "He's dead, bitch!" or any variant thereof for at least two (2) days.

We reserve the right to be so eerily accurate in our predictions that you think a sophisticated computer model is at work—or to be so wrong that you think we compute our projections in crayon on the back of a cheap hooker.

· In an effort to vacuum up the small amount of entertainment industry capital that she doesn't already control, power-mad gabber Oprah Winfrey resigns to do her talk show for another three years. [THR]
· HBO will air a Rosie O'Donnell documentary about a gay cruise she sponsored in July—perhaps the only place with worse haircuts than you'd find on the average hetero cruise line. You see, Rosie O'Donnell has a quite hilarious hair-style, and so must all the gay people on her cruise! [THR]
· Law & Order: SVU showrunner Neal Baer is close to a deal with NBC-Universal to keep showrunning his L&O fiefdom; he'll continue to oversee the firing of any cast members that ask for so much as a cup of coffee not mandated by their original contracts. [Variety. sub. req'd.]
· Columbia Tri-Star is nearly ready to unleash the Seinfeld DVDs on a public ill-equipped to resist their power. Jerry Seinfeld's cut will finally allow him to build that garage on the moon to house half his Porsche collection. [THR]

This morning, the trades clear up some of the details about Superman director Bryan Singer's near future, and it looks like he's officially in the Warner Brothers stable for a while. Variety reports that he's been signed at WB since Fox tore up his deal and ejected him from their lot when they heard he took over for the flying-averse McG. Singer, meanwhile, "isn't going to contest the studio's request that he vacate his offices on the Fox lot" because that would be a little like putting on the Superman suit to fuck a stuffed Wolverine doll in front of Fox chairman Tom Rothman. Of course, the chances of that tableau unfolding are about as good as those of Singer getting behind the camera for X3.

It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who memorably claimed that "there are no second acts in American lives." But Bill Kirchenbauer, who memorably portrayed Mike Seaver mentor Coach Lubbock on Growing Pains (a character spun off into his own sitcom, Just the Ten of Us), knows that Hollywood lives require second acts. You can't jam your head through sanitary toilet-seat covers on the stage at the Comedy Store forever. Click the picture to see the full ad, found by a reader in Wednesday's Tolucan Times.

Oh, now we get it. The "tell-all" book about Playboy hanger-on Jill-Ann Spaulding's horrifying experiences at the Mansion was ghostwritten by Hefner's PR team! Page Six has this excerpt from an interview with Steppin' Out magazine, and the omission of any references to the elaborate system of air hoses and pulleys that allows desiccated ladies' man Hugh Hefner to sustain an erection reveals the stinky fingerprints of Playboy publicity:

Erstwhile uber-agent/Disney president-for-a-day Michael Ovitz will probably have to face bloodthirsty shareholders, who filed court papers seeking the return of his $109 million golden parachute. They say he didn't deserve the money because he took the job knowing he wouldn't stay long and would cash out big (read: really fucking big). Ovitz was at Disney for just 18 months, so that severance package works out to about...by our calculations...$10 billion dollars a month? We may be carrying a zero incorrectly, but whatever. We just hope he hasn't spent all the money on the diamond waterfall in the grotto of the Barbie Dreamhouse he's building in Benedict Canyon or on the moglet's allowance. No one wants to see their child turned upside and shaken by a judge, but Ovitz would probably demand ten percent of whatever milk money falls out.

Yesterday, we linked to this Reviewing Entertainment Weekly blog post where the manager of controversially tubby actor Ken Wahl went off on unfunny EW list-compiler Dalton Ross. (Sample level of discourse: calling Ross out on his "scrawny little frame.") Since then, the action in REW's comments has only gotten more heated, with manager SHERRY SALERNO (all-caps hers) facing off against someone who may be Ross or a Ross imposter. Discussed in the comments: Wahl's weight, Wahl's possible alcoholic beverage intake, and a supposed call by Ross apologizing to Wahl's wife (one of the semi-famous, top-heavy Barbi Twins, stay with us now) for the article. We'll continue to monitor the situation and potentially triple the number of times Ken Wahl's name has been mentioned since the dawn of the internet.

—Of course, we're only figuratively accusing Halle Berry of smoking crack. You, however, should feel free to draw your own conclusions.
—You're in luck! There's now a way to show your support for a post-Paris-Hilton-era Nick Carter, and it's online. Please, we beg of you—sign the petition rather than get Nick's name tattooed on your ass. That's played. [via WOW Report]
—Collagen is the new Photoshop, at least in Keira Knightley's case.
—An LA.comfidential blogger goes to a party at The Grove, complete with celebrities and a Black Eyed Peas show, and has no idea what it's for.
—We imagine that arriving on a raft or running across the border is more fun, but now you can try to acquire a green card on reality TV.

Again, we put out the challenge, and you responded in such numbers that we would encourage your bosses to filter out this site if it wouldn't put us back on the Boulevard in a plastic skirt and see-through heels. And now, your much-anticipated guesses to Ted Casablanca's One Career-Curdling Blind Vice.

We heard a rumor that Bryan Singer, whose Bad Hat Harry Productions is was on a two-year overall deal at Fox, got an unceremonious heave-ho from the Fox lot once the trades announced he'd signed on to do the new Superman for Warner Brothers. Indeed, we indulged in something akin to "reporting" (i.e. picked up a phone) and called Fox looking for Bad Hat Harry's offices, which became mysteriously unreachable. (Yes, we know that studio switchboard operators are not the most reliable of workers, so we tried more than once.)

Cinemocracy enlists Northeastern Univ. professor and author Alan Schroeder as a guest-essayist, and Schroeder takes a look at George W. Bush's stable of Hollywood endorsers, which increasingly looks like a VIP lounge after the free booze has run out. Indeed, it seems that Kerry's got most of the star power behind him, but it's probably closer to being a wash than most would like to admit: If the GOP didn't have Vincent Gallo making noise for conservatives between billboard orgasms, Ben Affleck's motor-mouthed, baby-eating activism might have negated some of the apparent Dem advantage.

Wherein we invite you, readers with a great facility for translating gibberish back into gossip, to send in your thoughts on the identity of humpy E! dirt-monger Ted Casablanca's weekly blind items. This week: One Career-Curdling Blind Vice, featuring the phrase "sex addiction" in relation to a young actress: