· How does that funny little turntable-pawing dude pull so much high-end tail? This ABC News investigative report tries to get to the bottom of the DJ AM mystery, hoping to come up with a more satisfying answer than "has a great blow connection."
· Paula Abdul: Life Judge.
· Teri Polo's publicist deserves a raise for making us remember who she is.
· Your guide to this year's Superbowl ads.
· Blogger Paul Davidson has seen Vanna White without make-up, and he'll never be the same again.

We'll spare you the text of the publicist pitch that informed us that Taco Bell, like some kind of buzz-vulture feasting on the marketing carrion of another corporate predator's pop-culture kill, intends to get its own piece of the recent "controversy" over exhousehusband-for-hire Kevin Federline's much-discussed commercial for Nationwide insurance, in which a deeply offended fast-food community has loudly protested the upcoming denigration of a proud vocation during the Superbowl; suffice it to say that the attached photograph sums up the entire campaign concept in a single, tidy image. But should you desire to feel the sweet prick of the second spork-prong of Taco Bell's publicity attack, the letter containing their Fearless Gordita-Pushing Leader's formal offer of a one-hour shift working the sour cream gun follows after the jump:

You may recall the Lane Garrison accident from early December. By way of utterly depressing review: the former Prison Break actor made some teenage friends at a Beverly Hills grocery store one Saturday night, accompanied them to a house party, allegedly downed several shots of vodka, then later struck a tree with them in his SUV, injuring two and killing Beverly Hills High School student Vahagn Setian. A press conference held by Beverly Hills police today delivered the results of their investigation, including three separate charges, listed in decreasing order of fucked to fuckedest:

If perennially unlucky-in-love Jennifer Aniston had, hypothetically, decided her man woes could be cured by checking into the cheerily decorated offices of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon's clinic for some freshening up, who among us wouldn't have looked discreetly away, as if to say, "Just do what you need to do. We're running out of time and famous-enough suitors." The tabloid press is guided by an entirely different moral compass, however, and when they publish indelicately titled stories of the "Jen Gets a Nose Job" and "Wow! It's Jengelina: Jen's Sexy Revenge Makeover"-variety, it's all any of us can do to hold our breaths and just pray America's Abandoned Sweetheart isn't nudged permanently off her tightrope of sanity. Talking to People, Jen was asked point blank about the latest round of plastic surgery rumors, as well as the "lesbian kiss" she supposedly shares with Courteney Cox on Dirt:

· Music round-up: Polysics at the Knitting Factory; Helmet at the Troubadour; the Beat It Wally benefit brings Garbage, Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Victoria Williams, and others to the Alex Theatre.
· Somehow, Meryl Streep will find a way to get an Oscar nomination for her performance in photographer Laurie Simmons' three-act cinematic musical, The Music of Regret, screening tonight at the Hammer.
· The Pleasure Chest offers striptease lessons from "seasoned" (we put that in quotes only because it sounds vaguely spicy) burlesque performers Courtney Cruz and Shelby Jones. It's a ladies-only seminar, so men with boa and fishnet fetishes must wait in the parking lot until the event is over.

As alluded to in the typically restrained Drudge Report headline above, the freakout level in Boston has been officially reduced from "Holy shit, someone is leaving crazy-looking bombs all over the city!" to, "Hey, no terrorist would ever use Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters to sow the seeds of mass panic! This is just an incredibly ill-advised marketing campaign, everything's OK!" as Turner Broadcasting has claimed responsibility for the harmless flashing electronic boxes it scattered around the city to promote its Cartoon Network show through the widespread soiling of the undergarments of demographically desirable population segments. In its "sorry for the unintended terror scare" statement, Turner indicated that the devices have "have been in place for two to three weeks" in a variety of other cities, including Los Angeles, so our own wave of marketing-induced hysteria should roll along just as soon a shopper decides to report one of suspicious blinking boxes planted in The Grove's parking structure to security, rather than just shrug their shoulders in resignation and agree that it's time someone finally took out that place.

As we noted earlier, final ballots were mailed out today to the Academy's 5,380 voting members, but a single bullet-pointed note can't adequately convey the importance of this crucial step on the Path to Oscar™; to understand the potential mortal peril that heroic accountants routinely accept as part of their mission to maintain the integrity of the awards deliberation process, one need look no further than this image of Bradley J. Oltmanns of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who looks on dispassionately as a crazed, knife-wielding DreamWorks publicist is gunned down by Academy security before she could taint the ballot supplies with counterfeit forms on which Dreamgirls is presented as the sole Best Picture nominee. Despite the regrettable bloodshed, the ballots would go out on time, ready to play their part in the recognition of legitimate honorees.

As much as we cherished the idea of Courtney Love perpetrating the first physical act of judge-on-contestant violence (excepting, of course, those moments when Ryan Seacrest gets handsy with the shoulders of inconsolable male contestants) as the newest member of the American Idol team, we knew deep in our hearts that a wave of denials about an alleged offer to join the show was in the offing. Idol mastermind Nigel Lythgoe's statement that he never made a recruitment pitch to Love has Us Weekly backing slowly away from yesterday's item, while Love herself, in her trademarked agrammatical fashion, rambles at length on her website about how Us molested her (we think; it's all so terribly confusing) in its quest for controversy [via Tabloid Whore] :

· Sacha Baron Cohen may be the Oscars' only hope at getting a younger, wider audience to show up to this year's telecast, though of course there's no guarantee any time he spends at the podium won't be filled with references to how convincingly Ellen DeGeneres has hidden her testisatchels. [The Envelope]
· The Oscar ballots are in the mail and must be returned to Pricewaterhouse-Coopers by 5 p.m., February 20, where a small army of accountants will tabulate them and shout things like, "Yup! Another one for Forest!" [Variety]
· "Oscars" has seen a 440% jump in search engine queries since the nominations were announced, with increases for nominees Will Smith, Leonardo DiCaprio, Penelope Cruz, Kate Winslet, and, most popular, "Helen Mirren without underwear." [Earthtimes.org]
· Jennifer Hudson told Oprah she will be performing a song at the Oscar ceremony. And we are telling you it won't be the one you want to hear, but "Love You I Do." And we are also telling you that jokes involving this particular lyric have long overstayed their welcome. [Broadwayworld.com]
· Abigail Breslin also mentioned to Oprah that her date for the evening will be Curious George—her stuffed monkey. Bi-Curious George, meanwhile, still hasn't announced who he'll be bringing. [Hello]

· In a town hall meeting on the Fox lot yesterday, network president Peter Liguori delivered an ultimatum to his showrunners, threatening that those who don't staff and cast their pilots with diversity in mind might find themselves without a series pickup. Said Liguori, "We think as a network, it's the right moral thing to do," Liguori said, moments before announcing the positive example to be set by his always-virtuous alternative programming department, which is rushing Who Wants To Hire A Black Staff Writer? into production. [Variety]
· A little more on the CAA gas explosion. [THR]
· Sad news: Aardman and DreamWorks Animation end their "troubled six-year partnership," finally deciding that a mutual love of Claymation is just not enough to make a Hollywood marriage work. Also, it didn't help that Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Flushed Away kind of bombed. [Variety]
· Speaking of pilots, Var lists all the current pilot pickups in one handy place, letting you know to whom you can direct your production resume. [Variety]
· Perhaps fearing that the American Idol Nielsen Death Star might vaporize them if they dared switch the channel after the show, audiences stuck around in mind-boggling, record numbers for House, which drew in 27.7 million viewers last night. [THR]

With his elective stint at gayhab nearly complete, it looks as if rageoholic Isaiah Washington's Dark Night of the Gay-Bullying Soul will finally see dawn, as People is reporting the actor is scheduled to return to set Thursday with a sound body, clear mind, and taking his newfound slur-sobriety one day at a time:

While the industry held its collective breath in the immediate aftermath of yesterday's explosion at CAA's new Century City headquarters, waiting to see which Wilshire Boulevard rival would step forward to claim responsibility for a suicide bombing striking out at the evil agenting monolith's Hollywood hegemony, it exhaled in relief when it was revealed that blast was a maintenance mishap and no one was more seriously injured than they might be in a typical day's work at the agency. But with the momentary chaos produced by a gas-induced diaspora that temporarily flooded their neighborhood with Armani-clad refugees, tenants of nearby buildings needed some reassurance that everything was OK. Last night, that reassurance finally came in a memo from the company that manages CAA's building:

Bonus Slurs!: In another clip, Paris can be heard describing a "fucking hoodlum broke whore bitch from, like, Compton. Public school bitch," before a clearly audible pink f-bomb is dropped, upon which she explains that the trucker-hat-and-blazer-wearing dandy in question "wants to fuck my boyfriend."

Nestled between today's Page Six items concerning a Diddy goon's seizure of a digital camera memory card that may have contained unauthorized images of their boss dancing with Sienna Miller and a discarded Trump trophy wife's endorsement of Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions is this bizarre mash-note about Monday's news that recent Paramount pinkslip victim Gail Berman and Lloyd "All Media Mentions Of Me Must Include A Reference To My Role In Shepherding ABC Megasuccess Lost" Braun were joining forces to seize back control of their Hollywood fates:

Many thanks to the alert reader who informed us that Factory Girl star and former Jude Law nanny-zapping victim Sienna Miller could be heard saying "fuck" on the Today show this morning in the brief interval between the video cutting out and the show going to a commercial, for we feel it's the responsibility of everyone with access to the YouTubes to share such special moments with the world. We're grateful that there are several panes of expletive-resistant glass between Today's visiting, potty-mouthed talent and the Rockefeller Center tourists who gather behind them in the hopes of getting some fleeting screen time, for we'd hate for their trips to the big city to be ruined by the shocking profanity being uttered by famous people whose internal censors have failed them.

· The Film Experience blog compiles a list of people you're probably going to be pretty sick of by the end of 2007.
· The LAT examines the Spoof Movie Fart Joke Mystique.
· A question to which we don't care to ever know the answer: What's Up With Brit's Necklace?
· Rachel Zoe to reveal the utterly mysterious ways in which she transformed many of your favorite troubled starlets into stylish, stick-thin zombies.
· A fun thing for film nerds to discuss: Martin Scorsese's use of X's in The Departed.
· And the award for Best Sneaky Use Of A Network Catchphrase In A Publicist's Statement goes to this Bravo flack for working "Watch What Happens" into her response to the Top Chef spoiler flap.

Just in case you haven't yet had your fill of stories about the backbiting between Paramount emperor Brad Grey and the sneaky studio usurpers crouching not-so-quietly inside the DreamWorks Trojan Horse he bought a year ago, the LA Weekly's Nikki Finke reports that skeletal Viacom executive presence Sumner Redstone may have signed Grey's death certificate by letting slip at a cozy power-player dinner party a rather impolitic comment about why Dreamgirls found itself without a Best Picture nomination. Clasping your hand to your mouth while trying to suppress an outraged "Oh. No. He. Did. Int!" is completely optional as you read on:

· Taylor "Mr. Helen Mirren" Hackford (don't call him that—he gets touchy) hosts "Shorts!" at the Samuel Goldwyn—not a celebration of the latest in Bermuda, hoochie, board, and cargo styles, but a program featuring the ten Oscar-nominated films in the animated and live-action short categories. [Variety]
· For those of you feeling cheated out of an Oscar fashion show, however, here's a clip from the Andre Leon Talley event we mentioned a few weeks ago, in which Vogue intern and star of MTV's The Hills Whitney stumbles down some stairs modeling Hilary Swank's backless number. [BWE, Reuters]
· WGA West's Animation Writers Caucus is giving Jules Feiffer a lifetime achievement award at this year's Writers Guild Awards. The longtime Village Voice cartoonist also wrote Carnal Knowledge and Popeye. [Variety]
· We know who won Sundance, but what about the satellite festivals? Dylan Verrechia's Tijuana Makes Me Happy picked up Slamdance's top narrative honor, while the Slamdunk Film Festival awarded best fictional feature prize to The Junior Defenders. [THR]

· Music round-up: Kissing Cousins at Spaceland; The Breakups at the Echo; Alex Nackman at the Troubadour.
· Nancy Ward, the newly appointed regional director of FEMA, speaks at the
Luxe Hotel Bel-Air about disaster preparedness, a topic especially timely given the events unfolding over at CAA today.
· The New Beverly does its best to totally blow your damn mind with a double feature of The Apple and Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Reports are flooding in about a possible explosion within CAA that's resulted in a flood of Armani-clad refugees being evacuated to the sidewalks of Century City. A few accounts we've received: