· If it seems like David Caruso ends every CSI: Miami cold open by strangling the life out of an already cheesy one-liner, well, that's because he does.
Warning: Do not follow this link to a collage depicting the freckled death mask that is Carrot Top's face. Really, don't do it.
The Los Angeles Urban League suggests that the Michael Richards Apology Tour might have to extend a little bit past his Letterman appearance. Also: The Apology, remixed.
It's finally happened: MTV has completely run out of cities in which to film shallow assholes getting drunk and screaming at each other in a lavishly decorated home.
Never sell your baby to the bathroom attendant again just because you need to use the shitter! [via BoingBoing]
· Why do geneticists always have to go and fuck up a perfectly good, fraudulent claim by a crazy cat lady?

The Reeler provides us a with a perfect opportunity to revive our long-dormant Fauxteur Fashion Minute feature, in which we rather uncharitably spotlight the sartorial shortcomings of Hollywood's hackiest, most style-impaired directors, by confronting Denzel Washington with this photo (at right, depicting Scott with comparative fashion visionaries Jerry Bruckheimer, Don Simpson, and Cole Trickle) of Deja Vu helmer Tony Scott:

The frat boy pair suing the makers of Borat now have reparation-seeking company, as two inhabitants from the film's tiny, Romanian stand-in village are suing the production for $30 million dollars—a sum that, in the unlikely event that they should win, will be more than enough to put every citizen of Glod into their very own Clydesdale-drawn Cadillac. But as the film's reluctant stars' resentment towards the polyester-suited impostor continues to only fester and grow, Borat's original Enemy #1, the President of Kazakhstan—who once dipatched an elite deathsquad to snuff out Borat's website—appears to have finally gotten the joke:

· Music round-up: Birdmonster at Spaceland; The Lemonheads at the Troubadour; The Nightwatchman (i.e. Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello's solo acoustic act) at Hotel Caf .
· Comedian Bruce Daniels hosts his weekly Drunk on Stage show at Akbar, a revolutionary combination of alcohol and stand-up comedy.
· Charles Yu reads from and signs Third Class Superhero, his new short story collection, at Vroman's.

Inevitably, one of the unfortunate side effects of having a video of your racist meltdown (and subsequent, cringe-inducing apology to the "Afro-American" community) played in front of virtually everyone with either a television or an internet connection is that some troublemaker will comb through the deepest recesses of your IMDb profile and eventually turn up something that's going to look a lot less amusing in light of recent events and slap it up on YouTube. We can't say we've ever seen Whoops Apocalypse, but we're sure there was a compelling dramatic reason why Michael Richards had to portray a jive-talking blind man while wearing blackface that makes C. Thomas Howell's self-tanner overdose look convincing.

MGM and Revolution Studios have devised an inspired strategy for marketing Rocky Balboa, the sixth, not exactly long-awaited installment in the saga of cinema's most celebrated, cauliflower-eared pugilist: dispatching Sylvester Stallone to influential media outlets equipped with quotes depressing enough to both distract potential audience members from the ridiculousness of a premise involving a sexagenarian boxer making a comeback based on an X-box fighting simulation and to recast his participation as a valiant struggle against an industry that forces early retirement upon its aging stars. A melancholy Stallone tells the NY Times, in hopes of inspiring some guilt-induced ticket purchases:

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are now posted several times a week—so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let the world know about the time you couldn't help but notice Derek Jeter appreciating the aesthetically pleasing contours of Jessica Biel's ass during a visit to the Getty.

Producer New Line, distributor MGM, and Peter Jackson are locked in an epic battle over who has control over The Hobbit after Jackson declares that he's not willing to talk about directing the film until New Line coughs up the Lord of the Rings profits they've allegedly screwed him out of, while New Line counter-threatens to press on without him, a move that would almost certainly result in global fanboy riots. [Variety]
At the International Emmys, "very concerned" parent Steven Spielberg warns that semen-splattered corpses on CSI and people being sliced in half on Heroes might not necessarily be the best things for children to watch. [THR]
Heroes puts up the best 18-49 demo ratings that NBC's seen all season, throwing a spotlight on the momentum-stopping performance of Studio 60's Very Special Episode on the evils of product placement. [Variety]
· Nearly three years later, the FCC and CBS are still fighting over Janet Jackson's nipple. Thanks a lot, Timberlake. [THR]
Anne Hathaway is "close" to signing on to play Agent 99 to Steve Carrell's Maxwell Smart in Get Smart adaptation for Warner Bros. [Variety]

As little David Banda continues to adapt to his charmed, new life at an English manor, where he's getting into all sorts of adorable trouble crawling into his mom's closets and delighting in her secret stash of recreational riding crops and chainmail panties, Madonna's swelling heart is now set on giving David the sister he never had (not counting Lourdes, who has the disadvantage of being a less-desirable, biological child). But as with her first Malawian adoption, the follow-up tour is set to meet with much resistance and negative publicity, as 18-month-old Jessica has already been promised to an Australian missionary couple whose charity work in the impoverished African nation predates Madonna-come-lately's by seven years:

TMZ breaks the disappointing news that we'd long feared, but secretly dreaded deep in the dark part of our soul which cries out for shaky, handheld footage of the sexual congress of multimillionaire pop-star and poorly chosen, fortune-frittering househusband: There is no Britney Spears and Kevin Federline sex tape. The former couple reportedly will release a joint statement to that effect, hoping to finally squelch the constant rumors of its existence that would have eventually driven its imaginary street value over the $1 billion mark, forcing Spears and Federline to seriously consider reuniting long enough to shoot one and fulfill the astronomical demand.

Just days after Paris Hilton was likened by Tina Fey to fecal matter on Howard Stern's radio show comes yet another bodily-expulsion-related blow to her sterling reputation, this time from emo heartthrob Joshua Radin. In Vegas with his pals from the cast of Scrubs, because that's how he rolls, Radin described on his MySpace page the experience of sitting next to Paris Hilton at a local club where Jay-Z was performing. The Scoop reports:

Springboarding off the just-released Fast Food Nation's dramatization of how burger chains and Hollywood conspire to bloat America's children by inducing them to gorge on diabetes-inducing meat slabs en route to the plastic Shrek toy contained in their movie tie-in meals, the LAT's Patrick Goldstein calls out studio chiefs for happily endorsing a variety of social causes (AIDS, the environment, any other issue involving a charity dinner with an open bar) while ignoring the damage that McRibs are inflicting on advertising-prone kids:

This morning brings the sad news that director Robert Altman died last night at a local hospital. We'll leave it up to legitimate news organization to properly contextualize the legend's place in Hollywood history; we instead prefer to remember one of Altman's late career highlights, this stolen moment on the set of A Prairie Home Companion, in which grizzled auteur and unrefined talent finally bonded. We're sure that wherever Altman is now, the supple, 19-year-old thighs to caress while imparting the wisdom collected over more than half a century in show business are all attached to eager, disciplined actresses who never miss a call time or show up to work too hungover to remember their lines.

Those of you with "interests" and "lives" may not have caught Michael Richards' appearance on The Late Show last night, in which the actor appeared via satellite to apologize to the world for allowing his N-bombed-tinged heckler revenge fantasies involving fork-based sodomy to come spilling out in one ugly, unhinged, onstage tirade. But through the magic of YouTube, you now have the opportunity to spend the next seven or so minutes experiencing the cringe-inducing awkwardness that permeates the interview, complete with Richards' multiple references to the "Afro-Americans" he offended with his "crap," mea culpa enabler Jerry Seinfeld's scolding of a studio audience who, obviously confused over whether or not this was a comedy bit, tittered through parts of the apology, and Richard's questioning of whether Letterman's show was even the right venue for sincerity. (Answer: Probably not so much. Maybe if he'd hired a publicist to handle the situation, he could've gotten a spot on Oprah's couch, or some face time with established crisis diffuser Diane Sawyer.)

· The arrival of these photos has been threatened for a while, but Courtney Love finally shows off the new girls.
O.J.'s book and TV special might be canceled, but at least we still have If I Did It! The Musical to satisfy all of our hypothetical murder explanation needs.
With all the chokings and inadvertent outings out of their system, the cast of Grey's Anatomy is once again a happy family.
"Daaaaad, shut up! The inflamed liver totally went away once I stopped drinking an entire bottle of Grey Goose in one sitting."
· Quite frankly, the C-list Serial Killer isn't working nearly fast enough.

We allowed ourselves to become so consumed with the trivial matter of Michael Richards' repeated, angry deployment of a certain racial epithet in the hopes of silencing some hecklers expressing their dissatisfaction with his comedy act that we've neglected our solemn duty to join the world in celebrating the glorious union of two individuals who've played a significant role in all of our lives over the past 18 or so months. By now we assume you've already had your fill of stories of hackneyed serenades, inventories of the various outifts Giorgio Armani provided for the ceremony, and the petty complaints of turncoat townsfolk who once built shrines to the visiting couple, so instead of rehashing more of the same, we instead bring you this exclusive photo essay that we personally—personally! assembled from images provided by wire service photographers our network of spies to tell the story of Katie Holmes' final moments of pre-nuptial freedom.

A Defamer operative stumbled upon the subject of the racist celebrity meltdown du jour, Michael Richards, whose rambling and vicious verbal attack against some African American hecklers Friday night momentarily transformed the Sunset Strip's Laugh Factory into something more akin to the Hatred Sweatshop. The sighting occurred at CBS Television City, where Richards was likely taping the satellite interview set to air on The Late Show with David Letterman tonight:

· Music round-up: The Rapture at the Henry Fonda; Great Northern at the Echo; Let's Go Sailing at Spaceland; Babs at Staples Center; The Dilletantes (with Kay Hanley and Michelle Lewis) at Hotel Cafe.
· Sarah Silverman appears at Largo, where we imagine the subject of Michael Richards and racial epithets might come up.
· Gore Vidal will discuss his memoir, Point to Point Navigation, with Michael "The Bookworm" Silverblatt at the Central Library, though we imagine that the conversation will inevitably turn to the author's appearance on The Simpsons episode where Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon beat each other senseless.

We've already set our TiVos for tonight's episode of the Late Show, anticipating that David Letterman would probably have some questions for guest Jerry Seinfeld about a certain former castmate who recently tried out some controversial new material at the Laugh Factory. A tipster tells us that the taping has just ended, and that the Official Michael Richards "Sorry About The N-Bombs And Lynching Remarks" Tour has begun in earnest:

Think back, to long before Superman returned to our planet to thrill audiences with his heroic feats of lovelorn supermoping, to when the world's attentions were focused primarily on Kal-El's codpiece, aka the Bulge of Steel™—a protuberance of such reportedly goodly sized dimensions, a team of CGI artists were rumored to have been brought in to digitally diminish the young, unknown star Brandon Routh's groin into something less gasp-worthy. The Oh La La blog (somewhat NSFW if you don't want to be caught perusing a site featuring lots of muscley, shirtless dudes) has taken screencaps of a DVD bonus feature in which the newcomer is wearing a skin-tight, leave-no-nut-to-the-imagination leotard, even going so far as to magnify the critical area for your bulge-scrutinizing convenience. And while Mr. Routh has nothing to be ashamed of, it's certainly nothing close to the elephantine sex-organ-goiter the press had initially made it out to be. Perhaps it's a SuperGrower.