· In addition to the constant stream of lawsuits from co-stars unhappy with their profit participation, Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen is learning other lessons about the dark side of runaway success, like pasty-thighed fans who think it's OK to show up to movie premieres in their own neon nutslings.
· Have you heard? Our boss is blogging over at Valleywag, and while we have no idea if he's subjecting himself to the cruel lashings he distributes to his other minions when their posting pace drops, it looks like he's already figured out the value of a cheap "Separated at Birth" item.
· Losanjealous' Bill DeMarco is rating the top 50 Starbucks in LA. These are his stories.
· We made the call, and it's the Walken's sister one.
· You know what we haven't done in a while? Hey, unicorns!
· LA.com supplies a handy guide to stalking Nicole Richie. Weirdly, there are places where food is served on their list.

While browsing for a picture to accompany a post about Michael Jackson's recent comeback attempt at the World Music Awards (he had stagefright, his voice cracked during the chorus of "We Are The World," and other snoozeworthy events) we stumbled upon this photograph of the singer entering the arena, promptly causing our inner child to thoroughly soil its Captain Eo Underoos. Of course, our first instinct, after having ensured that the image had not literally reached down into our throats and stolen the wind out of our lungs, was to blow it up and share it with all of you. Sleep tight, little ones, trying your best not to think of the alabaster-skinned, nubbin-nosed bogeyman, who may or may not close in to seal your doom as you slumber.

Competition was as stiff as ever for the title of People's Sexiest Man Alive this year—just ask also-rans "Patrick, Brad, Matt, Jamie," and the "199 MORE GUYS!" the magazine teases on its cover. But sorry, Monsieurs Swayze, Garrett, Stone, and Lee-Curtis, the 2006 bragging rights go to none other than Hollywood's silver-maned conscience, George Clooney.

· Music round-up: Lady Sovereign (in a word; fuck yeah. OK, that's two, but whatever.) at the El Rey; Everybody Else at the Troubadour; The Drones at Spaceland.
· Producer Jeff Scheftel screens the uncut version of TV Junkie, a documentary that's a "self-imposed Truman Show with a dark twist," at 7 Dudley Cinema in Venice. With a live trumpet performance beforehand!
If you can't wait to get your fix of the D before the movie's wide release, there's a free screening of Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny (if tickets are still available) at the AMC Magic Johnson Theater. Giveaways are promised! We know how much you love free shit.
· Subway pitchman and future television judge Jon Lovitz does the Laugh Factory.

For those of you who found last week's David Lynch promotional stunt for Inland Empire too geographically inconvenient to attend, you have a second chance to catch the director, his trusty cow sidekick, and various signs celebrating Laura Dern's performance in person, where you can possibly absorb some of his cryptic wisdom on the origins of cheese. Alerts a reader apparently unaware that Lynch and his bovine prop previously graced a corner in Hollywood last Thursday:

While the headlines to this story blare O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened publisher Judith Regan's declaration that she considers the hypothetical double-murder how-to manual that Fox is gleefully adapting into two hours of stab-happy, civilization-eroding TV programming to be "his confession," we're more interested in the anecdote about the network that turned down a chance to air the special:

At Defamer HQ, there is hardly an event more breathlessly anticipated than Miss Golden Globes Day, in which the Hollywood Foreign Press announces which teenage celebrity offspring will be plucked from relative obscurity, momentarily paraded on stage during their alcohol-drenched awards ceremony in an extravagant gown, and then immediately returned to a life of languishing in the shadow of their famous parents, left with little more than the fleeting sensory memory of the overpowering whiskey fumes rising off slurry presenter Harrison Ford. At a ceremony taking place earlier today, Lorraine Nicholson (the 16-year-old daughter of multiple Globe-winner Jack, should you not be familiar with her work), like every Miss Golden Globe that has come before her, emerged from a twenty-foot-tall, gilded vagina representing "Mother Hollywood" (modeled, legend has it, on the ladyparts of pioneering actress Mary Pickford), a powerfully symbolic entrance dramatizing the honoree's glorious rebirth into the show-business community. Please join us in recognizing young Nicholson on this special day, then in looking forward to the profoundly uncomfortable moment in which daughter and proud, scene-chewing Dad appear together onstage, when Jack will find himself unable to resist the temptation to tick off the names of each of Lorraine's predecessors with whom he's enjoyed a sexual relationship.

THR explores the path that brought Desperate Housewives: The Game from its humble beginnings as a brainstorm by a Buena Vista interactive exec who thumbed through the company's annual investors' report and asked, "Now which members of the Disney family would be fun to blow away in a first-person shooter?" to a fully realized, immersive reality set on Wisteria Lane. The title's biggest cheerleader is Scott Sanford Tobis, a sometimes writer for the TV series hired to script the game, and who was immediately struck by the project's liberating lack of constraints. (Read: There was no Marc Cherry hovering over his laptop, snapping, "But Gabrielle would never say that!" before insisting he replace the exchange with a hilarious nun-punching sequence.) What's more, Tobis sees games as a viable prospect for TV writers who, not unlike the trend of feature directors working in TV, may want to expand their employment opportunities by slumming diversifying in another medium:

· Following in the footsteps of fellow sickly A-lister Jim Carrey, M. Night Shyamalan shitcans his longtime rep at UTA, succumbing to CAA's promises to lovingly suckle him back to health with the career-restorative milk flowing from its pair of demon teats. Details are sure to follow, but we're sure that the sudden dumping occurred at the end of a meeting in which the twist-happy director deceived his former agency into believing he would remain with them forever, no matter how cold his career had become. [Variety]
· AOL is close to poaching NBC TV Group president Randy Falco. Feel free to be utterly titillated or completely uninterested by this executive-shuffling development. [THR]
Variety eulogizes the VHS tape. You will weep openly for the obsolete format that once brought you so much joy, then smash your tape-rewinder in agony over the loss. [Variety]
Astounding numbers of people continue to be interested in Dancing with the Stars, which scores 26.7 million viewers with its last performance show. Additonally, the premiere of William Shatner's gameshow, Show Me the Money, proves decidedly less shat-tastic than its exuberantly shat-punning ads promised. [THR]
The Weinstein Company signs an exclusive four-year video rental deal with Blockbuster, cruelly withholding titles like Bobby and School for Scoundrels from the world's crap-craving Netflix queues. [Variety]

Burgeoning studio mogul Tom Cruise finally seems to realize that once his wedding-related responsibilities end with his puckish, celebratory rubbing of a tranquilizer-laced piece of cake into his new bride's mouth and her subsequent spiriting off to their honeymoon suite's Consummation Chamber, the public will expect that he return to the acting career he famously abandoned in favor of his various family-building pursuits. Variety reports that's he's chosen his next gig from among the projects he'd been circling:

We always look forward to the release of Film Threat's annual Hollywood powerless list, "The Frigid 50," and the 2006 edition provides yet another entertaining rundown of people and things that have managed to run cold in an eventful, but often unpredictable, showbiz year. You'll find the obvious candidates (#1: Mel Gibson, #28: Brandon Routh), a healthy smattering of controversial honorees (Borat, your shivery lack of sequel potential earns you second runner-up status), and even a bonus entry (yes, Colin Farrell, your expert nose for potential stinkers forced them to add a #51). As always, it's difficult to choose just one delightfully meanspirited entry to quote, but something about the subtly implicative undertones in their blurb about Scarlett Johansson's career trajectory deemed it worthy of spotlighting:

Yesterday afternoon, Fox announced that network Chief Exploitation Officer Mike Darnell is overseeing a two-part special in which accused double-murderer OJ Simpson will discuss the purely hypothetical ways in which Heisman-winning former rental car pitchmen might—theoretically!—go about the business of brutally slaying their ex-wives and their lovers. Our colleagues at Gawker have discovered that Fox has already jettisoned the unwieldy working title of O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened for something more apt to draw the kind of huge audience they're expecting for flipping the bird in the general direction of double-jeopardy laws. The new title is revealed in the leaked promo presented above.

With precious few days remaining before sufficiently convincing Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes stand-ins distract the media at a staged wedding ceremony in Rome on Saturday long enough for the real couple to complete their marriage vows on the Betrothal Deck of a Scientology-owned yacht in front of a phalanx of sailor-suited, tazer- and fishing-net-wielding witnesses (they've learned more effective bride-retention techniques after Penelope Cruz proved to be both quick and a superior swimmer), the tabloids are scrambling to discover the decoy event's star-studded guest list. Today's Page Six reports that onetime Cruise nemesis and postpartum depression sufferer Brooke Shields has made the cut, whom Holmes quickly befriended after the serendipitous discovery that Shields gave birth to her second child just a few doors down from where her own delivery of Suri allegedly took place:

In a stirring statement of personal empowerment combining the best elements of the Emancipation Proclamation, "I Will Survive," and the distilled sentiments of Snoop Dogg's most poignant couplets, Us Weekly reports that soon-to-be Britney Spears ex-househusband Kevin Federline wiped away the tears from his world-shattering discovery that the wife who had patiently enabled the elevation of both his kick and watch games to levels of ridiculousness utterly unreachable by lesser background dancers was divorcing him, grabbed a Sharpie, and defiantly scrawled the following message on a dressing room mirror backstage at his recent Chicago House of Blues show:

At this rate, the tabloid-inflated potential price of Britney Spears' sex tape should reach $350 million by the end of the week. And it will be worth every penny if we actually see K-Fed and Brit-Brit getting frustrated by their inability to remember which chess pieces "go all diagonal, y'all," sweeping them off the board, and then getting back to the monkeysex.
We imagine it does not surprise you in the least that the ways in which four-legged thespians can break into the business are virtually the same as those available to their bipedal, human counterparts.
Variety launches The Knife, a blog about the places where the entertainment industry likes to eat, leading off with today's report on Mozza, the Mario Batali restaurant that promises to be clogged with obnoxious power-eaters for months to come. There's also a post about Owen Wilson's shitty waiting skills.
Katie Holmes is in Rome! Cruise is seen leaving his hotel! Maybe this thing is going to happen after all.
· Our porny, pervtastic sister site Fleshbot is tricking its readers into taking their clothes off. Our personal ethics forbid us from trying to pull the same scam on you, but feel free to participate in their dirty game. [link NSFW]

Realizing that golf club memberships and real-murderer-trailing private investigator fees don't pay for themselves, free-moving sociopath O.J. Simpson has teamed with publisher Judith Regan for a book and accompanying two-part Fox reality special, tantalizingly titled, O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened.

Kristanna Loken, who hit the public's radar somewhere around the time Arnold Schwarzenegger slammed her T-X deathbot's head into a toilet bowl in Terminator 3, was asked recently by The Advocate about rumors that she and BloodRayne co-star Michelle Rodriguez's mutual, vampiric bloodlust had spilled off the set and into their personal lives:

Because there's nothing to brighten up an overcast Tuesday afternoon than a picture of a guy being arrested for running naked on the 405, we're happy to pass along this reader-submitted photo (taken from an office overlooking the road just moments ago) of the aforementioned sprinting freeway nudist's swift capture by several of LA's finest. We obviously have no ideas about the identity of the streaker, but the blurry focus on the subject made us immediately think of the recent cell-cam documentation of Will Ferrell in the act of voting, a local personality known for his tendency to shed his clothes and take off running virtually every time a camera is pointed at him.

· Music round-up: Explosions in the Sky at the El Rey; The Grates at Spaceland; 2 Live Crew and Har Mar Superstar at Cinespace.
· Chinatown, Shampoo, and Mission: Impossible screenwriter Robert Towne screens Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion at the Skirball, and just to mix up the Q & A formula a little bit, will answer audience questions before the showing. Crazy, we know.
· Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signs iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon at Book Soup. A night of spontaneous nerdgasms virtually guaranteed.

A couple of readers lucky enough to be on a Staples distribution list have forwarded along this e-mail (pictured) that went out on Friday, proudly touting the company's MailMate™ shredder's upcoming appearance on this week's episode of The Office. It seems that NBC has learned something from their product placement misadventures of the recent past, figuring out that if they partnered with an advertiser ahead of time to spotlight the product's more appealing features instead of demonstrating the unintended, finger-mangling uses of its whirring blades, the network could generate hefty placement fees instead of costly lawsuits.