· "Owen Wilson Voice Impersonator" sounds like a pretty easy gig for anyone who's seen Zoolander and has some weed lying around. And it should be a lot easier to get than the Butterscotch Stallion Ass-A-Like job.
Celebutard shocker: Dilletante heiress might not be taking her hotel design responsibilities seriously!
If only Tom Cruise had once appeared in a movie that would make writing headlines about his new studio job easier...
If the naked guy you've just arrested for jerking off outside a BART station admits that he's got a screwdriver up his ass, should it still count as a concealed weapon? We think not, but then again, we've always been soft on crime. [via BoingBoing]
Mahir's a little upset that Borat is ganking his schtick.

You're probably just moments from departing for the happy hour drink specials that will help you blot out the memories of the past week, so let's get to your blind item guesses. But first (there's always a "but first"), quickly review Three Envelope-Dangling Blind Vices:

Friday
· Music round-up: Say Anything at the El Rey; Mudhoney at Safari Sam's; Eastern Youth at Spaceland.
· The LA-Lit podcast interviews writer Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness and Torpor) at Betalevel. The event's being recorded, so no screaming and/or crashing of cymbals as you enter, lest you ruin the event for everyone.
Saturday
· More music: The Knife at the El Rey; The Who at the Hollywood Bowl; Giant Drag at Little Radio.
· Louis CK is doing two live shows at the Henry Fonda, which HBO will deceptively cobble together into a seemingly single performance at a later date. TV magic!
· Former The Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry will be Asssscat's guest monologist at the UCB Theatre. We really don't need to sell Corddry to you. You miss him enough on your own.
Sunday
· The Day Arnold Schwarzenegger Kicked My A** is a doc that follows filmmaker and producer Lori "Abner Zurd" Fontanes as she ran against the man who would become our beloved Governator, not the film that Alec Baldwin is trying so hard to get his voice out of. Proceed to Art Share LA with that important distinction in mind.
· And still more music: Modest Mouse at Avalon, and yet another chance to see The Who at the Hollywood Bowl and watch concertgoers your parents' age smoking dope and singing along to "Baba O'Reilly."

Ellen Burstyn has finally commented on the bizarre turn of events that saw her receive an Emmy nomination for a 14-second performance in the HBO movie Mrs. Harris (she lost, to co-star Cloris Leachman). Refusing to downplay the controversial nod, Burstyn only hopes, as any top-of-their-game athlete would, to shave a few seconds off her best personal time at next year's meet. The AP reports:

Somewhere deep within Fox's distribution department, the following conversation is taking place:

Ever since the announcement that MGM was pulling its United Artists brand out of mothballs and handing it over to the world's most famously unemployed actor, the headlines (and all the stunning UA watertower designs) have inevitably focused on Tom Cruise, not longtime producing strongwoman (and former agent) Paula Wagner, the person who will actually be charged with the responsibility of interpreting requests like, "Hey, let's do one where I sprint through the streets with perfect posture, and then maybe later I dangle from an airplane landing gear or something cool like that" into actual movie projects. The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke looks to bridge this yawning attention gap by filing us in on Wagner's personal history:

Stopping by Good Morning America this morning to support Bobby and to fulfill her biweekly quota of image-rehabilitating public appearances in which she assures the world that partying until 6 a.m. on a nightly basis has no deleterious effect on her work ethic, Lindsay Lohan claimed that she had never even seen the now-infamous letter from Morgan Creek head James G. Robinson informing the actress that all hangover-obscuring, exhaustion-related excuses for skipping work on Georgia Rule would no longer be tolerated, a missive read by roughly every living person in the entertainment industry within ten minutes of its publication on The Smoking Gun. We suppose it's possible that she never received it, as it was originally addressed to her temporary home at the Chateau Marmont, and not to a location where she spends the majority of her time. Accordingly, we'd suggest that any future employers needing to communicate urgent messages about unacceptable set absences have their letters delivered by hand to Lohan's favorite bathroom stall at Hyde, or to the emergency room at Cedars Sinai, the two places she'd most likely be found on days she misses her call times.

Russell Crowe once again indulges his favored hobby—bemoaning his terminal victimhood at the hands of a cruel and unfeeling world—in a recent interview with CBS, in which the actor adds yet another item to the floor-length list of mitigations and provisos appended to his apology for having launched a telephone at the head of a New York hotel concierge. Reports the BBC:

OK, this is how it's gonna work: We tell you how we want to do all sorts of wonderfully dirty things (let's go with "shrimping" this time) to the sponsors who advertised with us this week, then post a bullet-pointed list of said sponsors, allowing you to see what products and services on which you should immediately spend all of your disposible income. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and have your toes sucked (metaphorically, of course, unless toe-sucking is somehow your line of business) by the world's sexiest consumers, see this page:

· Audi
Blackberry
Dewars
Decemberists
E! Online
The First Post
For Your Consideration
Jane Magazine
Mini's First Time
Paramount's REDS
SV Supreme Vodka
Volver
Yahoo

Fox's post-World Series line-up is battered by all comers, with new sitcoms Til Death and Happy Hour begging to be put out of their Nielsen misery and the The OC bombing in the post-Coop era. And in a result that makes even NBC executives snicker, "Oh, that shit is embarrassing," Fox was beaten by Univision (who had the Latin Grammys) on the night. [Variety]
· Another way to describe The OC's premiere ratings is "awful." [THR]
Fox gives a series order to David E. Kelley's hour-long wedding planner drama The Wedding Store, which replaces previously announced series The Wedding Album and allows the network to maintain its FCC-mandated levels of nuptial-related programming. [Variety]
The relentlessly publicized Borat is finally opening in 837 theaters, with THR boldly predicting that there's no way the Kazakh can compete with The Santa Clause 3's multiplex-jamming release at 3,458 venues. [THR]
Because what television really needs is more sitcoms about emasculated men: The CW buys Beta Males, about "a trio of guys coping with their lives as domestic caretakers while their girlfriends and wives serve as the breadwinners." [Variety]

We thought a handsome companion item to our post about Alec Baldwin threatening to shit on an Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary is this photo, brought to our attention by our friends at BestWeekEver.tv, of a lovingly handcrafted Christian-Bale-on-the-crapper figurine, as precious and detailed as anything Hagen-Renaker has ever produced, and sure to only increase in value with time. The eBay craftsman selling "The Bathroom Man" is willing to hand sculpt your purchase to look like you, but why have a boring, non-celebrity such as yourself immortalized talking a miniature, poorly aimed crap (or are those cinnamon buns?) on the floor, when you can proudly display an unmasked Batman doing the same? And for those for whom the $139.99 price point is not an issue, may we suggest ordering a second sculpture, featuring the likeness of Bale's The Prestige co-star, Hugh Jackman—a handsome, bookend companion that would complete a diorama scenario of the two magician nemeses going head-to-head in a mantelshelf crap-off.

Wherein we invite our readers to drag the shiny, clean blind item razor blade offered by humpy E! gossip-cutter Ted Casablanca along an unscarred section of their fleshy forearms, the only self-destructive act that makes them feel truly alive anymore. This week, Ted ambitiously juggles three hopelessly concealed subjects, supplementing his obsessive coverage of Toothy Tile's half-out-of-the-closet antics with those of two secretly homosexualized co-stars. Dip your toes in Three Envelope-Dangling Blind Vices:

30 Rock's Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Programming, Alec Baldwin, has a storied history of not backing down from fights, whether he's getting all up in the grill of an NYPD officer who disagrees that his celebrity status somehow exempts him from airplane-crash-site cordons, or tattling to a gossip columnist about how a particularly difficult costume designer is a "fruit-salad head." The actor now once again finds himself at odds—this time with the producers of an Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary he was contracted to narrate—and Radar reports that the beastly Baldwin hasn't minced words in registering his displeasure:

While scouring the roughly sixteen thousand stories trailing Tom Cruise's unexpected, imminent return to gainful employment this morning, we noticed a lone voice rising from the desert of media analysis, repeatedly countering all the prematurely exuberant chatter about how the actor and producing enforcer Paula Wagner are ready to revive United Artists' legacy, usher in a new, talent-fellating Hollywood Golden Age with their studio gigs, and summon down from the heavens a deluge of investor cash. Not so fast, says our go-to Cruise contrarian:

Even though superannuated Viacom despot Sumner Redstone publicly reacted with the obligatory, magnanimous statement "(I wish Tom and his associates the greatest good fortune in their venture.") in reaction to yesterday's news that former moviemaking associate Tom Cruise is shacking up with MGM to revive United Artists, privately, he probably spent the day angrily commanding various abled-bodied minions to overturn heavy office furniture on his enraged behalf, berating his underling's utter failure to follow his orders to have Cruise placed on an ice floe and floated out into the ocean, eliminating the possibility that he'd ever work in the entertainment industry again. But for at least a few precious moments yesterday, Redstone was able to take some solace in the fact that he has at least one employee he can count on:

If you came of age concurrent to the rise of "independent" film you probably remember Adrienne Shelly. She was the muse of the early Hal Hartley pictures; she was absolutely adorable in Joel Hershman's criminally underseen Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me; she was pretty much on any soi-disant intellectual guy's top five crush list.

· You'd think that on Halloween, people in Santa Monica would be a little suspicious that the Borat trying to engage them might just be an annoying dude with a gray suit and a fake mustache, not the genuine article. Then again, they were all probably pretty drunk.
· Speaking of Borat, it seems that notorious Rolling Stone pullquote whore Peter Travers is pretty pleased with the movie.
· In honor of tonight's The OC premiere: Hey, Mischa!
Howard Stern superfan Tony Pierce lands an interview with Mike Gange, whom we previously believed ceased existing once the E! show went off the air.
This is probably the best poem about Martin Scorsese's eyebrows that you will read today. But don't hold us to that if you find a better one.

Other blogs are much better equipped to keep you informed regarding the coming traffic Apocalypse about to swallow any unfortunate soul wretched enough to have to drive anywhere near LAX, courtesy of your friends at 20th Century Fox's insistence that Live Free or Die Hard be filmed on an authentic stretch of Los Angeles freeway. We can, however, pass along a tiny bit of good news for those who find themselves stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam: They might hear some shit blow up in the distance and momentarily trick themselves into thinking that the strength of their hate has willed into existence one of their gruesome revenge fantasies involving Bruce Willis and some poorly timed pyrotechnics:

TMZ.com has scored a major find in the Anna Nicole Smith three-ring tragedy circus: A sworn declaration by a woman named Laurie Payne, who befriended Smith in 2005 in the Florida Keys when they were introduced through a common acquaintance, Smith's friend-with-benefits G. Ben Thompson, a real estate developer from South Carolina. The declaration contains several bombshell revelations, among them that Larry Birkhead is indeed the father of Dannielynn, and that Payne had witnessed Smith take "a rather high dose" of Xanax, in addition to having herself "personally administered" Anna Nicole pills from a bottle unsubtly marked "Methadone" during the pregnancy. An e-mail allegedly sent from Smith to Payne also came attached to the declaration:

· Music round-up: Cheap Trick at the Wiltern; Shelby Lynne with the Watson Twins & Jack Shit at the El Rey; Mouse on Mars at the Echo; Rocco DeLuca and the Burden, Kiefer Sutherland's Favorite Band™, at the Troubadour.
· This year's AFI Fest is up and running, and tonight the festival holds a tribute to homophonic Tom Cruise relationship survivor Penelope Cruz with a screening of Volver at the Cinerama Dome.
· Actress Arlene Sorkin mercilessly interrogates Teri Garr over possible exaggerations and fabrications in her autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, at the Santa Monica Public Library