It's likely you have caught wind by now of reports claiming Paris Hilton and her partner in whippet-induced Bentley-totaling crime, Stavro Niarchos, have finally ended their lusty tango of STD back-and-forth-passing romance. Adding another skanky wrinkle to the story is Life & Style magazine (the same celebrity journalism fabulists who broke the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes split-up story), claiming Nicole Richie's confidante and sometimes bathroom stall solo clean-up crew member Lindsay Lohan had been spotted at club Element on April 24 with Niarchos. According to the story, the two were "dirty dancing," and at one point the Greek shipping heir "had his hand up her skirt." A PR flack for the club then sent out this mass e-mail denying the story:

· The success of NBC's Deal or No Deal has erased every network's institutional memory of the primetime gameshow flops following the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? craze, as the nets scramble to once again get their copycat offerings on the air. Especially promising is Fox's obligatory knockoff, Yelling At Sequentially Numbered Duffel Bags Full Of Cash. To be hosted, of course, by a soul-patched Chuck Woolery. [Variety]
· Jack Black joins director Michael Gondry for the suitably surreal comedy Be Kind Rewind, about a man who must remake all the movies in his friend's video store after his magnetized brain destroys them all. [THR]
· Richard Gere and Terrence Howard are in talks to star in Spring Break in Bosnia, the (apparently seriocomic) tale of some journalists who are mistaken for a CIA hit squad in Bosnia. [Variety]
· ABC picks up a third full season of Boston Legal, a development that may temporarily slow William Shatner's enthusiasm for bizarre side business as he worries a little less about not having a steady paycheck. [THR]
· Fox plans to sell downloads of individual American Idol performances in both video and audio formats, allowing the modern entertainment consumer to never be far from his favorite Chris Daughtry cover of a Creed song. [Variety]

The Trixie blog snapped picture of unidentified white, powdery residue discovered after using an unspecified Hollywood club's bathroom after Nicole Richie. (We did the photo enhancement just for fun.) While Trixie carps that the "bitch could've shared," we find the leftovers to be an act of unexpected charity in the stingy stall scene; Richie's intentions to spread the wealth couldn't have been clearer if she'd left a rolled-up hundred dollar bill on the countertop and scrawled "Enjoy!" on the mirror in lipstick.

Two species from seemingly opposite ends of the universe—comic book geeks and Robertson Blvd.-wandering trend whores—merged last night as Kitson launched their new line of Superman-themed, heroically overpriced crap. And on hand to help push the $900 Swarovski crystal-encrusted S-shield cocaine-receptacles purses were none other than Superman Returns stars Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth. A starstruck reporter for Comicbookresources.com sets the scene:

Above: Unable to find an automobile upon which to trod in celebration of his new movie, Tom Cruise, famous the world over for his completely unscripted eruptions of exuberance during his myriad promotional appearances, spontaneously climbs the scaffolding at both the Paris and Mexico City M:i:III premieres.
· In Mexico City, Cruise describes the experience of spending time with his newborn: "The hours go by so quickly as I just stare at her." Sadly, the wire story gave no indication if this moment of tenderness was shouted through a bullhorn from his perch atop the scaffolding. [ABC/AP]
· Brooke Shields tells Access Hollywood that the "irony is perfect" that both she and Cruise welcomed daughters into the world on the same day, though truly perfect irony would probably require that Katie Holmes be crippled by a bout of postpartum depression despite not actually having given birth to a baby. [CNN/AP]

While The Sopranos' Artie Bucco still nurses his stirring hand back to health after its inopportune encounter with a pot of molten marinara, the actor who plays Artie, John Ventimiglia, has also found himself in some proverbial hot water: The Smoking Gun posted the police report from Ventimiglia's arrest last night, after cops spotted him weaving his Jetta around Brooklyn with the lights off, only to find an envelope containing cocaine residue in his pocket:

The accusations of violence, drugs, gay porn, whoremongering, lying, bad mothering, and publicity-whoring in the Great Charlie Sheen/Denise Richards Divorce War (please assign the preceding transgressions to either party as you see fit) were already damaging enough. But if you doubted for even a second that Sheen and Richards were hurtling toward mutually assured tabloid destruction, consider the gossip Apocalypse that Team Richards is calling down from the heavens by invoking David Spade's love life. (Quick recap: Richards is angered that Spade—who is seeing Richards ex-bff Heather Locklear, we think—called the gay divorcée a backstabber for dating Richie Sambora, who is divorcing Locklear. Got it? Good. We're shooting ourselves in the gut with a nail gun for typing that out.) Says Page Six:

· We're Not Dead Yet, Probably! Dept.: It's a big day for William Morris, as WMA is signed to represent Big Coffee's interests in Hollywood (hopefully avoiding another Akeelah and the Bee debacle), as well as signing up to become the latest agency that will fail to make the public give a shit about Jennifer Lopez's movie or music careers again.
· Britney buys baby clothes, but doesn't really seem that excited about it. Yeah, that's pretty much the whole story.
· Sit out Coachella this year, or were you just too messed up to remember much about the weekend? Buzznet's got a huge gallery of pics to either make you feel like you weren't too lazy to skip it or to jog your drug-addled memory.
· Whomever designed this spooge-flinging child's toy should probably be arrested immediately.
· Anna Nicole Smith's Supreme Court victory makes the world safe for skeleton-fucking golddiggers everywhere.

Somewhere in the Mojave Desert, Hollywood is doing its part for the war effort by lending some of its personnel and reality-simulating expertise to help troops prepare for the battle conditions they may face overseas. Reports the NY Times:

In this era of Angelina Jolie-instigated family-building tyranny, all celebrities are now forced to publicly consider (if not ultimately commit to) the adoption option, or suffer a public tarring as a privileged, callous enabler of Third World poverty and overpopulation. But even in the face of this pressure, Berry's interest seems half-hearted at best; while she seems to remove an initial contingency to her intentions by quickly acquiescing to a firmer commitment ("I will adopt if it doesn't happen for me naturally...I will definitely adopt. And I probably will adopt even if it does happen naturally."), she doesn't even bother to specify a suitably exotic ethnic background for her theoretical child. We'll believe she's not just cynically milking the idea for the publicity benefit when she announces her plan for voluntary sterilization, leaving herself no choice but to fill her empty home with the joyful cries Bengali street urchins.

· Producer Lynda Obst chats with author Hazel Rowley about Rowley's book Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at the Central Library, hopefully with a minimum of strained comparison between the book's "unconventional" love story and the Obst-produced Sleepless in Seattle.
· The Veteran's Memorial building hosts the panel discussion, "An Insider's View of Agenting," hopefully with a minimum of conversations involving reps breaking down a vet's life into pitches like, "Sounds like Pearl Harbor meets MASH with a little Jarhead. I can totally sell that." [eighth item]
· Monday night music round-up: Army Navy and the Presets at Spaceland; Mark Olson and Gary Louris of the Jayhawks at The Troubadour; Sunset Rubdown at The Echo.

Some men—lesser men, weaker men, men with steady day jobs—are content to share their feelings about significant relationships in their lives in the pages of national publications like the NY Times or Time. But other men must find different means of expression to convey the intensity of their emotions. Andy Dick is one of these men. According to TMZ.com, the inhibition-free actor transformed his entire being into kinetic poetry during a bar fight with the producer of his new movie, with each intoxicated push and crapulent shove a more perfect declaration of his amazing fervor for alcohol-induced brawls. Words, we've always found, are for pussies.

Something about the arrival of May, be it the fresh, spring air, the nearly daily revelations about the deepening seriousness of certain illegal wiretapping investigations, or the imminent arrival of the summer's first blockbuster, has inspired powerful men to issue heartfelt expressions of their ardor to their friends and collaborators. No sooner had we finished weeping over Ron Meyer's public declaration of friendship with Anthony Pellicano than the waterworks began anew after discovering Tom Cruise's paean to J.J. Abrams, the man whom he handpicked as midwife of his cinematic vision for Mission: Impossible III:, for the Time 100:

In Hollywood, you learn who your real friends are after your movie bombs in its opening weekend, or, in certain other cases, once you're jailed for possessing explosives and/or allegedly conducting scores of illegal wiretaps involving some of the most powerful people in town. Erstwhile Private Eye to the Stars Anthony Pellicano has figured out the hard way that the bond he shares with Universal president Ron Meyer is both real and special, as the NY Times reports that Meyer is fiercely defensive of their relationship after being questioned about his jailhouse visits to his incarcerated pal:

· China won't allow Mission: Impossible III to open on the same day as the rest of Asia, pushing its release date to mid-July, giving pirates an opportunity to flood the market with bootleg copies before the premiere. Chinese authorities say they're ensuring that the country is portrayed in an acceptable light, but secretly wanted extra time to take precautions protecting its population-controlled citizens from Tom Cruise's recently unleashed virility. [Variety]
· Fox's new, low-budget teen division, Fox Atomic, hires Kyle Newman to direct a profoundly unnecessary remake of Revenge of the Nerds. How about they just release a special edition of the DVD and we forget all about this folly? [THR]
· New York audiences were "polarized" by United 93 this weekend as they decided whether or not it was too soon to pay $14 to a Hollywood studio to relive the trauma of 9/11. [Variety]
· E! continues its mission to reach ever deeper into the darkest reaches of semicelebrity for programming, giving a reality show to Nick and Aaron Carter. [THR]
· A Catholic Archbishop calls for a boycott of the The Da Vinci Code film, denouncing its source material "full of calumnies, offenses and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the church," but admits that despite his stance, he "can't wait to see how Ron Howard dumbs it down." [Variety]

The high-school-quality drama surrounding beloved fauxteur Brett Ratner's apparent mentorship-with-benefits of Lindsay Lohan once again devolved into cat-fighting, with a "source" telling Page Six about Lohan's bedside discovery of Ratner's inconvenient model girlfriend during an unannounced drop-by:

· Yet another Great Moment In Movie Marketing: This weekend in Santa Clarita, the arson squad was called in to blow up an LA Times newspaper rack after someone mistook "a red plastic box with protruding wires"—a M:i:III promotional toy meant to play the movie's theme song each time someone buys a paper—for the more common kind of suspicious-box-with-protruding-wires, a bomb. The ensuing buzz around the controversial, but highly chattered-about, advertising ploy is now so strong that Paramount plans on affixing explosive devices to mailboxes and garbage cans that detonate and cover passers-by in a hail of flaming confetti as Tom Cruise's voice shouts "Mission: Impossible III, in theaters May 5th!" from the burning receptacle. [AP]
· Paramount reaches out to the fairer sex with ads playing up Tom Cruise's onscreen relationship with Michelle Monaghan and protection of co-star Keri Russell, hoping to show that he can have relationships with women that don't include brainwashing and/or suspiciously impregnating them. [WSJ.com]
· In dealing with his star's, er, controversial offscreen antics, director JJ Abrams favors a practical approach, i.e., showing up to work and hoping that the tents selling Dianetics with a free massage aren't in the way of his shot: "You obviously worry when you're doing a show or a movie and you realize that if that person does anything in an extracurricular way, is that going to affect what you do? But you have to live in a practical way in that you try to control to the best of your ability what you can control." [LAT]

Brighten your post-Coachella Blue Monday with the weekend box office numbers:

· The Charlie And Denise Show: Foul voicemails. A dead porn star. A nutjob's lawsuit. Charlie strikes back.
· The Pellicanist: Vanity Fair joins the fray, Nicole taunts Tom.
· Britney and Kevin is makin' critters agin'.
· Amanda Scheer Demme and the site of her former empire both look ahead.
· How Tom gave Katie "the willies." How Tom gave us the willies.
· Paradigm has an agent movement. Sam Gores' friendly note of impending doom.
· Michelle Rodriguez currently having the correctional time of her life.
· And this little Baldwin went to jail.
· Lesbians on TV!
· TV on lesbians!
· Lorelai shocks her family with her decision to audition for Project Runway in the next season of Gilmore Girls.
· Tori Spelling's new, sticky plan to get people to like her backfires.
· Jeremy Piven demonstrates both heroism and a keen eye for what the kids are wearing these days.
· Nick Lachey gets the Wenner Media shaft.

Our precious Friday afternoon time is slipping away, so let's get to your blind item guesses before we all sneak out for the weekend. But first, take another lap around One Lucky Bastard Blind Vice: