We never thought that we could get past the genetic perfection, the ready-made, multiculti orphan family delivered by one of the hottest women on earth, or the immense wealth and fame long enough to actually feel sorry for Brad Pitt, but we do. Doesn't the poor guy realize that no matter how many times he mentions that Frank Gehry's his hero or lets it slip that he's helping to design the bitchin'est casino in all of Las Vegas, the architecture industry is just using him for his body?

The folks at the Coffee Bean on the corner of Sunset and Fairfax really know who their customers are; for a limited time, their decadent Bolivian Lemon Bars will be served with a razor blade and on a special-edition mirrored plate, but patrons must supply their own rolled-up twenty-dollar bill.

Pamela Anderson has proven herself to be an indefatigable crusader on behalf of those beautiful and defenseless creatures many of us enjoy eating and wearing, animals. She made a homecoming of sorts with her most recent campaign, sending an impassioned plea to her homeland's leader, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to call off the highly controversial seal hunt currently underway on Canada's East Coast. From her letter:

· Universal picks up the rights to the forthcoming memoir How Starbucks Saved My Life, about an ad exec who loses his job and becomes a professional macchiato slinger, with the intention of having Tom Hanks don the green apron. Of course, the book's author was in his 60s during the personal crisis, but fudging the age downward should make the whole story that much more poignant as the humbled, middle-aged Hanks struggles to master the frappuccino blender. [THR]
· Nicole Kidman and writer Simon Kinberg will "team up" (can't you see them high-fiving after he delivers some rewrites?) for a spy thriller already acquired by Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox. Think the Bourne Identity, but with a hotter—and more female—Matt Damon. Those killing-machine superspies are always losing their memories! [THR]
· Walken. Ping pong. Balls of Fury. Choppy grammar meant to express overwhelming excitement. [Variety]
· Think the underdog-filled Final Four totally screwed your brackets? Think about what they might do to CBS's ratings. [THR]
· SAG members have "strongly backed" a strike against cable TV over residuals, threatening to shut down Monk, Nip/Tuck, The Shield, and whatever other shows we should be watching when we're killing our souls on Blowout reruns. [Variety]

We think it's his voice—Howard Stern's rich, bassy monotone—that lulls his guests into a hypnotic state in which they gladly share way too much. Then again, maybe when Wilmer Valderrama went on yesterday's show and talked openly about, among other things, taking Mandy Moore's virginity and the exact measurements of the thing he took it with, he wasn't aware that the big foam thing he was speaking into had the magical ability to send those words to millions of Sirius subscribers. Here is a partial recap of the interview from HowardStern.com:

With the suspicious birth of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' first offspring (or, if you're more prone to conspiracy, the final removal of the false stomach, pillow, or watemelon that's been strapped to her midsection the last few months) supposedly imminent, the paparazzi and tabloid press are on high alert for any sign of impending baby-expulsion. Always the leaders in gossip technology, the British Sun claims to have caught friends of the couple delivering the copious signage allegedly involved in the shadowy, much-whispered-about Scientology "silent birth" technique:

It was a forgone conclusion that Brokeback Mountain's last go at the awards show rodeo—the GLAAD Media Awards—would rope it its final trophy, what with Brokeback being touted as a monumental turning point in the history of gay acceptance, and these being the awards that celebrate gay acceptance. As predicted, Ang Lee accepted Best Picture, Wide Release at the ceremony in New York last night, easily beating out such other nominated gay-friendly wide releases as Rent and The Family Stone:

Is Amanda Scheer Demme's reign of celebrity-fellating terror about to end at the Roosevelt Hotel? Today's Page Six reports that the Roosevelt's owners are trying to tear up her contract to operate the poolside Tropicana Bar and her personal Batcave of exclusivity, Teddy's, due to clashes with the city and before a potentially damaging Rolling Stone profile hits the streets:

OK, now it's really, really, over. Well, sort of. Mostly? Variety reports that Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz won't come back to revive the series on Showtime, finally probably most likely jamming the proverbial fork in AD's resurrection hopes. Says Hurwitz:

· Ethan Hawke's Hottest State just got a whole lot...hotter. (Luckily for Hawke fans—stop snickering, you— this won't be as profound a setback as it might have been.)
· We're not sure that the Hollywood Reaper is going to accept the guy who wrote the novel Solaris towards satisfying his rule of three, so two other, better-known souls may still be harvested.
· When fads collide: Snakes on a Sudoku.
· "TV Heart-throb WILMER VALDERRAMA insists he is able to romance the most beautiful women in Hollywood because he remains grounded and grateful for his success."

The feel-good TV industry has never been more cutthroat, with the likes of Oprah, the Miracle Workers, and even Deal or No Deal's Howie Mandel locked in a pitched battle to lavish America's tragedy-afflicted souls with their own brand of televised redemption. Nowhere is this suffering-talent crunch felt more acutely than at ABC's genre-leading Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where the casting department has assembled a wishlist of interesting diseases and tear-jerking hard knocks that they feel will help keep their series atop the Nielsen mountain during their new season. The Smoking Gun has obtained an internal e-mail enlisting the help of ABC's affiliates in tracking down families touched by these dramatic misfortunes:

Glinty-eyed imparter of Hollywood movie wisdom Morgan Freeman is seeking to raise funds to erect a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington D.C. Celebrity pals Brad Pitt and Laurence Fishburne have each donated a motorcycle for a charity auction, while noted hog enthusiast Ben Affleck is selling two. From the auction website:

· Monday night self-consciously eclectic music round-up: Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt at Knitting Factory; Ghostface Killah at the House of Blues on Sunset.
· Get the bad taste out of your mouth resulting from being aware of The Shaggy Dog's existence by cleansing your cinematic palate with an offering from the Silver Lake Film Festival at the ArcLight.
·Nattily tailored funnyman Paul F. Tompkins celebrates the Linen Anniversary (that's four years, we're told) of his Paul F. Tompkins Show at Largo.

The purity of the Hottest Hollywood Assistants site has already been compromised, as several jokesters not content to waste hours rating actual future industry power-players unwillingly (we hope) put up for superficial scrutiny have created fake entries for Beaker (at least he's an assistant, though everyone knows it's for tyrannical, eyeless madman Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, not Kermit), Sloth from The Goonies (more enforcer than assistant), and David Hasselhoff (an employee of Knight Industries, not Devon Miles' coffee boy). We're a little disappointed that Lloyd, Ari Gold's Entourage abuse-magnet and the de facto face of an anonymous class, hasn't yet made an appearance, though we can't be sure he's not in there somewhere—we've only clicked through the rotation of photos a thousand or so times today.

People.com claims that this photo (screenshot above) of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes depicts America's Most Suspicious Couple exiting a "Beverly Hills medical building," but a sharp-eyed reader tipped us that it's part of a set of images of Cruise and Holmes at his son's baseball game last week. More troubling than the possible recontextualization of the photo is our paranoid fear that Cruise seems to be to traveling with a war-bride body-double wearing what appears to be a five-dollar wig and a poorly constructed rubber Katie mask, perhaps allowing him to take in a ball game without stirring up separation rumors while his pregnant fiancée remains back at the compound, where she can work with her silent-birthing coach to prepare for her imminent fake delivery.

As promised, Project Runway's Santino Rice did have a weekend-long yard sale, and while some of you who showed up were disappointed to discover that most of the goods had already been picked over by the more ravenous, early-bird reality TV junk vultures, there were nevertheless treasures aplenty to be had in the form of Rice's Runway reminiscences. Two Defamer operatives, giggly and unabashed Fantinos both, sent in their reports:

Unlike Isaac Hayes, nothing could stop Star Jones from chewing through her hospital bed arm-restraints in order to deliver a first-person diffusion of her own widely rumored medical mishap. As she told her View co-hosts this morning, all the hubbub about her almost bleeding to death during a breast lift gone wrong was "overblown":

On Friday, someone alerted us to the tracking board chatter accompanying the launch of HottestHollywoodAssistants.com, a Hot Or Not-esque online beauty pageant for the industry's desk slaves. At the time there weren't any assistants to rank, but now it seems that the site is well-stocked with up-and-coming talent ready for your numerical evaluation, a pool that we assume has been contributed almost solely by prankster co-workers or petty enemies bent on payback for bad phone etiquette. It seems that assistants all over town are already punishing their fellow call-rollers with artificially deflated scores; can it be possible that the average rating of underlings in the world's most image-obsessed business is a sad 3.5 out of 10? Put aside your professional jealousies for a moment and stop penalizing that pretty boy at the agency across the street just because you suspect he's blowing his married boss.

· Warner Bros. sets a July 21st start date for Ocean's 13 (George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh can now start salivating over what crazy, artistic thing they're going to do with their dirty Hollywood money), with celebrity choking victim Ellen Barkin joining the cast as an urban cougar whose designs on lesser gang members Scott Caan and Casey Affleck will result in several loosely plotted double- and triple-crosses necessitating that one of the young thieves has to dance through a matrix of laser beams. [Variety]
· 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Fantastic Voyage director Richard Fleischer dies at 89. Hollywood braces for the sudden loss of two more of its own to complete the deadly rule of three. [THR]
· Apple Corps, the Beatles' record company, is suing Apple Computer for violating an agreement that Apple (Computer) wouldn't operate in the music industry, thereby threatening the Apple (the Beatles one) trademark. [Variety]
· Time Warner in talks with the Big Four networks to create an on-demand "hits" channel, which would give viewers too lazy to TiVo their favorite shows access to episodes they may have missed on their first run for a reported $10 monthly fee. [THR]

Morgan Spurlock, the amiable everyman documentary filmmaker who nearly died for our McNugget-craving sins in his anti-McDonald's cautionary tale, Super Size Me, has found himself once again the object of controversy, this time for a lecture he gave to a group of 700 suburban Philadelphia high school students: