It's Ted Casablanca time! Take your best stab at E!'s humpy gossiper's gibberishy, eyeless scoop o' celebby dirt-pie.

From today's Page Six: "WHICH pro basketball player, husband of a world-class beauty, is said to be having a torrid affair with a recently divorced actress? And when he's not with her, he's chasing other foxes . . ."

A reader sends this report of another enemy of reporter Anita Busch getting nasty:

Corey Anderson of American Idle has obtained the sonogram for Julia Roberts' twins, smuggled out of Cedars-Sinai "in a cardboard tube wedged in his rectum." Enjoy this amazing document of early celebrity-offspring life! (Click picture to see a larger version.)

Alex Boese of Museum of Hoaxes weighs in with his guess as to supposedly A-list actor/pseudonymous blogger Rance's identity. [Ed. note—Museum of Hoaxes? Wonder where this is going...] Boese digs around in Rance's comments and follows the mysterious trail to...

[Originally posted 5-30-04] Blogger A Fly On The Wall hears some big celebrity procreation news from a "CAA agent friend." (Ed. note—Are agents actually friends with anybody? Fly, make sure you still have your wallet.) It's "official": Julia Roberts is all sorts of knocked up, presumably by cameraman husband Danny Moder. She's currently on location in Italy shooting Ocean's Twelve with Moder in tow.

No corporate beheading is complete without an email assuring everyone that it was the beheadee's idea to "step down" from the guillotine platform. It doesn't seem that E! employees are exactly throwing themselves in front of buses in a show of solidarity; says one, "This is the best thing to happen to company morale in years." Maybe she would've been better loved if she hadn't supposedly taken away everyone's paper cups for coffee and water to fatten E!'s bottom line?

Sometimes this gig is just so depressing. Says a reader:

The LAT prints its follow-up to yesterday's dirt-flinging story about the imminent firing of E! CEO Mindy Herman. (Which, by the way, mentions her meeting with E! lieutenants early Thursday morning in which she proclaimed she wasn't "going anywhere," a meeting noted on Defamer while it was still in progress.) A press release announcing her departure was released shortly after that meeting, illustrating that "I'm not going anywhere" loosely translates to "start packing up my office." As of the close of business yesterday, E!'s staff was still in the dark about her—get ready, here it comes—ankling.

The latest chapter in the saga of whom we dubbed "Crapulent Staffer at the Upfronts" and whom bitchy cold-coast cousin Gawker demurely named "Miss Poopy Pants" has been written. And it's vigilante justice at its finest: An outraged reader decided to trace the email to its corporate rumor-mongering source and out the sender to his bosses. We bet that today The Boy Who Cried Poop will be the one crapping his Dockers in some HR functionary's office as VPs somberly read back the litany of less-than-inspired shit puns. Maybe they'll take some photos!

Here are you answers, er, answer, really, to Ted Casablanca's Unbedded Blind Vice from yesterday:

Reuters lands an interview with supposedly A-list actor/pseudonymous blogger Rance. (Full disclosure: Defamer was interviewed for the story.) As we expected, Rance doesn't really give up any nuggets that might lead to his outster from the "mystery" blogging ranks. But the article claims that "it was never his intention to play hide-and-seek with the world," which stinks just a bit of the bullshit. Hello, world, I'm this totally famous actor, but don't go and try and figure out who I am! Did I mention I'm nailing this actress whose name I can't print?

THR reports that CEO Mindy Herman's rumored departure from E! Networks has been made official. Should we say it or should you say it? Mindy Herman ankle!s E! We always think that's going to feel better than it actually does.

It's a little late in the day, but what the hell, let's play the Guess Ted C's Blind Item Game! We invite our readers to decode E!'s humpy gossiper's gobbledygook and take a stab at uncovering his secret gossip item. This week's Unbedded Blind Vice:

The NYT and the LAT have printed their largely snore-inducing Graydon Carter stories. But FWD's Daily Spy hears that the Wall Street Journal stuck with the story and might be ready to go to print with a fresh account of Carter's Hollywood misadventures. Maybe this time something better than "Graydon totally puked in Steven Spielberg's hot tub!" will turn up.

The NYDN's Rush & Molloy report that George Clooney is getting his obscenely rich Hollywood buddies to kick in for his dad's run for Congress in Kentucky. Contributors seemingly very interested in Nick Clooney's Kentucky-fried politics include Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, Kevin Costner, Paul Newman, Adrien Brody, Renee Zellweger, Michael Douglas, and Matt LeBlanc.

An E! spy tells us that Mindy Herman has quietly called a meeting this morning for all the company's VPs so that she can "separate fact from fiction from the LAT article."

The Smoking Gun has the final divorce papers from Nicolas Cage's and Lisa Marie Presley's short-lived marriage. Neither party will have to pay support or divide up assets from before the marriage. The official reason cited by Cage is "irreconcilable differences," but we think that Cage quietly invoked California's obscure, "Holy shit, Michael Fucking Jackson had been there!" instant-divorce clause.

The LAT reports that E! Networks chief executive Mindy Herman could be out on the street with a cardboard box as early as today—but that box might be full of cash instead of Anna Nicole Smith swag. Herman may be getting $20 million dollars in severance.

We're hearing that Fox really drummed up some excitement at the upfronts in New York, but not because they've decided to destabilize the television business with their crazy ideas. The whispers are that a member of their marketing staff got so stinking drunk that he/she really got stinking drunk—and shit him/herself. Then someone took pics of said poopypants, which circulated back to the bosses. Which, of course, led to a speedy dismissal. It's bad enough to crap yourself in a room full of your peers (or so we hear), but if Fox fired the poor staffer, well, that would smell even worse.