Yes, that plaid shirt and those cutoff shorts are Lindsay Lohan's, and that liver-spotted hand firmly clasping that supple, 18-year-old thigh belongs to her A Prarie Home Companion director Robert Altman. It seemed like just yesterday that Altman couldn't remember Lohan's name; now the two of them seem so comfortable that he can probably summon her from her trailer by merely pantomiming a leg-stroking motion. Once a director and his actress form that magical bond, words just get in the way.

While it may seem to the casual Lindsay Lohan observer that the starlet has toned down her partying ways lately, true fans (read: obsessed bloggers) know that the relative quiet on the Lohan front is due to her presence in Minnesota, where she's shooting Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion. Luckily, her antics have been captured by the local media there, where she's been seen getting carded and acting "hyper-active" while shopping at a local vintage clothing shop:

The NYT breaks down Disney's recent, completely non-cynical revival of its Love Bug franchise, Herbie: Fully Loaded, into its constituent parts: product placement and shitergy. The movie's chock-full of Nascar-real advertiser bombardment and shameless ESPN (owned by Disney, naturally) tie-in buggery that encroaches into virtually every scene:

Lohan is down! Lohan is down!

After a fifty-year absence from American markets, De Beers, the world's largest diamond company, has landed its blingy whoreship in the middle of Fifth Avenue. The company's first store in the U.S. was not met without protest, however. Members of Survival International (along with Gloria Steinem) picketed the opening; the group insists that Gana and Gwi bushmen of Botswana have been evicted directly because of diamond mining. Amidst shouts of "cultural genocide," however, celebrities still came out to celebrate the arrival of new, sparkly things:

· Sayeth the Lohan: "I don't get involved in any drama." Of course, this I'm-above-it-all stance only applies to the displacement of bushmen by De Beers diamond miners, not something as monumentally important as the placement of one of her songs in her new movie or the guest list at a party at the Standard.
· "9:05 a.m. Relish life free from negative trappings of the reactive mind, God-like status of perfect mental, emotional, and physical health, and general infallibility. 9:29 a.m. Toast bagel."
· Please feel free to return to your regular, uninterrupted sleep patterns: Hermes has apologized to Oprah.
· A photography icon refuses to give an approving hand-job to the photography book Ben Stiller edited, nearly throwing the Earth off its celebrity ass-kissing axis. [via LA Observed]

Christ on a crutch, we're going to have to write about Lindsay Lohan again — at least we refrained from covering her post-Today show appearance on The View. (But as long as we're on the subject, Lindsay told the Viewsters that she has strep throat. In Lindsay speak, we know this means she was actually at Marquee last night, well after three AM, with a certain Wilmer fellow. Or so we hear, ahem.)

Lindsay Lohan stopped by the Letterman show last night to plug her latest masterwork of modern cinema, Herbie: Fully Loaded, and to do the kind of light image rehabilitation that must accompany any of her public appearances. There was a time when The Breast Question was the one she needed a quick answer for (if memory serves, it was "I blossomed!"); now it appears that Lohan's publicists have retrofitted the old breast party line for The Weight Question (which, naturally, is the polite, thinly veiled version of The Drugs Question), as she told Letterman she owes her new stick-figure to "puberty," that wonderful transition to womanhood that Lohan claimed only to have undergone at the age of 17. This makes perfect sense, for when we think of Lindsay Lohan, the phrase "late bloomer" is always prominent in our mind.

Lindsay Lohan just can't catch a break, you know? Her dad's in the slammer, her car's all banged up, her music career's been screwed, and those darn tabloids can't just accept her rapidly plummeting weight loss. Now, to make matters worse, Lohan's uncle is making nasty headlines. Paul Sullivan (brother of Lindsay's mother) has been freshly arrested in Long Island (of course) for mail fraud (what the fuck?). Allegedly, Sullivan was a bit too careless with his 9/11 relief loans, forging checks and scamming creditors. Tragic and classy; just further evidence that the Lohans are the Kennedys of our time.

· Listen guys, Lindsay works very, very hard! Don't judge her if she throws a fit when Disney shits all over that hard work.
· Maybe a bear claw, sure, but a Munchkin? Nah, we don't see it.
· We'd always had a creeping feeling that the curiously animated old guy from the Six Flags commercials had a deep, dark secret, but we're surprised at just how deep and dark it is.
· Hmmm. You'd think that with all that weed Woody Harrelson smokes, he'd be an excellent driver.
· That Tom Cruise character is so electric. But you knew that already.

Boi From Troy relates the sad tale of how Lindsay Lohan's rack of yore [Ed.note—Sigh...yes, we remember it well.] may have sabotaged Tower Records' plans to, ahem, erect a JumboTron-like billboard on Sunset:

In what should have been a joyful collision of two of our obsessions ("Hey, you got your out-of-control starlet in my desperate action-star!" etc etc), Lindsay Lohan gleefully hopped upon Jay Leno's couch last night in imitation of one crazy-in-fake-love Oprah guest, and in so doing, forcibly retired the kinetic poetry known as Doing The Cruise. This is a sad day at Defamer HQ indeed.

There are probably worse jobs than being a personal assistant to Lindsay Lohan—barbed-wire suppository tester or door-to-door herpes cream salesman spring to mind without too much effort—but no other gig leaves the former employee with an amusing array of "Lohanecdotes" to share with the internets. A "man-nanny" to an "unnamed" actress reveals what it was like to babysit his charge on a recent New York movie set:

A reader checks in with this brief account of the action outside Tuesday's Mr. and Mrs. Smith premiere, where a certain famously shrinking actress got a bone-rattling fame-check at the hands of Brad Pitt:

· Funny, we always thought that the golden popcorn at the MTV Movie Awards was inedible.
· Why does everything Michael Jackson touch go bad?
· In case you think that fake-shopping for Paris and Paris at Macy's isn't fancy enough, they've also not registered at Tiffany.
· The Butterscotch Stallion ain't buying what the Dalai Lama's selling.
· Ananova thinks that Lindsay Lohan "needs a good pie or two." We think they're talking about food, but that may be some kind of drug lingo that hasn't yet crossed the pond.

The guys at TVGasm think they've finally gotten to the bottom of the Lindsay Lohan Problem (though we should note there's a disclaimer hastily hung above this "fairy tale" to try and stop Lohan's lawyers from taking away their firstborn), citing a "source close" to the one-woman tabloid thrill-ride:

· Lindsay Lohan denies entry to Jessica and Ashlee Simpson at the incredibly shrinking starlet's MTV Movie Awards after-party; Jessica responds with hearty threats of southern-style ass kicking. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes continue to express their love for Scientology by licking one another for the camera. [Page Six]
· Has Butter-czar Scott Sartiano ended his romance with Ashley Olsen? And if Ashley and her sister Mary-Kate can no longer dine at Sartiano's restaurant, will they ever eat again? [Lowdown (2nd item)]
· When talking about the lack of African performers for the next Live Aid concert, Rush & Molloy refer to Mariah Carey as the "only touch of flava" in the lineup. No, you're not still drunk: they really used "flava" without irony. [R&M]
· Model Tyson Beckford emerges from a car accident with cuts and bruises — oh, God, why must you hurt our pretty people? [NYDN]
· By drowning her in Kabbalah water, Rabbi Berg can keep Demi Moore quiet about her pregnancy. [Scoop]
· Meanwhile, the Page Six-Jeanette Walls ultrasound announces that the Britney and Kevin's Federletus will be a girl. [Page Six]

· The real-life "Turtle" ("Donkey," improbably) is still waiting for Marky Mark to make his life like the one he has on Entourage.
· "There's not much I can do at this point anymore. I feel like the more I kind of defend myself, then the more they say. I'm just such an easy target, I guess. I don't know why I'm so interesting." Hmmm...good point, Lindsay. Why are you so goddamned interesting? Oh, that's right—the peekaboo rack, the scary weight loss, and the disarming public moments of introspection.
· Sure, people were disappointed, but at least no one wound up with a telephone-inflicted head wound.
· "Klugman, Dr. Ruth and Randall's ghost"—Who are three people we're definitely not inviting to the celebrity orgy?
· Its vast reserves of Vaseline are well-known, but is Neverland Ranch sitting on black gold as well?

Are we entering a new era of publicist lockdowns? Today's Page Six describes how Angelina Jolie's lawyer warns journalists that they can't discuss her personal life or use their interview "in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning or derogatory to Ms. Jolie," and now Lindsay Lohan, out junketeering for Herbie: Fully Loaded has a list of banned topics that turns interviews into meta-discussions of her life. From Zap2it.com:

It's been nearly two days since Lindsay Lohan's ride was rather rudely de-pimped by a crash-happy paparazzo; the incident's all over but the jail time and the lawyers' public positioning for the inevitable lawsuit: