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[File under: "Stories We'd Hoped Would Go Away If We Ignored Them, But Still Wind Up In the Inbox A Dozen Or More Times"]

By now, it's common knowledge that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie are no longer off-screen BFFs, and that Richie has been summarily dismissed from all future Simple Life duties. But yesterday Hilton, no stranger to the timely, well-placed sound-bite, decided to cocktease the entire celebutante-obsessed portion of the civilized world by issuing this cryptic statement about the status of Hilton-Riche relations: "It's no big secret that Nicole and I are no longer friends. Nicole knows what she did, and that's all I'm ever going to say about it." Our readers have been clamoring for the demystification of this statement, so we did some digging and came up with the following reasons for the disintegration of their partnership:

1. Jealous of the tabloid attention that Paris has attracted by conspicuously dating someone also named Paris, Nicole risked immediate de-friending by staging a public three-way with a chick named Nicole and a dude named Richie.
2. During the first season of The Simple Life, Nicole always insisted on being the first to bury her arm up to the elbow in a cow's anal column; when it was Paris' turn, Richie taunted her with derisive talk of "getting the sloppy seconds, just like with Nick Carter" while flirting with Hilton's favorite cameraman.
3. At an intimate gathering celebrating Hilton's casting in House of Wax, jokester Richie replaced the photographic self-portraits of Paris' vagina decorating the walls with charcoal rubbings of her own genitalia.
4. [Sound of toaster dropping into the bathtub.]