Here, perhaps the single most bootleg photo editing job ever, which spared 1971 LA Times readers the horror of seeing Charlton Heston bare-chested. Click to enlarge it right this instant. [LAT via Sociological Images]

UPDATE (11:31am): Looks like we've been pap'd! If only Ashton Kutcher could've come up with a ruse this elaborate, maybe Pop Fiction wouldn't have been unceremoniously dumped after 3 episodes. Instead, we got Audrina Patridge tattoos! Oh well, it was fun while it lasted...

A startling revelation from the '60s emerged this week when Dan Richter, who played the contemplative ape in the prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey, acknowledged a top-level, primate-swiping security breach on Stanley Kubrick's set. It all started with the embittered recollection of losing a special 1968 Make-Up Oscar to Planet of the Apes — and then, like a slo-mo bone in the prehistoric sky, the conspiracy theories flew:

As we put this week to bed, it's time to reflect, project, deflect and genuflect on the week that was...
· Big week for Gorgeous George Clooney. His passion project, Leatherheads,
disappointed at the box office (twice!), he was on the receiving end of a threatening phone call and his sand-loving girlfriend turned his bachelor pad into Yankee Candle outlet. Ah, who are we kidding? He can still pull digits with the best of 'em.
· Ellen Page butched it up on Leno and may (or may not!) have dissed Hanoi Jane.
· Certainly, Tom Cruise has had better weeks. MGM tried to spin Valkyrie's second release date pushback as a B.O. ploy, but we knew better.
· Artie Lange and Charlton Heston both had shitty weeks, too. Artie resigned from the Howard Stern Show and Charlton, well, he died.
· The hackiest hack that ever hacked, Uwe Boll, found himself on the wrong end of an online petition that might just end his career (fingers crossed!). Howevs, he was able to leverage the power of the internet to fight back ... twice!
· It was Musical Chairs week at Hollywood's biggest talent agencies. Bob DeNiro bolted from CAA (spurring a hilarious poison pen post from the Death Star), Nick Stevens led one of "the biggest agent migrations in years" when he bolted from UTA to Endeavor and a finch with a mean streak wreaked havoc at CAA shortly after Ashton Kutcher became the agency's newest client.
· Teri Hatcher and Clint Black learned that they're both better off sticking with their day jobs.
· After publicly (and somewhat shadily) announcing that he and his wife were victims of an alleged extortion attempt by his nanny, Rob Lowe displayed the keen ability to turn an adjective into a noun when he coined the term "false terribles."

If you're planning on going out and getting bombed tonight, it's best to do so on a full stomach. Enter Dirt Sandwich, carefully crafted by Defamer's Top Chef, Molly McAleer. Each week, she grazes through the rich pasture of tabloid television for the juiciest ingredients and then stacks them all together into an easily digestible sammy, one that's guaranteed to soak up all the booze you'll be pouring down your gullet this evening. This week's Dirt Sandwich features Robin Williams' appearance at Idol Gives Back (not showing any sign of his personal troubles!), the first interview Denise Richards has ever given in her bathroom (an E! News exclusive!), Jamie Lynn Spears' romantic birthday dinner at a Louisiana Ruby Tuesdays (say what you will, but their Double Chocolate Cake is KILLER) and, of course, Rob Lowe's allegations that his nanny was set to blackmail him with "a vicious laundry list of false terribles" (which, btw, became word of the week at Defamer HQ). Enjoy, kids ... False Terribles!

If you've ever been a fact-checker, you probably had beaten into you the fact that — above everything else — you must get a person's name and age right. When we were starting out, we once let "Kerri" Kennedy Cuomo slip by us and we can still count the cane lashing scars on our ass. So our buttocks started tingling in sympathy when we read the New York Times' corrections admitting that they'd screwed up Charlton Heston's birth name and age in his obituary. There were some other goofs as well.

If having your loved one cremated and poured into a jar that sits in your house isn't enough remembrance for you, LifeGem has a better idea: take those ashes, subject them to a huge amount of force, and create a diamond to wear around. You'll always know the gem was made from, as the company puts it, a very special "carbon source"—that means your loved one! You can even get them for your pets, which are also diamond-worthy carbon sources. Once your order is delivered, we imagine, you sing a creepy little song about "the diamond within you," and cackle maniacally. Strange business. As TNR points out, this would be an apt fate for Charlton "Soylent Green" Heston. Below, some of the company's gently persuasive sales pitch, which is somehow hair-raising. There's no right way to sell this product.

The papers and the news shows (and next year's Oscars) are going to bore us stupid with footage of Biblical and gladiatorial chesty male sweatiness. But what do everyday folks think of when they think of Charlton Heston? Soylent Green, and "from my cold dead hands."

Well, you can have his gun now. Oscar winning actor, NRA president, and all around iconic conservative slab of beefcake, Charlton Heston, died last night at his Beverly Hills home. He was 84. "His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms 'consistent with Alzheimer's disease.'" [NYT] Olds, and The New York Times, will remember him as the star of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, but for the rest of us, he will always be the man who launched a thousand spoofs. Update: "Heston was born John Charles Carter in Evanston, Illinois, on Oct. 4, 1923, though the year of his birth has been in dispute for years, with some sources saying he was born in 1924." [Bloomberg]

Charlton Heston, whose turns in epics including The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur reset the leading-man standard in Hollywood and who later won all of our hearts as the president of the National Rifle Association, died Saturday in Beverly Hills. He was 83. A family spokesman declined to specify a cause of death, but Heston had been suffering from "symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's disease" since 2002.