· In today's installment of Rambling Anecdote Theater, Captain Kirk answers a call to Playmate-snapping duty. [Tonight Show]
· Elizabeth Berkley has launched a website where teenage girls can write in for advice. Finally, a place that collects such nuggets of wisdom as this: "Just as Nomi, my character in Showgirls, gets turned on by things that challenge her or obstacles or other hurdles to overcome, those are things that I welcome and I love that." [ask-elizabeth.com]
· Hey, MTV Films: Could we interest you in our spec, The Two Davids: America's Idols? We already have some casting ideas. [Popwatch]
· Come on, Chandler Tempe, AZ voters: If you want change, choose Schmuck! This message approved by Team Schmuck. (Thanks, Dave.) [Defamer]
· Here's the good news: The Larchmont Crumbs opens Friday. Here's the better news: 1000 FREE CUPCAKES. Oh. Ma. Ga. [Eater LA]
· Run for your lives! The British Bachelor Giant will devour us all! [JustJared]

Speaking at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando, Florida, Bill Gates said some stuff about Internet Explorer 8, blah blah blah. More importantly, he rolled out the latest version of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a Windows-powered machine that waves its arms and shouts "Developers, developers, developers!" It can even throw eggs in order to fend off ruthless Hungarians when necessary. Presumably it can also throw chairs to fend off larger predators like Google. However, any attempts to buy Yahoo inevitably result in a blue screen of death. We hear Steve Ballmer 2.0's first decision was to hire Lloyd Braun.

Over the last few days, we have touched on many aspects of the fire that ravaged this town over the weekend: the lost prints, the mystery of the 3am blowtorching, the things we wish would've burned and the destruction of the King Kong attraction. But there is one crucial aspect to the blaze that the media continues to ignore, likely due to the power and influence wielded by a certain member of local government. That man is Mayor "Goldie" Wilson. And while most cower in fear of him, our Intrepid Defamer Videographer Molly McAleer is just the type of woman to stand up to his reprehensible actions (while, at the same time, bringing you this evening's To Do's). Fight the power!

Ah yes, we fondly recall the halycon days of the summer of 1999, when a fresh-faced batch of no-names captured the zeitgeist by bringing the carnal pleasures of beating off to webcam porn and fucking pastry items to the big screen. Yes, that's right, American Pie was a surprise hit that summer, grossing over $100 million back in the days when that threshold still meant something. It went on to launch the careers of a whole handful of marginally talented actors and even managed to spin off not one, not two but FIVE sequels. The intervening years, however, have not been kind to the cast. Some ended up in rehab (Tara Reid, Natasha Lyonne), some were exposed as having no talent (Jason Biggs, Chris Klein), and some found themselves twirling around dancefloors in silly costumes on utterly banal reality television programs (Shannon Elizabeth). Of the lot, only Alyson Hannigan and Seann William Scott are still in a position where people actually return their phone calls. At least that's what we thought until we saw Stifler out himself on last night's Late Night With Conan O'Brien by confessing that his Q Rating with the millenial set is somewhere south of Carrot Top's. Good luck, Alyson — now you're the last counselor left at Band Camp with any cred. [Late Night With Conan O'Brien]

Almost a year after it originally went on YouTube, this video of a kid playing with a glass ball is starting to get big. In the clip below (followed by two more clips of the same performer), a young man in a t-shirt and fedora makes up for his terrible outfit by showing off his extremely niche body trick: He can manipulate a glass ball so it seems like a living creature, a trick called "contact juggling."

"You could say I was too lazy to calculate, so I invented the computer." The whole documentary is a lot of fun to watch — famed British thespian David Jacobi even makes an appearance in a dramatization as the legendary Alan Turing. Zuse and Turing were on opposite sides of World War II, with Zuse's machine mostly used to crunch numbers for the Nazis' rocket projects. Helping to keep track of the undesirables intended for slaughter in the concentration camps? That was IBM's job.

Forget searching Technorati, pitching bloggers and creating Facebook pages. Know what helps a video go viral? It's easy! Launch it on MTV and cast Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. — you know, actual Hollywood talent. Then, upload it to YouTube and just sit back and watch as bloggers hungry for content discuss your video's importance in the shifting landscape of online video, all so they can embed it. As we have, below:

On last night's installment of The Bachelorette—ABC's envelope-pushing social experiment in which a houseful of horny male actors split their evenings between discovering each other's bodies and convincing a deeply deluded young woman that they are actually there to woo her—the remaining suitors were treated to a surprise field trip to The Ellen DeGeneres Show studio. There, they were grilled by the talk show host on what, exactly, they found so alluring about designated trophy-object DeAnna Pappas. (This proves especially challenging, as Pappas quite noticeably suffers from a congenital personality-deficiency that prevents her from doing or saying anything of interest beyond recalling the death of her mother.)

· The totally chill dog who threw this party is really regretting having invited Andy Dick. [TMZ]
· We take a moment to remember Bo Diddley. [NY Times]
· Also, the man who invented the Pringles can passed on. His family honored his wishes of having his delicious, salty remains placed inside one of his convenient snack-tubes for eternity. [Telegraph]
· In our wildest Stupid Celebrity Tattoo fantasies, nothing—and we really do mean nothing—ever prepared us for this. [ONTD]
· An utterly non-obligatory shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal photo. [WOW Report]
· Here's an insider's guide to spotting Photoshop trickery, using an American Idol promotional shot. Clue #1: Paula Abdul is successfully seated upright without the use of visible ropes or pullies. [sciam via BoingBoing]

In case you hadn't heard, momager extraordinaire Dina Lohan's new reality show was sadly slammed in the ratings by Sheen Sperm-aversive blabbermouth Denise Richards in the ratings. But before weeping for the runner-up, don't forget: Dina still officially wears the crown of Mother of the Year! They gave her a trophy and everything! Yes, "they" are a group of cleavage-baring Long Island moms with fake tans and nails as long as their list of ex-husbands, but a title is a title. Which is why Defamer Video Vixen Molly McAleer has put together a rather inspiring series of moments from last night's second episode, in which we learn three very important lessons on parenting from, that's right, the Mother of the Year. Our favorite and most valuable parenting rules as taught to us by Dina herself:

When she's not busy winning over the likes of Verne Troyer, Molly McAleer is hard at work bringing you each evening's To Do's. For tonight's installment, she decided to go back to a well that still has plenty of water left in it. That's right, back by popular demand, it's another Harryhausen-meets-Hepburn stop motion classic. Enjoy!

Twitter's outages are becoming more and more painful for us. Not because we're addicted to the service, but because Twitter outages seem to bring out the worst in people. Take Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, for example. Ordinarily a normal, decent person, during a recent outage, he created the video embedded below. It's titled "Twitter Come Back" and it involves an approximation of singing. Then, for more punishment, view Darren Barefoot's video on the same topic. What we're really looking forward to: Behind-the-scenes spin doctoring on whether this is the fault of Twitter's former chief architect, Blaine Cook, or the service's incompetent management.

While the broadcast portion of yesterday's MTV Movie Awards was short on thrills, the same cannot be said for the red yellow carpet. Armed only with a laptop, an iPhone and a video camera, Molly McAleer and your Uncle Grambo did our darndest to bring you a sense of the hustle and bustle as a gaggle of celebs — which ran the gamut from A to Z-List — strolled and sprinted by us on their way into the Gibson Ampitheater at the still smoldering Universal Studios. The following video, culled together by our magical pixie of a videographer, conveniently boils down the two hours we spent baking in the hot California sun into two short minutes. From Rainn Wilson's special message to you, the loyal Defamer audience, to a horrifying closeup of the veins that punctuate Verne Troyer's bald dome, kick back and relax with our SPF 100 recap of last evening's pre-show festivities. [MTV Movie Awards]

Tech Ticker's Sarah Lacy and BoomTown's Kara Swisher share a particular interviewing style: Badgering their subject into submission through interruptions, personal anecdotes, and swift corrections. The main difference is that Lacy smiles when she does it. The technique is effective with tech titans and media moguls, but did it work when Lacy interviewed Swisher? Check out the clip above to find out.

Twitter's founders are waging a behind-the-scenes war with Blaine Cook, the blogging service's former chief architect. The subject: Who's responsible for the service's perpetual outages. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington ran a series of leading questions about Twitter's infrastructure, attributing them to "people who say they’ve seen Twitter’s architecture." I don't think that's true, if only because I received a similar set of questions, before Arrington's post went up, from a source who identified himself as a "friend of Blaine." In their official response, Twitter cofounders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone — they're the two one always forgets about, because they're not as interesting as Evan Williams — go out of their way to avoid naming names.

As rumored earlier, the new season of MTV's geriatric (and "pioneering" blah blah) reality series The Real World will be set in "downtown" Brooklyn. The producers are calling the neighborhood Fort Greene, but that's as amorphous a real estate designation as any of the others in Crooklyn (after describing where I live to various people, I've come to the conclusion that I live in 172 different neighborhoods. I just call it Stinktown). The seven drunken, broken strangers will be perched high above the Jay St./Borough Hall subway stop in a $6 million bi-terraced, 10-feet-windowed deluxe apartment in the sky (with, of course, hepatitis-filled jacuzzi!). A promo video for the apartment building (the Belltel lofts) that will try to contain the nightmare is above. Watch it. It's a good lesson in how to talk to/understand insanely dumb yet inexplicably rich New Yorkers.

A ban on drinking in London's subway system — the Tube, they call it — began on Sunday. On Saturday night, London's best drinkers gathered for a Circle Line Cocktail Party, also known as the Last Round on the Underground. Thousands attended, 17 were arrested, two police officers were assaulted and Mark Zuckerberg made it all happen. Reports say word of the the citywide cocktail party spread only after 26-year old London banker Alexandre Graham created a Facebook group called "Circle line party - last day of drinking on the Tube." Soon after, several other Facebook groups formed with plans to party as well. "The point of it was just to make fun of how ridiculous the ban is," Graham told the Evening Standard. "I hope I don’t get sacked," he added. (That's British for "fired.") Below, ten YouTube videos of "the Last Round On The Underground." Graham's employers at the Royal Bank of Scotland, will want to examine them closely before determining his fate.

As Defamer's resident sous chef Molly McAleer will attest, the most difficult part of culling together each week's installment of Dirt Sandwich is not finding material worthy of inclusion, but rather trying to decide which parts to eliminate. This week's episode is no exception; even in a four day work week, this sammy is overflowing with juicy morsels of celebrity detritus. WATCH (!) as Billy Bush nearly drops an s-bomb when he learns about Clay Aiken's impending fatherhood. REVEL (!) in the sheer delight of knowing which celebrity in Hollywood Barack Obama looks up to. CELEBRATE (!) the wonder of TMZ's long-haired broseph when he describes Jodie Foster's erotic shopping trip as "Harsh, dude." Our thoughts exactly.

If you woke up this morning and noticed that something in the air seemed, well, different, your senses were not deceiving you. As the final days of May trickle to a close, that can only mean one thing — it's time to hit the beach! For those of you who haven't been swimming in the Pacific yet this year, might we suggest bringing an inflatable alligator to the beach with you this weekend? After all, nothing puts a damper on a lovely day at the beach like getting caught in a riptide and ending up marooned on Santa Catalina Island (especially if a burst of negatively charged exotic manner ends up making said island up and disappear!). Whether you end up at the beach or not, Molls McAleer is here to guide you on your journey of all the fun that can be had in Los Angeles this weekend. Enjoy!

As if Harvey Korman's passing wasn't enough cosmic, clipworthy grief for Mel Brooks devotees, today comes word that the filmmaker's 30-year-old production shingle Brooksfilms is closing its doors. It's not quite the loss it sounds like at first blush — the company hadn't released a film since 1995 — but as symbolic deaths in the family go, this one smarts. Brooks founded the shingle in 1978 to avoid potential genre confusion over The Elephant Man and other dramas he would produce throughout the '80s; Brooksfilms also yielded his last great comedy, History of the World, Part I, before tapering off with the likes of Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Then came Broadway, and Brooks never looked back. That doesn't mean we won't, though; join our reminiscing with the accompanying greatest hits (sorry, no Solarbabies here!), and Netflix accordingly. [NYP, video by Molly McAleer]