Sound the alarms: Michael Stipe of REM recently shocked fans around the globe by officially coming out of the closet (to "help some kid somewhere"!), the closet he's already been out of for say, one meeellion centuries. But Michael's not the only one with a groundbreaking announcement to make. Apparently his bandmates, Mike Mills and Peter Buck, have been waiting all these years to make an earth-shattering declaration regarding their own sexual preferences. In the clip above, hear Stipe outs his bandmates, complete with a prepared hand-written statement. ('Cuz he's nervous! Cute!)

So Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, is apparently an on-air personality on MSNBC. Today Yesterday on Joe Scarborough's morning show, she co-interviewed her dad. It is a very serious talk about the Iraq war and Dr. Brzezinski's advisory work with Barack Obama, except Mika calls him "dad." Which is cute, but kinda disconcerting. It's a bit like Billy Bush interviewing George H. W. Bush, except with both parties involved being considerably less vile.

This year's YouTube awards were better allotted than the Oscars, with one winner that actually made me cry. As with feature films, they're better than the biggest box office hits. Apparently the trick to finding good YouTube clips is to wait a year. Five particularly worthy clips are below.

Everyone's first reaction is that's awful, that's exploitative. To which Josh Perry, the star of the show and a young person with Down syndrome, says shove it, because he knows what he's doing when he plays the eponymous character in "The Retarded Policeman." While this web series largely rides on shocking humor, it mixes up the scandalizing themes (and avoids the scatalogical) enough to remain entertaining. Below, Perry hits on a dude's mom during a traffic stop.

· On The Ellen DeGeneres Show today, Margaret Cho explains how she avoids the knife in favor of the needle. [Ellen]
· HBO orders a pilot from the Mr. Show guys. [THR]
· Is the Guitar Hero party over? [Idolator]
· Squint a little and you'll get a picture of what Jakeypoo Gyllenhaal will look like in his 50s. [ONTD]
· You'd think someone 81-years-old with the wherewithal to build himself a "suicide robot" from the ground up would have something to live for. Also: Wouldn't it be more accurate to just call it a "murder robot?" [Times Online]
· Behold the one Jared Leto poster that will not be adorning your 30 Seconds To Mars-groupie daughter's wall. [moviesblog.mtv.com]

Soren Dayton, an aide to the McCain campaign, posted a link to his Twitter account of an inflammatory YouTube mashup of Barack Obama's recent speech on race, remarking that it's a "Good video on Obama and Wright." The video mingles clips featuring Obama, wife Michelle, controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, and Malcolm X, the ultimate redneck boogieman. Of course, the post was quickly deleted, followed by the entire Twitter account, and now Dayton's been suspended from the campaign. Way to leverage social media! After the jump, the clip the McCain campaign either wanted you to see or didn't, depending on when you asked:

The Moment of Truth—the bold Fox reality experiment that promised to pulverize real lives into a fine confetti by hooking average Americans up to a lie detector and having them answer brutally personal questions about their crotch-stuffing and philandering habits—has failed to really deliver on its promise.

No sooner did the Universal logo appear onscreen than straight men around the world shrugged at the sight of the new Mamma Mia! trailer, a glittering, sensory-overloading hint at this summer's forthcoming tribute to the revolving institutions of ABBA, Meryl Streep, and general gayness.

After the chilling lessons of last night's South Park, in which paparazzi and handlers carried on mistreating the surviving bottom-third of Britney Spears's blown off head as if nothing at all was wrong, we thought we'd take this opportunity to instead focus on some of the more exciting and positive things going on in her life. For one, Britney released an album this year! It's called "Blackout," it's available on iTunes, and mark our words when we tell you, this thing is going to pop up on more year-end Top Ten lists than you can shake a stick at. (We wish we were even kidding.) Moving along:

We haven't associated sexiness with Brooke Shields since...well, scratch that. Even her so-called hot Calvin Klein ads never really did anything for us in terms of fantasies. As pretty as Brookie may be, her Amazonian stature and broad shoulders never put her at the top of our dream girl list. But during her appearance on last night's Late Show, Shields did her very best to not-so-subtly assure the masses that she is, indeed, one sexy mother. Feigning surprise that Dave just happened to have a copy of her latest spread in this month's Interview, in which she poses for scantily clad photos, Brooke proved that it's possible to accept compliments even when no compliments are actually given.

Fantastic news! CNN Anchor Don Lemon was finally given permission by his new boss to wear a vest! Everyone at CNN is so excited about this that they spent like 20 minutes talking about how great vests are, and Lemon also showed off his reading glasses. Then he said an amazing aphorism that we are having embroidered on the dress shirt we've just torn the sleeves off of.

After a touching season premiere in which Cartman learns he's been accidentally infected with HIV, South Park decided to lighten things up in the second episode of their 12th season by having Britney Spears put a shotgun in her mouth and blow off 70% of her head. (Don't worry—she lives!)

Yahoo's recently launched video site is having a difficult time catching up to Google's YouTube. It did find one way to get pageviews though: porn. As of this writing, Yahoo has a pair of hardcore porn movies hosted in the Yahoo Video Health & Beauty section. Click on to see some mostly-safe-for-work screenshots and links to the not-safe-for-work videos in question.

· "Fabian is my music," Marlee Matlin said, just moments after playing grab-ass with her mambo-champion Dancing with the Stars partner. This suggests to us that her gaydar is about as finely tuned as her hearing. [DWTS]
· Set your alarms, everyone: Your first glimpse of J.Lo's twins comes at 7 a.m. sharp! [People]
· Ivan Dixon, aka Hogan's Heroes Kinchloe, dead at 76. [AP]
· Hey—it's that immortal dude from New Amsterdam's junk! (NSFW) [OMG BLOG]
· Bring this coupon Saturday, get $100,000 off your Silver Lake loft—and free sangria. [Curbed LA]

Ready the rage of the creative underclass: Chris Crocker says about this five-second clip, "The point of this video is to show that all I have to do is blink to get the video views I do." So far it got 806,112 views.

After two weeks of witnessing American Idol finalists despoil the beloved compositions of The Beatles' songbook, Sherri Shepherd could sit silent no longer, unleashing on today's The View a blistering condemnation of their shameless, vocoder-assisted blaspheming of the sacred pop texts.

So there's this YouTuber! English teacher! Talks about word history! No wait come back she's hot! Hotter in the poorly-lit videos, I think, than in the Maximy photos she uses to make the episode thumbnails look sexy. So. In each episode of "Hot for Words," the host Marina (who has "two degrees in philology") explains the history of a word or phrase. The title reflects the topic; recent episodes include "Boobs," "2 Girls 1 Cup of Joe," "Hooker," and "Antidisestablishmentarianism." The style is simple, with a few cheesy effects (not enough to ruin it). Marina's been in Maxim and Wired and on G4's Attack of the Show and Fox News's RedEye. Here she is, talking about the word "mistress."

It's not breaking news that boinking a politician can really boost a call girl's career, but Eliot Spitzer's speed dial favorite Ashley Dupre is sure milking her fifteen minutes for all they're worth (and, apparently, they're worth a lot). Ashley, aka "Kristen," has gone from cokehead hooker to pop star and potential Penthouse pet in under a week, and it was only a matter of time before Girls Gone Wild parolee Joe Francis dug his grubby claws into her newfound fame. After recently offering Dupre $1 million to ride along on one of his pervy bus tours and getting denied, the annoyingly clever Francis dipped into his sticky archives and managed to dig out five-year old footage of none other than Ashley herself. To see how Ashley partied at 17, check out our clip, via TMZ, after the jump.

How far David Letterman has come in his interactions with reality stars since the days when he'd require visiting Survivor castaways to stand in quarantine, disinterestedly lobbing questions about insect-ingestion from a contagion-safe distance of 15 meters. Now, they climb right into the chair next to him, just like real stars!

Buried on the bottom edge of your browser, Facebook's new instant-messaging feature "is meant to be really unobtrusive and there when you need it," explains Facebook project manager Peter Deng in a video demonstrating Facebook Chat, below. We know it's unobtrusive because Mark Zuckerburg put Facebook's easily missed Beacon opt-out notifications in the same spot. More details on Facebook Chat revealed weeks ahead of schedule in the clip below.