· This is the best video about a director interacting with a puzzle we've seen since a behind-the-scenes clip on The Island DVD showing Michael Bay standing over a toppled Jenga tower at a wrap party and screaming, "Why didn't you fucking tell me the fucking thing would fall over if I pulled that block out, you little piss-ant!" at a nearby PA. [via BoingBoing]
· Defamer PSA: If you're thinking about drinking and driving tonight (and we know you are, because this is LA), you might want to avoid this section of Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills. At least the cops are giving you some advance warning.
· RAIN: CAN IT HAPPEN TO US?
· Hurty Elbow has compiled a gallery of Borats who don't really look like Borat.
· You're really not going to want order creamy salad dressing ever again after reading this, so just skip it.
· Doesn't this story make you nostalgic for the summer, when it seemed every day brought a story of wild animals loose on aircraft?

• The Soup: Dreamgirls [YouTube]

Good news, heathens/Satanists/church-burning Nordic black metal bands: according to a study by nutbag finger-waggers show business watchdog group the Parents Television Council, the idiot box is twice the incubator of prime-time Godlessness that it was a year ago. And in perhaps the least surprising finding in the history of crackpot research projects, Fox is leading the charge against the faithful. Reports the LAT:

Friday
· Music round-up: Dan the Automator at the El Rey; The Blood Arm at the Echo, Dressy Bessy at El Cid.
· Over the weekend the Aero is showing five Pink Panther films—and not one of them is the shitty remake with Steve Martin! You owe it to yourself to attend. [via Flavorpill]
Saturday
· The UCB Theatre again hosts The Dirtiest Sketch in LA contest, where filthy-minded performers try to outporn each other in under three minutes. We heard a girl took out her boobs in the last one, so who knows what you'll see this time.
· Marc Joseph signs his new book of photographs, New and Used, which features essays, short fiction and poetry by Lydia Davis, Stephen Elliot, Thurston Moore, Jonathan Lethem (and others!) , at Arcana Books in Santa Monica.
Sunday
· More music: Silversun Pickups and Irving at the Troubadour; Guns N' Roses at the Universal Amphitheatre; The Temporary Thing at Spaceland.
· We do this "blog" stuff for a living and we have no idea what a "blogzine brain-share" consists of, but we're sure that boosters of the incredibly exciting medium that's streamlined the sharing of photos of Britney Spears' vagina will be interested in this event at The Bungalow Club on Melrose.

On the off chance that you haven't been following the saga of troubled™ American Pie actress Natasha Lyonne that's been dragging on since last April, CNN.com's helpful "Story Highlights" box on today's update should get you all caught up. There is, however, a pitfall to taking the easy shortcut offered by the above bullet points: if you don't read on into the body of the article to discover that Lyonne barged into the apartment and actually had the canine in hand when she said, "I'm going to sexually molest your dog," you lose almost all sense of the hilarious, poodle-diddling jeopardy in which the quivering animal suddenly found itself.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are now posted several times a week—so send them in often. (Every time you do, an angel gets its wings! ) Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about how ridiculous K-fed's sneaking-into-the-Pirates-of -the-Caribbean-ride game is.

How bad have things gotten for Tara Reid? Apparently, so bad that she'll have to travel all the way to a Marriott in Chicago to get someone to pay her a modest appearance fee in exchange for downing tequila shots, dancing on top of a bar, and occasionally shouting a slurred "Woooo!" on New Year's Eve, activities which a basic cable channel once paid her to perform at drinking establishments all over the world. We can't bear to see Reid in such a desperate state, so party promoters of Los Angeles, we beg of you: Please make her an offer to let her stay in town for the biggest (amateur) drinking night of the year; we're sure the Chicago people haven't sold too many of those $135 and $165 tickets yet, and would be compassionate enough to release her from her commitment if a less embarrassing offer came along.

To bring you up to date on what the media (well, Gawker) has dubbed Chingchonggate, People's 2006 Scariest Lesbian Alive Rosie O'Donnell first addressed the ongoing controversy—her personal "macaca"—on her website, putting some of her thoughts on the matter into her trademark blogku verse. She finally addressed the matter directly on yesterday's The View, saying, "Apparently 'ching chong,' unbeknownst to me, is a very offensive word" to "Japanese people," a gaffe that instantly made us nostalgic for the days of Michael Richards reaching out to the "Afro-American" community. She then apologized, though tempering it by saying "there's a good chance I'll do something like that again...'cause that's how my brain works." Apparently, that wasn't good enough:

We only have one more opportunity to thank our sponsors before the holidays hit, so join us in savoring this penultimate moment of advertiser/blogger love. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and drive spend-horny consumers to your fine product or service, see this page.

· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Back to the Jungle, Again Edition: Warner Bros. and producer Jerry Weintraub are developing a "new take" on Tarzan; only the potential involvement of director Guillermo del Toro gives us hope the project might evolve into something other than an excuse to put Ashton Kutcher in a loincloth. [Variety]
Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, dies at the age of 83. [THR]
Director RJ Cutler will follow around Vogue's Anna Wintour as she prepares the magazine's fifty-pound fall fashion issue, hoping to capture documentary footage of the assistant-abusing atrocities fictionalized in The Devil Wears Prada. [Variety]
· CBS wins a "quiet" Thursday night in the ratings behind CSI and Survivor; Meanwhile, The OC continues to tank. How long until they stunt-kill Chino or Seth? [THR]
Scott Rudin and Miramax are adapting Pulitzer-winning play Doubt for film. Playwright John Patrick Shanley will write and direct the movie version, planning on using a liberal amount of NY location shooting to avoid that not-so-fresh, "this still feels like a play" feeling that afflicts so many stage-to-screen adaptations. [Variety]

Whether lending out her couch for love-trumpeting acrobatics, her ear to the plight of African orphan-snatching pop icons, or simply launching a new generation of grating and ubiquitous talk show hosts groomed in her own branded image, America's spiritual shepherd Oprah Winfrey has always made it a point of giving something back. Now the Winfrey charity bonanza is coming to prime time, with two weepy, feel-good reality TV specials that promise to give audiences that magical, "I just gave everyone I know a Pontiac!" feeling:

As the publicity campaign for Rocky Balboa ramps up for next week's release by repeatedly reminding the public that Sylvester Stallone is still essentially the scrappy go-getter who marched into United Artists' offices with a boxing script and a crazy demand to star in his passion project, new online showbiz newsmagazine (with the value-add of "Attitude," a novel concept in entertainment coverage) Hollywood Today reports that this beloved piece of Rocky's backstory is, not to put too fine a point on it, total bullshit:

A teaser trailer for Live Free Or Die Hard intended to premiere in front of Eragon and Pursuit of Happyness today was "accidentally" leaked online yesterday afternoon by Yahoo! (the offending page was quickly pulled), a completely unorchestrated error that resulted in the clip's immediate proliferation on the YouTubes. (Egads! What will the studio do to counteract the publicity disaster represented by a fully finished movie commercial getting out 15 hours early? Heads will roll!) At the risk of becoming party to Fox's transparent ploy to build buzz for the resurrection of its moribund "desperate guy fighting terrorists all by himself" franchise, we present the teaser, in which so much shit blows up and so many cars are launched through the air in a single minute (without a hint of plot) that we wouldn't have been surprised to see the words "A BRETT RATNER FILM" pass across the screen.

The AdFreak blog points out a truly inspired Charlotte's Web promotion offered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, in which kids are invited to color a picture of Wilbur, the film's porcine star, for a chance to win dinner for four at Famous Dave's restaurant, an eatery specializing in serving pigs not lucky enough to have a talking spider pal to save them from the slaughterhouse. While the prize meal may traumatize a child who's grown attached to Wilbur (really, the cartoon mascots both begging to be devoured and doing the cooking aren't helping), the trip will provide the contest-winning family an opportunity to teach their young ones a valuable lesson about the cruel realities of farm life that the film irresponsibly teaches can be easily overcome by some web-based barnyard anti-slaughter campaigning.

· At last night's premiere of Rocky Balboa, star Sylvester Stallone and pals Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Patrick Swayze, Dolph Lundgren, and Christian Slater briefly gathered by the bar to share a few laughs about the good old days, but quickly scattered when Slater began his pitch for a six-way buddy comedy about a bunch of past-their-prime actors who enroll in the Police Academy together. [Note to MGM: We will sue if you put this into development.]
Q: "What has seven legs, male and female reproductive organs and nub antlers?" A: We don't know, but didn't it just get into Eddie Murphy's car on Santa Monica Boulevard? [via Boing Boing]
Amy Poehler's breasts are now a matter of public record, but at least her baby factory is still locked down.
We're going to be really depressed if this amazing video turns out to be some kind of viral ad for Famima pork buns. Which, we might add, are totally delicious.

Hey, England! The recent discovery of five prostitutes' bodies has you jittery, upset, and dreading the thought of what is quickly looking to be a 21st century Jack the Ripper in your midsts. The British Comedy Awards should cheer you up—presenter Oliver Stone, take it away:

We missed this pretty dead-on Mad TV parody of Studio 60 back when it originally aired in November, due largely to the fact that we had no idea that Mad TV is still on the air. (Usually when we say that, we're just being wiseasses, but we genuinely thought the show was canceled two years ago—hey, even their official website thinks they only went 10 seasons.) But now, thanks to the power of YouTube, we're offered a peek into a parallel television universe, where the Sorkinesque patter crackles rather than grates ("Dammit! Can anyone here be a fluffer, is a fluffer, *know* a fluffer?!"), where we fully believe in the talent of Savannah, their featured performer, and where the stakes are appropriately high—we find ourselves not only caring deeply about our tumescent boys at King's Air Force Base in Bellevue, Illinois, but believing that if their rocks are not gotten off, national security would, in fact, be compromised. Enjoy your all too brief trip to Studio 69 on Van Nuys Boulevard.

· A distribution of nominations according to studio puts Paramount Pictures at the head of the pack with 15, not including Paramount Vantage's 7 for Babel. You can bet the hugs were flying at Vantage today! [GoldDerby]
· If you caught a replay of the nomination announcements this morning (or, heavens forfend, actually woke up to watch them), then you probably caught an ethereal Jessica Biel's shimmering cascade of giggles as she twice had to read the words Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. You then fell back to Earth with a thud when permanent grouch-face Matthew Perry approached the podium to cough up his list of nominees. [Reuters]
· Nominee quote orgy! The Gloater: "I'm just going to sit and bask in people's envy." -Justin Kirk. The Anhedonic: "Our film is really about enjoying the experience of life...and not getting caught up in the contest." -Jonathan Dayton, co-director, Little Miss Sunshine. The Liar: "It is a privilege to be mentioned in the same breath with actors like...Will Smith..." -Leonardo DiCaprio. [AP]
· Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry describes the typical writers' room post nomination announcement celebration: "I will probably toast my writing staff with Diet Coke and we'll spend about 10 minutes talking about it and then we'll just jump back into work," putting their celebration at roughly five times the duration of the one Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria have planned for their nominated co-stars, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman. [AP]

· Music round-up: The Slackers at the Troubadour; The Movies at Mountain Bar; Great Northern at "Spaceland On Ice" at Pershing Square; Under the Influence of Giants at The Roxy.
· The State alumni Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter are at the Wiltern, though without David Wain on the bill, we're not sure if we're even allowed to bring up our beloved Stella in connection with this gig.
· Hit the opening of MOCA's "Skin + Bones" fashion exhibit and see the "Defensible Dress," which is "a wearable security system equipped with sensor-activated quills," as well as the "Modesty Protector 500," one with "an artificial intelligence so advanced it can remind you to put on your panties before heading out to Hyde." OK, maybe we made one of those up.

If you're the type to pick up the latest issue of People, pore over a two-page spread about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's latest, empty-handed orphan-acquisition trip through a developing nation, then hurl the magazine against the wall, frustrated that that couple is just being too damn choosy ("What was wrong with the kid with that adorable cowlick from the refugee shelter in Karachi?!" ) about the next addition to their multicultural brood, we urge you to take a deep breath and relax as Jolie herself once again reminds you about the complexity of intrafamilial race-matching: