It seems that a committee of interested publicists, agents, lawyers, producing partners, and film executives have finally decided that Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston can finally end their loose, unconvincing public association as a Hollywood power couple and pursue separate careers, as a "close friend of Aniston's" has told Page Six that the couple is "no longer romantically connected," freeing up both parties to seek out mutually beneficial partnerships with whatever future co-stars they so desire. Vaughn's camp is apparently already hard at work nurturing a new, hard-partying, swinging bachelor image, as Page Six points out that the tabloids have placed him in a Hungarian strip joint catering to fans of "explicit" exotic entertainment, complete with a report that one of the performers is ready to shop a tale about how the insatiable actor spent a king's ransom trying to test the limits of her ping-pong-ball-ejecting abilities. Meanwhile, we imagine that Team Aniston is bracing to combat a fresh round of stories that she spends her lonely days casting various reminders of yet another soulmate lost into a raging pity-bonfire on her stretch of Malibu beach by granting an immediate "JEN: I'M OK, REALLY" cover feature to whatever magazine offers the biggest headline font.

· Music round-up: Gob Iron (with Son Volt's Jay Farrar and Varnaline's Anders Parker) at the Troubadour; Roger O'Donnell (of The Cure) and DJ Jimmy Tamborello (of The Postal Service) at Spaceland; Brandi
Shearer at The Hotel Caf .
· Comedy Death-Ray jams Doug Benson and Graham Elwood, the guys from Tom Goes to the Mayor, The Sklar Brothers, Neil Campbell and Paul Rust, and Jimmy Pardo into a single UCB Theatre show. We fear a shutdown by the fire inspector for comedian overcrowding.
· The New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff and frequent The New Yorker cartoon contributor (and former Six Feet Under writer) Bruce Eric Kaplan get together at the Central Library to discuss (this is going to shock you!) the history of cartoons in The New Yorker.

We knew that it had been a long time since we'd seen him in anything, but we had no idea that To Wong Foo and House of Buggin' star John Leguizamo has already entered the ghostwritten, tell-all memoir phase of his career. Radar has a handful excerpts from Pimps, Hos, Players, Haters and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends, Leguizamo's attempt to generate some buzz for himself by reminding the public that former co-stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Costner, and Steven Seagal are assholes, that he had a slapfight with Patrick Swayze while in drag, and that he may have been a party to a Leonardo DiCaprio sex tape. A couple of the anecdotes follow:

Not to be outdone by the recent headline-grabbing antics of the racist-meltdown-having comic community, giant celebrity mess Andy Dick has decided to up his personal ante, supplementing the substance-fueled displays of face-licking, reporter-biting banditry for which he has become infamous with a well-placed N-bomb at a recent appearance at The Improv:

A reader directed us to Lane Garrison 101, the "very first and only Lane Garrison fan site" (well, with the possible exception of this one) which has put itself on hiatus following the Prison Break actor's well-documented, tragic car crash. We understand the impulse to temporarily take the site down, but we'd argue that he needs his fans—especially ones dedicated enough to erect a web presence celebrating a performer we'd never heard of before yesterday—now more than ever to provide much-needed moral support while his lawyer valiantly battles to prove that the unfortunate combination of faulty brakes, bad alignment, and a possibly spiked cup of keg beer was responsible for the accident.

TV producer impostor and charlatan Joseph Medawar, who swindled 50 people out of millions of dollars by convincing them they'd have a stake in an nonexistent Department of Homeland Security drama, has been handed down a far more lenient punishment than federal prosecutors had hoped for—a single year in prison:

WGA West President Patric Verrone defends the organization's decision to delay contract renewal talks with studios, deflecting accusations of saber-rattling with counter-saber-rattling-accusations about the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers' threats to accelerate production and stockpile scripts if the Guild doesn't immediately do their bidding. [Variety]
America's Next Top Model moves closer to being completely unionized; unfortunately, it's not the union their recently fired writers were hoping for. [THR]
Patrick "McDreamy" Dempsey signs on to star in the romantic comedy Made of Honor, in what will be an ultimately futile attempt to recapture the big-screen stardom he achieved as Loverboy's gigolo pizza delivery guy. [Variety]
· July 2006 Disney shitcanee Nina Jacobson signs a three-year producing deal with DreamWorks, who promise never to fire her while she's in a hospital delivery room, witnessing the miracle of life. [THR]
It's the usual Monday night Nielsen drill for NBC: viewers tune in for people shouting at briefcases, stick around to watch indestructible cheerleaders, then flip to another channel before 10 pm momentum stopper Studio 60 has a chance to capture their hearts with a monologue about the absurdity of FCC fines. [Variety]

Yahoo has released its annual list of top search terms for this quickly expiring, action-packed 2006, a rundown that should once again prove that the internets, despite their still-untapped capacity for great good, still remain a tool primarily engaged for the productivity-sapping, minute-by-minute tracking of celebutard evil. A press release touting the list's arrival informs us that Britney Spears has been the top search term for five of the last six years, but this year's title should easily be the sweetest, earned as it was on the power of millions upon million of queries as varied as "Britney baby drop," "Britney Spears deadbeat divorce," and the recent, Web-slowing searchalanche, "Britney Spears upskirt vagina pics."

It has now been determined that it was indeed actor Lane Garrison behind the wheel of the tragic accident that claimed the life of Vahagn Setian, a popular 17-year-old student at Beverly Hills High School, and injured two other 15-year-old girls Saturday night. (For those unfamiliar with Garrison's work as Eminem-wannabe inmate Tweener on Prison Break, a fan posted this highlight reel on YouTube, in which he demonstrates a repeated reluctance to being made many an inmate's bitch.) Garrison has retained attorney Harold Braun for his defense, who, despite offering several alternative scenarios to counter the currently popular "drunkenly plowed into a tree" theory, is still having trouble getting around the whole "my client picked up a bunch of teenagers at a supermarket and accompanied them to a party" part of the story. The LAT reports:

It's been literally hours since we've considered the plight of the soul-searching/ hand-wringing/hair-tearing Academy voters who are trying to determine whether they should punish Mel Gibson for the paranoid, tequila-liberated thoughts about Jews he expressed on that fateful night in Malibu by withholding awards nominations for Apocalypto, or whether they should ignore such outside concerns and celebrate the directorial artistry necessary to movingly depict the graphic removal of ancient Mayans' faces. In today's NY Times, Sharon Waxman gives us a fresh opportunity to contemplate the Oscar dilemma, even getting a Actual Jewish Person to go on the record about the matter:

While we impatiently await the day sometime in the next five or so millennia that Hollywood's most powerful executives finally make the inevitable evolutionary leap to a new, single-gendered superspecies capable of both pre-menstrual rage and the intimidating swinging around of external genitalia, we suppose that sex-specific lists like THR's Women in Entertainment Power 100 will continue to exist. Until then, we must discuss them: For the 2006 iteration of their annual ranking of female potency, released today, The Reporter was faced with a potentially paralyzing dilemma: their entrenched two-time champion was coming off another impressive year, but a studio survivor who weathered a disastrous 2005 rebounded to release 12 number one films, a feat nearly as impressive as her escaping dismissal for thinking anyone would want to see a movie about a sentient plane made cranky by a lightning bolt.

· ABC News Presents: How to Talk to Your Kids About Skanky, Panty-Shedding Celebutards. It's not too late to keep your children off Hilton's pole.
Minibar-draining wild baboon attacks: the hidden danger of South African location shoots.
Blogger vs. MSM Oscar coverage slapfight!
Rubber bullets and pepper spray are two other, non-lethal ways that rowdy UCLA students can be effectively subdued.
Beverly Hills' new The Prime Grill steakhouse: "Our kosher steaks are so delicious that Mel Gibson and Michael Richards are afraid to eat them."

We'd long assumed that the title of Most Powerful Man in Hollywood belonged to the velvet-hooded, anonymous potentate who presides over the monthly Gay Mafia induction ceremony held in the secret, well-fortified sub-basement of a certain Malibu compound, and who wordlessly orders the ritualistic removal of each new member's pinkie toe by pantomiming a scissor motion with two of his fingers. (The shaving, oiling, and branding pantomimes are far too involved and horrible to describe here.) The AP, however, informs us that the person who truly holds sway over the entertainment industry is superstar Hollywood fire inspector Robert Gladden, whose ability to cancel the Oscars—and, by extension, all of existence—by stepping into the green room and declaring, "If a spark from a cigarette lighter comes within a hundred yards of Harrison Ford, everyone in the Kodak Theatre will perish in the ensuing whiskey-fume fireball. We're shutting it down," makes him a figure of unparalleled local influence:

America's fascination with Gwyneth Paltrow seems to have dwindled much in the years since she married the British soft-rocker of her dreams and birthed various produce- and Bible-inspired progeny. Her press coverage has become mostly limited to the basic formula of "Gwyneth Paltrow said snooty thing X," followed soon thereafter by "Gwyneth Paltrow refutes having said snooty thing X; instead said somewhat less snooty thing Y." The entire media cycle began anew with a recent, widely reported quote ("The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans,"), attributed to the actress and allegedly spoken to a Portuguese journalist. Now comes the second part of the equation:

· Hollywood Heart's annual Don't Call Us, We'll Call You benefit event, in which agents, casting directors, and managers demonstrate the performing gifts that led them to their current vocations to raise money for programs for at-risk kids, takes place at the Paramount Theater on the Paramount lot.
· Music round-up: Death Cab For Cutie and Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach; Delta Spirit at Spaceland; Four Good Men (featuring ex-members of Simple Minds and Big Country) at Knitting Factory.
· Former Senator John Edwards discusses and signs his new book , Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, for Vroman's at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Note the stringent signing rules—if you want him to write "Keep on truckin', Love, Sen. John John" in your book, you're shit out of luck.

A reader informed us that the ladies of The View were all sipping conspicuously out of the same ceramicware this morning: The View Winter Mug, artfully adorned with snowflakes and the disembodied heads of the show's four co-hosts, and available for purchase at the ABC online store. A perfect stocking stuffer for the "has everything" agent who will delight in adding an authentic craquelure to Barbara Walters' suspiciously supple portrait by launching it at an assistant's head, the reader went directly to the website to purchase one of the mugs, whereupon they found the following prominent warning:

Truth be told, the details of Rip Torn's DWI arrest this afternoon in upstate New York don't really interest us, as much as we admire the actor for getting liquored up in the middle of the day. His mugshot, however, is breathtaking, a combination of vintage Nick Nolte dishevelment and Gibsonian insouciance, with a puckishly raised eyebrow that seems to say, "Go ahead and take my picture, sugar tits, but both of us know that I'm gonna beat this rap, just like the last one."

Variety today launched its new, online-only "Pushy Question" feature, in which various industry types are invited to offer anonymous opinions that might otherwise be too honest for full attribution in a respectable trade paper without career repercussions. The inaugural query (our paraphrase): "So, Apocalypto is kind of good, but how fucked is Mel Gibson with the Jews who run the Academy Oscar voters?"

On Friday afternoon, we sent the just-appointed Defamer Power Luncher, a currently unemployed individual with a rumbling stomach and a burning desire to dine in close proximity to the entertainment industry's most celebrated power-eaters, to the venerable Grill on the Alley and report back on his meal. While his initial trip lacked the high-wattage spectacle he'd hoped for (is it too much to ask for to catch Les Moonves and Sumner Redstone lovingly slurping on opposites ends of a strand of spaghetti?), he nonetheless spied enough supping players to resist the impulse to toss his napkin at the nearest waiter and storm out of the place in disgust:

Renée Zellweger—who has demonstrated an impressive ability to turn zaftig for a role in roughly the same amount of time it takes to adopt an approximation of an English accent, only to take the weight off as quickly as you can say "red carpet photographers"—explained to a reporter at the premiere for Miss Potter (Zellweger Plump British Heroine Index: 8.7) how she managed to return so effortlessly to the skeletal frame that serves as the blank canvas she can later fatten as required: