Is anyone else surprised it's taken this long for the newly loose-lipped Tom Cruise to begin proselytizing about aliens?

According to an article on the always incredibly reliable Female First website, Jennifer Garner's withholding toes from fiancé/impregnator Ben Affleck. To the paparazzi lens, the relationship looks wholly satisfying, but every time Affleck thinks about ex Jennifer Lopez's little piggies, he descends into sepia-toned remembrances of toe-sucking past and the accompanying Pavlovian drooling response:

Any morning Cruise round-up worth its Sea Org salt must begin with Banterist's Cruise-inspired Xbox controller. What, no "disparage psychiatric pseudo-science" button? That must be mapped to one of the unseen trigger buttons underneath.
· What's it like to travel around the world on the WOTW tour with Cruise? One brave reporter finds out.
· What's it like to be trapped in an elevator with Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes at last night's BET Awards? One brave reader reports:

While the world does its best to bite the towel of acceptance and endure the existential Brazilian wax it received in Michael Jackson's acquittal, we must strive to remember the silent victims—the MJ impersonators who lurk near the Chinese Theater and the countless others who share this regrettable vocation. A reader snapped this pic of a lonely Jacko near Hollywood and Highland, who can only watch in impotent dread as tourist attention forsakes him for Darth Vader and a minion. The crushed, ersatz Jacko's body language suggests that he realizes that no fake Jesse Jackson will appear to offer counsel in this time of spiritual crisis.

The AP obtained the Dept. of Agriculture's final, inconclusive report investigating the tragicomic tiger mauling of Roy Horn. The real reason why the white Bengal attacked his sequined-bedecked master still remains a mystery, but some of the more "popular" theories were either ruled out or no evidence proving them was discovered:

While we're inclined to throw the laptop out the window and declare that IMDb's sanctioning of Owen Wilson's nickname means our work is finally done, we realize that there are always new steeples to vault. We shall not rest until the dream is fully realized. A flash of our modest, yet greedy, fantasy is after the jump.

On days like today, the media-sensation-made-flesh known as Tom Cruise uses his mastery over the universe to defy our best efforts to contain his exploits in a single morning round-up. Above, our friends at Open All Night document last night's War of the Worlds premiere in LA, where Cruise terrorized the crowd by riding a motorcycle up and down the red carpet and aggressively hugging Will Smith. Fake-adoring fake-spouse-to-be Katie Holmes stood nearby and smiled in approval, probably glad to be momentarily free of Cruise's death-clinch.
· TV Newser reports that publicists pressured Today producers to edit Cruise's now-infamous sparring match with Matt Lauer. If what we saw was the edited version, the mind boggles at what psychiatry-baiting madness wound up on the cutting room floor.
· A reader e-mailed to tell us that "Tom Likes A He" is an anagram of "Katie Holmes." We don't know what that's supposed to mean, nor do we know what an anagram is. Is it like a female engram?
· Cruise holds forth on his favorite drug on The Early Show: "Jess, it's a point of, you look at something and you go OK. I've been on the other side of that, when people's lives have been torn apart, where you talk about suicides, where we're looking at now Ritalin is street drug; it's a study drug, because it's an amphetamine. Look, you don't have to believe me. I'm just saying, look at the data and where does that data come from?"
· Yes, we have seen that e-mail going around that claims that a certain crazy-in-fake-love person often discussed in this space and another person were caught doing certain things by a concerned third party. And no, we don't think the e-mail is authentic. This concludes our Cruise coverage for at least the next fifteen to twenty minutes.

Sometimes it feels like we lose touch with old friends. But when a reader spots the prodigal pal and dutifully records the encounter for all of us to share, it's like they never left:

Lohan is down! Lohan is down!

Not that anyone should doubt the sincerity of Russell Crowe's Post-Concierge-Bashing Televised Redemption Tour, but now we're understanding the actor's impulse to launch into operatic soul-searching each time someone points a camera at him. Page Six reports that in addition to the previously-documented phone-tossing antics, Crowe also demonstrated his proficiency in the hurling of decorative ceramics and a flair for hard-boiled dialogue. Oh, and there's a video tape of the whole thing:

Salon.com's second installment of its four-part series on Scientology turns to the pseudo-science of book reviewing, as the online magazine utilizes suppressive critic Laura Miller's spurious lit-tech to impugn the literary merits of the Church's sacred tome: (Note: you may have to watch an ad to read the review.)

It's always nice to see our most beloved celebrities take a stand on something important to them. The TV judge/crusader is just trying to get her foot in the door in Sacramento; once the nail salons are cleaned up, she'll then turn her attention to achieving humane working conditions and a living wage for the illegal immigrant who caused her infected nail bed. First things first, people.

· We're not here to judge (or to wonder about whether the ad is real or not), we're just here to help supposed celebrities posting on Craigslist get anonymous blowjobs.
· Free Katie bumpersticker spotted!
· Steven Spielberg is so tired of Tom Cruise questions that he doesn't even mind comparing War of the Worlds to 9/11.
· TTFN: April Winchell reacts to her father's death.
· Finally, psychiatrists fight back: "It is irresponsible for Mr. Cruise to use his movie publicity tour to promote his own ideological views and deter people with mental illness from getting the care they need."

OK, guys, we get the message: Brad's a super daddy stand-in, and your relationship consists of more than just the animalistic throwing together of your sexual reproductive organs. And it's nice that you're all outdoorsy with the cute sand-castles and the dirt-bike riding, but the tandem skydive was really overkill.

In discussing a story about Jack Nicholson's "rewriting" of a sex scene in The Departed to include a "prosthetic appendage" and the dusting of an actress's posterior with cocaine, we inadequately identified the appendage as a "dildo." These pictures from a Dutch magazine (and posted at Twitch) clearly demonstrate that the appendage might be more accurately described as a "strap-on." We apologize for our failure to fully recognize Mr. Nicholson's inventiveness and dedication to craft.

In the first of a four-part series about Scientology's sudden, Cruise-assisted visibility, Salon.com wonders (note—you may have to watch an ad to read the story) if the actor's recent talk-show antics, unconvincing red carpet tongue-wrestling sessions, and antipsychiatry zeal are tied to his likely ascension to the COS's highest echelons (i.e., where they tell you about the aliens and volcanos):

Paul "Tigger" Winchell and John "Piglet" Fiedler have died.

We've finally gotten around to watching the video of Tom Cruise tussling with Matt Lauer, and we know that this is going to surprise a lot of you, but Cruise's constant assertions about his superior knowledge of the history of psychiatry and its very, very devilish, pseudoscientific underpinnings has finally won us over. Repetition of the message really does work, and there is only one rational response to this incredible eye-opening: We're headed to the nearest hospital to beat the living shit out of anyone wearing a labcoat. Yes, some of these people may be involved in "legitimate" fields of medicine (Wait, are there any? We're not completely sure what we believe, we're still new at this), but we can't take the chance that they might have come into contact with a bottle of Ritalin (a street drug) at some point and carelessly assigned a reckless, completely arbitrarily determined dosage to a 5-year-old boy with too much pep. No, Cruise didn't specifically suggest this course of action, but we've always been really good about taking the initiative in these kinds of situations. And you know what else? We never found Brooke Shields to be particularly attractive, even before she started poisoning her body with devilpills.

Also: Drudge is gripped by Cruise vs. Lauer transcription-mania, but we much prefer this illustrated version, which we think places Suppressive Lauer's leading questions in the proper light.

Hey, did you know that Nicole Kidman has a movie opening today? Well, she does! Don't drag that razor blade across your quivering forearm in punishment just yet—we'd forgotten all about Bewitched too, until we stumbled across this utterly fascinating wire story, in which Kidman reveals the rigorous physical preparation for her role and whether or not she'd like to be granted witch powers for a day:

Radar Online reports that Russell Crowe's lawyer was responsible for the great advice that led Crowe's publicist to issue perhaps the most entertaining press release in the history of actor-related assault, in which Crowe's infamous bashing of a hotel clerk with a telephone was blamed on the employee's poor customer service skills: