• Shiksa Ivanka Trump and Observer-owning Jewish beau Jared Kushner have the rabbi for her conversion all picked out. It was important to both of them that he hate the Times. [P6]

♦ Angelina Jolie is either "burning up with jealousy" over Brad Pitt's flirtatious relationship with co-star Diane Kruger, or she's completely happy and getting ready for her next adoption in the next few weeks, depending on which tabloid you pick up. [Star, OK!]
♦ Elisabeth Hasselbeck gets more death threats than any other host on the View, news that probably won't surprise you. [P6]
♦ Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer spent last weekend at a romantic spa in Arizona. [Star]
♦ Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen appeared at a book signing yesterday, but they did not permit fans to talk to them. [P6]
♦ Page Six follows up on the news from three weeks ago and reports Ivanka Trump is converting to Judaism for Jared Kushner. She's attending synagogue regularly, too. [P6]

• Madonna's "spiritual leader" in Kabbalah is demanding he and other sect leaders settle her divorce with Guy Ritchie out of court, since the bitter splt causing bad publicity for the religion. Wait, now they're embarrassed by Madonna? Really? [Mail]

♦ You didn't expect to hear that Lydia Hearst actually wrote that column in Page Six magazine by herself, did you? In response to Hearst's accusation that Page Six fabricated her latest column—the one in which she bashed her family's publishing company—the mag now says that Hearst's writing process involved being interviewed by a reporter who then "put her thoughts into cohesive paragraphs." And they have the emails to prove Lydia's trash talk. [P6]
♦ Madonna is reportedly under pressure from the leaders of Kabbalah to reach a divorce settlement quickly, lest the mess cast a negative light on their freaky cult. Guy Ritchie, however, isn't making it any easier now that he's apparently rejected Madge's latest £20 million offer. [Daily Mail, ThisIsLondon]
♦ Michael Phelps got paid $100,000 to swim around at a pool party thrown by a TV network chief's wife. [P6]
♦ It's a match made in heaven: Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Jerry Ferrara, who plays Turtle on Entourage, are dating. [R&M]

• Fashion student Andrea Feick, 19, met U2 singer Bono in a club on the French Rivieria, met up with him later in St. Tropez, walked on the beach with him, posed for a picture in a bikini from his lap and rode on his yacht. She can't believe anyone would insinuate they might be more than friends. He's "much older than I am!" Think that will work on Bono's wife? [Mail]

♦ Amy Poehler and husband Will Arnett became parents for the first time on Saturday when Amy gave birth to a son, Archie. [Us]
♦ Madonna is in "meltdown mode," and asked her assistant to gather all the items she received from Guy Ritchie so she can "bury them." Guy, meanwhile, has reportedly said the couple's marriage began to disintegrate when she started planning their sex life around her workout schedule. [MSNBC, Daily Mail]
♦ Jennifer Hudson is offering a $100,000 reward for the return of her nephew, who went missing on Friday when her mother and brother were fatally shot. [People, Access Hollywood]
♦ Lindsay Lohan doesn't want people thinking she's a lesbian just because she's dating a girl. [NYDN]

Click to viewBoomp3.com Sherlock Holmes star Robert Downey Jr and an extremely animated Jude Law took the swingin’ streets of London to help their boss, Guy Ritchie, wash that woman out of his hair with a night on the town. Downey Jr. said, “It’s not going to be a bender. It'll never be a bender, but we're going to have the most fun humanly possible before our 6 a.m. call time. Watch out, world, reformed Kabbalist on the loose!" [Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

• Madonna has her own Kabbalah counselor on staff to help her deal with her anger at soon-to-be-ex husband Guy Ritchie, who is just a terrible gold digger or something. A gold-digging famous movie director who hangs out with Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. It's sad, really.

♦ Lydia Hearst, seen here attending a party last week, doesn't think her family's publishing company should be hosting parties these days. "It's time to work through this crisis, not party through it," she says. [P6]
♦ How are Madonna and Guy Ritchie coping with their split? Madonna has supposedly enrolled in anger management classes at the Kabbalah Center, while Guy has been out with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. [The Sun, People]
♦ Elisabeth Hasselbeck is introducing Sarah Palin at a rally in Florida this weekend. [ET]
♦ A month after vacationing together in St. Tropez, Jennifer Lopez has asked Benny Medina to come back on as her manager. [Fox411]

• Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes can't stop buying their East Village neighbors' apartments. There are two flats for staff alone. One's a gym. Everything's on a different floor. Insane. Sounds like them! [P6]

♦ Guy Ritchie supposedly cried after seeing son Rocco wearing a Yankees t-shirt this week. So sensitive! Or maybe not so much: Ritchie also reportedly described Madonna as "old, fat, ugly and wrinkled," and said she couldn't sing. [Us, NYDN]
♦ Not only did Lindsay Lohan's stint on Ugly Betty get cut short because she didn't get along with America Ferrera, LiLo clashed with everyone else on set, too. Also, she enjoys snipping out photos of herself from the tabloids. [P6]
♦ Jennifer Aniston's publicist is denying she's pregnant. [ET]
♦ Gossip Girl's Taylor Momsen spent four days in the hospital with a "potentially life-threatening throat-infection." But she was miraculously cured and released yesterday afternoon. [Us]

The ink is barely dry on those first giddy divorce filings, and already the vultures are circling world's biggest pop star Madonna and her cuckolded soon-to-be ex-husband, "film director" Guy Ritchie. While the two stars themselves have remained relatively demure about the whole matter—Madge makes the same "emotionally retarded" joke at every concert, Guy reportedly said on the set of his new film Sherlock Holmes, "today's going to be a weird one, but don't feel awkward because this is where I want to be" while waving a copy of a British tabloid—the press has been a little more salacious. The latest Us Weekly features a gushy, long-for-that-publication article on the storied split, providing hideous and sad details like how Ritchie used to refer to sex with his Isla Bonita as "cuddling up with a piece of gristle." That's just... well, that's poetry Mr. Ritchie. How messy is this thing going to get? One hopes, because there are three young children involved, that they'll keep their cool and blunder on in private. Though discretion is not always Maddy's forte and Guy will have to come to terms with the fact that he's not really famous without his muscly bride. Though juicy details about Madonna's Kaballah-fueled romp in the twenty million dollar hay with Yankees sucker Alex Rodriguez and Ritchie's supposed on-set romance with a young British chippy promise to "entertain" for some time. Plus, there are wonderful unconfirmed tidbits about Madge slapping Guy and calling him a coward for eating chocolate bars, and Guy returning fire by calling her old and wrinkly. Whee! The tabloid press will, of course, screech and caw and ruffle their feathers, pulling smaller and smaller strands of meat from this marriage's dessicated carcass, but eventually—if Madonna and Guy play it close to their chests—they'll have to find some other moldering corpse of a blessed union to feed off of. Who's due? Um... Ashlee and Pete? Nicole Richie and that man that she married? Elton and David??

• Jennifer Aniston is either back with John Mayer and maybe asking for his hand in marriage because of a> "a barrage of romantic emails from him "(Star), b> her pregnancy with his love child just like in those pictures or c> an insatiable need to look insane in the tabloids.

♦ Jennifer Aniston is pregnant with John Mayer's baby. At least that's what the always-reliable Star is now reporting. [Star]
♦ Remember how Donald Trump said he'd help Ed McMahon by buying his home out of foreclosure? Seems like it was just a publicity stunt at McMahon's expense, although Ed's newfound career as a rap artist should pay the bills for now. [P6]
♦ Your daily dose of Madonna-Guy news: Madge says her husband lived "like a king" off her money and she's insisting the kids be with her during the holidays ("Christmas doesn't exist in the Madonna household because of Kabbalah"). For his part, Guy may already have a new girlfriend. [Daily Mail, Mirror, Page Six]

Another day, another approximately 12,000 steaming new dishes laid out in the ongoing Madonna/Guy Ritchie divörgåsbord, a sumptuous schadenfreude buffet. We highlight a few, for your gustatory enjoyment:· Madonna's inner-circle (a 450-person-strong army consisting of stylists, trainers, hair & makeup people, plastic surgeons, background singers and Voguers, and one horseback riding instructor) claim Ritchie's nickname is "Material Guy," for his notorious gold-digging tendencies. [The Sun] · A-Rod is shopping around for real estate near Madonna's apartment on the Upper West Side, and is closing in on an $80 million, 5,200-square-foot penthouse in the new Robert A.M. Stern condo going up there. [NY Daily News] · In the NYC-London battle royale for Madonna's presence, look for New York to win. She accepted a life in London for Ritchie's sake. That means a Brooklyn accent should return within the year! Yay! [People] · Unless of course you believe the story that says her heart is in London, and she could never leave. [Daily Mail] · Ritchie reportedly infuriating Madonna when she learned he humiliated daughter Lourdes by pointing out her budding breasts and saying she's "becoming a woman" over lunch. [The Sun] · Ritchie claims he's being spied upon by Madonna's camp, saying, "this is a divorce, not the Cold War." [The Sun] · Madonna and kids arrived at the Chelsea Piers sports facility in New York with a massive security duty—and in a particularly nice touch, Rocco was wearing a Yankees T-shirt. Both he and sister Lourdes were photographed laughing and playing. [Daily Mail] · African demi-orphan David Banda's biological father is apparently listening in to the developments on his battery-operated Aiwa radio in disgust, telling The Sun: "I am still a poor farmer with nothing to offer, but maybe he'd be better off back with us. This woman, Madonna, told me herself that David was beautiful and made her happy and she promised to take care of him. Now I see him in a big bewildering crowd in the street with people pushing and shoving, and many cameras around, and without a mother and father to hold his hand. I'm feeling bad for him." [Newsday]

• Michael Phelps is dating Barbara Walters' assistant "Marina," with whom he went to college. Wait, that's a fake name right?? Is someone playing a trick on poor old Cindy Adams? [Cindy Adams]

♦ Who's helping Madonna cope with her nasty, public divorce from Guy Ritchie? Best pal Gwyneth Paltrow, of course. "You know, she's a dear friend, and I'm supporting her in all [the] ways that I can... she's a very good friend." [Us, AP]
♦ In other Madonna news, Guy Ritchie now believes Madonna is spying on him, Madonna is now suggesting she wants to raise her kids in NYC, and Alex Rodriguez wants to move so he can be closer to the love of his life. [The Sun, People, R&M]
♦ Least plausible rumor ever: "Well placed sources" say that if Obama is elected president, he'll consider making Oprah British Ambassador. [TMZ]

♦ The Madonna-Guy Ritchie messiness continues: The biological father of Madonna's adopted son says he might be better off in his native country of Malawi, Ritchie supposedly told friends that having sex with Madge was like "cuddling up to a piece of gristle," Madonna has described Ritchie as a gold-digger, and the two sides aren't even close to finalizing a divorce settlement, which means this is going to continue for a long, long time. [NYDN, Mirror, NYP, SS]
♦ Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen may get married at Tavern on the Green, of all places. [P6]
♦ Sam Ronson and Lindsay Lohan got into a little fight aboard the Acela. [P6]

Attention friends of Madonna and Guy Ritchie: You are no longer friends with Guy Ritchie. Madge is mustering her forces for what is hopefully going to be an epically nasty divorce. First strategy, gather the troops and hunker down. So the icon is reportedly telling her friends, hangers-on, sycophants, and other assorted slaves to stay the hell away from her soon-be-ex husband. You know, she doesn't want to be discussing how her lawyers may totally savage Ritchie's character in advance of a possible custody battle over their son Rocco just to have it get back to the director and his friends.

Ah, what a difference a divorce makes. To see Guy Ritchie's jubilant face on the occasion of his 40th birthday on September 10—just weeks after Madonna had embarked on her Men Are All Sickening, Selfish Pigs Tour—is to look into the toothy grin of freedom itself. Sure, he got perhaps one more African orphan out of the bargain than he had hoped for, but there was really no point in looking backwards now, was there? He was 40 (still relatively young), his career was right back on track, and he would never again be faced with daily surveys of the, "So which do you think—the embroidered python jodhpurs or the deconstructed parachute pants?"-variety.Compare that, then, with this interview, taken a few weeks earlier at TIFF, in which Extra cornered the director to ask him about his Untitled Kabbalah Project I Have No Intention of Completing Once I Get What's-Her-Face Out of My Life. When asked if Madonna was contributing to the project, Ritchie's lolly-headed animus barely conceals contempt for his insufferable wife and her Purim-centric belief system. [Photo credit: Splash News via Crazy Days and Nights]