The Defamer Special Correspondent on Cost-Conscious Summer Blockbuster Promotion just beamed us this cameraphone photo revealing the recent whereabouts of the Transformers BigFuckingRobotsMobile first spotted at the Burbank Staples on Monday morning. Dreamworks' economy-class rolling command center was parked outside of the Ca$h Plus near the corner of Alameda and Main (precise coordinates mapped here), where its conspicuous presence undoubtedly enticed dozens of potential ticket-buyers to squirrel away their freshly cashed paychecks until the movie's Fourth of July opening.

Sure, it would be easy to read the Observer's profile of Fiat heir Lapo Elkann and get all ladyishly offended. Lapo does seem have that noblesse oblige thing going on, especially when it comes to his dealings with the fairer sex! Seriously, what kind of guy sits down to an interview, checks out the waitress, and says, "Usually this place has ugly waitresses, but this one is a very delicate and elegant one, I must say"? But maybe that's just Lapo being... refreshingly honest! Uh oh... what is this feeling? Do I actually have a crush on a Euro-jerk with an anchor necklace who characterizes his conquests as like "flowers in a vase—they need to be changed every couple days"? Dad, why were you not around more when I was little?

For about ten minutes yesterday, a Ferrari was parked in front of our office on Crosby Street in SoHo. Since such a car usually has some jerkface inside, we rarely take the chance to peek in and see what's going on on the passenger side. We've been missing out! Let's take a closer look at what we found and annotate the damage!

In a shocking decision that has shaken our faith in celebrity slap-on-the-wrist justice and should quickly ignite a series of riots all the way from Hyde to Area (Molotov cocktails fashioned from bottles of top-shelf vodka will soon set ablaze the streets of West Hollywood, so avoid the district effective immediately), TMZ reports that Paris Hilton has been ordered to serve 45 days in jail for violating her probation, and is to begin her sentence (no work release, no sassy electronic ankle bracelets, and, we assume, no conjugal visits allowing her to keep her love life in the tabloids) on June 5th. We'll update if more information becomes available; we'll be spending the rest of our afternoon monitoring our inbox for the first reports of widespread looting on Robertson by angry mobs in Kitson's new line of FREE PARIS t-shirts.

This weekend will be all about Spider-Man 3's inevitable march to the all-time opening weekend box office record (we're still waiting for reports about how audiences at the Thursday midnight screenings volunteered to pay triple if that helped beloved Sony get to $140 million), but that's not going to stop competing studios with their own summer products to overhype from trying to steal some of Spidey's thunder. As we speak, motorists stalled in traffic on Sunset Boulevard are enjoying the spectacle of witnessing one of the Strip's most famous buildings wrapped in the largest pulsating, promotional prophylactic ever attempted by mortals:

In a blatant bid for "most-emailed" status, the Times has published an article about whether some cars are more homosexual than others. Well, it's a step up from all those "College: Will Your Child Get In, Or Did You Fuck Up Your Life And Hers?" articles! Anyway, "Gay By Design, or a Lifestyle Choice" left some questions unanswered. So we asked them of a Gay.

Quick! If you can get over to West 43rd St. by 10:45, you'll witness what will undoubtedly be an awkward presentation featuring several NYT executives and some car people unveiling the Times' new "plug-in hybrid sprinter van" before it takes its very first drive from Midtown to the Times printing plant in Queens. Truly, this is an historic moment, but really, until Sewell Chan gets a Prius we're not convinced that the paper is really doing anything to help the environment. The internal memo (what, no press release?) after the jump.

If you've read Jalopnik—or seen the endless stream of posts they send over our way, some of them tangentially related to New York—you'll know that this is the week of the annual New York Auto Show. But what do New Yorkers know about cars? We sent The Assimilated Negro and Richard Blakeley to investigate.

Today, TMZ broke the news that Moesha star and sometime filler of the token seat on the View Brandy had struck another car with her Land Rover, which then struck another car whose driver was killed. We joked that everyone would soon forget all about the incident, just like they did when sometime Noxema spokesgal and wife of someone on Grey's Anatomy Rebecca Gayheart hit and killed a 9 year old in 2001. But that's just the tip of the 'famous people who have killed with their cars then gone on to be famous like nothing ever happened' iceberg . . .

Last year, an amoebic cosmic blob supplanted the male CEO ego as the largest known thing in the universe.

In other news from Time's Person of the Year selection of "You," a small coda related to automaker Chrysler forking over millions to be the sole POTY sponsor. As Daniel Radosh points out, several of their genius ads began with the tagline "You Might Not Be Time Person of the Year." But then again, You might, and in fact, You are! Give Yourself a hand, and buy a Chevrolet while You're at it.

So sad: It appears the beautiful dream of planting a NASCAR track on New York's forgotten borough has finally died, languishing in the spectral headlock-hug of resident opposition. We were about to direct disappointed fans to the NASCAR Cafe in Times Square, but apparently there is no NASCAR Cafe in Times Square. We'd assumed one had just inevitably sprouted there by now. However, from death comes life, as with an SI councilman's resurrection of the phrase "schnapps idea" to characterize the track proposal — i.e., something that seems great after you've had a few drinks. With that name, the recurring column proposal pretty much writes itself. Stay tuned.

You may have already tired of the current crop of debutards—we admit we've been hitting the Tinz pretty hard lately—but fortunately, a new class was sworn in Saturday night in Paris, WWD reports. In the grand tradition of debutard balls, the new ladies are an international array of the well-born and the sort-of well-bred. We've got Hannah Olivennes, daughter of Kristin Scott Thomas, who had these wise words: "I wasn't going to do it initially, but who would turn down the possibility of wearing Chanel couture?" Or Upper East Side "princess" (per WWD) Angela Mellon (pictured in her mermaid-ish Christian Lacroix gown at right), who said, "I came for fashion week and picked out my dress at the show." Then there's Caroline Ghosn, whose father is the chairman of Renault and Nissan chairman:

It's that time of year again. Time to observe how ad agency and "brand architects" Team One—part of the Saatchi & Saatchi billion dollar clusterfuck of agencies, which is part of the even bigger Publicis global ad conglomerape—attempts to lure middle class consumers into further debt by gifting a fucking Lexus.

Ever since the Google/YouTube buyout was at its rumor stages, Mark Cuban wouldn't shut up about how it was going to be a legal land mine, and while we have yet to see a lawsuit against Google, he has been kinda right as takedown requests are happening more frequently than pre-buyout.

The relentless pursuit of scoop/exclusive credit is a die-hard pastime on this, our Internet. At Gawker, we tend to prefer a more squishy concept of content ownership; information wants to be free, or at least infinitely reproducible without cost, man. Nevertheless, we do try to provide credit where credit is due, and that's the subject of a witch hunt by the greasy gearheads at Jalopnik. Seems they managed to con some exclusive pre-release Chevrolet commercials out of General Motors, though unfortunately the "final" commercials did not feature the promised nuclear explosions. They did feature lots of patriotic imagery and the heartland musical stylings of John Mellon Cougarcamp, which apparently appealed enough to Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report that the show reproduced the video with no thanks to poor Jalopnik. "When a journalist or 'web logger' takes something not their own and slaps a pre-roll on the front of it with their name and puts it up on YouTube, that's as good as if they made it themselves," claims Jalopnik righteously. Typical mainstream media, surviving parasitically on blog content, just like always.

Our gearhead brothers over at Jalopnik are at the Paris Auto Show right now (apparently we now send bloggers to far-off locales to cover events relevant to their site — speaking of which, isn't about time there were a NYC media event in the Maldives?). When they're not chain-smoking Gauloises and test driving baguettes, they're expected to blog about all the shiny cars...except that the venue's press internet access has Gawker on its list of banned sites. So the Jalops can't really get into our publishing system and are thus unable to write anything. Les b tards chanceux.

New Yorkers aren't particularly fond of the endless swarms of Ford Crown Victorias that make up our taxi fleets, and sure, we'd maybe like to suck down a little less exhaust when pedestrianizing. But why did the life-affirming new hybrid taxi have to get stuck inside the grim visage of a Chrysler PT Cruiser? Could anything look more blocky and unappealing than these retro-necrophiliac chariots? Well, actually, yes. The above proposed "Standard Taxi" is just as thrilling as its breathlessly exciting name suggests. Sure, it seats four passengers and can split open to engorge/disgorge a wheelchair, but it looks like a Humvee made of Play-Doh. You won't have much luck enticing those honeys from Lotus into this contraption at 4 a.m.

Since we're in New York, our automotive experience is limited to taxis and other cars that get in the way of taxis, but that doesn't mean we're insensitive to the largely undiscovered (or undercovered) world of automotive media. Hairy-backed sib site Jalopnik has just begun to idly berate car mags like Popular Hot Rodding — yes, Popular Hot Rodding — for the thinly veiled practice of trading car parts for good reviews. It seems almost like medieval bartering, but we suppose it's no different than raiding the fashion closet for listicles, then taking home the newly distressed samples for further "review." Apparently this is more a case of impoverished "enthusiast media" journalists just not getting paid much in cash, so they take their editorial compensation in advertiser payola. We doubt many carburetors get offered nonchalantly across desks in Manhattan media offices, but if they do, we want to hear about it. Don't tell us about the payola you've accepted (unless you want to), but feel free to pass on anecdotes of the most baldfaced advertiser bribe you've ever turned down.