Seriously! It was not bad last night. And if Madonna didn't try to take over every single conversation, it would almost have been good. Only one problem, this is the only week with Larry David and Ricky Gervais.

Sure Larry David can write two hit sitcoms but can he riff? Pace? Kill? The answer to all of these questions are YES! Listen to Larry kill different audiences in his pre-curb HBO special.

Today at Gawker.TV, Paula Deen gets hit in the face, an angry girlfriend destroys an X-Box, Larry David is terrible at playing himself, iPhone pranks, and Dr. Oz searches for the most fat and lazy person in America.

Larry David created George Costanza as a reflection of himself. So exactly what happens when you get Larry David playing George Costanza playing Larry David?

Last night was the first time in several months that we had to face a Sunday evening without Mad Men. What to watch? There are plenty of options, but how will they stack up against the critic's darling?

• The Condé Nast shake-up continues: A day after the company shuttered four titles, it's ousted the publisher of Details. And rumor has it the Condé cuts may now "inspire" similar such moves at Hearst and Time Inc. [AdAge, NYT, NYP]
• Ruth Reichl says she was completely surprised by the news Gourmet was closing. (She says she's planning to write a book about her years there.) And Gourmet's offices have since been completely cleared out. [NYT, Gawker]
• David Letterman should apologize on his show every night. His latest mea culpa generated better ratings than anything NBC aired during primetime. [AP]
• CBS is talking to Nancy Grace about hosting a Judge Judge clone. [B&C]
• The only big media company hiring and not firing? Bloomberg LP. [Crain's]

Seinfeld was a revolutionary sitcom, so its reunion had to be equally brilliant. As witnessed on Curb Your Enthusiasm, the non-reunion reunion about the making of a reunion on a different show will make blood pour out of your ears.

Choire Sicha and Jeff Smith saw very different sweater scenes; Perez Hilton questioned someone's Twitter ethics; and Larry David did a shameless imitation of Larry David. The Twitterati were obsessed with cold-weather clothes and diseases.

• A&E has agreed to acquire Lifetime, which means it's not entirely out of the realm of synergistic possibility that Duane Chapman of Dog the Bounty Hunter will make a cameo on Project Runway sometime next season. Yay. [THR, NYT]
• The Daily News has dropped its restaurant critic, Danyelle Freeman, and doesn't appear to be making any plans to replace her. [P6, NYT]
• Another luxury magazine is coming! The Financial Times plans to bring its quarterly glossy, FT Wealth, to American shores this October. [Crain's]
• It's been nearly two years since Oprah announced plans to launch a cable channel, and the venture's been riddled with problems ever since. [LAT]
• Italian officials are now investigating Google for its "lack of transparency." Yes, the same Italy that's governed by a man named Silvio Berlusconi. [NYT]
• Larry David will be bringing the cast of Seinfeld together for a multi-episode appearance on the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Which makes sense considering it's not like Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, or Michael Richards have anything better to do, now do they? [EW, LAT]

Three picture deals, reunions, prequels, and the secret ingredient to box office success have all been revealed! Like a fresh patch of skin that emerges after a viscous sunburn, this last week of July has some rejuvenating news from Hollywood.

Orlando Bloom passes on playing Will Turner to be with his girlfriend, Megan Fox thinks zombies are sexy, Tara Reid is quite skinny, Paris Hilton claims to have inspired Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse almost dies after a binge.

Lindsay Lohan turns 23 today. Larry David is turning 62. Singer Michelle Branch is 26. High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale turns 24. The chairwoman of the New York City Opera, Susan Baker, is turning 59. Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Richard Axel turns 63. Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu is 69. Former model Jerry Hall is 53. Retired baseball player José Canseco turns 45. And Imelda Marcos, the former First Lady of the Philippines, celebrates her 80th birthday today.

Jada Pinkett Smith says she and Will like to bang in other people's homes, Victoria Beckham has her third boob job, Nicole Ritchie breaks up Lohan and Ronson, Owen Wilson still loves Kate Hudson, and Judd Apatow sucks in bed.

Woody Allen uses the word "tragic" four times in his front-page interview with the New York Observer. Also, "nihilistic," "dreadful," "sad," "malcontent" and "embarrassment." And that's before he gets going about the "appropriate police."

♦ Cuts have arrived at Hearst: Cathie Black (left) is "going floor by floor at the Hearst Tower to trim costs and staff positions." [WWD]
♦ Lloyd Grove talks to Tina Brown about her new site and the economic climate: "It's pretty scary. It's scary, scary, scary." [Portfolio]
♦ The New York Times Co. reported profits fell 51 percent for the quarter amid the drop in advertising sales. Traffic to the Times website, however, is up. [Bloomberg, AP, NYO]

While on the set of Labor Pains, Cheryl Hines wanted the paparazzi to know that there are other people in the movie besides Lindsay Lohan. Hines thought it would be nice if the photographers could expand their photographic horizons and take pictures of other people on set, too. Hines explained that she understands that Lohan is bit of a financial rainmaker for people, but she felt it would be nice if they took her photo from time to time. Hines enjoys having proof to show friends and family that she's working on a fairly regular basis.

Reality makes you dumb — that's our four-word distillation of the groundbreaking new study by neuroscientists at NYU, who compared a cross-section of work by Hitchcock, Leone and Larry David (!) in an attempt to determine stimulation patterns for movie and TV viewers. Their findings revealed that participants' highest "inter-subject correlation" — i.e. the most commonly stimulating editing and direction — occurred for viewers watching an expertly crafted Hitchcock TV entry, followed closely by The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Curb Your Enthusiasm brought up the rear with an 18% ISC, essentially suggesting that its loose, pseudo-reality format defied subjects' attention spans. "Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers' brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film's sequence through aesthetic means," the researchers wrote. "The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds." But how many DVD box sets did he sell? Eh? That's right. Hack. [Science Daily via THND]

Have you ever found yourself mindlessly trying on the latest pair of $800 jeans at Fred Segal and suddenly realized, you know what? It must be way hard for all those African girls out there in Africa and The Iraq Such As to even wear jeans like this. Why? As "Cameron Diaz" (flawlessly portrayed by Tracey Ullman) informs us, for the very first time all their genitals are falling off! The suckiest part? "This is the golden age of American blue jeans! It's really sad and amazing." The fictional burp-happy actress' solution, of course, is to star in That Terrible Time Of The Month, in which a gun-toting Diaz burps and farts her way through the jungle to save each and every halfway-severed ladypart from girls named Toko. For more insight, including Bono's method of miming the actual chop and toss, watch our clip after the jump.

Blogging on the election (presidential, not Idol) for the Huffington Post, Larry David admits he's lost a bit of confidence in the increasingly histrionic Hillary Clinton: "There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she'd actually kill herself if she lost...I don't care if it's 3 a.m. or 10 p.m. or any other time. I don't want her talking to Putin, I don't want her talking to Kim Jong Il, I don't want her talking to my nephew. She needs a long rest. She needs to put on a sarong and some sun block and get away from things for a while, a nice beach somewhere." We're looking forward to Jerry Seinfeld's own op-ed on the race, in which he asks, "What is with this Hillary Rodham Clinton? The woman's totally a woodwork wacko! And she's a three-name woman...and many of the three-named people do become assassins." [HuffPo]

• Singer Britney Spears, said to be worth around $50 million, has become steadily more sane since her father was placed in control of her finances and other affairs several weeks ago. She parted ways with hanger-on ex-paparazzo Adnan Ghalib and earned the right to see her children more often. Apparently her father is compensated at $2,500 per week for his oversight, and the many tabloids that make money off Spears insanity are incredulous. So is comedian Rosie O'Donnell, who wrote in her Web Q&A forum that Spears' dad's high pay has become "the problem." Apparently these people have never priced rehab, or done some simple math on the scale of Spears' image problem.