Lyor Cohen and Al Sharpton are both celebrating today: The Warner Music chief (and boyfriend of Tory Burch) turns 49; the rabble-rousing clergyman is 54. Others marking the special occasion: socialite Alexis Bryan is 32. Clive Owen is 44. Jake Shears is 30. Gwen Stefani is 39. Ashlee Simpson is 24. Composer Steve Reich is 72. Tommy Lee is 46. Neve Campbell is 35. Actor Sean William Scott is 32. And the notoriously precise Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley is 53. Weekend birthdays after the jump.

(1) The 9th annual Art For Life Benefit took place on Saturday at Russell Simmons' East Hampton house. Despite tickets not selling out as fast as usual, the event played host to Aretha Franklin, Christy Turlington, Lorraine Bracco, Soledad O'Brien, David Paterson, Diddy, Padma Lakshmi, Brett Ratner, LA Reid, the cast of Real Housewives of New York, Al Roker, Kelly Bensimon, Alina Cho, Simon de Pury, and Porschla Coleman—whose break up with Simmons, judging by their behavior, is either incredibly amicable or no longer in effect. [PMc]

With Nicole Richie playing house for the next five minutes or so, Kim Kardashian having moved on to mall clothing endorsements and her own show, and sister Nicky entrapped in a brand new anorexia scandal, Paris Hilton has no one to play with. Not even her hypersexual litter of puppies. So she's prepared to do what Britney and Jessica Simpson did before her: pay someone to be her friend. Teaming up with MTV and Ish Entertainment, Paris announced the debut of her next reality show, Paris Hilton's My New BFF, in which 20 lucky boys and girls will prove to Paris that they're capable of being loyal, trustworthy pals who won't try to feel her up or plan porny video attacks mid-party. As Paris herself put it, "[I am looking for] someone I can just trust, someone who's not gonna stab me in the back like has happened a lot in this town, someone I can have fun with." But what does the winner get in exchange?

You think it's easy being a Hilton? Think again.

You read Us Weekly for the articles. You can't help but be interested in what Lindsay Lohan snorted, ran her car into or slept with this week. But, you went to college, you read the new Chabons and Lethems as soon as they come out! You're not a vapid person! Good news: Celebrity is not only a major driver of the economy, it's a subject worthy of academic scrutiny. University of Southern California professor Elizabeth Currid, PhD., explains the sociology of fame and pop culture.

We weren't familiar with Red, what appears to be AOL Teen's rebranding attempt at capturing the Zac Efron-obsessed segment of the online market. Now that we have sampled their content, however—in the form of their lovingly compiled slideshow, "Red's 20 Ugliest Celebrities"—we have never felt more confident that the online megacorp is doing all they can to teach their readers some valuable life lessons about how even the most hotness-challenged among them can go on to great, celebrity-related things. And who better to demonstrate that fact than background Hilton sister Nicky, who has never once allowed her physical shortcomings to discourage her various fashion and hotel industry aspirations?

As the pulverized Swarovski crystal sands runs through Paris Hilton's Hourglass of Freedom, members of her support network (consisting of various family members, sycophantic hangers-on, and exotic pets lacking the brain capacity to know any better) continue to bang the drum loudly on behalf of the persecuted heiress. Sister Nicky Hilton, while accompanying Paris to one of those glamorous Hollywood parties feting the introduction of a new text messaging device, was good enough to comment to People on the travesty of justice that is Paris's jail sentence:

• Page Six reports that Nicky is dating Jeffrey David Katzenberg, (ok, excuse us for not being smarter than Page Six. We've been doing this for a week. What's their excuse?) Dreamworks scion/Ashley Mary-Kate Olsen ex. "They have gone to dinner but have not hit the clubs together," reports an "LA spy." So it's only at, like, Defcon 2. [Page Six]
  

· "Owen Wilson Voice Impersonator" sounds like a pretty easy gig for anyone who's seen Zoolander and has some weed lying around. And it should be a lot easier to get than the Butterscotch Stallion Ass-A-Like job.
Celebutard shocker: Dilletante heiress might not be taking her hotel design responsibilities seriously!
If only Tom Cruise had once appeared in a movie that would make writing headlines about his new studio job easier...
If the naked guy you've just arrested for jerking off outside a BART station admits that he's got a screwdriver up his ass, should it still count as a concealed weapon? We think not, but then again, we've always been soft on crime. [via BoingBoing]
Mahir's a little upset that Borat is ganking his schtick.

• Mary-Kate gets herself an oil heir, presumably one who can pay for his own porn. [MSNBC]
  

• Diddy reveals that he's just too damn old for this shit: after staying up all night and partying, he overslept and showed up over 5 hours late to his White Party. When you're too tired to go to your own vanity event, it's time to throw in the towel. [Page Six]
• Christie Brinkley comes face-to-face with philandering husband Peter Cook, copes with the pain by handing out popsicles. [NYDN]
• After skateboarder Chad Muska made an inappropriate comment about Nicky Hilton, her boyfriend and Entourage star Kevin Connolly jumped Muska and hit him. And yet Muska was the one asked to leave the club. With Aquaman comes infinite power. [Us Weekly]
• And so the torturous marriage of Star Jones and Al Reynolds draws to a close. [Page Six]
• Lindsay Lohan will be questioned in a lawsuit against her mother for fraud. If she testifies half as well as Paris Hilton does, we're in for a real treat. [TMZ]
• We almost didn't notice, but Daily News gossips Rush & Molloy finally update their columnist picture so that it actually looks like they do. [R&M]

• David Hasselhoff is barred from Wimbledon because he sweats vodka and tried to get in without a ticket, screaming, "Do you know who I am? I'm the Hoff!" David, that shit only works on the set of Baywatch Nights. [Page Six]
• Nicky Hilton plans to open her own chain of hotels. The girl loves a challenge. [People]
• Hillary Clinton refuses to cooperate with writer Gail Sheehy for her forthcoming profile in Vanity Fair, maybe because Sheehy is seen attending events in a bright orange blazer. [Lowdown]
• Get photographed with some blow, and you'll raise your income by $11 million. Sears Portrait Studio, here we come! [Page Six]
• Russell Crowe and Danielle Spencer give birth to a baby boy; Crowe promptly punches baby in the face. [Us Weekly]
• Johnny Damon smoked pot as a kid. Related: new study finds that some teens drink alcohol. [R&M]

• Thanks to her lost diary, we all get a glimpse into the frighteningly intellectual world of Lindsay Lohan.
• A Times sports reporter gets unacceptably frisky with a Rangers cheerleader; coincidentally, Times reporter Jason Diamos just happened to be covering the Rangers that night.
• Time Inc. brings the bloodshed, forthcoming layoffs can be considerably less painful thanks to union rules.
• Fake Writer James Frey adds a relatively un-fake author's note to existing and forthcoming editions of A Million Little Pieces.
• Let Fashion Week begin! Just don't feed the models, obviously.
• It was a week of sad farewells: Wendy Wasserstein, Coretta Scott King, and CNN film critic Paul Clinton.
• The New York Sun an innovative new circulation plan, whether you like it or not.
• Go ahead, call Nicky Hilton. She'll be happy to hear from you.
• Wonkette gets itself two new cocks and Gawker Media launches tech geek gossip rag Valleywag.
• Ryan Seacrest is no more or less Gay than last week.
• Anderson Cooper, however, is a little more Gay when he wears his gimp mask.
• Thought Alessandra Stanley's correction rate couldn't get any worse? Think again. And again. And again, if you can bear.

While it's hardly as "hot" as losing one's Sidekick, Nicky Hilton's cell phone number has made its way online (917-929-0223). Alas, by the time most people caught on, she had long given up on answering her calls.

We're sure you tried to avoid it, but you all know damn well you read the profile of Paris Hilton in the October issue of Vanity Fair, in which her sister Nicky was quoted as follows:

It's Day Three of This Week's Fake Engagement of the Century, and developments in the Kimberly Stewart-Talan Torriero impending nuptials are flying at us faster than $20 bills at a homeless man willing to humiliate himself for Paris Hilton's amusement. When last we posted, Stewart was flashing her five-carat engagement zirconia at a Microsoft video game system party. Page Six now tells us that the wedding is not to be some cliffside affair drowned out by the whir of helicopter blades in the distant future. For hot to trot Stewart, reality show husband sex can't happen soon enough:

It's not strange to see Nicky Hilton and Kevin Connolly at Chelsea megaplex Marquee at 3 AM. It is, however, rather strange to see them partying at said hour with Nicky's parents. Seriously: What were Kathy and Rick Hilton doing at Marquee at 3 AM on a recent school night? (Not that they'd be any less out of place on a weekend.) Does this strike anyone else as strange? The Hiltons are hardly parental types, but the thought of Kathy dancing on a banquette at such a late hour still gives us chills. Call us conservative, but we like our parents asleep by 10 PM, passed out on the couch in front of the History Channel, right where they belong.

You know what today is, don't you? No? Why, it's the one-year anniversary of Nicky Hilton's ill-fated Vegas wedding to "hipster money manager" Todd Meister! (Or it's approximately the one year anniversary; the follies of rich drunkards don't adhere to the restrictions of common calendars.)

Speaking of celebrity news, the latest issue of Maxim has a revealing quote from cover girl Nicky Hilton:

Hellooooo, Austrailian people who are apparently visiting Gawker from The Age. Hope you like Nicky Hilton, Tina Brown, and all things New York. A clarification: we do not have pictures of Catherine Zeta Jones half-naked, pregnant, and smoking on the site. We never did. We linked to another site that had Catherine Zeta Jones half-naked, pregnant, and smoking, but the link doesn't work anymore. We don't know why the link doesn't work anymore, because it's not our site. So for the people emailing and asking, "Why did you take the images down?": the answer is, we never had them up.