With at least one major exception, it's been a relatively modest cycle for manufacturers of Oscar-season buzz. But one day into 2009, the new "hybrid quote" looks to revolutionize the Fine Art of Hype.

TMZ is reporting that actor John Travolta's 16-year-old son Jett has died while vacationing in the Bahamas.

Via Towleroad, we bring this production still from The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, in which John Travolta is upstaged by two doomed cowboy lovers who appear to have wandered into the wrong movie.

Enjoy your cruise! But beware of running aground, falling overboard, disappearing, and/ or being jacked by Somali pirates. Click to watch a compilation of just one month of holiday cruise ship disasters.

Happy New Year, folks—or, as English-torturing songstress Courtney Love might blog it, "HAPPPPPY happy yr NEW happy." Love has posted a brand-new pair of wildly accusatory Myspace entries. Can we decipher them?

Far be it from us to tell somebody not to sell a useless item on eBay for an absurdly high price, but how much is a single joke from an Onion staff writer really worth?

Jewel heist survivor Paris Hilton was spotted around Christmas getting cozy on consecutive nights with George Clooney, according to a shocking report from the Centers for Disease Control.

Delightfully insane fashion person Karl Lagerfeld is not afraid to formulate patently ridiculous defenses of decadence. Fur is bad and models are too skinny? More like animals are dangerous and girls are too fat!

Blago faces impeachment! The embattled Illinois governor is about to become even embattleder, as the Illinois House rushes back to work (next week).

12/28 — VINNIE JONES of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties in full soccer kit at an IHOP in West LA with Hollywood United F.C. teammates. You heard me, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties! [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

After Viacom went blazingly public Wednesday with its threat of an MTV/Comedy Central/Nickelodeon blackout on Time Warner Cable, an 11th-hour truce settled the matter just in time for 2009.

If you've got some gossip or useful info you'd like to share with us, please drop us a line at tips@cityfile.com. Thanks and happy New Year!

"Let's hope the Magic Negro does a good job," is the New Year's wish of "Jen and John C," courtesy of the Fox News crawler. Hey, thanks for that. Click through for the clip:

Being a celebrity is a double-edged sword: you're often more likely to find yourself involved in ridiculous, well-publicized crime, but at least it's easy to get acquitted!

After being pwned by Politico, the Washington Post is launching a secret new political website in two weeks, and has hired TPM's Greg Sargent as blogger-in-chief. Politics and blogs, together? It just might work. [TPM]

Will the economy get any better in 2009? Will Barack Obama see the U.S. through the most challenging political and economic climate in a generation? And what will happen to Britney? Fortunately, the Daily News has all the answers, which it obtained from the only people willing to hazard guesses about any of these things: they contacted a bunch of local psychics.

[Lindsay Lohan, a Miami beach bathing beauty, with child! A Pieta for our modern age; image via Bauer-Griffin]

A note taped to Defamer HQ's door greeted us this morning — not an eviction notice as we feared, but rather just another Weinstein news dump announcing Inglourious Basterds' [sic] eyebrow-raising late-summer '09 release date.

A couple of weeks ago, teen fashion designer (and Russian heiress) Kira Plastinina announced plans to close "most" of her US-based locations, including the hot-pink branch here in NYC. Today we learn it really is the end of the line: After burning through $80 million of the dairy mogul's cash, the company filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday. But we're pretty sure it's the first time that Bloomberg News has reported on a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing with a quote from a MySpace page. [Bloomberg]

In the "They don't make em like this any more" category: foreign correspondent, dapper author, and WWII Allied spy Paul Hofmann is dead at the age of 96. He outlived Hitler by 63 years.