· "So tell me, Brandy-girl. Did you watch your brother's sex tape?" "Ew! Tyra! No! Did you?!" "No! Well, some of it." It's funnier when you watch it.
· The woman who walked around El Coyote refilling your water glasses has left the restaurant for donating $150 to Prop 8, making the business safe for your gay-wedding-reception dollars once again. Justice is served! We're so glad the person holding this tasteful sign spoke up for all of us.
· Bettie Page is in intensive care following a heart attack.
· Catherine Hardwicke's been having a bad day, so we suppose we don't want to pile on by informing you she's also the person responsible for this monstrosity. Oops—we just did.
· The Academy reversed its The Dark Knight best original score consideration disqualification: A TDK sweep is again a possibility!
· How did they make this toy monster truck rally look so much like real life? Probably because this is real life made to look like a toy monster truck rally.

Madonna's estranged brother Christopher Ciccone must be smirking at the news coming out of a British court: The singer claims an interior designer she hired to work on her Beverly Hills mansion surreptitiously photographed pictures of her wedding to Guy Ritchie, then sold them to the Mail On Sunday, which published them in October. Madonna wants $7.4 million in copyright damages from the paper and has identified the designer as Robert Joseph Wilber, heretofore unknown to the public. Of course she could have avoided this whole mess if she hadn't screwed over and disowned her interior designer brother, who worked on that very mansion.

This weekend's John Malkovich-hosted SNL featured a great many virable moments, if you'll indulge us the coinage of an incredibly annoying e-jective (make that two incredibly annoying coinages), but we'll set aside the toe-tapping pleasures of interslack ejaculation for a moment to focus instead on the work of Fred Armisen. Always a strong SNL soldier, Armisen's star has dimmed of late for what has been deemed a substandard Obama impression—indeed, by Obama himself.

Anne Hathaway's "type," as it were, is something of a going concern around the Defamer office these days. One man is doing hard time for essentially stealing a jet-setting lifestyle they could share, and yet another made his big gossip-page debut smeared as little more than a skirt-chasing social-climber. And in between are the principled ones who just come out and ask her: "Will you take $12,000?"

With the chance of a frostbite in LA only slightly less likely than Brian Grazer getting his hair relaxed, we pay tribute tonight to one of the great winter cities, Boston, MA. Though the "Athens of America" is known for being somewhat racist, many of our top minds (Barack Obama, Natalie Portman, Craig Bierko) studied there. Lets's take a walk down snow-covered Newbury Street, dodge some slugs and say goodbye to an old caustic friend.

Just last month, Fortune reported on how investors are still bullish on green technology. And there's plenty in its pages about the bright future of online media. But Fortune's accountants must not read the magazine! Fortune has laid off two reporters on the cleantech beat, and all but one of its New York- and San Francisco-based online reporters, who wrote primarily for the magazine's website.

Jay Leno will stay at NBC and move to 10pm weeknight slot after Conan O'Brien takes over his Tonight Show in June, Broadcasting & Cable and Nikki Finke are reporting. Everyone thought Leno was probably going to end up at ABC after he said in a July interview "I am definitely done next year - with NBC." But NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker persuaded him to stay! Probably with wheelbarrows full of money. The big loser in all this? That would probably be embattled NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman, who just survived a major corporate bloodletting but suddenly finds himself with five fewer hours a week to program. And to think he was having so much fun skiing in Utah this weekend!

With its beloved mascot swirling 'round the toilet, letting out a meager peacock "yorp" as its exhausted claws scratch helplessly at its porcelain confines, there truly was nothing left to come out of NBC HQ today we thought could possibly shock us. We were, of course, hopelessly wrong, as it is now emerging that Jay Leno—the longtime poster boy for NBC mismanagement for the way he was being forced out of his Tonight Show spot at the top of his ratings game—is being given the 10 p.m. slot on the network. Every night of the week.

Sad news: on a day that has already seen the ignominious shitcanning of Hollywood's best "cyborg dinosaurs rescue kidnapped children" franchise, word has emerged that screenwriter Eric Roth has quietly buried his unnecessary script for Forrest Gump 2 out by the old oak tree. While promoting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Roth told Slashfilm that the sequel just didn't seem the same after 9/11 happened (what, those scenes of a digital Tom Hanks outrunning smoke and debris in Manhattan felt too soon?). The news reminded us that several years ago, we attended a talk where Roth revealed the Gump sequel's surprise twist, which he told us not to tell. Guess it doesn't matter now! Here's your before-the-jump SPOILER ALERT...

Paris is lovely in December. And even lovelier if someone else is footing the bill! Oblivious to the world's economic meltdown, 1,500 self-involved, self-indulgent opinionators have flown to France for Le Web, a meet-and-greet on the tech circuit.

So Friday afternoon we threw together a little post trying to make sense of a power shakeup at NBC that saw Katherine Pope and a number of other NBC executives nudged out. In our typical, lightly inflammatory reporting-fashion, we headlined it, "Jeff Zucker Sends Out 'You're Fired Unless Your Name Is Ben Silverman' All-Staff NBC Memo." As of today, however, that headline is more or less accurate.

It's been far too long since we last checked in with flack-to-the-nobodies/frequent Page Six source Hal Lifson, who last showed up on our radar for pushing the absurd "scoop" that Sarah Palin would be joining Desperate Housewives (like Marcia Cross would ever let that happen!), which he somehow got into a major newspaper. Imagine our delight, then, when Lifson appeared in today's Page Six with his newest outlandish story:

The Writers Guild unveiled its 2009 TV nominees this afternoon, revealing a radical shift in taste that rotated only one new drama and two new comedies into the year's Best Series nominations — all replacing old nominees that weren't on the air this year. Let's hear it for attrition!

Hey, good for John King. The blue-eyed, silver-haired CNN guy who isn't Anderson Cooper, and who is famous for manipulating a giant iPhone to display election results, will get a four-hour Sunday show on CNN. Jon Klein calls him "the best political reporter of his generation," even though John King honestly just manipulates a giant fucking iPhone and talks about demographics. Media "critic" Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Source" show will be a part of this new show, as well, and we'll continue not watching CNN, because honestly it's worse than Fox, in its own way. [CNN]

When we asked you which difficult doc on Grey's Anatomy doc was being punished with less screen time, you resoundingly guessed, "T.R. Knight" (with just one dissenter answering "Boo-urns"). Now, rumors are flying that Knight himself has reduced his screen time to zero by walking off the show entirely.

In the past 45 years, the percentage of US homicides solved annually has declined from 91% to just 61%. On top of that, incompetent superflack and total war advocate Ronn [sic] Torossian has published an op-ed about the importance of "earning trust." [AP, AJC]

A little late, no? The Pulitzer Prize, conventional journalism's most sought-after award, is opening its doors to Web publications, eleven years after Internet reporters first tried to submit their work.

A laid-off journalist has proposed a fancy idea that would have the twin benefits of re-employing a lot of unemployed journalists, and producing a quality historical record of our time that could reside in the halls of our nation's finest libraries forever. So needless to say it will never happen, because the public hates journalists, and is functionally illiterate. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, now that the liberal elite is in control of the public purse strings! So is it time to bring back the Federal Writers Project?

· If you hadn't yet heard, Tribune has filed Chapter 11, putting the LAT in serious jeopardy. You know, it just occurred to us—if the LAT folds, we're Los Angeles's #1 news source. Happy to serve you, Southland! [Variety]
· Miramax is developing Arizona, based on the 1976 car-bomb killing of an Arizona Republic reporter snooping into mob ties to state government, as a project for Ben Affleck to direct. Ben—start using the remote ignition. Terrible, we know, but we just feel better having said that. [Variety]
· ABC has ordered a pilot based on DC Comics's Fables, about various fairy tale characters living in New York. "[They'll] keep some of their trademark characteristics. For instance, Prince Charming will be handsome, while Big Bad Wolf will have to shave a four-day shadow from growing back every day." And that's just on his back! [THR]

As we learned last week, the Canadian "government" just collapsed, thanks in part to the queen. Having an unstable failed state right on top of America is obviously an untenable situation. So we're calling in the Air Force! Starting in January, unmanned Predator drones will take off from Grand Forks, North Dakota and patrol the northern U.S. border, protecting us all from sleazy Canadian foot-severing terrorists. This is obviously an important part of the war on terror and not just a colossal waste of resources. [AP/Google]