In all the strike deadline hysteria, we've barely had a moment to acknowledge that today is an (egregiously not nationally recognized) holiday. It's Halloween, everyone—the spookiest, scariest celebration of the year! And on The View, that usually means stuffing Barbara Walters into some sort of sex-kitten outfit. This year's theme—which we think was Ill-Fitting Cotton Club Costume Rentals?—gave Walters an excuse to talk about her club impresario father Lou Walters, a touching, grandmotherly reminiscence about a simpler time, when you could get a steak, a sidecar, and an unobstructed view of a showgirl's rack all for a nickel.

· Defamer videographer Molly goes deep inside slow news day victim Barbara Walters' beef with her TMZ TV tormentors, stringing together the show's speech-impediment-based attack and Walters' subsequent Airing of the Grievances on today's The View. Enjoy the feud while it lasts!
· Brad Pitt's publicist patiently explains that just because someone at his production company may be looking at Unambomber script doesn't mean that he's wandering around the office trying on hooded sweatshirts, sunglasses, and various crazy-person beards quite yet. After all, he may eventually realize that Benicio del Toro is a much more natural fit for the part.
· David Beckham will attempt to save his adopted home from the wildfires through the power of soccer.
· An angry father accuses a strip club of fraudulently lapdancing and champagne-rooming his son into $53,000 worth of charges, threatening to diminish what was obviously the greatest day of his kid's life.

We'll have to wait until Wednesday to find out what The View has in store for us this Halloween: We're pretty sure it won't be nearly as scary as last year, which featured Rosie O'Donnell in full Queen Victoria drag, or the one before that, in which Barbara Walters horrified a nation by refusing to break her breathy, baby-voiced Marilyn Monroe character for the entire episode.

· We realize we left many of you hanging last week when we posted the shocking clip in which the beloved Olly Girls of Sunset Tan were let go for failing to fully commit to their accelerator-pimping duties. As this Yo on E! clip plainly shows, however, the girls are in good spirits, and ready for whatever spray-on-nozzle-clearing challenges lie ahead.
· Drew Carey waxes philosophical about suddenly finding himself in a game show ghetto.
· Now it's Virgie Arthur vs. Howard K. Stern on the Anna Nicole Sue-Go-Round.
· Every lyric from Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," explained with a hyperlink.
· No, your eyes are not deceiving you. That's Barbara Walters making out with Star Jones on a New York city street!

View nurturer Barbara Walters quietly pulled Anne Heche aside before an audience of several million today to explain how she knew all along that her marriage to Coley Laffoon would end up in heartbreak: It's because Heche "is all heart, and I don't think you always think with your head," she explained, choosing to keep her next thought, "Probably because your head is usually preoccupied with instructions from various intergalactic beings," to herself. [People]

When Rosie O'Donnell joined Roseanne Barr on the stage of a New York comedy club last night, she stunned audiences when she abandoned her regular prop-comedy act involving a cardboard standee of Elisabeth Hasselbeck and a black Sharpee with which to scrawl Hitler moustaches. Instead she revealed yet more stunning insights into her abrupt departure from The View, and into her tangled, beyond icky relationship with Barbara Walters:

We're happy to report The View seems to have found its way back to the good-natured and ribald discussions that made it such a welcome oasis from our daily homemaking chores in the first place—as evidenced by some recent chiding by a visiting Caveguest, and a lively-but-never-personal debate over the true shape of the planet (Team Flat!). We therefore credit this safe-zone environment for rendering Barbara Walters comfortable enough to share the above anecdote, in which her darkest fears came true, and the septuagenarian TV icon suddenly found herself squeezing a $750 Frederic Fekkai hairdo through a 18-inch gap below a bathroom door.

With the publication date of Rosie O'Donnell's memoir Celebrity Detox fast approaching, the Post spins into action, taking their hard-hitting approach to news to its logical extreme. They had a couple of psychiatrists read an advance copy and perform a diagnosis of the former "View" host. What did the good doctors learn? "Rosie O'Donnell is full of rage, has a profound distrust of men, craves public adoration, shows signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and dishes out her anger mostly to women because of deep-seated abandonment issues over her mother's death."

· In addition to providing entertaining footage of drunk chicks puking on Hollywood sidewalks, last night's TMZ TV debut blew the lid off what Maddox Jolie might be eating for lunch at his fancy-pants school.
· Learn more about Leave Britney Alone Guy, whose YouTube clip is rapidly approaching a million views and has inspired a new fragrance.
· Rosie O'Donnell thinks it's time for someone to grab a throw pillow from The View's sofa and hold it over a napping Barbara Walters' face until she slips off into retirement.
· K-Fed: This acting stuff is dope, yo.

· These are truly exciting times over at IndianaJones.com. Not only have they treated us to the first photos of Harrison Ford in a dusty fedora taken in nearly 20 years, they've now released exclusive footage of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas drinking champagne and staring at a monitor. (Also while wearing distinctive hats!) Who knows what special surprises the coming weeks will bring cyber-savvy Indy fans?
· Things that Barbara Walters considers "beneath her": interviewing Paris Hilton once she gets out of jail. Things that Barbara Walters is OK with: reading aloud on The View a transcription of a conversation she had with Paris Hilton about finding God while she was still in jail.
· Does no one have the heart to tell Renee Zellweger that boinking a CAA agent is so Hilary Swank in the summer of 2006? It's tragic, really.

According to various reports—more on that later—one network or another has agreed to pay or to not pay a large or even more large amount of money to Paris Hilton for an interview. The network will not be ABC—although they figured the "credibility" and close connection Barbara Walters has with the Hilton family (oh, plus an offer of $100,000) would snag them the first post-jail interview with Paris Hilton. Some reports say Walters was out-credibilitied by Meredith Viera and at least $650,000. Others say NBC's offer is $1 million. NBC says they don't pay for interviews, and fast-talking Paris publicist Mike Sitrick says the same, which means the opposite is true.

It feels like only yesterday that Paris Hilton was re-jailed after one magical night of luxuriating in the freedom of home-imprisonment, but the moment when she finally emerges from an unjust incarceration and shines as a Mandelaesque beacon of hope to all of those affected by Los Angeles County's oppressive system of celebutardtheid is nigh. And when Hilton exits the Century Regional Detention Facility sometime next week, she will need to be greeted by a television camera and a friendly face to ease her transition into her new role as Goodwill Ambassador for Stuff She Cares About Now.

A heartfelt thanks goes out to the Defamer Special Correspondent on Meaningless Honors Involving Personalized Stars And Filthy Slabs of Sidewalk, who braved the throng of crazed View groupies assembled to gape in awe as Barbara Walters took her place on the Walk of Fame today to send us the above photograph. Before seeing this indelible image, we feared that the Paris Liberation Front had lost all of its momentum, its message drowned out by the voices of an unreasonable mob who won't be satisfied until they can bathe in the heiress's privileged blood. But now that we know that her noble cause has been taken up by tireless crusader for justice Guy Wearing An Ill-Fitting Spider-Man Suit In Front of the Chinese Theatre, hope has been restored that Hilton will be freed from her unacceptable persecution sooner than any of us dare dream.

With Rosie O'Donnell gone from The View, the majority of her days since her abrupt, contentious departure spent dictating angry haikus to an assistant while suspended in her upside-down depression-therapy rig, ABC has been quietly auditioning potential replacements. According to Star Magazine, they have settled on former Patrick-Swayze-channeling conduit Whoopi Goldberg:

Paris Hilton did indeed call Barbara Walters collect this weekend to talk about her jail time; on today's "The View," Babs discussed the how the incident has caused a spiritual awakening in the young hotel heiress. It's a powerful story of redemption. And so honest.

Demonstrating the same admirable commitment to bravely seeking out publicity in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy she exhibited in choosing to spend her final night of freedom with 4,000 of her best friends at the MTV Movie Awards, a newly re-jailed Paris Hilton yesterday expended one of her precious phone calls to reach out to the only person she felt she could trust to deliver a message of hope to her millions of fans: Barbara Walters. In a brief conversation with The View's den mother, Hilton reveals that her brief stay in prison has caused the Swarovski crystal-encrusted scales to fall from her eyes: she's now found God, is ready to drop the dumb girl "act," and wants to build a giant dollhouse in which sick children can simulate her own charmed, carefree upbringing. Truly, the L.A. County justice system's short-sighted desire to topple an icon of privilege has backfired, as Hilton will soon emerge from her incarceration as the Celebutard Nelson Mandela.

Even if this weren't an incredibly touching story, this clip from "The View" would be worth it solely for the way Barbara says the word "hookers" about three hundred times in twenty seconds.

This week's Time features the fourth annual installment of THE TIME 100: The Most Influential People In The World! It's a pretty thick issue, which is all the more remarkable given the crappy paper stock the magazine uses. Anyway, who are the folks Time's editors think are "transforming our world"? Well, Justin Timberlake makes the cut, as do Angelina Jolie (as an activist, not an entertainer), Kate Moss, and the chick from "Ugly Betty." Time M.E. Rick Stengel reminds us that "the real magic of the Time 100 is in the pairings. We match author to subject so the former can offer special insight on the latter." There's certainly special insight in Donald Trump's appreciation of subway hero Wesley Autrey.

Donald Trump has adopted a new hobby and immersed himself in it just like any man approaching his retirement years would, only instead of model trains or ship building, the combforwarded land baron has committed himself to becoming the greatest, classiest Rosie O'Donnell hater in the world. He hasn't publicly shared his thoughts on The View co-host in over a month (her admission that she suffers from depression led him to sensitively admit that he too would suffer from depression if he was trapped inside her frame), but that doesn't mean Trump hasn't been hard at work in his Mar-a-Lago basement readying his latest anti-Rosie mastepiece:

From the first moment we laid eyes upon a Lilliputian, love-advice-dispensing Star Jones, we knew in our hearts that the stifling format of The View wasn't doing nearly enough to showcase everything this wise former D.A. had to offer her viewers. Kudos, then, to Court TV, who has scooped up the deposed daytime monarch to host her very own entertainment/law show. Sporting a brand new makeover (short hair + glasses + pantsuit + a face you can trust = instant credibility!), Jones offers TVGuide.com some thoughts on her journey away from The View's hysterics and back into our hearts: