With Scott Peterson getting the death penalty, is there any way that Ben Affleck can turn down the role of a lifetime? Oscar loves those impassioned Death Row scenes.

With the sting of being named Hollywood's official scapegoat for John Kerry's election failure finally starting to fade, Ben Affleck is now taking heat for the bad career moves he didn't make. Affleck sensibly wanted to keep a low profile and rejected director Kevin Smith's overture to star with him in the Canadian teen soap opera Degrassi: The Next Generation, yet still winds up getting flogged for the very mention of his name. At this point, it might take five years on a media blackout vision-quest in the Himalayas to make the poll numbers even out. And even then he'd probably have to spend the first three years explaining Gigli to some Buddhist monks with an US Weekly subscription.

· Katie Couric, who will be hosting "The Tonight Show" on May 12, has been making impossible demands on the staff and was angry when her choice of guestsBen and J-Lo together and/or the entire cast of Friendsdeclined to do the show. [Page Six]
· Sightings: "David Gest getting peevish at a P.J. Clarke's waiter who balked when Gest ordered a salad for Liza Minnelli that wasn't on the menu." [Page Six]
· "THE London-based Cinnamon Club, maybe the world's most expensive Indian restaurant, is planning to open a branch in Manhattan. Sources tell The Post's Braden Keil that reps for the elegant eaterydubbed Posh Spice by Brit criticsare searching for a location to show off its costly curries, calfskin menus and back-lit urinals." [Page Six]
· Barry Diller on Fox programming when he was in charge: ""You can't have a more genuinely pure, liberal program...than 'The Simpsons.'" [NY Daily News]

Radar isn't SPY, but there's definitely a faint resemblance:
· In an article titled, "The Iron Chef's Ultimate Challenge," Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto is forced to use the following "eeeeengredients": Velveeta, SPAM, Jif peanut butter, and Chicken of the Sea chunk light tuna.
· "Ask America" polls the populace on "the burning questions": "Has Ben Affleck turned into a wussy?" (68% Yes, 32% No.)
· Given a piece of paper with an empty silhouette of a head, celebrities are asked to fill them in with something describing what they're thinking. Patty Hearst responds by gluing Zoloft to the paper.

· The producer and director of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck's upcoming movie, Tough Love got into a shouting match blaming each other after test audiences didn't like it, in an apparent refusal to believe that the movie just plain sucked. Affleck broke them up. [Page Six]
· Hipster celeb fight: Page Six reports that "Sean Lennon came to blows with Brain McPeckthe lead singer of Paul Sevigny's band A.R.E. WeaponsSaturday at Swa. 'Sean walked by and knocked Brain's hat off,' said a witness. An infuriated McPeck called Lennon a 'faggot.' And then fists flew." [Page Six]
· The NY Daily News has padlocked their old smoking room. [Page Six]
· MTV President Van Toffler insists that the network isn't censoring anti-war videos. [Page Six]
· Jack Nicholson: "I don't believe in cosmetic surgery and I have no plugs or tucks. I look at that as mutilation." [Cindy Adams]
· Jogging in France: "Anyone who does anything in Paris that smells of Yankeelike, for instance, joggingis expected to wear a shirt with a logo that's anti-US or anti-Bush or anti-war or anti anything that's anti-Franceor you get cursed upon and/or spat upon." [Cindy Adams]
· Robert Downey Jr's former cellmate, Charles Bell, is suing, Downey, Vanity Fair, and Conde Nast for remarks Downey made about him in a Vanity Fair article two years ago indicating that he was a "recovering pimp" who "talks to satellites." [NY Daily News]