When life—and doesn't it just seem to always?—gives you lemons, do what we do: roll up your sleeves, paint on a smile, and make "this having to work on Monday thing is really putting a damper on my long weekend plans"-ade! To help you sweeten that sour nectar, some high fructose box office numbers:

Bow before the sacred numbers that the box office gods have provided for us on this holy Monday morning:

· Var declares this summer "most competitive weekend," meaning that no one is really that excited about seeing new releases Lake House, Nacho Libre,
or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and will probably just wind up going to Cars again. [Variety]
· Sigourney Weaver is in negotiations to join the budget-conscious cast of Matthew Fox, Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, and Forest Whitaker in the blandly titled presidential assassination thriller Vantage Point. [THR]
· Josh Hartnett seeks to continue his unquestioned dominance of movies with titles including multiples of 10 and forms of the words "days" and "night" by looking to star in the Sony horror flick 30 Days of Night. [Variety]
· THR says that Hollywood's love affair with sappy romantic dramas is over. Well, over once The Lake House tanks this weekend. [THR]
· Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom we wouldn't mind seeing in about 10 movies a year, will star in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead before moving on to shoot Charlie Wilson's War with little-known character actors Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts. [Variety]

Let the weekend box office numbers bring some sunlight into the June Gloom hanging over this dreary Monday morning:

Beginning Sunday, the Times will expand its Automobile section, introducing three new half-pages of editorial content. Come Monday, the expansion will hit online; the dot-com complement will include "additional car reviews, added video features, a national directory of car clubs and an interactive events calendar."

Can you feel the electricity in the air? Oh, hell yes: This morning marked the start of the New York International Auto Show, where people with driver's licenses descend upon the Javits Center to marvel in the excitement of the automotive industry. Seriously, we didn't sleep a wink last night, thrilled with the prospect of ogling all the brand new monstrosities — so many options for idling on the L.I.E. this summer!

If you hadn't read the Automobiles section — which, in fact, we usually don't, and we have no idea what possessed us to do so this week — you'd have missed this delightfully jarring bit:

Andrew Lin blogs his daily commute between San Francisco and Apple's Cupertino HQ. Not to be confused with the one on Google Video (guess great minds think different). Lin records both the morning and evening commutes each day. There's a good reason: it's not every day you pass a car on fire.

Time's cover this week is a largely glowing profile of Bill Ford, the environmentally inclined Ford Motor scion who, as the display type says, "believes a green revolution can fix his family's troubled company."

The Times carries word today that an influential city business association is pushing the idea of charging vehicles to drive in midtown during the day as a way to cut down on traffic, help the environment, and speed trips for buses and other mass transit currently trying to fight their way through Rock Center gridlock.

And we always thought they were effeminate and fastidious.