Sometimes we pine for the days before celebrities became bloggers. There was a time when, if you wanted to hear something that originated in a celebrity's brain, that something had been painstakingly culled by a professional pseudo-journalist from the reams and reams of useless, insipid crap that make up the bulk of what celebrities say, do, and think. That way, celebrities could be accurately portrayed as shapely, pretty, empty shells upon which we all could project our hopes and dreams. But that was before they fucked it all up by putting their ideas onto their own blogs without any adult supervision whatsoever.

We take it back! American celebrities aren't all boors who just drink and never do anything fun and cute like play Scrabble. Apparently they play dominoes! Specifically, something called Mexican Train Dominoes. It seems that Ashton Harold Kutcher and Demi Maude Moore introduced the game to their celebrity pals, and everyone has just gone crazy for it. Penelope Cruz, who Kutcher calls a "vicious warrior at the game", has her own little dominoes parties. This is just like when my friends and I rediscovered Guess Who? one drunken night and played all into the morning. Then we forgot about it. And remain vaguely embarrassed. [Showbiz Spy]

Well, you'll be happy to hear that the purely altruistic GUCCI/ Unicef fundraiser for Malawi went off smashingly last night at the UN; no thanks to you, cheapskate, who didn't even buy a single $2000 ticket. Luckily for Africa, people like Madonna, Ashton Kutcher, Tom Cruise, and J-Lo are willing to put the welfare of refugees before their own needs. Some of them even showed up in new Gucci outfits, in order to help the company, which is a force for good in this world. Madonna took on the accusations "made mainly by bloggers" that the event is a sickening, decadent fashion orgy, a sham passed off as a benefit for a charity that is run by the co-director of the Kabbalah Center . The Material Girl doesn't pay attention to that talk, because it's that same old "controversy surrounding anything that involves change." You go! And Gucci CEO Mark Lee clarified that it is just "a coincidence" that Gucci is opening a new flagship store in NYC this Friday. To emphasize the point, they even scrubbed the original press release!

Britney Spears was committed to the hospital twice this month with psychiatric problems and Heath Ledger was on tons of medication before his tragic death. Now we learn that Alex Kalev of Grey's Anatomy checked in and out of the same psych ward as Britney this week and that Kirsten Dunst is "on the verge of a breakdown" after erratic behavior at the Sundance Film Festival. Even the paps are acting strange, quitting their jobs over something called "guilt." Everyone is exhausted, sad and emotionally burned out. Meanwhile, all the twitchy, unpredictable celebrities are descending on New York for Fashion Week to compensate for missing the about-to-be-canceled Oscars. How to prevent a domino-like series of nervous breakdowns? We should, of course, turn to the sage, calming words of sobriety guru Courtney Love. Her advice for Britney and, really, all the troubled souls of the world, after the jump.

Apparently every cab in New York will eventually be home to a celebrity iPhone; just a week after the NY Daily News reported on the guy who copied Annie Leibovitz's assistant's contact list after he found it in a cab, a Facebook user says he found the iPhone of Richard Cohen, the NYC real estate developer who recently divorced newscaster Paula Zahn, in a cab. The celeb contact list is below, so you can argue whether the list (which includes Kissinger, Kerry, and Deniro) trumps Leibovitz's.

Moby sympathizes with the plight of captive creative minds imprisoned by corporate giants like MTV by signing an autograph for one of them. You know what she might appreciate more? A celebrity-sponsored health plan! [Via Flickr}

Hey, did you know celebrities also eat food by putting food into their mouth, just like us? Some, like Hayden Panettiere even use forks and other utensils to transport the food from their plates to their stomachs! [Celebrities-Eating]

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera's new WeSmirch Leaderboard repurposes the software that runs his technology A-list to track the top 100 celebrity gossip sites. WeSmirch replaces boring TechCrunch and The New York Times with the far more salacious TMZ and New York Post. Skimming for Britney videos turns out to be a lot like surfing geek blogs. You remember she used to get you all excited; now you only stick around for the next trainwreck.

We once posited this analysis of professional talking head, dating columnist, and internet metacelebrity Julia Allison: "The extent of her self-awareness of her persona is a constant source of speculation for me. I think she must know to some extent that the character she has constructed—a hyperstylized vixen—borders on absurd but you gotta admit, she's milking the character for all it is worth." Now we wonder no more! Julia writes: "I've always felt completely self-aware—like, if you don't get that 94% of the things I do are to amuse myself, or because I fear, more than anything else, being boring—how is that my problem?" Snap! Oh, and it gets better. She's written a whole post about her image construction! Sociology grad students, listen up.

TMZ.com, the celebrity website dedicated to the destruction of the west's 5000-year tradition of literacy and culture, ups the ante today: They're launching Star vs. Star, an online game "combining the fantasy sports craze with the world's obsession for all things celebrity."

"Americans say the media is to blame for the saturation of celebrity coverage on TV, a new survey finds. The Pew Research Center for People & the Press said Thursday that 87% of respondents said celebrity scandals get way too much ink and airtime." Additionally, 93% are dying to know why Lindsay Lohan just can't get it together. [THR]

In Sunday's Arts & Leisure section, Virginia Heffernan deconstructs websites that make a living making fun of bad photographs of celebrities. And where does she turn for an authoritative analysis? Why, our fave crack art historian, Perez Hilton!

As gossip site TMZ's syndicated television show approaches its initial air date of September 10—and in advance of what will no doubt be a busy day tomorrow with Paris Hilton's release from jail—the New York Times takes a look at the Associated Press of breaking vagflash news and finds that not only is it profitable ("one of the few remnants of the AOL-Time Warner merger that has resulted in some cross-platform success"), it's not much different from every other gossip-gathering organization. It pays for stories (er, "collateral materials") and thrives on the fear of celebrity flacks, who know they need to fill the TMZ tip jars with publishable material if they want to stay in the game.

The top U.N. drug enforcement official, Antonio Maria Costa, has urged the media to be more critical in reporting on the "shooting, snorting and sniffing habits" of certain pop stars and models. Costa, who heads the Vienna-based U.N. office on drugs and crime, said, "Less focus on coke-snorting celebrities would help governments shift public attitudes and help develop greater social awareness of the dangers of drugs."

In a video announcement, YouTube's founders referred to its purchase by Google as "two kings are coming together." Cocky? Not really — they were just making a Sean Combs Burger King joke.

Is it a coincidence that Yahoo invited two Scientologists to its campus this year? First, CEO Terry Semel arm-wrestled Tom Cruise. Then, Beck (who quietly acknowledges his faith in L. Ron Hubbard) played a concert at Yahoo Hack Day. Is Semel the missing link? Is a ten-year-old letter to the German Chancellor any hint?

Hey, just wanna alert you all that no, Bono is not at this week's DEMO conference in San Diego. There's just some dude who actually looks more like Robin Williams wearing a VR helmet. He fooled plenty of attendees, including PC Mag writers, who later figured out that the U2 star is actually in New York this week. (Is the conference worth going to anyway? No.)

We once had a boss who was fairly well-to-do financially, but it wasn't the money that drove him. He didn't care about the trappings of success (well, no more so than the rest of us); for him, the greatest part about wealth was the access it provided. He wanted money only as a means to furthering his own fame. Nothing was more important to him than being talked about, discussed, gossiped over.

We are a nation at war against terror, and every citizen is a potential target of that war. We all share in the burdens of the battle, whether we serve overseas or sit and wait here at home. But let's be honest: We're not all created equally. Some of us suffer more than others.

Blogger cityrag points us to Celebrity Skin, a site that allegedly "sells various bodily samples (fecal matter, skins cells, bacteria, etc) from famous people." Whether or not this is some bizarre marketing stunt or an actual example of how completely over the top America's obsession with famous people has become, we couldn't help but notice this: