Michael Julianelle of online mag Intrepid Media recounts a recent Brush With Ben Affleck While Employed In A Service Capacity at Boston restaurant Union Street. After word of Affleck's Pope-like gracing of the eating establishment leaked out, the media showed up to scour the premises for any blessed relics of The Visit. "US Weekly, People Magazine, the Boston Herald, something called the Star...all of them sent emissaries or made phone calls in an attempt to learn exactly what Ben ate, who he was with, what he was wearing (leather pants, I swear!), even where he sat." The writer gets a little fed up with all the coverage, and offers this imagined exchange as Affleck exited the restaurant:

Low Culture sums up the economics of Hollywood in two sentences. It's a little long for a tattoo, but just short enough to carve into your Entertainment Weekly editor's desk with a letter opener:

Sad news for fans of four-dollar bottled water and anonymous festival sex in porta-potties: Lollapalooza has canceled all dates for its 2004 tour due to poor ticket sales. (The festival had a local date at the Ventura County Fairgrounds July 22nd). We suggest that all ticket holders gather in the parking lot of the Fairgrounds and get high anyway; SoCal Morrissey fans can hang out on the perimeter in their BMWs and bitch about how these fucking KROQ kids can't, like, possibly understand his music.

Eschewing that pussy, win-for-charity stuff with which the Hollywood card-poseurs of Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown waste their time, Ben Affleck took home $356,400 real American dollars as the winner of the 2004 California State Poker Championship. Congratulations, Ben! We have to admit that we're a little sick of celebs playing poker for orphans, boob cancer, and various subsets of the illiterate community. It gets so depressing. Take your mad-money windfall and get yourself a treat. Maybe the 300 large can pay the salary of a guy to scan your driveway for paparazzi whilst you wander around in your boxer-type shorts and adjust your balls? Perhaps he could even adjust them for you.

From a Craiglist DC posting, a request for a sculptor to immortalize everyone's favorite action star/governor on (yet another) bobblehead doll. This time, Bosley Bobbing Head Doll Company wants to commemorate one of the prouder chapters in our allegedly handsy Governor's career. "Need an experienced sculptor for original art design of the body of a new 'Groping Arnold' satirical bobblehead doll....The 'Groping Arnold' bobblehead will poke fun at a Governor who has problems with admitting mistakes, either in courtroom, a movie set, or the State Capitol."

Straight actors playing gay is the new filing a $100 million defamation suit against a mouthy, gay porn star. The NY Daily News' Rush & Molloy have a helpful rundown of avowedly penis-in-vagina thespians taking on roles that were once taboo. Colin Farrell makes the list, playing Alexander the Great, "one of the most powerful bisexuals in history." [Ed. note—Have these people never heard of Andy Dick?]

According to the LAT's Hot Property column, Ally McBeal creator/anorexia booster David E. Kelley and wife/White Oleander star Michelle Pfeiffer are putting their Brentwood compound on the market for $49 million (stunned italics ours), apparently seeking a "change in lifestyle" at a new ranch in "horse country." In this new lifestyle, Pfeiffer will take up acting and Kelley will force the ranch's skinny livestock to eat until it has no hope for a career in one of his lawyer dramas.

Blogger So Says I prints a letter from a friend who is appalled at the "piddly" salary being offered for an assistant position ("right arm to the president') in an entertainment firm, taking up the cause of the coffee-fetching, grievously-underpaid Hollywood peon class that makes this town run.

By now everyone knows that Madonna has taken the name "Esther" in conjunction with her Kabbalah faith (we guess the Catholics weren't so hot on trying to move copies of her crappy children's book). She says she wants to "attach [her]self to the energy of a new name," but is the name-switch really a cry for help? Blog Towleroad discovers a secret code in the new name; by some mystical Kabbalah process, typing "Esther" in the predictive text entry of your cell phone yields "DRUGS." We knew that there was a perfectly logical explanation for her erratic behavior. Perhaps once she's checked into rehab she'll abandon this cult-y nonsense and get back to the important business of wearing pointy bras and simulating masturbation on stage.

Just what you've been craving on a Friday morning— a picture of someone with way too much money making someone with a lot less money do something vaguely demeaning. But do we sense a subtle relief in the guard's face, perhaps a little twinkle in the eye at having pulled Shoe Carry Detail instead of Wiping Detail? (If you must see that Timberlake is indeed barefoot and strolling on the beach, click on the picture.)

Today at Defamer, we take our mission of bringing you the A-list of celebrity trash to a ridiculously literal extreme. After showing you what ends up in Larry King's Hefty Steel-Sacks, we now bring you Sean Penn's somewhat disappointing detritus, courtesy of an anonymous source who attended the "Star Trash" art installation in NYC: some Budweiser bottles, a pack of Dunhills, the odd rat trap (click the picture to get a better look).

LA Weekly "Deadline Hollywood" columnist Nikki Finke persists in being the bane of besieged Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter's dapper existence. In this week's column, Finke adds a few tidbits to the disappointing non-scandal: Clinton flack Dee-Dee Myers' supposed suggestion that Carter hire a crisis manager to ride out the Scandal Lite, and a paranoid fantasy that a "Republican operative" is trying to take him down. (That "operative" turned out to be a literary agent at Endeavor, so perhaps Carter should fear him for a different reason.) Really, you need to read the column, in which Finke also recounts how a NYT Washington reporter calls her a "cunt" for continuing to sniff around Carter. Whew. You'd think they'd be a tad more demure about what's under the Gray Lady's granny panties.

We cribbed this pic of CNN talk show host/original Skeletor inspiration Larry King's garbage (from an art exhibit on celebrity trash) from bitchy, snarkmongering New York sister "blog" Gawker. If you want to read about the shitstorm—really, it's more of a drizzle—check out the Page Six story. But we think that the most embarrassing thing in Larry King's trash is, by far, that copy of Los Angeles Confidential magazine. How mortifying. Let's just hope he kept it handy in case he suffered a Depends failure.

In his diary for Slate, writer David Amsden chronicles taking a 17-year-old girl to her high-school prom. In this excerpt, he explains his motivations for pursuing the story; his rationalizations could serve as a syllabus for Jailbait Theory 101, as he invokes the names of the Olsen Twins and Lindsay Lohan. You know, we always suspected that Vanity Fair was somehow to blame:

Gotta get this out there quickly...in about 30 minutes, Ryan Seacrest will be carrying the Olympic torch across the 4th Street Bridge from downtown to East LA. This may be asking for too much on too short notice, but pics of this potentially history-altering event would be very much appreciated. And if the torch accidentally ignites some of Seacrest's hair product, well, that would make for quite a photo op, wouldn't it?

Defamer's Special Correspondent On Shy, Seemingly-Awkward Filmmakers/Daddy's Girls In Foreign Advertising sends us this dispatch about Sofia Coppola's commercial for her sparkling wine in a can, Sofia.

Screenwriter John August is in London, working on the "last details" of the updated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. This brief travelogue illustrates some of the horrors our peers may encounter when leaving our fluffy cocoon for less star-studded destinations:

Even with unhinged, decrepit mascot Jack Nicholson making the trip to Detroit, the Lakers were still unable to keep the Finals alive for one more game, putting off our city's championship riot dreams for at least another year. The game wasn't pretty (after all, this was Detroit), but a reader pinpoints the moment she knew it was really, really over for the purple and gold:

Perhaps our favorite Craigslist post of all time, entitled "Need help selling celeb porn tape":

Are you tired of drinking all of your celebrity-inspired sparkling wines out of a box? Did you ever wonder how Sofia Coppola might have gotten over the disintegration of her marriage to Spike Jonze, when nights cuddled up with an Oscar statuette weren't cutting it? If your answer to either of these questions is a quivering yes, then you're ready for Sofia Mini canned sparkling wine, named for and inspired by everyone's favorite daddy's girl. (And distributed through his Napa vineyard.)