The White House crushed the dreams of thousands of Star Wars fans yesterday when they officially rejected a petition to start building a Death Star by 2016. The petition wasn't quite as successful as the idiotic one to deport Piers Morgan, but it did garner over 34,000 signatures, 9,000 more than necessary to receive an official response from the White House. So, good to their word, the White House responded yesterday via on a post on their website; in the post, resident nerd Paul Shawcross (official title: Chief of the Science and Space Branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget) gave some matter-of-fact reasons why a Death Star would be a bad idea for the country/universe in general:

Whooop! Whooop! CAA Kitchen Fire! Just when you had been lulled into a false sense of Death Star culinary confidence—positive that no incendiary Chinese appetizers would again engulf the TV lit department in thick clouds of cabbage-and-pork-scented smoke—comes this CAA! Kitchen! Fire! Deathtrap! Exclusive! "Subject: CAA can't cook! they set fire to their kitchen and got evacuated!" We ask that you remain calm at this time, until we get a full headcount (just the agents, obviously—not assistants); commuters in the Century City area, meanwhile, are instructed to keep as far away from the scene as possible, regardless of how enticing those wafting, mouth-watering gusts of BBQ baby meat might be. [Defamer]

Our noting earlier of a rumor that CAA assistants were now being made to park in a life-size Connect 4 board on the bottommost level of the Death Star parking structure brings us this report from an operative directly affected by the new policy:

As if life wasn't hard enough for the Stormtrooping underclass aboard the CAA Death Star—one moment, they're required to spend an afternoon with their foot wedged beneath their boss's wobbly Aeron chair, the next, they're returning a baby coldcuts platter to Jerry's for not having "enough girl meat"—Deadline Hollywood Daily reports the agency's assistants are now subjected to this:

Some accounts place Robert De Niro's recent defection from CAA to Endeavor as a move at least a decade in the making. That inevitability didn't lessen the sting for an anonymous CAA operative, however, who chimed at Deadline Hollywood Daily on Thursday with a poetic reality check entitled, "Why Did Bobby Leave Us?"

In another case of life imitating art, The Death Star is under attack! By Hitchcockian birds of prey, no less!

Sometimes, all it takes is something relatively insignificant—say, the firing of two proton torpedoes down a thermal exhaust port that leads directly to a reactor core, or an overcooked chinese appetizer—to fell the seemingly invulnerable. This just in from a Defamer operative stationed in the vicinity of the CAA Death Star: "Not sure if you heard, but apparently the caa bldg. was evacuated because someone burnt an egg roll in a toaster oven and it set off the fire alarm." We encourage further eyewitness accounts of the burnt-egg-roll carnage (and baby-flavored dipping sauces) that brought operations at Hollywood's most powerful institution to a grinding halt.

Having received a tip that the building that formerly housed the 360 Restaurant and Bar is leaning, we threw it open to you, our intrepid readers, to send in photo evidence suggesting whether or not the angle was merely an optical illusion, or if in fact at any given moment There Will Be Blood patrons at the nearby Arclight Dome won't end up seeing far more blood than they had bargained for. More than one of you came through, and after a careful examination, we fail to see a significant tilt to the structure, and we thus really see no need for Hollywood locals to run screaming through the streets, at least any more than they usually do. And while we did request no Photoshop, one reader's submission so awed us with its erotic vision of the CAA Death Star getting the skyscraper-pounding it's long craved, we've included it above. The other photos are after the jump.