Unafraid to push the limits of breaking celebrity news, The Insider may have been the first media outlet to inform the world that Dancing with the Stars contestant Jane Seymour's mother has died. [The Insider Online]

Miss Moneypenny passes on, having never woken up to find James Bond's tuxedo crumpled up on her bedroom floor. [AFP]

Tragically, a special effects tech was killed during a stunt's test run outside of London for the Dark Knight production shooting there. And while the studio hasn't released his name, the report does give us the obligatory "no actors were involved in the accident" update, just so no one will worry unnecessarily about the health of the talent. [Breitbart]

Sad news: Brett Somers, whose countless Match Game PM showdowns with flamboyant game-show foil Charles Nelson Reilly (here's a taste via YouTube) are remembered fondly at Defamer HQ, has passed. [ [BrettSomers.com]

· The trades mourn the recent silencing of their favorite of the Three Tenors. [Variety, THR] [THR]
· Scott Rudin beats out Warner Bros, Universal, Sony, and New Line for the movie rights to the historical novel I, Claudius, with Leo DiCaprio and his The Departed screenwriter William Monahan expected to jump ship from their failed WB bid to join the winning Rudin team. [Variety]
· The Agent Dance, East Coast Edition: NY-based CAA bigshot Bart Walker leaves the evil agenting monolith to form a talent management division at indie film powerhouse Cinetic. We expect reports of the mysterious torching of Walker's apartment to emerge shortly. [THR]
· Apple and Hollywood still can't decide whether to fuck or fight. [Variety]
· Studio execs head into the Toronto Film Festival with "fat wallets and a healthy appetite for product," ready to snap up any movie they think might make a buck during a possible strike by the guilds. [Variety]

· YouTube is calling Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert to testify in the suit the comedians' corporate overload Viacom filed against them, perhaps hoping to get one of the hosts to crack and admit that they're secretly uploading unauthorized clips of their shows to the site to spite Sumner Redstone.
· This WowWee Alive Elvis should haunt your dreams for months. Enjoy waking up in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat and begging the undead King not to devour your soul!
· Mark Philippoussis's Age of Love cougar runner-up has a naked past. This is not entirely surprising.
· We remember the dearly departed Scooter from a childhood's worth of Yankee games, but his Money Store spots also hold a special place in our hearts.
· Yeah, 300 parodies are like so Spring '07, but this one's really well done.

· Offering a tour of the photos lining his office walls, Griffin once indicated he was on a nickname-only basis with the greatest civil rights crusader of our time: "Yes, here I am with John Kennedy...And here I am with Frank Sinatra...And here's Elizabeth Taylor...And Marty King..." [pastdeadline.com]
· The numbers you're probably wondering about: $1.6 billion, one son, two grandchildren. [LAT]
· Merv composed the Jeopardy theme music himself, which he banged out on his piano in less than 30 minutes— a melody he anticipated earned him somewhere between $70-$80 million, or what Merv dismissively referred to as "cabana boy tip money." [National Post]

Maybe we spoke too soon yesterday when we said that the Rule of Three had been satisfied and we wouldn't be receiving news of any other notable passings for a few days: Directing legend (yup, another one) Michaelangelo Antonioni, of Blowup, Zabriskie Point, The Passengers,, and L'Avventura fame, has died at 94. [Reuters]

Actor Ulrich Muehe (or Mühe, according to IMDb), who starred in last year's Oscar-winning The Lives of Others as a sympathetic East German secret police eavesdropper, has died at 54 from stomach cancer. [CNN.com/Reuters]

Legendary cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Shampoo, The Toy, Ghosbusters, and far too many other credits to list here) dies at 74. [THR]

Character actor Charles Lane, "whose crotchety persona and roles in hundreds of films made him instantly recognizable to generations of moviegoers," dies at 102. [!] [AP]

Joel Siegel , longtime Good Morning America movie critic and rabid Kevin Smith fan, has died at 63. [ABC News]

· Say what you will about yesterday's ottoman-humping clip, but at least no one got hurt.
· Fred Thompson is ducking Michael Moore's debate challenge, but at least he's doing it in style.
· Tinky-Winky victorious.
· The supposedly yanked Kim Kardashian sex tape is still for sale? Get yours now before she's no longer marginally famous.
· And finally: dumb cop brownies. [via Queerty]

· We're number one! We're number one!
· RIP, Tom Poston. Couldn't they have gone with something a little better than "TV's clueless everyman"? At the very least, how about "TV's lovably clueless everyman"?
· A recovering Ebert speaks.
· Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields are really overdoing it with the BFF act. We get it, he's totally OK with her choice to use dangerous street drugs to treat her depression now.
· You see, it's funny because a bitch is a female dog. She's shopping for a dog! LOL.
· Toronto gets 999 Borats.

• Director of 'A Christmas Story,' son killed in PCH crash [LAT]

• Larry Bud Melman in a bear suit [YouTube]

· Don't fault CNN's Jack Cafferty for asking a seemingly snippy question of the network's Master of Mysteriously Deceased Celebrities Ceremonies Wolf Blitzer. Given the staggering pace of the updates following her death, the answer to "Is Anna Nicole Smith still dead, Wolf?" easily could have been, "Actually, Jack, we're hearing that she may have been revived by a voodoo priest and is currently fleeing for the Bahamas on a stolen yacht." [YouTube]
· Having failed thus far to obtain Anna Nicole's autopsied stomach from an insider at the Broward County medical examiner's office, TMZ momentarily settles for posting pictures of Smith's refrigerator in the Bahamas (contents: Methadone, Slim-Fast, yogurt, just like your fridge at home) and of her snuggling with the Bahamian immigration minister, which we're sure is just part of the naturalization process down there. [TMZ, TMZ]
· Cause of death rumors update: MNSBC's Rita Cosby cites the potentially lethal combination of too many pills and too many breast surgeries. [NY Daily News]
· An ET/The Insider crew coaxes tears from lawyer/husband-like companion/Danielynn paternity hopeful Howard K. Stern, while on a plane—had they waited for him to land, Access Hollywood might have scooped them for "first celebrity TV newsmagazine to make Hollywood's most suspicious baby-daddy weep" bragging rights. [YouTube]

We were hoping to get at least a tiny break from the Anna Nicole Smith updates, but the Random Celebrity Gossip Generator has output a story so mind-meltingly absurd that it bears immediate attention. By our count (and we're including Larry King, as per yesterday's suspicions) there are no fewer than sixty-eight men in the Dannielynn paternity chase now that Zsa Zsa's husband, Prince Frederick Heinz the Baron Krauss von Espy, has officially entered his DNA into the race.

Almost completely lost in the media chaos following Anna Nicole Smith's death was the fact that soon after News Corp. potentate Rupert Murdoch shocked—shocked!—the entertainment industry by bragging that his 20th Century Fox division had locked up Sacha Baron Cohen for a Borat sequel, the studio had to very delicately inform the world that while Fox loves and admires Cohen and would like nothing better than to lavish millions of dollars upon him for such a project, things were not quite as contractually finalized (the phrases "casual discussions" and "too preliminary to discuss" figured in the statement) as the boss might have erroneously hinted. Following such a public backtracking off a blockbuster announcement, it's not too hard to imagine that an embarrassed Murdoch's vague order to "Make this go away. I don't care how," being taken by an overeager underling as an opportunity to demonstrate his skill in creating the kind of media smokescreen only achievable by the mysterious and unexpected passing of a troubled celebrity.

Any attempt to deal with all of the updates about Anna Nicole Smith's death on an individual basis would probably result in "mysterious" and "unexpected" heart failure, so here's our best attempt to round up the developments for your perusal over your first cup of coffee: