Attention Brad Pitt fans: You can stop sending your get-well cards, stuffed animals, and lacy underthings to Cedars Sinai (see, we told you so), as Pitt has already left the hospital and returned home. Our hysterical diagnosis of the dreaded African Mystery Flu, perhaps obtained by eating some bad hummus procured from an Ethiopian street vendor, proved incorrect. According to Pitt publicist Cindy Guagenti (initial flack diagnosis: "I think he has the flu"), the actor has been temporarily felled by viral meningitis, the mild-mannered cousin of the sometimes deadly bacterial meningitis. We'd love to accept this explanation at face value and move on, but experience tells us that publicist-endorsed statements about hospital stays nearly always mask some other unpleasant reality. Therefore, we're forced to conclude that Pitt has actually contracted some extremely rare social disease previously identified only in seventeenth century French kings, and has returned home to live out the rest of days wracked with madness. The lush robes and powdered wigs, however, should lend an air of the exotic to his and Angelina Jolie's lovemaking, which lately had failed to reach the villager-terrifying heights of their infamous sexual safari.

If you're bored, you can head on over to Cooter's Place, where the avuncular former TV mechanic accuses the movie of rampant Blue Stateism: "Frankly, I think the whole project shows an arrogant disrespect for our show, for our cast, for America's families, and for the sensibilities of the heartland of our country." Cooter then took a big bite of apple pie, saluted the flag, and then rolled himself back underneath a replica of the General Lee.

· Help defend LA's honor by voting it the World's Sluttiest City at Gridskipper, a fine Gawker Media Internet Site™. Bangkok's in the lead, but we know that LA has a much higher sluts-per-capita rating.
· "'Really happy,' she gushed, at the 'Batman Begins' L.A. premiere. 'I don't care, I'm so happy,' she told People. 'I mean, I'm just so happy,' she confessed to W magazine. 'I love celebrating our happiness.' 'I'm very, very happy,' she crowed at the 'Batman Begins' London premiere." Please, somebody buy brainwashed Scientology bride-to-be Katie Holmes a thesaurus. At least Tom occasionally mixes in an "extraordinary" when he's pretending to be in love.
· Hey, unicorns!
· Don't you kind of wish that it was the janitor from One Day at a Time co-hosting the Teen Choice Awards with Hill to the Duff, and not Deuce Bigalow?
· Don't bother calling Angelina Jolie's people for comment.

· Outfest LA rages on with performance art at the RedCat. Watch as artist Ron Athey sits on an apparatus called the Judas Cradle, made to inflict a great deal of genital pain in the name of Art! Can't be worse than sitting through the Fantastic Four, can it?
· Hump Day Local Band Round-Up: The always entertaining Kennedy at King King; Irving at Spaceland.
· If you can afford the zip code, but not the semi-legal help to handle such piddling, homemaking-related concerns, author Linda Koopersmith discusses The Beverly Hills Organizer’s Home Organizing Bible at Brentano’s Century City.

OK, who else is, like, totally bummed out about this heavy 9/11 talk? Yeah, we are too! Totally! You know what would be really good right now? Yeah, that's right, a nipple slip featuring famously unhinged pop singer Mariah Carey! We don't usually "do requests," but so many of you heard about Carey's runaway areola and bombarded us asking where you could get a glimpse of her partially obscured woman-parts that our icy heart was melted. Enjoy your meal, sickies.

The LAT got an early look at the script that will spawn Oliver Stone's sure-to-be-controversial 9/11 movie (starring, quite logically, Nicholas Cage, fresh off a movie in which he rides a motorcycle while his head is engulfed by demonic flame). The good news: The screenplay "might be the most coherent, moving piece of material to fall into Stone's hands in over a decade." We think we all know what the bad news is:

At the risk of completely handing over this Wednesday to His Galloping, Creamy-Maned Majesty, we did sort of promise you that we'd pass along the cover of UK mag The Big Issue invoking Hollywood's Hottest Nickname. So, there it is, thanks to a very generous reader with a scanner. You can click it and make it even larger, which sounds suspiciously like "another path to the waterfall," if you get our heavy-handed drift. An excerpt from the mag, in which Wilson is once again forced to confront his loving moniker, is featured after the jump.

A reader was surprised to find Ben Affleck's square-jawed good looks gracing this cheaply made toy's packaging at a Chicago flea market, but shook off the momentary disorientation (no, he's probably not that hard up for cash) and snapped it up for our amusement. (She was further surprised that she couldn't take advantage of the depressed market for the actor's services and haggle the vendor down to fifty cents, and had to pony up a buck for this piece of obviously unauthorized Affleck memorabilia.) Perhaps even more jarring than Affleck's unconvincing portrayal of a toy-endorsing cop in his new medium, Flimsy Cardboard Backing Theater, is that his rogue cop would include a hand grenade in his crimefighting arsenal. We'd always pegged Ben as more of a tazer guy.

· Wednesday is Butterscotch Stallion Day! Paramount signs Owen Wilson to star in a remake (How novel! Paramount never does that!) of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. [Variety]
· Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan is joining the cast of The O.C. as a mysterious woman that Kirsten meets in rehab, and a nation full of real-life Seth Cohens prepares for exciting nights composing Borg-Chino slash-fic. [THR]
· Uma Thurman and Luke "Why Don't I Get A Stallion Nickname?" Wilson will star in the Ivan Reitman-directed romantic comedy Super Ex, in which Thurman uses her super-powers to torture the man who dumped her. [Variety]
· Predictably, the baseball All-Star game attracts more Nielsen eyeballs than INXS's desperate attempt to replace their dead singer with a part-time bartender or waitress. [THR]
· ABC greenlights nine episodes of Simon Cowell/Freemantle Media reality show for entrepreneurs:The Million Dollar Idea. Here's a freebie: Someone should invent a set-top box that makes Paula Abdul seem like she's not flying on pain medication during American Idol episodes. [Variety]

Where else would we turn to for a story about Hollywood's colonizing barbarians at Venice's gates but the NY Obserrver? A piece in today's Observer details tensions of artsy locals (and colorful crack smokers) as they helplessly watch their beach paradise be overrun by fleets of Mercedes carrying industry suits looking to snap up overpriced real estate and separate themselves from the differently-flavored yuppies of Brentwood:

ThinkFilm, distributor of the documentary The Aristocrats, featuring a litany of comedians telling "the dirtiest joke in the world," is up in arms over theater chain AMC's refusal to show the movie. Let the he-said/she-said accusations begin!

The Undersportz blog reported yesterday afternoon that not even a potentially disfiguring "pyro mishap" can stop Matthew Perry from the swift completion of his appointed, sports-entertainment awards show hosting duties—and it was merely a rehearsal!

Apparently reasonably certain that Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson's lawyers have decided not to sue them over what was perhaps the most thinly-veiled blind item of all time, Page Six discusses an upcoming Rolling Stone story in which Wilson shrugs off the public revealing of his signature move (i.e., two hours of "licking the buttocks"):

· So there we were at the edge of the reservoir, grasping a burlap sack full of newborn kittens. "God," we said, "If you don't send us a news item about how Kevin Spacey's hair growth affects his participation in movie projects, we are going to drown this bag full of kitties." The kittens lived to be adorable for another day.
· Hey, unicorns! [NSFW, via The Black Table]
· When life hands you strippers, make stripperade! via BoingBoing]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, etc etc etc. How many times can we say it in one day?
· "Martin Lawrence plays [punchy, one-syllable man's first name] — an [adjective], disgraced [type of sports professional] who gets one last chance at redemption: To get back into the [sports league], he has to coach a bunch of [adjective] junior-high students on a hopeless [verb ending in -ing] streak!" At last, Martin Lawrence mad libs.

· Are there any sweeter words in the English language than "A Conversation With Andy Dick"? Well, perhaps, "A Conversation With Andy Dick That Doesn't End With His Tongue In Your Mouth And His Hand On Your Eightball." But let's not quibble over semantics, just enjoy the evening with Dick at SAG's James Cagney Room.
· Easy choice: You can see Billy Corgan begin his two-night sold-out stand at the Fonda OR watch Hillary Duff lip-sync her way through 90 minutes at the Greek. It would be an easy choice for us, anyway, if we'd remembered to buy Corgan tickets.
· A more difficult choice: Watch as Defamer's favorite Hollywood war bride, Gigi Levangie Grazer, signs her novel The Starter Wife at Dutton’s, OR check out the book launch for The Stripper's Guide To Looking Great Naked at the Silent Movie Theater. Decisions, decisions...

Tom Cruise might be too busy playing with speedboats in Rome (where he began shooting M:I3) to engage in the kind of utterly charming psychiatry-baiting and sofa-stomping activities that we all miss so dearly, but the blog chatter lives on. During a recent viewing of Cruise's PKE (Pat Kingsley Era) movie Vanilla Sky, The Save Dakota blog (War of the Worlds is over now, so she's probably safe) notices something eerily prescient in a dream sequence:

Yes, that plaid shirt and those cutoff shorts are Lindsay Lohan's, and that liver-spotted hand firmly clasping that supple, 18-year-old thigh belongs to her A Prarie Home Companion director Robert Altman. It seemed like just yesterday that Altman couldn't remember Lohan's name; now the two of them seem so comfortable that he can probably summon her from her trailer by merely pantomiming a leg-stroking motion. Once a director and his actress form that magical bond, words just get in the way.

After all of this talk of alleged sex tapes and the alleged unspeakable acts allegedly contained therein, we collapse against our keyboard, so spent that we can merely blockquote this touching press-released sentiment from New Paramount™ head Brad Grey on the occasion of the heartfelt ankling of COO/vice-chairman Rob Friedman:

If you're lunching at your cubicle or desk, please put down the sandwich before reading on, because we don't want to be responsible for any sudden, severe indigestion. We've heard some very loud whispers that someone is not-so-quietly shopping around a video that they claim features everyone's favorite, totally-unconvincing-as-a-young-conqueror, merrily-boozing star Colin Farrell and former Playmate girlfriend Nicole Narain romping in alleged, sexual sex-tape fashion. The sellers are supposedly looking for a seven-figure upfront fee to hand over the tape for release by a distributor.

How can the AP be so goddamn calm and rational when Brad Pitt rushed himself to an undisclosed local hospital (cough—Cedars Sinai!—cough) with flu-like symptoms? We've already torn out clumps of hair over this maddeningly vague diagnosis by publicist Cindy Guagenti: