The Kung Fu Records website announces that Variety has served punk band The Vandals (please no angry e-mails about my possibly incorrect genre-pigeonholing etc etc) with a cease-and-desist letter over the band's new logo. Frankly, we don't see the resemblance. The Vandals' bass player muses, "It's weird that a news organization that depends on free speech for its livelihood couldn't see the artistic merit of what we have done." Weird? Clearly, the band's never read any of the gibberish below the "V" at the top of a Variety page.

Even with a self-imposed two-year adjustment period, turning over the reins of a media conglomerate that you've controlled for 20 years can be a psychically draining experience. We've broken down a recent picture of obsolescent Disney CEO Michael Eisner to illustrate the things that every mogul-in-twilight needs to ease the transition into month-long golf trips and unreturned phone calls.

Word on the street is that humpy E! gossiper Ted Casablanca has directed hordes of his loyal readers to this site on a hunt for "additional clues" to his patented Blind Vices, which through linguistic contortions and verbal subterfuge mask the identities of various actors and the people that join them in highly discreet gay sex or capricious drug use. If you're one of these guests, here's a link to today's Blind Item Guessing Game, still in progress. Past Guessing Games—complete with the reader-supplied "clues" or "guesses" you crave—covering previous blind items can be found here.

· SATC's Darren Star gets a script commitment from Fox for a half-hour behind the scenes restaurant series based on the book Kitchen Confidential. Let's hope the term "funky spunk" never comes into play. [THR]
· The relationship between Disney and partner Pixar is likely coming to a sad end. They've "outgrown" one another, according to Disney president Bob Iger. True, the relationship has evolved; Pixar's a money-printing machine and Disney really isn't interested in that kind of thing anymore. [THR]
· MGM puts new Bond on hold while they hunt around for a director. Also, they're probably busy combing all of Australia to find an actor to actually play James Bond and figuring out who to fire when they merge with Sony. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Nothing can stop Chris Columbus, director-lite of annoying confections. He's made a deal with Warner Bros to develop and direct Slanted and Enchanted, a dramedy about a recovering pathological liar with magical elements. So...Liar, Liar meets Harry Potter? That sounds about right. [THR]
· Harvey and Bob Weinstein's Miramax and Dimension get into the CGI game, signing a deal with Wild Brain animation company. Evil, corpulent mogul Harvey just canned everyone he couldn't strang—-Hey! They're making an Opus movie! That's fucking awesome. All is forgiven. [Variety, sub. req'd.]

Wherein we invite our readers to untangle the slippery prose-spaghetti of humpy E! gossipist Ted Casablanca and guess the identity of his weekly blind item. Today, Ted puts the butt-sex of supposedly straight actors on the back burner and foregrounds our other favorite blind item topic, drug abuse. Ecce, One Blind Blind Vice:

Oh, now we know why the publicist for The O.C.'s Ben McKenzie clamored to get an item in Page Six reaffirming his hott career and love for the ladies. This interview from Elle is a flack's worst nightmare, even more chilling than the one where they're sitting in their underwear on a crowded red carpet and suddenly find themselves unable to lie:

From the LAT, breaking news: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is fond of the industry that made him a multimillionaire, international star, and gave him enough exposure to indulge his political ambitions. He's showing his love by fighting runaway production and piracy, and, no doubt, personally answering every mash note he receives from head movie-biz pimp Dan Glickman.

A British reporter's viewing of the new Paris Hilton sex tape (which we've preemptively named 12 Hours in Paris, making the tape's eventual vendor's job a little easier) turns up a troubling scene, and no, we're not talking about anal. According to the report, Hilton has what seems to be a pleasant conversation with a couple of African-American guys, then casually drops the N-bomb. Did we ruin the surprise?

—Everyone's trying to be a comedy writer: Sister site Wonkette unearths recycled Seinfeldisms in press releases about Iraq.
—Who would have guessed anything fishy could happen with online, offshore gambling on reality television? Why not try betting on something more obviously foolproof, like boxing?
—The incredibly informative Brandcameo tracks product placement in movies. It makes it so much easier to get outraged about all the secret advertising you're being subjected to.
—Vanity Fair editor/starfucker supreme Graydon Carter muses about how great VF would be if he weren't infected with the starfucking virus. [fifth item]
—And, just because: Masturnader.

1. Go see the Comedians of Comedy at the El Rey featuring Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, and Maria Bamford. The last time we saw Oswalt do stand-up, we laughed so hard we almost vomited. Is there any better endorsement that that?
2. Get your Elton John on at the Scissor Sisters show at Avalon. Or, at the very least, get your "that sounds a lot like Elton John before he started doing Disney soundtracks, but in a good way" on.
3. If it's feeling like a quieter kind of night, how about a paranoid political thriller that was recently remade into an inferior movie? The Manchurian Candidate (the original, don't despair) plays at the ArcLight.

Sooner than you probably think, the capitalist exchange of items that have passed into and out of Britney Spears' possession will be the dominant mode of commerce in our society (an inevitability originally postulated by Adam Smith in an oft-overlooked section of The Wealth of Nations). It's in everyone's best interest to stockpile the easily available assets that will allow the Britney Economy to operate efficiently, before scarcity of these Spears-anointed goods drives their price to levels unseen since a post-WWII Germany, where it took a wheelbarrow full of devalued cash to buy a single loaf of bread. Below, we present the latest entry into our Britney Economy's Golden Age, as a Craiglist poster tries to sell off an invitation to the fancy, official wedding that was obviated by the quick-and-dirty ceremony held recently.

Our readers are officially putting bikram-devotee celebrities on notice—if you bring your weak shit and high-priced yoga mats to Silver Lake, everyone's going to know about your snotty tissues and your bad outfits. Even if you were once the darling of the indie film world before that regrettable guest spot on Will & Grace, you'll never do the downward-facing dog on the Eastside again!

Blogger The Corsair once again plies his invaluable transcription skills on the latest issue of Complex magazine, in which Serena Williams boyfriend/occasional hacky director of overblown, feature-length music videos Brett Ratner reveals that he has not-so-hot secret tapes of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John dancing in the Grease disco in his house. [Ed.note—If Ratner directed the video, does Travolta explode for no reason ten seconds in? We'd pay to see that.] Ratner also brags that he crashed with pal and legendary producer Robert Evans while his house was being renovated—which is something to boast about only if you're so obsessed with being retro that your idea of fun is watching your grandfather collapse face-first into a punchbowl full of blow while hookers root around for his wallet.

While inexplicably devoting valuable viewing time to Last Comic Standing, the Defamer correspondent on televised roasts of marginal Saturday Night Live alums notices an interesting choice by NBC executives to broadcast a joke about how host Jay Mohr landed a breakout role in a big film:

Photographers caught Herbie: Fully Loaded star Lindsay Lohan getting in a quick IM session in some down-time on the set. (Some of you might remember that Lohan's reported hard partying warranted some threats from her director and Disney executives, who thought her hangovers were affecting her work.) Through the magic of the internet, Defamer was able to intercept a snippet of this IM conversation with boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama. Our partial transcript follows after the jump.

· The House passes the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which allows up to 6 years in prison for camcording a movie. Still, former MPAA chief Jack Valenti's probably a bit upset that the House passed on the provision that pirates are castrated and forced to eat their own testicles. [THR]
· Columbia self-consciously tries to cast nearly every quality actor in Hollywood to distract from the fact that they're unimaginatively remaking yet another classic movie, trying to add Meryl Streep to the All the King's Men super-cast. Also assisting the subterfuge are Sean Penn and Jude Law, with Kate Winslet, and Mark Ruffalo to potentially sign on. [THR]
· It's so cute when executive mouths write checks that their studios can't cash: Tom Freston promises less crap from Paramount Pictures. Good one, Tom! Why not just promise us Paramount will find Bin Laden? [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Lion's Gate picks up the rights to A Love Song for Bobby Long. in which we think Scarlett Johansson's old-guy fetish is satisfied by—grab your stomach pills—John Travolta. God, we hope we're wrong on this one. [THR]
· Melissa Etheridge's "reversed Will and Grace with a kid" sitcom gets a script commitment at ABC. We don't have any idea what that means, but ABC seems to have bought it. Network TV really needs a few more nonthreatening gays who constantly make puns about how gay they are, so why not? [THR]

The New Yorker's Jame Surowiecki examines embattled, time-delay retiree Disney CEO Michael Eisner succession plans. Or rather, the lack thereof, since the closest he's actually come to making those plans happened in the moments before quadruple-bypass surgery:

A spy tips us that Viacom co-president/toothy, inevitable galactic dictator Les Moonves visited the offices of KROQ as part of a tour of the conglomerate's Los Angeles radio properties. Is Moonves pushing up the date of the invasion that will someday enslave us all, kicking the tires of his instruments of eventual domination? Our spy's transmissions were choppy; no doubt he was hiding in an air duct until Moonves' white-glove inspection passed. Here's what we pieced together:

Reality Blurred points us to this Spike TV press release revealing that the network tricked an entire Iowa town, overtaking it with a fake production (complete with all the attendant Hollywood wackiness) of a William Shatner movie called "Invasion Iowa." To avoid an old-fashioned hangin' and pitchfork-and-torch riot, the producers gave the punked town of Riverside (pop. 978) a check for a measly $100,000 as they owned up to the hoax yesterday. The next time you wonder why TV networks are so enamored of reality shows, think about how Spike rented an entire town for a hundred bucks a head. Here's a tip to the residents of Riverside: Don't put away those pitchforks yet. When you poke holes in people from Hollywood, money pours out. Give it a try!

In case acid has been burning holes in your stomach from worrying about where temporary Britney Spears husband/unemployed background dancer Kevin Federline scraped up the funds for his new bride's wedding ring, you can now throw away your roll of Tums, Spears has gone on the record to the always-reliable WENN that K-Fed went into hock for the wedding band, and to "contribute to the wedding." Do you get the feeling that his loan application was approved by the Bank of Britney, since lending instiuations generally don't accept dirty wife-beaters and a ten-second performance of professional-quality Running Man as collateral? At least he was smart enough to take out enough money for the ring, the boombox rental, and a bucket of the Colonel's finest. Oh, and we imagine he sprung for the "Shut Up and Do Me" trucker hat as well, which she can pull down nice and tight should her alien mask fall off during her next paparazzi sortee.