· If anyone knows where we can pimp our gas-guzzling ride with the words "Clean Energy" along the sides in massive blue letters, we're all ears. We hear it's foolproof horny-starlet-bait. [via TMZ]
· Congratulations to Lindsay Lohan, whose first post-rehab gig appears to be selling $5 Polaroids of herself to tourists with the rest of the Chinese Theater Justice League!
· Is it a coincidence that on the day reports emerge that #1 Yahoo search topic Britney Spears failed to show up to her "Piece of Me" video shoot, MTV and Jive Records announce their Make Your Own 'Piece of Me' Video Contest? Wethinks not.
· We defy you to resist these photos of injured hedgehogs with brightly colored scrunchie casts.
· It's the first night of Hanukkah. Has linking to Adam Sandler's "The Hanukkah Song" become a cliché? Yes. Yes it has. Do we care? No. No we don't.

Having just hit his stride with an Emmy-buzz-building role and a cast that he genuinely enjoyed seeing every day, Alec Baldwin seems to us as apt a poster child as any for the tragic human toll the writers strike has taken on our creative community. In his darkest moments, Baldwin has turned to the Huffington Post to blog out the pain: Having written previously of "this motherfucking, motherfucking, motherfucking strike" that keeps him from his beloved 30 Rock family, the actor's latest dispatch suggests a radical shift of WGA strategy—shaming producers online until they are brought to their knees:

A family dinner on last night's I Love New York 2 quickly descended into an ugly face-off between the mothers of Grand Prize Ho New York (so named for challenging both Port Authority and Penn Station's claims to being the East Coast's most traveled commuter hub) and her Italian stallion suitor, The Entertainer.

In just the latest example of mounting tensions between stars and the auteurs who cast them, director Paul Schrader wasn't one to mince words when a reporter asked why he thought Woody Harrelson, who plays a gay D.C. escort to older society women in his film The Walker, refused to put in his requisite junket time promoting the film. From the NY Observer:

· Music round-up: Cave Singers at the Echo; Jonathan Davis of Korn at the Orpheum; Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings at the El Rey.
· Seth Rogen and writer partner Evan Goldberg will be at the Borders in Westwood to sign DVDs of Superbad. For one day at least, it's entirely appropriate to ask Rogen to sketch you a tank that fires its sticky ordnance through a veiny penis-barrel.
· The Aero Theatre in Santa Monica hosts a seminar on "Unraveling Independent Film Distribution," a "frank" discussion of what do to when a major distributor wants nothing to do with your passion project.

Some 13 months after the theatrical release of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary about an intellectually curious Kazakh journalist's travels across the U.S. and A to engage in cultural exchanges with as many litigious Americans as possible, one might think that any of comedian's on-camera victims who hadn't already filed lawsuits had grudgingly accepted their cinematic notoriety. Amazingly, legal papers are still being filed, with the latest coming from the driving instructor tasked with teaching the foreigner how to operate a non-mule-powered vehicle:

Some developments in the Dennis Quaid twins overdose nightmare: While it seems like his newborns will be fine, the actor and his wife are suing Baxter Healthcare Corp., makers of the blood-thinning drug Heparin, in the hopes that it will force the company to stop packaging differing doses in identical vials. [THR/AP]

Here's a fun way to simultaneously kill a few minutes of company time (come on, that phone hasn't rung more than three times a day since the writers went on strike—live a little!) and a bunch of brain cells you probably weren't using anyway: a quiz of celebrity face-parts made harder to recognize than normal by some creative zooming. Score a perfect 12 out of 12 and reward yourself with undeniable proof that your People and Us Weekly subscriptions were money very well spent! [Boston.com]

Never ones to shy away from incisive discussion of the most pressing issues of the day, the ladies of The View tackled the sensitive, hot-button topic of Jennifer Love Hewitt's ass, an embattled posterior famously made the latest casualty of the celebrity/paparazzi war by the combination of a zoom lens, less-than-optimal lighting conditions, and an unflattering bikini bottom.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often! Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about the time you secretly wished you had the balls of that creepy dude at The Grove Apple Store hitting on Gabrielle Anwar:

With nothing more than some savvy wardrobe choices, a few thousands strokes of a hairbrush, and enough Botox to magically vanish the laugh-lines of the craggiest of Hogwarts headmasters, The Golden Compass's stylists were successful in transforming Nicole Kidman into a villain every bit as terrifyingly handsome as the most feared dandy wizard in the Ministry of Magic. [Manolo the Shoeblogger]

· Hoping to heal the emotional damage he once inflicted upon national treasure Steven Spielberg by declaring the director's possible departure from his corporate family "completely immaterial," Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman offered a conciliatory flurry of hugs, kisses and a vigorous foot massage to the icon he once offended, calling him "one of the great filmmakers of our time and actually of all time," and promising that "We're going to proceed with calm, with deliberateness, and our entire objective is to focus on making him happy doing what he's doing. Whatever makes him happy and makes us happy will be the way it works out" as they continue to try and salvage their relationship. [Variety]
· The strike clock, as always, is ticking: if things aren't settled "in the next few weeks," pilot season—and the booze-drenched upfronts parties TV reporters so look forward to each year—could be lost. [THR]

Dave Chappelle has broken his own marathon stand-up record, beating his nearly 6-hour-long set last April with one Sunday night at the Laugh Factory that lasted 6 hours and 12 minutes. "Dave was determined to keep his record because he recently heard that Dane Cook was planning on trying to break (his) record," said club owner Jamie Masada, awed by Chappelle's selflessless in potentially saving an audience from 6 mind-numbing hours of Dane Cook. [AP]

While we are romantics at heart, we're typically reluctant to note news about celebrity engagements unless they are triple-flack-confirmed and appear beneath a flashing "EXCLUSIVE!" sign in a reputable news source such as People or Entertainment Tonight. But MediaTakeOut.com seems so convinced that they can hear the faint sound of wedding bells on the horizon for one of Hollywood's most beloved glass closet dwellers, we felt compelled to pass the news along to you:

In the most stirring show of solidarity with the scribes' cause to date, YouTube's animal superstars have pledged to immediately shut down their viral pipeline of footage of virtuoso cats, X-Game-hopeful canines, and, most critically, hand-holding otters. For the love of God, Nick Counter and the AMPTP, make a reasonable offer before everything that is good and worthwhile about the internet disappears forever. (And don't miss the brief cameo by Carson Daly!)

It was on Howard Stern's show that Tina Fey described SNL guest host Paris Hilton as "a piece of shit" who was universally hated by the cast, and now in Playboy (sorry Feynatics—just an interview, not a Naughty Showrunner spread in which she delivers script notes wearing only glasses and an unbuttoned men's dress shirt with the collar up), she recalls the experience of working with Paula Abdul:

In Gandhi's 1929 autobiography The Story of My Experiments in Truth, the founder of modern-day non-violent resistance wrote:

Fun fact: 6 out of 10 fender-benders occurring within a three-block radius of Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel involve washed-up semicelebrities. Be careful out there, motorists, or risk a rear-ending by somebody distracted by their search for a TMZ camera to document their nightclub attandence. [popbytes]

We'd like to offer our gratitude to an attentive reader, who pointed us to today's AFP story on a lawsuit Crash director Paul Haggis recently filed against producer Bob Yari, which for one fleeting, poorly fact-checked moment righted one of Hollywood's most egregious wrongs. Even though the wounds inflicted by those heavy hands had long ago healed, briefly revisiting what could have been was still a nice way to begin this Tuesday morning.

About a week after the controversial announcement was made that Carson Daly would cross his writers on the picket line and return to Last Call, the highest-rated late-late night talk show among graveyard-shift convenience store clerks looking for a break from watching closed circuit video feeds of their empty parking lots, the embattled host finally returned to the airwaves Monday.