· Did Dancing with the Stars champ Helio Castroneves announce that he's newly single before he took his victory lap on The View? Because we want to know if we should read the crackling sexual tension between him and Barbara Walters as the forbidden or out-in-the-open, headed-to-her- dressing-room-at-the-commercial-break kind. (We know! And with the dance partner he may or may not be diddling sitting right there! Shameless.)
· Meanwhile, all former Dancing contestants and their guests were treated to complimentary face paralysis at the finale's afterparty.
· The writers strike seems to have cost Chevy Chase a regular gig on SNL's Weekend Update desk.
· Remember when posing semi-clothed on a magazine cover while pregnant was kind of a novel thing?

At long last, Nicole Richie has lifted the media blackout surrounding her pregnancy by Joel Madden—lead singer of seminal, early-Oughts angst-pop outfit Good Charlotte—giving Access Hollywood's celebrity-baby-obsessed Billy Bush carte blanche to ask the not-burning questions we had zero investment in the answers to.

Feeling perhaps a tad emasculated after his shriveled member made the rounds in a naked photo circulated 'round the internets—virtually erasing all memory of his barbaric piledriving of Johnny Fairplay at the Fox Reality Channel Really Awards—Radar notes that Danny Bonaduce has put out feelers to Penthouse editors, hoping he has a chance to redeem himself with a nude spread to accompany an upcoming profile.

If you're anything like us, every stolen glimpse of pre-release images from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, the movie we're all hoping will effectively erase the years from 1999-2007 from Harrison Ford's IMDb profile, sends a pleasant feeling of warmth through your rapidly engorging naughty areas. Excited by the idea of a fifty sixtysomething Jones holding a whip in one hand and a gun in the other? No? Then how about one of the adventurer and his son, who's apparently fallen in with a crowd of leather-wearing bad seeds, crouching and pointing a flashlight at some unseen danger, looking as if he's about to tell the boy, "Listen, I know that it wouldn't be cool to admit to your no-good greaser pals that you're afraid, but where I come from, it's OK to be scared shitless by a pit full of thousands of snakes. So let the old man wet his pants a little and let's not make a big deal about it, agreed?" If neither photo turns your on, you're pretty much out of luck, because the one of Indy standing near a motorcycle probably won't do it for you, either.[AICN]

· Music round-up Iron and Wine at the Orpheum Theatre; Meiko at the Hotel Cafe; Carole King and James Taylor celebrate the Troubadour's 50h Anniversary.
· Inventor/writer Cy Tymony signs his book Sneakiest Uses for Everyday Things at the Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica, which may or may not include a discussion of how to most effectively torture your abusive boss with nothing more than a paper clip and Bic lighter.
· Ubiquitous cinematic badass Chris Cooper will be on hand at the Aero for a special screening of Breach, in which he plays infamous FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen. (Sorry, no Phillippe this time.)

So successful (read: chock full of cute, single writers) was the inaugural Gay Gate march outside Raleigh Studios that the organizers have already called for a sequel. Gay Gate 2: Return to Oz is slated for tomorrow at 10 a.m. outside NBC. Why NBC? A gay striker explains in a rallying e-mail:

Truth be told, we can't be made to care about who took home the Golden Tap Shoes—by far the most coveted of all the celebrity-based reality TV talent competition trophies—on last night's Dancing with the Stars finale, even after discovering that the heady rush of victory was so overwhelming that the show's new champion was moved to drop his fiancée like she was a tango partner who caught fire in the middle of a dip. The only reason we even bothered to tune in to the fifteen-hour coronation ceremony was to check in on Marie Osmond, America's Emotionally Fragile Sweetheart, whom we weren't sure would survive the defeat her now-legendary Baby Doll Dance of Despair made all but inevitable.

Armed & Famous star Erik Estrada returned to Muncie to continue the reserve police officer training he began on the canceled D-listers-with-guns CBS reality show. "I hope, 30 or 40 years from now, God willing, that when it's time to put me in my grave, I'll go in my Muncie uniform and badge," he told the local paper, adding, "And hopefully my trusty K-9 co-officer will be inside that overcrowded casket right along with me." [AP]

Due to a recent absence of adorable photographs in our inbox of the most potent symbol of Writers Guild solidarity to emerge from the strike, we were a little afraid that the Incredible Picketing Baby, finally tuckered out by weeks of instilling fear in the hearts of studio executives with her clever signs, had retired from marching detail. This apprehension on our part was, of course, completely ridiculous, as the IPB—shown earlier today patrolling the newly exorcised Warner Bros. lot—will not rest until this thing is settled, even if it she has to put off enrolling in kindergarten to see her mission through.

· Var insightfully notes that picket lines full of bored writers marching in endless circles with little else to do but chat, network, and dream up theme events have transformed into something of a "social scene." [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Tom Hanks On A Budget Edition: Matthew Perry will play a grown-up version of Disney superstar Zac Efron in Big-in-reverse project 17, in which a suddenly teenaged, mysteriously overtanned Perry/Efron enrolls in high school so he can hang out with his children, who wonder why the "new gay kid" keeps trying so hard to become friends with them. [THR]

According to a brave, anonymous sex-slave who somehow swallowed down his Hello Kitty ball-gag, chewed through both wrists to escape the pink-fur-trimmed handcuffs that kept him chained to a four-poster bed of nails, and survived the traumatic blood loss from his valiant struggle for survival long enough to exclusively tell Star magazine about his harrowing imprisonment in Britney Spears' Mulholland Drive sex dungeon, the troubled pop star may be into some relatively kinky shit. Reported the survivor with his dying, erotically exhausted final breath:

In case there was any lingering confusion about whether or not Paris Hilton did or did not offer a tearful plea on behalf of the plight of India's pale-ale-addicted elephants, the celebrity heiress appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show today to dispel that rumor, and another involving an interest in cryogenics.

Had she lived, Anna Nicole Smith would have been 40 years old today; she'd also very likely be disoriented, naked but for a set of lipstick cat whiskers, and wandering around the lobby of a Florida Hard Rock hotel with a nearby Howard K. Stern capturing every pratfall on Hi-8. As ever-tabloid-present in death as she was in her drug-addled years on Earth, Entertainment Tonight commemorates the posthumous milestone by approaching the two most essential mapping points on the love-polygon that defined much of her life—Stern and Larry Birkhead:

We share the following clip, a Canadian ad about workplace safety, for no other reason that no PSA has ever made us recoil in horror while screaming Holy. Fucking. Shit. You've been warned. [Deadspin]

According to today's Variety, the relentlessly versatile Jake Gyllenhaal will soon pad a resume filled with iconic turns as dreamy-eyed cowboy bottoms and disaffected, clothes-averse Marines by taking on the role of flamboyant Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath, who delighted NY sports fans of the 60s and 70s with his guaranteed Super Bowl victory, sideline modeling sessions of the latest in fur-coat fashions, and scene-stealing Brady Bunch cameos.

As promised, Miss Puerto Rico Universe winner Ingrid Marie Rivera appeared on The Today Show show to answer whether the much-talked-about pepper-spray sabotaging incident was in fact nothing more than a beauty queen flimflam, with host Meredith Vieira going so far as to suggest the hives outbreak Rivera claims was caused by high-grade hot sauce was instead the result of a nervous reaction.

This morning in unflattering paparazzi photographs of your favorite TV stars: Jennifer Love Hewitt's bikini bottom, Steve Carell picking his nose while jogging. Enjoy! [Egotastic, Splash News Online]

If you were one of the many horny mailroom clerks, assistants, or bosses who quietly snatched out of the nearest recycling bin the issue of Variety featuring a tantalizing glimpse of Heroes's Hayden Panettiere's stretchy, crimson underthings, we bring news of an exciting charitable opportunity currently underway at the NBC Universal Auction Store:

Responding to Tuesday's reports that not only was Carson Daly choosing to be the first late night talk show host to cross the WGA picket line and return to work without his striking scribes, but that he'd undertaken a hilariously ill-advised e-mail campaign to organize friends and family into an ad-hoc staff of gag-writing scabs, the Guild announced late yesterday that it was tearing every last TRL-era Tiger Beat magazine cover featuring Daly's smirking image from their headquarters' walls in protest, releasing this statement of Official Disappointment: