As Hollywood breathes a collective—if cautious—sigh of relief following some happy weekend news, here's the morning round-up of StrikeWatch news:

As you impatiently listen to the clock tick off the seconds until your Thanksgiving holiday, distract yourself from your daydreams of stuffing and candied yams with a look at the weekend's box office numbers:

· The Strike - Week 2: Bring Your Kids to the Strike Day; the Empire strikes back; what the AMPTP isn't telling you (anymore); Picketing with the Stars; and what of the assistants?; Strike Dancing Fever!; a diaper-wearing star is born; hatin' on tiny-penis havers; munching on flatulence; Not The Daily Show; Gays gay-up the strike gaily; "Wha'chu talkin' 'bout, Counter?"; the 93-year-old striker is almost as cute as the baby; a world without patter.
· Kissing Kirk Douglas.
· Sharon Stone clearly has had some work done.
· It's beginning to feel a lot like fake Christmas.
· All roads in the sad death of Donda West lead to this dude.
· The Week in Sexiest Men Who Are Still Breathing: Matt Damon wins! No—the Conchords win. Wait. No. Dwight Schrute wins.
· Why do bad things happen to good Ellens?
· In Runway, sometimes you're thin, and sometimes you're out.
· Correction: Paris thinks elephants should be able to get drunk if they want to.
· Rolling out Dick Clark for another Rockin' Eve.
· Little-known Spider-Man facts: Hails from Mississauga, Ontario, wears no foundation garments.
· Come on a Hooker Safari with us.
· If only O.J. Simpson would shut up about beer-making and let you enjoy your copy of Sky.
· Lindsay does her hour-and-a-half, and it's all good.

As it turns out, the script for Da Vinci Code prequel Angels & Demons that screenwriter Akiva Goldsman rushed in to beat the pre-strike deadline wasn't as shoot-ready as Sony had hoped, forcing the studio to indefinitely postpone production of Ron Howard's next crowd-narcotizing blockbuster:
"'While the filmmakers and the studio feel the screenplay is very strong, we do not believe it is the fully realized production draft required of this ambitious project,' a Sony spokesperson said. 'At this time, there is no new start date for Angels & Demons, but we are setting a release date of May 15, 2009, and are hopeful to deliver the movie worldwide to theaters on that date. We do not expect any other film on our 2008 slate to be affected.'" But take heart: as we've recently learned, the production setbacks that don't kill Imagine's Brian Grazer only make him stronger, so we have every confidence he'll make sure this latest passion project eventually gets made—even if that means he has to circumvent the too-cautious studio by buying his own copy of the book at the Grove's Barnes and Noble, taking it over to Tom Hanks' house, then forcing the star to act out the story at gunpoint while the dogged superproducer captures every precious word on a camcorder. [Variety]

Friday
· Music round-up: Neko Case at the Walt Disney Concert Hall; Tiger Army at the Wiltern; The B52's at the Roxy.
· Matt Ogens' documentary on the Walk of Fame characters we all so know and love, Confessions of a Superhero, is finally opening at the Laemmle Music Hall. See it and learn all about what brought Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Hulk to Hollywood Blvd. (Cameos by Shake-Me-Down Elmo and Headbutting Chewbacca!)

We know better than to get between an ugly gay divorce, particularly that of singer (that's what he does, right?) Lance Bass and his fame-hungry reality TV star ex, Reichen Lehmkhul, but when they take their bickering out of the privacy of the Crunch cardio room, where most Gays have the decency to work out their personal issues, and decide to splash them across the pages of major publications and MySpace blogs, like it or not, their problems become our problems. According to Reality Blurred, the latest round began with a interview in the current GQ in which Lance blamed the break-up on Reichen's infidelities, saying, "I thought [at the time], 'Why does everyone hate him?" At the end, I was like, 'Ok, everyone was right.'" Star Magazine then reported that Bass was sent a letter in which he threatened to sue. Lehmkhul clarified the issue on his MySpace page yesterday:

Though John Travolta's long, deep, and utterly unselfconscious kiss with longtime idol Kirk Douglas initially drew a thundering round of applause from the Santa Barbara Film Festival crowd assembled to see Travolta receive a lifetime achievement award named for the screen legend, the ovation was quickly replaced by gasps of horror once the guest of honor, obviously lost in the moment, failed to break their clinch until the oxygen-deprived nonagenarian collapsed to the stage.

Hasn't Amy Winehouse earned the right to visit her incarcerated husband in prison without having to be subjected to a humiliating beehive search? After all—just because her most famous song is called "Rehab (No You Never Gonna Get It)," doesn't mean she's the type to do a bump mid-song before thousands of fans in Birmingham. [Starpulse]

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 spotted Jeff Garlin at an "Up With Kirk!" rally.

Time again to raise our voices in praise of this week's sponsors, with whom we'd be thrilled to share a prison cell while we serve our 84-minute debt to society. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and make us your banner-ad-bitches, see this page

Clearly the female side of the Lohan family tree contains a dominant progeria gene, as Ali at 13 looks like Lindsay at 21, who looks like Dina at 45, who looks like 168-year-old Great Great Great Grandma Abigail Lohan, designer of the family crest. [Us Weekly]

· Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks are cast in Kevin Smith's Zach and Miri Make a Porno, the story of two platonic friends who try to use the power of hardcore pornography to solve their debt problems. As the actors previously appeared together in The 40 Year Old Virgin, this film represents the kind of re-teaming effort that drives us so wild with delight. [Variety]
· In one of the final Thursday night shoot-outs at the Nielsen Corral before the networks expend all of their first-run-episode ammunition, CBS defeats ABC. [THR]

In yet another story about How The Writers Strike Has Affected, Is Currently Affecting, Our Will Affect The Lives of TV And/Or Movie-Loving Americans, the AP looks at the impact the walkout may have on the slew of upcoming awards shows dependent on the work of WGA professionals to provide the monologue jokes, seemingly off-the-cuff banter, and cutting-edge film-parody montages that help fill out the ceremonies' blink-and-you've-missed-four-hours-of-your-life- you'll-never-get-back running times. Reps from the Academy and the HFPA opine on how the strike might hamper both Hollywood's Biggest and Drunkest Nights, respectively:

There will be no shortage of glistening, lifelike CGI flesh on display in Robert Zemeckis's latest masterwork, opening today. The character of Grendel's Mother, for example—naked, dipped in gold, and outfitted with a prehensile braid and fuck-me pumps—will give audiences a reasonable approximation of things only Brad Pitt was meant to see. Others, however, such as the protagonist himself (voiced and performed by Sexy Beast star Ray Winstone), use their human inspiration as mere jumping-off points, after which a cutting-edge series of gut-reducing, ab-defining filters are applied, resulting in a ripped, battle-ready hero worthy of the name Beowulf.

Though we'd feared that the writers strike would make the Yuletide TV schedule a mirthless, depressing affair, new hope has arrived in the form of a joyous press release from our friends at VH1. Christmas will be saved—we're sure of it—by the appearance of a sleeveless-vested Santa Claus on our television sets, who'll fill us with the spirit of the season by devouring the snacks of beef jerky and frosty cans of Miller Hi-Life some rosy-necked tykes have left upon their mantelshelf, belching out a rendition of "O Holy Night," and then disappearing up the chimney as a bellowed "GIT R DONE" reverberates through the house:

A judge has issued a $30,000 civil warrant against Oprah Approved™ Dr. Jan Adams—Kanye's mom's surgeon—for having failed to show up to a hearing today, as he has yet to pay the $100,000 settlement against a patient in whom he accidentally left a sponge. While the autopsy reports have yet to be filed for Donda West, we think Dr. Adams' can kiss any shot at making it into Los Angeles magazine's Best L.A. Doctors issue goodbye. [TMZ]

In an open letter to America, Hollywood tries to explain why all those people in red shirts keep turning up on the evening news: "2. Writers are greedy jerks who hate you. This is a little known fact, but all writers are paid in gold and candy. Now they want to be paid in platinum and caviar. I'm not making this up. I tried to tell them that, frankly, gold and candy is the better deal. But you know what they did? They spit on me, and they kicked me in my male bathing-suit area. Is that the act of reasonable people? No. It's the act of greedy jerks who hate you. Boo." [The Morning News]

What a truly wonderful world it is in which we live, where a Siberian stripper can come to America, work her way up the pole to the point where she's performing a champagne room command performance for the likes of Oscar de la Hoya, spend 24 hours in a Philadelphia Ritz-Carlton room during which she snaps the welterweight champion enacting his deepest fishnets-and-pumps-wearing desires, sell said photos to a hungry paparazzi agency for $70,000, and then—and this is the real coup de grâce—turn around and sue de la Hoya for $100 million for allowing the boxer to convince her not to shoot higher with her asking price. From the Reuters report:

Following their Not The Daily Show colleagues' very successful foray into the world of viral WGA-solidarity videos, some striking Colbert Report writers have whipped up the videologblog of "hungVP158," a studio executive who realizes it's finally time for the AMPTP to take to the YouTubes to fight back against the wave of pro-scribe sentiment being spread by camcorder-wielding propagandists trying to keep busy in between picketing shifts.