· Celebrated documentarian Ken Burns has finally devoted his attention to a conflict that can hold our attention over an eleven hour span: Karen vs. Pam.
· Sinbad is dead...is dead! Or...is...it? It feels like we haven't gotten a Sinbad sighting in quite a while. Hmmm. Dude could totally be dead.
· "In one scene, a cute, topless girl is roughly tied down on a table by evil female Nazi experimenters who begin draining her blood and, as she screams in agony, they brand her like livestock with a coal-hot steel swastika. And every girl in the Nazi concentration camp is topless." To paraphrase a friend of ours...some say best fake topless Third-Reichsploitation flick trailer evs?
· Ari Emanuel's brother: Let's keep the new kids in Congress away from that big, bad Colbert guy. He might make us look silly!
· Always a fave: Famous person falls down! It's funny because we know who she is! (Actually, it's still pretty funny when that second chick wipes out, too. Because we are bad people.)

Local foodie blog Eater LA has been steadfastly tracking the progress of Ketchup, the newest addition to Dolce Group's ever-expanding empire of scenewhorey restaurants that promises to erase any preconception of the American diner as somewhere you don't go to do a bump in the bathroom before returning to a VIP vinyl booth to order a $27 Godiva milkshake. But imagine their surprise when they stumbled upon an item on paparazzi concern Splash News's website, listing Tara Reid as one of the celebrity owners:

With Hollywood's younger generation proving on a near daily basis that it can't hold its booze, we feel it's important to celebrate the more seasoned individuals on the scene who can have a drink or ten without shaving their heads, trading their babies for a pack of smokes, and then heading off for a month of poolside rehab to battle their lightweight demons. And so we pass along this story from the Pop Stand blog, in which a civilian's very late night encounter with Official Eastside Drinking Buddy Kiefer Sutherland on the streets of the actor's Los Feliz stomping grounds refreshingly does not end in shaky TMZ video footage of a famous person mowing down a pack of paparazzi in their luxury automobile:

We're not entirely sure which unfortunate webmaster has been assigned the thankless task of redesigning Britney Spears's official website, but whoever they are, they have already replaced the unsettling tiger imagery with a placeholder homepage that hints at wonderful, vintage-Playboy-inspired things to come. And instead of angry poetry, we get a spiral notebook full of good wishes for a speedy recovery from fans around the globe, such as Anthony, whose sentiments about weathering life's rough, bumpy bits we're certain comforted the singer when she took a short break from a 17-hour Coca-Cola-fueled mattress-trampolining session to check her laptop.

· Partake of one of the greater Los Angeles area's more than ten thousand yearly organized celebrations of movie magic at the Other Venice Film Festival, which runs tonight through Sunday night.
· The Ace Gallery hosts VOOM Portraits, avant-garde playwright and theater director Robert Wilson's fancy-like, hi-def images of famous people, like that one of Brad Pitt that wound up on the cover of Vanity Fair not too long ago.
· Music round-up: Ollin at Amoeba; Head Automatica at the Troubadour; Ramones tribute at Safari Sam's with the Fresas, Death Party, Merle Jagger and many, many more.

Perhaps disappointed that David Geffen's bid to buy the paper and transform it into the pulpy megaphone he's always craved never really went anywhere, the LAT is doing what it can to make sure that the voices of the entertainment industry's biggest personalities are heard, inviting Imagine's Brian Grazer to superproduce the inaugural edition of an already doomed a bold guest-editor experiment for its Sunday Current opinion section. So what exactly will be required of the new Times editor-for-a-day? A press release can explain while we dab up the bit of melted brain matter that's trickling from our ear:

From the first moment we laid eyes upon a Lilliputian, love-advice-dispensing Star Jones, we knew in our hearts that the stifling format of The View wasn't doing nearly enough to showcase everything this wise former D.A. had to offer her viewers. Kudos, then, to Court TV, who has scooped up the deposed daytime monarch to host her very own entertainment/law show. Sporting a brand new makeover (short hair + glasses + pantsuit + a face you can trust = instant credibility!), Jones offers TVGuide.com some thoughts on her journey away from The View's hysterics and back into our hearts:

The first photograph of latest Angelina Jolie orphan acquisition Pax Thien (née Pham Quang Sang) comes not, as we might have expected, in an impeccably shot Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair spread dramatically depicting the actress's multicultural brood as delegates within the world's most adorable United Nations assembly, but in this simple wire service image of all the children available at the now world-famous Tam Binh orphanage at the time of Jolie and Brad Pitt's Thanksgiving urchin-scouting trip.

· To celebrate Fox's order of 13 more episodes of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, please take a minute to once again relive the televised near-humiliation (hey, he got it right...eventually) of Pledge of Allegiance Guy. Many more special moments like that one are sure to follow! [Variety]
· The floundering First Look Studios is rocked by yet another "mutual decision" for an executive to surrender his or her job, with president Ruth Vitale announcing she's exiting her post once she makes sure Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters gets released without any marketing campaigns that terrify entire cities with their innovative techniques. [THR]
· Ocean's 13 will make its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (though out of competition). What this means to you: Nothing, as your boss is too cheap to fly you to France for the fest, but you at least might get to hear some amusing stories about the French audiences booing the film for not living up to the lofty artistic expectations set by Ocean's 12 . [Variety]
· Daniel Craig is in talks in the Fernando Meirelles drama Blindness, getting a start on the long and frustrating process of obtaining roles in which he's not asked to portray a British superspy. [THR]
· Behold the awesome power of American Idol, which can elevate even the worst, previously low-rated sitcom to unimaginable Nielsen heights! [Variety]

If you caught last night's American Idol elimination round, you may have experienced what could only be described as the kind of fever dream Paula Abdul has after taking one too many daytrips on the Percocet-Mezcal Express. What you were witnessing, however, was no opiate-induced hallucination, but something far more sinister: A Ford Motors-sponsored "music video", featuring the contestants—set adrift on a concept best described as "Let's dress you up as disco and old school hip-hop dancers! That'll be a fun kind of thing!"—performing "Float On" on the Fox backlot. It could have only been less deferential to the source material if producers has opted instead to have their budding superstars encircle Modest Mouse lead singer/songwriter Isaac Brock, beat him unconscious with a variety of blunt objects, then spin around to lower their bellbottoms and tracksuit pants and relieve themselves, Final 12-style, on his broken, bruised body.

In praising the versatility and talent that allows accomplished dramatic directors like Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou to direct epic action pictures like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, Rush Hour 3's Jackie Chan suddenly found himself in the uncomfortable position of needing to quickly come up with a similarly positive appraisal of the skills of the guy who's nominally in control of the set of his current project:

Star magazine reports that the in-patient currently occupying rooms 1 through 14 of Promises Malibu may be the facility's most legally wired, with vast amounts of high fructose corn syrup and caffeine constantly coursing through her veins, courtesy of the reportedly 24 cans of Coke Britney Spears consumes daily:

Orphan successfully adopted! Us Weekly follows up on yesterday's reports that Angelina Jolie was on her way to the Tam Binh orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City to personally collect her latest child purchase and save on exorbitant international shipping charges, revealing that the newest member of the rapidly expanding Jolie-Pitt clan is now safely in her possession. With Maddox's new little brother officially her property, Jolie is wasting no time customizing the three-year-old boy to her liking:

It's been a tense couple of weeks since Hollywood event catering watchdog group TMZ.com has made any headway in its selfless crusade to inform the entertainment industry's party-going populace about their potential risk of a Hepatitis A infection from partaking of the delicious hors d'oureves served at 14 ultra-secret Wolfgang Puck-catered events staffed by a Hep-afflicted cook.

· Is Head-Butting Chewbacca on the loose at the Galaxy Complex on Hollywood Boulevard? We're not sure that's the same Wookie outlaw, but we advise all tour guides passing through that area to wear protective headgear, just in case. (More pics here.)
· Hillary's "Fuck You '07" Tour A Resounding Success.
· A new design usability study reveals that dudes love to stare at George Brett's pine-tar-stained package.
· Hey, unicorn defense!

A disappointingly coherent center American Idol judge Paula Abdul is offering us little to celebrate by way of memorable meltdowns this season. She did burst into tears last night, but who really cares about that if it isn't immediately followed by blacking out and some involuntary crowd surfing? At least we could still cling to one Idol truth (besides Ryan Seacrest being dwarfed by even the female contestants, regardless of whether or not he happens to be wearing heels), and that's that she and Simon Cowell hate each other's guts. Not so! says Abdul in a recent interview, calling Cowell "a really good friend" and likening him to an "antagonistic brother goofing on me." Alternately, she says she sees Randy Jackson as "kind of like the annoying guy who works in the cubicle next to you who says 'dawg' a lot? But like, no one really knows what he does? And he'll, like, eat the SnackWells in your top drawer when you expressly told him not to? Really, we're just co-workers. Maybe, like, once-in-a-blue-moon after-work-margarita friends, but nothing more."

• The dumbing down of TV quiz shows [WaPo via LAT]

Just because Daniel Baldwin struck out with Britney Spears doesnt mean the convalescing clipper-abuser (HairRecoveryWatch: Long enough to sustain a butterfly clip!) was completely closed off to the possibility of romance during her rehabilitative stay at Promises Malibu. The National Enquirer recently reported that Spears had embarked upon a journey of spiritual fulfillment and marathon face-sucking with Jason Filyaw, the "33-year-old lead guitarist of the rock band Riva." (Being unfamiliar with said band, we tracked down their website, which we promptly abandoned 15 words into an introductory bio that began, "Like a finely aged whiskey, the inside of this band is strong, smooth & nurtured...") TMZ then tracked down Filyaw, who offered some thoughts about his relationship with the "Crazy" and "Toxic" singer:

· Music round-up: Bobby Bare Jr. at the Troubadour; El Perro del Mar at the Hotel Café; The Abyssinians do the Dub Club at The Echo.
· Esquire and VF humor columnist Brian Frazer signs Hyper-Chondriac: One Man's Quest To Hurry Up and Calm Down, his memoir about his pharmaceutical/New Age-y/Kabbalistic attempts to achieve a normal human being's stress level, at Book Soup
· In case you missed them: the Academy and the UCLA Film & Television Archive co-sponsor a double-feature screening of March of the Penguins and Grizzly Man at the Linwood Dunn Theater. SPOILER ALERT: Penguins do a lot of totally cute things!

Following a screening at the SXSW Film Festival, Variety is head-over-heels, ass-over-teakettle, fill-me-up-with-your-bastard-slacker-lovechild in lust with Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's probing exploration of what happens when individuals from different beauty castes violate societal norms by mistakenly procreating: