With roughly five-hundred celebrity-programming-focused basic cable networks vying for coverage of the same dozen or so people on a daily basis, it's to be expected that the crushing pressure to land exclusive video footage of a famous person's house in the salacious act of resting on its foundation might occasionally drive an overzealous camera crew to flirt with illegality. Entertainment journalism watchdog TMZ.com, whose clean, groundbreaking "fart in a mitten" confrontation of Paris Hilton is still the standard by which all celebrity ambushes are judged, reports that an E! crew was caught in the act of trespassing on Brad Pitt's property last Thursday:

Yes, you're probably right—your afternoon would have ended on a far brighter note were it not subjected to this campaign ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, featuring Michael J. Fox suffering from an unsettlingly advanced spate of Parkinson's tremors. An actor's political endorsement for a Midwest race isn't typically the type of thing we'd bother to share—but that was before corpulent pharmaceutical enthusiast Rush Limbaugh decided to chime in with accusations that Fox was faking it:

· Celebrate the miracle of our local mass transit systems with the Public Displays of Affection Los Angeles show, featuring the Secret Machines and a DJ set by Shepard Fairey at Union Station. Also in music: Say Hi To Your Mom at Spaceland, Beastie Boys at the Henry Fonda.
· Competitive Awesome, a group that should be immediately recognizable as a comedy troupe by their self-consciously self-aggrandizing name, performs for the LA Fest of Sketch at the McCadden Theater.
· Get drunk and discuss "restoring balance in copyright law" over a heated air hockey game (for more fun, inscribe the copyright "c" on the plastic puck) at Barney's Beanery with the CopyNight folks.

If Oprah Winfrey's audience members are good for one thing—besides screaming as if their heads were on fire whenever brought into direct contact with swag—it's blabbing about the goings on inside the top-secret celebrity visits they were explicitly instructed not to blab about. So even though the talk show host's high-profile interview with a fellow zillionaire feminine icon with a God complex is not set to air until Wednesday, we get to find out today what was going through Madonna's with her recent adoption-cum-PR fiasco:

Understandably "furious" about yesterday's Page Six report on Blood Diamond's alleged "Limbs for Photo-Ops" program, in which the production was accused of having not yet made good on its promises of providing prosthetic appendages to amputees used as extras in the movie, director Ed Zwick rang up the LA Weekly's Nikki Finke to go on the record about the story, which he calls "a very cynical and appalling tack to take and in the worst taste," and "the work of someone who clearly bears the film ill will." (The diamond industry? Harvey Weinstein?) A snippet of his explanation of the shoot's charitable endeavors:

Snow-locked actor Ted Danson may have escaped blogging duties on the Huffington Post, but that doesn't mean he eludes Arianna's grasp. Somehow and somewhy, A-Huff has a cameo on Danson's new sitcom, Help Me Help You. In her scene, Huffington is supposed to talk up a friend that Danson is dating. HuffPo readers are asked to pick the best one-liner for Huffington to utter; all four variations were filmed for reader review, and with each one, Danson does a more extreme "wh- wh- wh- whatty what?" goofy reaction. Whichever choice proves the most popular will supposedly go on the show. Our money's on the Hurricane Katrina joke. Don't even get us started about "nibble and quibble."

Somehow, our invite to last night's Borat premiere at the Chinese Theatre got lost in the mail (the easy joke here is to blame the Kazakh postal service for bungling the task by getting too drunk on fermented horse urine to complete their appointed rounds, then shooting their most reliable delivery-donkey—and if you know anything about us, you know we're constitutionally unable to resist the easy joke), but the wire service photos of the event proved amusing enough that we've assembled the greatest hits into a gallery for your leisurely perusal. As he did at the Toronto Film Festival, Sacha Baron Cohen hired some extras to enhance the experience with the cultural flavor of his adopted home country: peasants dragging bales of hay, ladling the aforementioned, equine-produced hooch, and brazenly offering their sexual wares partied alongside strong-bodied, benutslinged bathers in matching neon swimming caps. Note also the telling photo of Courtney Love, whom a Defamer operative who was actually in attendance noticed falling asleep during the premiere, an unexpected catnap our attendee described thusly: "an impossible feat, to fall asleep during all that laughter, especially for a SOBER person such as she."

Not everyone was caught by surprise when Grey's Anatomy star T.R. Knight slipped in a subtle, "So I'm gay, no big whoop, could you pass the yams?" Thanksgiving-style outing last Thursday—at least not according to the pinging of our commenters' highly attuned gaydar, not to mention the counsel of a highly-placed Defamer operative who quietly confided to us, "I suspected something was up when he showed up to the Tony Awards with blue hair." Count CBSNews.com's Rob Todd among those in the know as well, as has been on to Knight's not-so-interesting non-secret for at least a month now. He explains:

Realizing that Borat's imminent opening effectively ends his "innocent Kazakh documentarian who doesn't understand why he can't purchase sex from shopgirls at The Gap" ruse, Sacha Baron Cohen is already working on the next character (fat suit? age make-up? differently colored nut-sling?) he'll inhabit for a top-secret movie he's expected to shoot next summer. [Variety]
In arguments that the FCC must relax their rules on large media conglomerates, CBS manages to get a dig in on NBC: "Four years ago, when the FCC last reviewed its broadcast-ownership rules, the YouTube.com domain name had not even been registered, the first Windows version of the audio iPod was just rolling out, Google was only a search engine, cable companies sold primarily video packages, and telephone companies sold primarily voice service....and NBC was the most popular broadcast network thanks to its high-rated sitcom 'Friends' airing in the first hour of primetime." Ouch. We'll spare you the punchline, where they mention NBC's layoffs. You get the point already. [THR
Charlize Theron helps out boyfriend Stuart Townsend by lending her star power to The Battle in Seattle, his directing debut. Cute! [Variety]
Is it pre-Oscar awards season already? The Independent Film Project announces the nominees for its Gotham Awards, which include Half Nelson, Babel, and Little Miss Sunshine. [THR]
The placement of TV episodes online by networks and studios hardly seems like news anymore, but Fox will show the first two episodes of the new season of The OC on MySpace and their station sites before they air, and Warner Bros, TV hopes to entice people to start watching The Nine by streaming its pilot episode. [Variety]

• SIZZLER: The View vs. Law & Order! It's On! [BestWeekEver.TV]

Believe it or not, we take no pleasure in Studio 60's consistently anemic ratings—should NBC eventually cut its losses and send to Cancellation Valhalla the show the network once believed would deliver it to a Nielsen Viking orgy, it will probably just push new hit Heroes back to 10 p.m. and offer it a two-hour lead-in of people shouting at briefcases, robbing us of our enjoyable Tuesday morning debates about how an episode we thought was going to be about Matthew Perry trying to get laid by bimbos who din't know what "writing" is could instead get clogged with stories about senile blacklist victims, resentful parents from Columbus who've been locked in an underground bunker with no access to the pop culture of the past half-century, and black comics getting plucked from obscurity and staffed on the show based on a poorly articulated joke about his barber's insufficient profit margins on high-quality marijuana sales. In any case, the overnight ratings for last night's installment don't look good, especially when framed as a "momentum stopper." THR runs the numbers:

As Kevin Federline continues to spend most of his limited energies lately developing a niche acting career in which he improvises a few lines of dialogue before finding himself on the receiving end of a violent, audience-pleasing act, Britney Spears has been flying suspiciously below the radar. Unlike the arrival of the first, slippery little addition to their household, Sean Preston's younger sibling has yet to surface on the cover of a single celebrity glossy—surprisingly, not even in a telephoto shot of a sidewalk faceplant after the brave, little tyke pulled the short straw in a competition for mom's grip, losing to two Venti Frappucinos and a set of Mini Cooper car keys. There hasn't even been a consensus yet reached on the official official gender or name of the child, and the baby's parents seem perfectly happy to ensure that the youngest Federline remains swaddled in mystery:

Mere seconds after we'd posted our earlier item about Tom Cruise's circling of various projects in which to possibly make his splashy return to the ranks of working actors, we saw that Us Weekly has gone truly, madly, deeply exclusive with the news that Cruise has finally picked the day on which he will make an honest war bride of the woman he plucked from a promising acting career, quickly imprisoned within the walls of his impenetrable Beverly Hills compound, and ordered impregnated by his finest team of genetic technicians. Let the world observe a day-long moment of silence for Katie Holmes on November 18th, the date on which she will ceremonially turn herself over to her couch-brutalizing captor:

We're as guilty as anyone of losing sight of this, but before Tom Cruise began dabbling in a variety of new vocations on a more full-time basis—theme-park-greeter-cum-NFL mascot, baby-toupee impresario, and diamond-nippled youth soccer videographer among them—he was a successful actor. Perhaps sensing that his failure to attach himself to an acting gig since being held up as an example of all that's wrong with the Overpriced, Profit-Hogging Star System by cranky Viacom overlord Sumner Redstone isn't helping the perception he's currently in exile semi-retirement, Team Cruise is apparently letting slip which projects he might be interested in. Reports Variety:

Last night, a reader emailed us why we hadn't been covering the sexual harassment trial against hip-hop monthly The Source and its founders, Raymond "Benzino" Scott and David Mays. The trial has wrapped up already -a federal jury in Manhattan ordered the defendants to pay $14.5 million to former editor in chief Kimberly Osorio- and it looks like we missed a doozy of a trial.

· We're not sure what possessed Gawker's video-editing guru to throw together a clip of Conan O'Brien dancing and set it to "Monster Mash," but it's easily more frightening than anything you're going to see on their upcoming Skelevision episode—even Larry King accurately represented as nothing but suspenders and exposed bones.
Namibia: Now not only celebrity-childbirth friendly, but celebrity-fugitive friendly.
· We tend to ignore California politics, mostly because we fear that this attack ad is less insane than what Schwarzenegger's people will come up with in the nex two weeks.
· TVGasm has obtained exclusive footage of Isaiah "Dr. McChokey" Washington's recent Grey's Anatomy blow-up, which we previously did not realize included the use of automatic weapons.
Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie's recent reconciliation seems to have involved the transfer of Hilton's mystery assflap to her skeletal pal.

The LAT's Hot Property column reveals a very handy home-buying tip: a willingness to ignore a languishing listing's blood-drenched history—and a daily visitation by a bus full of noisy Crime Scene Tour gawkers—can result in some significant savings:

Like an oxcart pulled by four of the heartiest, mustachioed women in all the village, the publicity machine is rolling full speed ahead for the big screen debut of the world's most radical men's swimwear revisionist, Borat Sagdiyev. The first four minutes of the film are now available for viewing on YouTube—clearly the fiendish handiwork of the greedy, mischief-making Jew-devils in charge of Fox marketing—and Borat has been quick to align himself with fellow like-minded movie icons at recent press appearances:

· Monday night music round-up: Wheatus at Safari Sam's; D.O.A. at the Knitting Factory; Yo La Tengo at the Henry Fonda.
· The Museum of Television and Radio hosts the L.A. Premiere of The World According to Sesame Street, a doc about the challenges of bringing the Muppets to countries where children have problems a little more profound than getting fat from eating too much junk food.
· Yeah, it's another way to sit on your ass and be entertained, but ALOUD at Central Library is screening Surfing L.A., an "improvisational documentary" about the "psychology of Los Angeles," that may at least make you feel like you've gone somewhere in search of diversion.

We continue this afternoon's exhaustive coverage of disappointing, expensive television dramas with this brief report about an online survey regarding Studio 60 a reader was asked to take after self-identifying as a disgruntled viewer of NBC's programming, an interesting window into how the network tests a show that recently built an entire episode about the evils of focus group testing: