If we were to tell you that a marketing research firm dedicated considerable resources to determining the values of 46 discrete personality attributes for nearly three thousand celebrities, and that one of the categories their study sought to measure was "overexposure," we'd wager that you could rattle off with hardly any effort at least ten of the top 12 scorers. (We'd never ask you to actually follow through on this exercise, but should you get the urge to sacrifice no more than five neurons to this test of mental rigor, be our guest.) In their story on this breakthrough scientific examination of exactly how sick we are of seeing the same dozen or so famous faces over and over again, Forbes examines the test case presented by Jessica Simpson (#12, 41% overexposure rating), who progressed from the humble beginnings of Britney Spears (#2, 62%) clonedom to the kind of recent ubiquity that makes it all but impossible to crack open a fortune cookie without seeing her image alongside a Confucian aphorism altered to relate to the dropping of her latest album:

Variety finally offers some insight into how recently pinkslip-happy Viacom executive mummy Sumner Redstone decided to cleave his corporate kingdom in twain and install yingy MTV builder Tom Freston and yangy CBS despot Les Moonves as the twin CEOs of his newly split companies, a move that stoked a highly entertaining feud between Redstone's vassals. Notes Var:

· We don't know if this Very Special Episode of the Facts of Life was from the Paul Haggis era, but the social issue it addresses is handled with the same level of nuance he brought to the race-relations problem in Crash.
· Film Threat offers its tips on how to make your own celebrity sex tape. One glaring omission: The part where you hire the hookers willing to let a Screech-level actor defile them with a Dirty Sanchez.
We don't often do this, but we'd like to extend a personal apology to Tina Yothers for so losing touch with her current whereabouts that we had no idea that getting herself bikini-ready was some kind of a triumph. We won't let it happen again.
· Michael Bay has brought his movie magic to Detroit.
Shadowy anonyblogger Bachem Macuno resurfaces with this opening: "Agent [ey-junt] n. : someone who will lie to you as part of their natural respiration process and would happily stab you and fuck the wound while sweet-talking a more important client on their cell phone." And it only gets better from there. Still not sold? The new blog is titled " Agents Can Eat My Ass Out Like Hungry Bears."

While the furry denizens of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show have always been available with a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of overindulging in chocolate chip cookies or not properly restacking one's toys, it's not unusual for their counterparts in less stable locations around the globe to have a far more daunting lesson plan. Former Jim Henson puppeteers in Afghanistan, for example, are presently hard at work creating a cast of Muppets who'll teach the local child population about the limb-severing consequences of stepping on landmines:

Nearly every actor who has found success in Hollywood has endured enough professional humiliation to have developed mental strategies to deal with the psychic distress associated with the near-constant stream of rejection experienced during their "dues paying" phase. For example, when confronted with the upsetting circumstance of being booed during the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Marie Antoinette, star Kirsten Dunst merely deflected the criticism with a culturally based rationalization:

· Music round-up: Roger Waters performs Dark Side of the Moon at the Hollywood Bowl (pack your best drugs!); Jet at the Henry Fonda; Shoot Out the Lights at the Silverlake Lounge; Teddy Geiger at the Troubadour.
· While the La Brea Tar Pits themselves are a place where tourists gather to stare at the murky, bubbling goop and ask themselves, "Is that it?" the Tarfest is a "festival of emerging film, music and art" held by the pits and around Museum Row. [via flavorpill]
· Join the Machine Project for the opening reception of Edible Estates, "an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent." Sounds a little angry to us, but we don't really have anything against front lawns, other than their frequent appearance on Desperate Housewives. Hmm, maybe they've got a point. [via Cheapskatin' LA]

Not only do they let the porn star who ran for governor into your premiere party, they allow her to be photographed in front of the already ridiculous, giant photograph of you in a powdered wig, perhaps hoping that some moviegoers will turn out because they think you signed up for a period porno flick while you were in the middle of a particularly bad bender.

While the disastrous, completely unforeseen dissolution of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn's soul-mate-level bond almost certainly dooms the upcoming DVD release of The Break-Up to instant, bargain-bin obscurity, some publicists insist on seeing the glass that Aniston undoubtedly hurtled at her former partner's head during their heart-wrenching split as half full. This pitch, which bravely ignores the impossible task handed to them by the campaign-crushing appearance of real-life interpersonal strife, landed in our inbox this morning:

It's been a while since Desperate Housewives' haunted set has unleashed a Final Destination-style attack on one of the show's stars—not since April, to be exact, when a series of linked events beginning with the unsealing of a deli platter at the craft services table eventually led to shards of exploding lightbulb lodging themselves into Teri Hatcher's eyeball. But the possessed, bloodthirsty Universal backlot location seems to do its best work with Eva "Conked on the Head" Longoria, and has thus returned to its former muse. From an Extra press release:

Halle Berry will star in Class Act, the true story of Terry Cahill, the sixth grade teacher who ran for Congress (and lost) with the help of her students. We were all ready to be uplifted, until we read further and discovered that Cahill is a white woman, and now are instead anxious about the coming protests from the perfectly employable Caucasian actresses whom DreamWorks is obviously trying to keep down. [Variety]
Dave Matthews will make the inevitable foray into acting that all rock stars attempt once they find there are no more co-ed groupies to conquer, appearing with Sissy Spacek in the family drama Lake City. But despite his attempt to separate his music from his new career by being credited as "David" Matthews, his collegiate fans still plan to follow the movie from theater to theater, assembling in lobbies hours before showtime to get high and perform clumsy renditions of his hits on bongos and battered acoustic guitars. [THR]
George Lucas has seen the future of the movie business, and it's not Hollywood's' current, wasteful, tentpole-driven strategy, but one where studios take the $200 million they budget for a single, crappy blockbuster and instead use it to produce 50 or 60 lower-budget, crappy movies. [Variety]
· Ludacris will play an angry elf in Fred Claus, the Vince Vaughn vehicle about the degenerate Claus sibling who nearly ruins Christmas. [THR]
Neal Mortiz's Original sets up two sitcom pilots at Fox, Think Tank and Macho Steve, whose comedic premises you can easily discern from their titles. [Variety]

As photographic evidence recently demonstrated, there is a universe of flabby difference separating the John Travolta of the Sweathogs from the John Travolta of Wild Hogs, the suburban-biker-dad comedy in which he co-stars with Martin Lawrence, Tim Allen, and William H. Macy. But in this photoset of the actors splashing around between takes of a skinnydipping sequence, Travolta demonstrates the time-honored practice of maximizing his gynecomastic assets by squeezing them together for maximum cleavage (1), a trick which proved less successful when he later tested it on other body regions (2). A more body-conscious Lawrence was only trying to help out resistant friend Allen with the ancient Chinese ritual of love-handle-binding (3), a technique that has always worked for him (4). Macy is no stranger to set nudity, and proudly displayed his taut buttocks, but ultimately chose to demure from baring it all with a junk-satchel (5). Nothing, however, could have prepared the boys for when Wild Hogs director Walt Becker came out from behind the cameras to join the fun, stripping down to reveal a jaw-dropping, megaphone-sized member the likes of which even Captain Travolta had never seen (6).

Late yesterday, when we noted corporate garbage disposal behemoth Emerson Electric Co. lawsuit against NBC over Heroes' unauthorized, potentially defaming depiction of one their fine waste-elimination products, we weren't able to hunt down pictures of the disputed scene. But we've finally obtained screen captures of the grisly, brand-besmirching images, which we've helpfully assembled into a collage demonstrating the network's clear attempt to portray the featured InSinkErator™ device as a looming, cheerleader-mangling black hole from which no teenage extremity could possibly escape unflayed. NBC still maintains that Emerson's claims are without merit, but in the interest of insulating themselves from further frivolous lawsuits, plan to remove a controversial scene from the show's fourth episode, where the rapid-healing character further demonstrates her invulnerability to kitchen appliance injuries by placing her bare foot in a whirring Sunbeam blender.

This truly is a brave new world we're living in, where technological breakthroughs like MySpace allow celebrities to communicate directly with the unwashed masses to address any rumors about the genital-genital contact they may or may not be having with other members of their C-list caste, without the messy, and often cost-prohibitive, involvement of fancy publicists. Late last night, dust-broom doppleganger Nicole Richie offered this clarification about yesterday's "break-up" with semi-recognizable publicity partner Brody Jenner, who was transparently trying to climb her exposed ribcage like a ladder to a slightly higher level of tabloid fame. Clarifies Richie:

People has posted their $1 million get: the exclusive photos of Anna Nicole Smith and Howard K. Stern's symbolic-union-at-sea. From the looks of it, that fee further prorates to approximately $125k per zonked-out portrait of Smith and her legally unbinding lawyer/lifemate/rock exchanging "vows and temporary rings before a Baptist minister." (We'll assume any glasses being smashed after the "I do's" were purely accidental and probably methadone-related.) And while varying eyewitness reports have placed everything at the scene from Dom Perignon-powered speedboats to pasty-enhanced breast feeding sessions, the reality was that Smith's fake party-boat marriage was the kind of modest and low-key affair that is not at all out of place for someone who just lost their son to a mysterious drug overdose weeks before:

Comedy Central's Insider blog sent a reporter down to street level to document director Terry Gilliam's "crashing" (i.e., pre-publicized attempt at organizing a "flash mob") of The Daily Show's audience line yesterday afternoon, where Gilliam tried to generate some buzz for Tideland, his latest movie:

We can think of no better way to start our day than by sharing this clip (via Reality Blurred) from last night's Project Runway reunion show, in which hyperbolically self-regarding contestant and onetime softcore independent cinema star Vincent Libretti goes absolutely, positively batshit insane over the production's inability to follow his precise laundry instructions, resulting in the tragic ruination of some pricey garments. Enjoy.

· "Woods is sitting on one side of a couch in the front room with Ashley. Someone mentions 'Entourage,' and Woods reminds everyone that Ashley played his girlfriend. She was the one that was fixing her [breasts], remember? That was her. She was [complaining] and she said, 'My ... shoes hurt.' She improvised all of that. They wanted us to come back, and I said, "I can't come back and keep playing myself for scale." Double scale! I actually have another job, a day job. This one. Ashley: 'Your day job was poker at that time.'" Any couple that enjoys that kind of crackling repartee, no matter how creepily age-mismatched, can weather even the nastiest of break-up rumors.
· Following today's rumors that Mel Gibson is back on the sauce, the local Jewish and Sugar Tit communities called for a summit to plan for the possibility of a new wave of attacks.
· Employee Megan asks the tough questions about the last episode of Studio 60: "1. Would you care if Steve McPherson, Kevin Reilly, Dawn Ostroff, Peter Liguori or Nina Tassler got a D.U.I. eight years ago? 2. Do you know who Steve McPherson, Kevin Reilly, Dawn Ostroff, Peter Liguori or Nina Tassler are? 3. Would you even waste a glance on a tell-all book written about Steve McPherson, Kevin Reilly, Dawn Ostroff, Peter Liguori or Nina Tassler?"
· Brody Jenner clearly got the message that he should be fucking someone a little more famous if he hopes to keep his name in media circulation.

Harrison Ford seems to have settled comfortably into his role as an elder Hollywood statesman, his once-handsome, now craggy face marinating nicely under 14 weeks' worth of stubble, and a far away look in his eyes that all but says, "I've paid my dues acting opposite everything from a giant slug puppet to Melanie Griffith. Now step aside as I proceed to get shitfaced in the lobby of this pointless awards ceremony." It's not hard to see, however, how unwitting security guards might mistake the screen legend emitting visible alcohol fumes for an area derelict looking for forty winks in the comfort of a noted television actress' luxury vehicle:

NBC is currently living every legal clearance department's nightmare, as a perfectly innocuous scene from the pilot episode of new drama Heroes, in which the series' indestructible cheerleader character demonstrates her rapid-healing abilities by jamming her hand into an InSinkErator™ brand garbage disposal, has resulted in a lawsuit by the manufacturer seeking to prevent the network from re-airing that show:

· The Hump Night music round-up: The Dears at the Troubadour; Billy Bragg at the Henry Fonda; The Shys at Spaceland.
Privilege hosts an album release party for Robin Thicke, possibly the best musician working today fathered by a Growing Pains star (Don't hold us to that, though, as we have no idea what other cast members' kids are doing with their careers.)
· At Book Soup, former Police guitarist and Dennis Miller talk show bandleader Andy Summers signs his memoir, One Train Later, in which he recounts a rockstar life spent among legends like Clapton, Hendrix, Sting (duh), and Belushi. John, not the one David Cross hates.