· Shortly after these photos of Tom Cruise were taken at tonight's Redskins game, their new, high-priced, culturally insensitive mascot stripped off his dour suit, donned a loincloth and headdress, and delighted the crowd with his ritualistic "scalping" of fans in the front rows of the stadium.
· This is why we love YouTube: Just hours after ABC aired the Path to 9/11, some people with a video camera posted a parody about further liberties the network has taken with historical events.
· Sadly, the Hilton-initiated celebutard pandemic is spreading unchecked across the globe, and soon no well-off, vacuous blonde will be safe from its debilitating effects.
· New York has unleashed our beloved Fug girls on Fashion Week. We fear that the models will soon develop back-up eating disorders to deal with the newly inflicted psychic damage.
· Jalopnik has the first few pages of The Transformers script. Nerds, prepare for Decepticon teaser chubbage.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but next Monday's series debut of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, fourth-place NBC's extravagant show of faith in troubled-but-gifted West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, is easily the most important moment in the network's history since an infamous 1949 episode of Texaco Star Theater, in which a clearly intoxicated Milton Berle scandalized a then-record live television audience by allowing his enormous manhood to "accidentally" dangle below the hem of his dress for a full three seconds, threatened the shutdown of their entire broadcast operation. The NY Times visited Studio 60's set recently, where NBC's commitment to Sorkin's exacting vision was apparent:

Of all the many Canada-mocking opportunities afforded us by the Toronto Film Festival, perhaps none is riper than this report on the sad state of the festival's swag bags and gifting suites. Paltry to begin with by our obnoxiously generous standards, celebrities are opting to pass on the freebies completely this year, as daunting visions of filing international IRS tax forms dance through their heads:

We'd call Longoria's bold eschewal of post-Desperate Housewives television gigs a somewhat premature retirement announcement (she's probably got another year or two on Wisteria Lane), but we have a feeling that once Housewives' last episode wraps and her agent delicately offers her the choice of playing the "older love interest" on a midseason Freddie Prinze, Jr. sitcom or slowing starving to death in a series of houses of declining square footage in the Valley, she'll quickly rediscover her love for the medium.

· Monday night music round-up: Sea Wolf at Spaceland (free!); Fast Forward at The Smell; Los Abandoned and Oohlahs at the Troubadour.
· The following people will be on hand at Largo to satisfy all of your comedy needs: "Lucky" Louis CK, Laura Kightlinger, Doug Benson, Howard Kremer, Aziz Ansari, and Andy Blitz.
· The Beverly Hills Fine Arts theater screens Gandhi, a fine alternative to the tossed-off, he-witch offerings currently playing at your local multiplex.

Politics-obsessed sibling site Wonkette points us to today's Reliable Source column in the Washington Post, which notes that Tom Cruise will be joining Redskins owner and new, deep-pocketed BFF Daniel Snyder at tonight's Monday Night Football game (we're told he was already spotted in a pre-game spot on ESPN moments ago), where we're sure the batshit-insane-in-love star and alleged new dad will respond to every owner's box close-up with a feverish makeout session with war bride Katie Holmes. The Source further reports that Cruise and family were also treated to a night at Snyder's Six Flags theme park yesterday, where the actor could see firsthand where all of the amusement park money that's going to keep his production company afloat comes from:

"It was the hardest boyfriend I ever had to break up with," Stacey "Fergie" Ferguson told Time magazine in an interview for the issue that hits newsstands Monday.

There is no shortage of Big Hollywood Stars roaming around Toronto's streets for the International Film Festival this week, taking in the tidy sights and throwing around local, toboggan-adorned currency like it's going out of style. But no single celebrity has made a bigger fuss up yonder than Brad Pitt, for whom the entire country has put its contempt of all things American on hold just long enough to grovel at his architecture-loving, poverty-hating altar. A Brad Pitt at TIFF round-up:

Longtime Defamer readers may remember the time that monosyllabic Matrix thespian Keanu Reeves first established the open-faced motorcycle helmet as last summer's must-have accessory for the quirkily conspicuous celebrity moviegoer. A Defamer operative notes that Reeves was once again rocking the indoor-helmet look at the ArcLight, possibly in an attempt to reestablish the trend for the fall fashion season:

· After the studio dabbled in the unsexy world of distributing and marketing "mid-range indie pics," MGM head Harry Sloan is ready to restore The Lion to its rightful place as a mega-budgeted sequel factory that will pump out blockbuster product like new Terminator, Pink Panther, and Hobbitt movies. [Variety]
Spike Lee stretches his creative wings, following up his HBO documentary on the post-Katrina New Orleans with a pilot script for a drama series about post-Katrina New Orleans. [THR]
This weekend's box office take was the lowest of any weekend in three years, a slowdown that experts attribute to "shitty movies that no one wants to see. Especially that Renny Harlin one." [Variety]
Fox orders a presentation of a potential late-night talk show starring The Sopranos' Steven "Bobby Bacala" Schirripa to fill a development void left by the abrupt cancellation of its The Big Pussy Domestic Violence Hour earlier this year. [THR]
As the America's Next Top Model writers strike drags on with no end in sight, WGA members debate whether or not it's a good idea to continue to commit resources to their expensive occupation of the sidewalk outside the Top Model offices. [Variety]

This weekend, actor, director, and oft-photographed househusband Ben Affleck took an important step in reclaiming some buzz for a once-promising career stalled by a blow to the head from James Gandolfini's shovel and ill-advised participation in various, doomed J. Lo-centered endeavors, as Aflleck's turn as Hollywoodland's suicidal TV Superman George Reeves won the best actor award at the Venice film festival. But the The Envelope's Gold Derby blog notes that stay-at-home dad Affleck probably shouldn't start arranging a nanny for Oscar night quite yet:

What should have been, for all intents and purposes, the most joyous of blogging occasions—everyone's favorite car wreck at the corner of Crazy St. and White Trash Ave., Anna Nicole Smith, giving birth to a baby girl—has been dimmed considerably with news that Smith's 20-year-old son, Daniel, has been found dead in the Bahamas. He was there to visit his mother, who had delivered three days earlier:

Under intense pressure from officials from the Clinton administration who felt that ABC's miniseries The Path to 9/11 contained fabricated scenes insinuating that the then-president was too preoccupied with a possible impeachment to give the order to kill Osama bin Laden, the network aired an edited version of its first installment last night in which some disputed scenes were altered to deflect accusations of bias. But rather than anger Republicans by shifting blame from Clinton to the Bush administration, ABC decided to take a more politically neutral, if radical, direction, rebranding the project as a "reimagining" of the events leading up to the September 11th attacks, which in tonight's miniseries finale are discovered to have been masterminded by an evil extraterrestrial sleeper cell that had been living among us since 1947, an eventuality that couldn't possibly have been foreseen by either party.

When we referred to the new season of reality show Survivor (where contestants are separated by race) as Survivor: Race War, we shortly thereafter had to parenthetically note that this was just our jokey name for the fiasco; it's actually Survivor: Cook Islands, if you must be technical. And we were hardly the first to make that joke. Still, when our left-coast sib Defamer linked yet another interview with show host Jeff Probst, we were struck by more than just Probst's amazing (and perhaps affected) ignorance of Asian national diversity. Washington Post columnist Lisa de Moraes refers to the title of the show as Survivor: Race Wars, with nary a sarcastic wink. How long before CBS just gives in and goes for the maximum race-baiting viewer share by retitling the show as the viewing public obviously demands? If Probst didn't know about the difference between Koreans and Chinese, surely he'd realize that nobody else knows or cares where the Cook Islands are?

Exhale a sigh of despair into your first cup of coffee of the work week, knowing that a movie you've likely never heard of topped the box office.

· First glimpses of Suri. Surimania. Everyone's child. Mom speaks. Rug-rats. The Puffpieceicist.
· Life After Freston: Another Tom bites the Viacom-family dust.
· Paris Hilton, DUI: Eyewitness reports. The double-double that never was. Straight back to work for a straight to DVD.
· Smackdown at Barney Greengrass! Lox and breadsticks everywhere!
· Race-War Survivor: Neo-Nazis rejoice. Mark Burnett confuses. Jeff Probst enlightens.
· We thought "I won metal!" had a shot at being the next "You're with me, leather." We were wrong.
· Rosie's first day gets an FTD Good Luck™ bouquet.
· Ben Affleck gets his greedy paws into a French Canadian journalist's poutine.
· Lindsay Lohan's $1 million dollar bag stolen from Heathrow. World stops spinning. Bag recovered. World resumes.
· A qualified Clay Aiken is appointed to the President's Very Special People's Club.
· Only 169 days, 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 34 seconds until Ellen hosts the Oscars.

· Deviant Renee Zellweger fetishists (really, are there any other kind?) will be thrown into a priapic tizzy when they discover that her Bridget Jones granny panties will be up for auction next week, though the erotic appeal might be slightly diminished by Hugh Grant's inconsiderate Sharpie scribbling.
· If you don't know who Lonleygirl15 is, congratulations, you probably have some sort of fulfilling life outside of a YouTube video window. In any case, the LAT and some cybersleuths made her creators confess that she's a "show" to help launch some kind of video site. And to make her fans feel even dirtier, she has ties to CAA.
· What Jeff Killed: It's like Stuff on My Cat, but far deadlier.
· We never really had Homer Simpson pegged for a rapist, but who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of animated men after a few too many cans of Duff?
· Looks like Lindsay Lohan forgot the top half of her underthings this time.
· Newswire lede of the week: "A Slovak driver who crashed into a bus shocked rescuers who found him unconscious and half naked with a vacuum pump on his penis."

By now it's certainly no secret that American movie stars often make a quick buck overseas by taking on the kinds of commercial endorsements that might be frowned upon in the States. (And yes, we're still thinking about Ben Affleck extolling the tail-attracting powers of deodorant spray, a gig so irredeemably cheesy that Nick Lachey starred in the shot-for-shot remake here.) What surprises us is that Ed Harris is even famous enough in Spain, where these Dewar's ads are currently running, to move the booze he's hawking. We can only assume that there's some kind of weird Spanish reverence for the drinking ability of character actors who never really got over the leading man hump.

Had Jeff Probst stuck to the Survivor script of outlining the rules for fire-starting contests and overseeing tribal counsels, he probably would have gone down as one of reality TV's more likable and competent hosts. But then the series took a forty-five-degree turn into eugenics territory, and made the even arguably dumber decision to allow Probst to defend the format to the media. What followed were a series of startling statements that revealed the host to be somewhat of a numbskull, such as the epiphany he recently shared with the Washington Post that not all Asians are exactly the same:

Friday
· Recoil in pants-crapping horror when an army of zombies seem to shuffle out of the movie screen in an attempt to eat your brain at Night of the Living Dead 3D, showing at midnight at the Egyptian as part of the World 3D Expo II.
· Friday night music round-up: Cold War Kids at the Troubadour; The Vibrators at the Anarchy Library; Rakim at the House of Blues.
SATURDAY
· More music: The Long Winters, still our leading candidate for best band in the world, opens for Feist at Avalon; the also excellent Apollo Sunshine at the Troubadour; and Husky Rescue at Spaceland.
· We're not even going to tell you what this event is, just give you a link and a list of activities being offered. You'll take it from here if you're interested: Potty Toss, Dirty Darts, Pony Pics, Insulting Caricatures, Drunk Duck Pond, Cactus Ring Toss, Sleazy Face Painting, Atari Carnival. [via LAist]
SUNDAY
· Yogafest 2006: Either you want to go to that, or you don't.
· Revenge of the son of more music: All 347 members of The Polyphonic Spree at the Henry Fonda; KCRW's World Festival continues with Willie Nelson, Ryan Adams, and Neko Case at the Hollywood Bowl; A Tribe Called Quest at the Wiltern.
· Delightfully unhinged novelist James Ellroy reads from The Black Dahlia at Skylight Books. Topic for Q & A: How enraged is he that Josh Hartnett was cast in the upcoming film version of his book?