Reality show producer and former agent Jamie Gold is currently the chip leader at the World Series of Poker No Limit Hold 'Em Championship in Vegas, but he's terrified of winning—not because he's afraid of the millions of dollars he'd take home, as an agent's moneylust never truly fades, but rather because he fears the fame that a victory will bring. In an interview with ESPN.com, Gold explains why the idea of instant celebrity is so frightening that he openly muses about taking a dive into second place:

Because we realize that a "Lindsay Lohan falling head-first down the stairs of the Chateau" spotting can only be fully enjoyed when served at its peak freshness, we are now committed to publishing reader-submitted PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings several times a week. Send yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about the time you saw Keanu Reeves and Tate Donovan on a double date at the Hollywood Bowl.

Hoping to recreate the publicity bonanza that was its recent Britney Spears Baby Safety Night, minor league baseball team the Newark Bears is willing to risk the disappearance of thousands of fans into the fleet of menacing white vans idling in its parking lot during its Hubbard-baiting Scientology Night promotion:

With the only talented, productive member of the Spelling dynasty gone, it falls to the surviving Spelling women to proudly bear the torch, and honor their beloved in the best way they know how: by doing everything in their power to slander the other's good name while sabotaging planned, competing TV tributes.

Longtime consumers of celebrity nuptial news know not to panic over Vaughn and Aniston's speedy, official disavowal of Us Weekly's engagement story, as the Reflexive Publicist Denial That Will Soon Be Exposed As A Needless Lie is a crucial step in every celebrity's long, public march to the altar. Just to get a sense of where we stand in the process, a cursory search of WeddingChannel.com has revealed that we haven't yet entered the Posting Fake Online Bridal Registries Allegedly Revealing The Famous Couple's Wedding Date phase, but we did discover that at least three other women also think they're engaged to Vince Vaughn. Their publicist might want to get out a fresh denial in triplicate before magazines scooped on the engagement start spreading ugly rumors about Vaughn's secret polygamist life.

It's no secret that Robin Williams has struggled with the fiery-eyed demons of addiction before, starting at the very earliest days of stardom, when he'd hide inside a giant, Orkian space egg and blow rails until he was called to set. Sadly, starring in RV has taken a far greater toll on the actor than anyone could have imagined, as he appears to have fallen off the wagon:

Pixar philosopher-kings John Lasseter and Ed Catmull might find themselves investigated by the SEC for receiving possibly illegal backdated stock options, potentially tarnishing their reputations as Disney's new, infallible Messiahs. [Variety]
· Rupert Murdoch pops a fistful of Viagra, publicly chubs up upon News Corp's announcement that the company boosted earnings 19 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter. [THR]
A Maryland court rules that Brent Redstone's lawsuit against dad Sumner's National Amusements company can go forward, but also decrees he must wait until the completion of the trial to snuff out the old man with a throw pillow while he naps during a Golden Girls rerun. [Variety]
Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson will recapture their How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days chemistry in the adventure comedy Fool's Gold, which is described as "just go rent Romancing the Stone and save yourself a trip to the theater." [THR]
· NBC greenlights reality competition You're the One that We Want, in which viewers choose which singing and dancing contestants will star in a revival of Grease. Travolta's going to look pretty ridiculous trying to squeeze into the old leather jacket during his audition, and even more so when Hugh Jackman beats him out for the part. [Variety]

A new MTV cartoon depicting black women squatting on all fours tethered to leashes and defecating on the floor is drawing fire from several prominent African Americans who call the episode degrading. [...]

A glut of Mel Gibson stories has forced our retreat into the protective shell of the round-up format:
· Pictured: An actual ad in rotation at MySpace. Forgiveness is just a free laptop scam away! [MySpace]
· The Philly City Paper's The Clog blog shares some fond memories of Mel Gibson's downtime while in town shooting Signs, where he liked to get liquored up and perform A-list shoulder rubs (nickname: "The Cruncher") at local bars, went to AA meetings to repent for the aforementioned inebriated, amateur chiropractic behavior, and may have had relations with a lady who claims she has "nude Polaroids of Mel holding his happy rooster in one paw and a phone in his other." [The Clog]
· Is Disney quietly trying to shop Apocalypto to a studio that might be a little more experienced in handling radioactive material? Roger Friedman thinks so, but he also thinks that Lindsay Lohan is reformed. [Fox 411]
· The National Enquirer is preparing a story that brings to light the shocking, world-shattering revelation that Mel likes to party. [The Scoop]
· And you knew this was coming, but: Officer Sugar Tits, the hastily designed Cafe Press t-shirt. [Cafe Press]

The interminable, months-long SuriWatch saga may soon be coming to an end. Page Six reports that Vanity Fair has won a fierce bidding war with both Celebrity magazine and the Sears Portrait Studio for the rights to take the first images of the suspiciously unseen offspring of Tom Cruise and indentured incubator Katie Holmes, which VF will debut this fall in a spread photographed by legendary celebrity soft-lighter Annie Leibovitz. We hope that Leibovitz will elevate the shoot above the simplistic, new-parents-basking-in- the-miraculous-glow-of-their-loin-fruit concept used for the public introduction of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, and perhaps even take this opportunity to poignantly reinforce the power of the couple's utterly unbreakable, contractual billion-year partnership by revisiting her iconic work for Rolling Stone.

Call them Vaughniffer, call them Vaughniston, call them Brangelina, But Not Nearly As Hot And Without All The Charity Crap, call them Hey, Brad, I Can Fuck My Co-Star Too! Brad? Brad?!, call them whatever. Us Weekly is reporting that Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston are engaged (shouldn't the Jen Says Yes line go below the VINCE PROPOSES! line? Where's our spoiler alert?) after a year of conveniently timed courtship occasionally marked by the suspiciously public performance of pantomime of sex airplanes and sessions of man-on-man cardio work. The Us blog mentions that Vaughn proposed on the private jet ride on the way back from Joe Francis' Mexican resort—nothing solidifies a relationship like nine glorious days at the Compound That Drunken, Jailbait Titties Built—and that "Vince almost cries whenever he tells the story of the proposal," an egregiously emasculating statement for which his publicist should immediately be fired.

· At left, rightful American Idol winner Katherine McPhee selflessly shields a Florida youngster from the blistering summer heat by allowing her to shade herself underneath McPhee's glorious rack.
Project Greenlight fans, semi-rejoice: Feast will get a limited theatrical run of late night shows before being dumped off to DVD. Gulager!
· The Believer's interviewer is so good that he gets Steven Soderbergh to imagine that if he had a "balloon cock dick," he might find a career in porn appealing. That's nice work.
Seriously, you gotta be pretty desperate to mug Screech. Don't they know the dude is selling t-shirts to save his house?
Gawker weighs four glossy fall fashion issues, discovering in the process that they've purchased 9.5 lbs of eating disorder promotion.
· Mental Floss asks: Will celibacy turn Paris Hilton into a genius? If she were actually sincere about it, the field of physics could be looking at its next Nobel winner.
· Mel Gibson: the ringtone.

Taking a cue from his That 70s Show co-star Ashton Kutcher, Wilmer Valderrama has already expanded his skill set to producing and hosting duties of (quite possibly be the worst show in TV history) Yo Momma. He's also poised to make his big screen debut as Ponch in the movie adaptation of CHiPs, still listed as "in development" by StudioSystem.com, but sure to be greenlit any second by a fired Warner Bros. executive in an outgoing act of defiance. And now, as the Franklin Avenue blog points out, a press release reveals the Venezuelan actor has been getting his paws into even more Hollywood pots:

It was just a week ago that humpy E! gossip-gerent Ted Casablanca chummed the waters of scandal by telling his perpetually baffled readers that he knew "how Star Jones Reynolds felt" after being mysteriously yanked from his regular spot on E!'s airwaves. Suspicious fans immediately started dusting Casablanca's neck for Ryan Seacrest's fingerprints, but the crytpolinguistically gifted dirt-slinger has been silent about his job status since. That is, until now, when he updated the NY Observer about his standing at E!:

Approximately 10,000 hopefuls of varying degrees of non-talent gathered at the Rose Bowl for the first day of American Idol's sixth season auditions. All foster dreams of being crowned the next instant superstar on the stage of the Kodak Theater, perhaps even rendering David Hasselhoff a salty puddle of blubbering emotion in the process. With an army-sized talent pool to winnow down in a limited amount of time, it should come as no surprise that the preliminary rounds are fast and furious:

· Music round-up: The Editors and the Cold War Kids at Avalon; Inara George at Tangier; Dirty Pretty Things at the Henry Fonda.
We're not sure what might distinguish comedian Bruce Daniels' Drunk on Stage from all the other shows featuring wasted comics standing in front of an audience, other than that he's at least up front about it. And it's at Akbar.
· The Egyptian Theater presents a tribute to Vincent Sherman by screening The Hard Way and rare interview clips of the director prior to the film. We hope that this doesn't kill your enthusiasm for the event, but this is 1943's The Hard Way, not the 1991 version starring Michael J. Fox as an actor doing cop research with James Woods. Be forewarned.

In a heretofore unexplored aspect of the ramifications of the Mel Gibson story (we thought we might be dangerously close to running out of angles once the AP profiled the PCH, but we were so, so wrong), SFGate.com political blogger Carla Marinucci notes that Gibson recently penned a "unusually gushy, three-page, single-spaced fundraising letter" endorsing Republican state senator Tom McClintock's campaign for lieutenant governor*, a high-profile endorsement that is perhaps not as welcome today as it would have been, say, in the time before Gibson fled to rehab to wait for the smoldering effigies of the Braveheart star being quietly torched in Steven Spielberg's basement to burn themselves out. The blog has some excerpts from the letter issued to GOP supporters, but we've obtained the somewhat more concise, less exuberant note (pictured) Gibson sent to his Hollywood friends on the off chance his largely liberal-leaning industry associates might contribute to the cause.

We know that today's Roger Friedman Fox 411 column revealed that Lindsay Lohan has abandoned her frequently dehydrated ways to become the Fiji water-toting, teetotaling picture of temperance, responsibility, and all-around sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice-ness, but there was a time not too long ago when the actress was rumored to not have the best on-set habits or attendance records. The WOW Report posts this account of the antics on the set of Herbie: Fully Loaded which earned Lohan the undying love and devotion of her co-workers:

We at Defamer will not rest until Victoria Redstall, the charmingly kooky, if incredibly naive, serial killer groupie/struggling actress who's befriended an imprisoned psychopath, gets an acting gig that will give her something better to do with her time than wait around for her new BFF to turn her glowing skin into a fetching kimono. So, compassionate producers and casting directors of Hollywood, we beseech you to watch some of the finest work from Redstall's reel, in which the actress ably submerges her British accent and delivers each line with the sensual nuance of a housewife who's about to be bent over the couch by her shirtless "cleaning hunk"—a performance made all the more impressive when you consider that Redstall curbed her desire to ad-lib some dialogue asking the pine-scented furniture-polisher if he has any products strong enough to dissolve dismembered limbs in a bathtub. Surely one of you can find a use for a talent like this and rescue her before it's too late.

Seeing as William Shatner has a pretty respectable TV gig these days, you'd think he could finally take a hiatus from some of his revenue-generating "side projects" (e.g. The William Shatner Sci-Fi DVD Club), and, more importantly, spare us from the endless stream of press releases in our inbox alerting us to the latest crackpot scheme cooked up to promote them. No such luck: