When Paramount test-screened World Trade Center, the studio's altruistically conceived, non-exploitative attempt to keep fresh a five-year-old story hopelessly receding into a confusing blur of cable news footage with bad production values, they came to a startling realization: Teenagers might want to see this thing. Today's LAT details the steps Paramount's marketing department took in the aftermath of this epiphany, delivered to their promotional forebrain like a lightning bolt shot out of a plasma screen during an episode of Pimp My Ride:

While browsing for the DVD of the Charles Bronson/Lee Marvin fugitive fur-trapper classic Death Hunt on Amazon.com, Austin360.com's Dave Thomas discovered a feature he hadn't noticed before*: User submitted plot keyword tags, ranging from the extremely broad (clicking "Snow" brings you to 16 pages of wintry titles, including The Empire Strikes Back and, predictably, White Christmas) to the highly specific ("Shot In The Eye" conveniently aggregates movies, such as Saving Private Ryan and The Godfather, that feature a well-placed bullet in the peeper, though a separate tag exists for "Shot In The Genitals"). The classification system is highly useful, even if it tends to tread into the realm of obsessive excess: V for Vendetta, for example, gets 103 tags, and while it's helpful to remember that Fight Club and The Seven Samurai also feature someone having their head shaved, we think we were fine without having access to a list of titles that also make prominent use of a toilet.

Not that you need any special reason to reflexively doubt the words coming out of a publicist's mouth in the moments following a client crisis, but a troublemaking reader with pharmacy credentials writes in to refute the flack-approved explanation of "dehydration" for Lindsay Lohan's latest suspicious hospital stay:

THR's Ray Richmond reports that the website of TV writer/producer Matthew Carnahan was hijacked by hapless "Middle Eastern extremists," who replaced Carnahan's homepage (still down the last time we checked in) with these rather unpleasant images of death and strife from the region and the message, "If You Stop War We Will Be(sic) Stop Hacking." But while the man who will soon broker on-set peace between real-life couple David Arquette and Courteney Cox-Arquette on FX's upcoming Dirt undoubtedly has valuable insights into the crisis in the Middle East, Richmond points out that the hackers probably meant to target Matthew Michael Carnahan, the next entry down on the IMDb search page, the writer of terrorism drama The Kingdom. Then again, this could all just be a ploy by edgy publicists at FX to stir up some viral buzz for their series, "The outrageous celebrity tabloid workplace comedy the terrorists don't want you to see."

· Don't even pretend to act surprised that Travolta doesn't look good with his shirt off. You saw Pulp Fiction at least a decade ago, didn't you?
If you're a news outlet wondering how to correctly cover Lance Bass's coming out party, these handy guidelines from the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association should put you on the right track.
If you've ever wondered what happens when you e-mail a picture of a cat in a t-shirt to the Craigslist blind date who stood you up, well, wonder no more.
Today's obligatory SoaP-related links: Snakes on a Flying Machine and the seemingly inevitable Snakes on a Train. [via The Hot Blog]
· No one laughed harder than Colin Farrell after Michael Mann told him he'd just swallowed five crack rocks for no good reason: "To heighten the movie's air of reality, the actors trained with weapons and worked with undercover cops. They acted out scenarios for drug buys, and Farrell even tagged along on a mishandled drug bust he thought was real."

In the Girls Gone Wild Tour, Joe Francis' rack-flashing sideshow boards a giant bus, prowling America's highways and byways in search of a new crop of coeds willing to sacrifice just a few seconds of their own exposed, jiggling dignity in exchange for being part of something much bigger. Unfortunately, their titty vision quest was set off course when it hit a soft, cyclist-sized bump in the road:

· Hump Night Music Round-Up: The Sleepy Jackson at The Troubadour; Buzzcocks at the Henry Fonda; the "Don't Call Us Tori" showcase at Tangier.
· Stella's Michael Showalter, Eugene Mirman, and Leo Allen comprise The Comedy Men from Tomorrow, who travel back to the present to perform their hilarious magic tonight at the Knitting Factory.
· Television archivist Dan Einstein throwns down at the Festival of Preservation (OK, "throws down" is probably not the right choice of words when talking about TV preservation, but we gotta sex this up somehow) with restored episodes of Playhouse 90 and the United States Steel Hour featuring obscure chat show host Johnny Carson at the UCLA Bridges Theater.

One might expect that collapsing from exertion in unseasonable heat and being administered Vitamin B shots at one's favorite hospital would be enough excitement in a single day for a dangerously dehydrated starlet. But if the heat-stroker in question happens to be Lindsay Lohan, a little emergency room pit-stop is nothing more than a perfect happy hour tune-up for a night out on the town. Reports a reader who claims to have seen the actress last night and not been aware of her hospitalization earlier that day:

On a day so utterly clotted with both gay- and blow-related news, we wouldn't dare keep you in suspense about your responses to the gay/blow blind item guessing game. But before you move on to the good stuff, stick a little more Two Old-School Blind Vices up your nose:

The web archaeologists over at BestWeekEver.tv have unearthed a particularly impressive specimen: a 2001 McDonald's commercial featuring recently queer-empowered Lance Bass up at bat during a round of spin-the-bottle with the members of *NSYNC and Britney Spears. With the odds an attractive 5-1 that Bass would be spared the one vagina at the table, the bottle lands on the big money: Justin Timberlake, whose convincingly icked-out reaction undoubtedly drew upon countless late-night tour bus inquiries from his bandmate along the lines of, "Hey, Justin? You still up? Wanna arm wrestle, then compare abs?"

A hard-partying starlet has no better friend than a heat wave like the one we've been experiencing in L.A., which provides a handy excuse for an on-set collapse that might otherwise raise suspicions that the swooning performer was brought down by the powdery Colombian monkey on her back. The Insider reports that a "overheated and dehydrated" Lindsay Lohan was taken to the hospital yesterday from the set of Georgia Rule, an incident immediately attributed by her quick-thinking flack to good, old-fashioned hard work in triple-digit temperatures:

Who of us hasn't stumbled upon an episode of NBC's America's Got Talent, and, between savoring Hasselhoffian critiques of an armpit-playing barbershop quartet, thought to ourselves, "This show would really be onto something, if there were just some way to lower the incredibly high talent bar set by its contestants." Well, look no further than CBS' new reality show pilot, Singing Office, where they're banking on viewers showing up in droves to find out what happens when someone hands a microphone to Debra from Accounting:

Either the people at Madame Tussauds in New York have an incredibly sick sense of humor or they truly believe in the divinity of messianic celebrity offspring Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, as they've placed their just-unveiled, graven-in-wax* idol of the Chosen One in a reinterpretation of the nativity scene, complete with stuffed stand-ins of the native African wildlife mysteriously drawn to the birth of Jolie's Word Made Flesh. Thankfully, we are spared the spectacle of Namibian wise men bearing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and the decapitated heads of overly aggressive freelance photographers, but the tableaux was realistic enough to draw a small crowd of worshipers to the museum, all of whom soon retreated, still palsied and cancer-riddled, after learning firsthand that the startlingly lifelike wax Shiloh posses no miraculous powers of its own.

Disney's Cast Member Massacre started in earnest with a round of layoffs yesterday. But in a happier note, studio chairman Dick Cook seems to be getting a hang of the termination business, as Buena Vista exec VP Karen Glass was let go nowhere near a delivery room. [Variety]
Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence has signed on to adapt and direct the prequel to Fletch, Fletch Won. His friends have instructed him to not "fuck it up," a directive made all the more challenging by the planned miscasting of Zach Braff in the title role. [Variety]
In Hollywood, everything old is senselessly new again: 50 years after its Broadway debut, ABC plans a musical version of Peter Pan for television. [Variety]
Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat movie will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and maybe we've already gulped the Kazakh Kool-Aid, but even the title has us excited: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. [Variety]

• Previously: The Morning Cruise: Wedding Rumors, Katie's Career, And Other Fun [Defamer]

Aaron Spelling deathbed no-show Tori Spelling is now paying the price for her lax mourning schedule and subsequent, messy tabloid war with mother Candy Spelling. According to Us Weekly, the go-to publication for when you absolutely, positively have to hear Tori's Side of the Story, her share of her father's $500 million fortune will barely cover this month's breast-inflation bill:

Wherein we invite our readers to grab the nearest whip and folding chair and attempt to tame feral E! gossip-lion Ted Casablanca with a couple of nasty lashes and some savvy guesses as to the identity of his weekly blind item. Torn between his twin loves of closeted actors engaged in sodomy-based shenanigans and actresses with a healthy appetite for powdered narcotics, Ted offers blind dirt on both subjects. Unload both shotgun barrels on Two Old-School Blind Vices:

After successfully surviving a first pregnancy in which she ingested nothing but a shake made from Red Bull, Cheetos, and an occasional texture-additive handful of Funyuns, Britney Spears thought she had a pretty good handle on prenatal nutrition. But after a recent false labor in her second pregnancy necessitated a visit to the hospital and a lecture from some very unpleasant pointy-head types in labcoats, Spears had all her illusions about the baby-growin' properties of artificially colored and flavored orange cheese dust cruelly shattered:

It's been too long since we've been able to fete that most joyous of Hollywood occasions, "celebrity everyone already knew was gay making it official by coming out of the closet on the cover of a major magazine." Happily, our long wait is over: Lance Bass, former *NSYNC member and current Reichen Lehmkuhl cuddlecake, has decided to put an end to all the lispy whispers, and proudly announced his orientation on the cover of People with a 190-pt. headline trumpeting, "I'M GAY."

When we wake up to multiple Tom Cruise-related items spread across various gossip rags, we are forced to revert to the round-up form to handle the onslaught: