Several readers have written in to inquire about the identity of Hugh Jackman's friend "John," whom the actor thanked in his Emmy acceptance speech, pictured above at left (we hope) with Jackman's wife Deb. (At right, we hope.) Very cursory research reveals that this individual is probably John Palermo, Jackman's longtime assistant and current producing partner, though we are loathe to use the words "longtime" and "partner" in the same sentence and send your gossipy little tongues wagging even more pruriently. Really, on the happiest night of his life, can't a dude with a soft spot for musicals thank his longtime assistant and producing partner without the world reading into the relationship? You should all be ashamed of yourselves. It's not like he's Jackman's "personal trainer" or something.

Blogger Paul Davidson recaps his Emmy weekend, from pre-party to the Big Night, observing herds of B-listers in their natural habitat: wandering around the NBC/Vanity Fair Spago bash and hoovering up free food from the buffet:

· Variety reminds you about the Emmy moments you may have slept through: Lost takes best drama, Raymond best comedy, Felicity Huffman beats out her fellow Housewives, HBO nabs the most awards overall, and as best comedy writing award winner Mitch Hurwitz would like to remind you, Arrested Development plunges headlong into a third straight season of teetering on the brink of cancellation. [Variety]
· THR analyzes various Emmy wins, including Raymond's statue-hogging last gasp: "How did 'Raymond' pull the comedy series upset? My theory is that voters looked at 'Housewives,' thought to themselves, 'I like this show, but it isn't particularly funny,' and then went with their heart rather than their head..." In other words, ABC's scheme to submit DH as a comedy exploded in its face. [THR]
· More Emmys? Yeah, we got that: Celebs wear ugly flowers to honor the victims of Katrina, but largely avoid going all Kanye West during the show. However, the Bush administration is expected to give serious consideration to Blythe Danner's call to bring our soldiers back from Iraq, but ultimately will double over in laughter and light their cigars with money earmarked for hurricane relief. [Variety]
· Martin Sheen will leave the White House to executive produce a sitcom for NBC through Warner Bros. TV. Brace yourself for the ensuing hilarity: "The show is described as loosely based on a situation that occurred in Sheen's extended family whereby a heterosexual man found himself living with his gay older brother and his brother's lover, all three of which are tasked with taking care of the straight man's ailing mother-in-law. The mother-in-law, however, is a fundamentalist Christian and thus is kept in the dark about the true relationship between the gay couple." [THR]
· Project Greenlight update! First season winner Pete "Stolen Summer" Jones sells his comedy script, Hall Pass, to 20th Century Fox as a possible directing vehicle for the Farrelly brothers. [Variety]

Realizing that the only way to silence Emmy co-presenter Quentin Tarantino when he's coked up to his hairline is to shove a tongue down his throat, CSI star Marg Helgenberger bravely takes one for the team.

Yes, we know that we said that we were going to liveblog the Emmys telecast, but when the show opened with John Travolta recounting what it was like to accept an award on behalf of deceased The Boy in the the Plastic Bubble co-star Diana Hylund in 1977, we realized that no amount of alcohol would allow us to track three hours of profound boredom in real time, hit pause on the TiVo, and went to get a bite to eat. Oscar's crayon-eating little brother would have to wait. We returned, belly full, to distill the show into a collection of Emmy Moments, presented here in chronological order:

Take refuge in the weekend's box office numbers, forgetting for a moment that you're about to embark on five straight days of pain and suffering.

Friday:
· Beck's doing a last-minute surprise show at the El Rey. (The password is hellyes. Thank you, Ambitious Outsiders.) For those of you who still get a little too creeped out about Mr. Hansen's Scientology ties, Paul Weller is at the Wiltern.
· Maybe it's too late to get tickets, but Charlie Kaufman's Theater of the New Ear is finishing up its brief run at UCLA. If you can't get in, head home and watch Eternal Sunshine while listening to your iPod.
Saturday
· Emmy's Eve music round-up: Tori Amos at the Greek; Midnight Movies at MOCA; Michael Penn at the Troubadour; Arcade Fire, Bloc Party and Beck at the Glen Helen Pavilion as part of the KROQ Inland Invasion.
· Cinemaphiles will flock to the Egyptian and tear each other limb from limb over the rare delights offered at the American Cinematheque Movie Book, Poster & Memorabilia sale. Pack a flack vest and a stun gun.
Sunday
· Hollywood's Second Biggest Night, If You Don't Count The Golden Globes thrills and amazes the world's boob-tube worshippers with the 57th Annual Emmy Awards. As is our sad, sad custom, Defamer will be liveblogging the festivities from the West Coast feed (unless some travel plans are delayed). Tune in to this space at 8pm PST and see how many envelopes are opened before we're too drunk to type.

Every time a short-lived celebrity couple call it quits, the baby Jesus poops his swaddling clothes:

Demonstrating that he's certainly no "blubbering basket case" passively waiting for another season-long Nielsen colonic, NBC president Kevin Reilly fired off an e-mail rallying cry to his troops this afternoon as the network prepares to launch its new Fall season. Things are really "sparking," he says, instantly conjuring an image of the fourth place pres struggling valiantly to conjure fire from a child-proof Bic, from which a nearby six year-old easily coaxes a two-foot flame. But putting aside our predictable negativity, Reilly maintains that they have a lot to look forward to:

It's Emmy weekend, and we understand if you want to lock yourself indoors and mentally prepare yourself for all of the Desperate Housewives acceptance speeches. But the movie world will do its best to lure you out of your TV cocoon and steal your money in exactly the following way:

Look, we're not going to try and sell you on these reader-created pictures* inspired by upcoming reptiles-and-aircraft masterwork Snakes on a Plane. You either want to see them, or you don't.

Join us in showering confetti made of pure gold on this week's sponsors, who are always there with a hug and a bottle of cheap whiskey when we're feeling down. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and become the sexiest person at the online marketing conference, see this page.

Since People rushed to be the first to inform a largely ambivalent world that the blink-and-you-missed-it blessed union of skeletal on-screen pouter Renee Zellweger and cowboy hat model Kenny Something, the AP story about the break-up revealed that the court papers cited "fraud" (without any elaboration) as Zellweger's cause for filing the for the annulment. So many big questions are raised by such a little word: "Is Chesney a gay?" "Did Zellweger's publicists determine that Chesney's people misrepresented his level of fame while they were in negotiations to arrange the marriage?" "If we drink every cleaning product we find under the sink, will our death be swift and painless?" We suppose we'll have to wait until the papers are leaked or otherwise made public before we get to find out. In the meantime, we're going to go find out what those amazing scrubbing bubbles feel like as they work their way down the esophagus.

· The new-look, post-Weinstein Miramax looks to roar back to relevancy and make a splash at the Toronto film festival by acquiring...a documentary about girls' basketball. [Variety]
· ESPN will branch out from Bristol with offices in a new Los Angeles entertainment center (think ESPN Zone on steroids—a lot of steroids) being built across from Staples Center. The new facility should help the network's ESPN Hollywood coverage become at least 200 percent more pointless and annoying. [THR]
· House executive producers Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs move from NBC Universal to Fox; Fox's Peter Liguori calls the producers "monster talents" with whom he'd "like to make out with, all day, every day." [Variety]
· On a slow news day, sometimes it's fun to dive down into the deepest recesses of the casting notices and see what kind of bizarre bioluminescent news lives there: Devon Sawa and Matthew Lawrence sign on to star in the sci-fi/horror flick Hunter's Moon. [THR]
· Simon Baker joins Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in Fox 2000's The Devil Wears Prada. We feel somewhat ashamed that we have no idea who Simon Baker is, even after reviewing his IMDb profile. [Variety]

Writing an online diary for IGN.com about his involvement with the movie Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, cinematographer Robert Brinkmann, the now-estranged husband of Mena Suvari, recounts how sensitively the wonderflacks of PMK handled the disintegration of his marriage:

American celebrities are always threatening to leave the country when they're displeased with the political climate, but has one of them finally put her passport where her mouth is? Gwyneth Paltrow shows Alec Baldwin how it's done, spending more of her life overseas with the fruit of her womb and the world's leading producer of elevator music:

After discovering the hidden joys of having a big-budget Hollywood production like Steven Spielberg's Munich take over their neighborhood (i.e., closed streets, towed vehicles, unfriendly production staff), the Budapset-based Pestiside.hu blog passes along a rumor about Spielberg's alleged latest attempts to ingratiate himself to the locals:

· Finally discovering an environment even more hospitable to the wooden reading of badly written lines than the Apprentice boardroom, Donald Trump signs up for a guest-starring role on Days of Our Lives. In a real test of his dramatic range, he'll play a real-estate mogul who insists that his ridiculous looking hairpiece is actually his own hair and that his model wife married him for love.
· Finally, a way to let the world know about your little penis once you get out of the Hummer. [via Boing Boing]
· We were going to link to this yesterday, but didn't get around to it. Here you go, but click only if you have a higher than normal tolerance for Phyllis Diller-related sexual situations.
· Sometimes the police blotter is a handy way of keeping track of whether your favorite D-listers of years past are still alive.
· What's in the Friends mystery box being auctioned off on eBay? Let's just say that the winning bid might find himself the proud owner of Matthew Perry's career.
· Shame a petty jackass while helping the victims of Katrina!

· Noted poet and Guy Who Cut Off The Cop's Ear in Reservoir Dogs Michael Madsen signs his new book of poetry, The Complete Poetic Works of Michael Madsen, at Barnes & Noble at the Grove. Accept no partial collection of Madsen's tender wordplay.
· The Egyptian hosts a screening of Happy is Not Hard to Be. You think something like Broken Flowers is an "indie" film? Bah! They probably had trailers and craft service! The filmmakers will be on hand after the showing to discuss how much more hardcore they are than Jim Jarmusch.
· Music round-up: Go Betty Go at the Troubadour; Tim Easton at Spaceland; John Mayer gets a second night to siphon away area Tri-Delts at the House of Blues.

We're going with the screen grab of the People story so we don't have to waste any more words than necessary on this non-story (a first, we know). In searching through our archives, though, we noticed that the relationship, brief and utterly pointless even by Hollywood standards, began with a tsunami and ended with the hurricane. The imposed symbolism of that is absolutely crushing, isn't it? No? Then take a second to mourn the death of love between a painfully skinny chick and a guy in a cowboy hat, then get back to that game of Minesweeper.