The Sunday NY Times profiled upcoming CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother executive producers Craig Thomas and Carter Bays (strangely, and perhaps fittingly, pictured clinging to each other for dear life), who played a dangerous game in devising the pilot for their series: trying to get inside the mind of Les Moonves:

Like a bucket full of ice water cruelly ending the last moments of your weekend slumber, here come the box office numbers:

· 'I DON'T think anybody has ever seen my body!" Jeremy Piven complains to Liz Smith about how he yearns to doff Ari Gold's Armani straightjacket and unleash the pecs n' pythons on the public. Next season on Entourage: Lloyd slathers Ari in sunblock at the Standard's pool as the agent once again tries to talk Vince out of quitting Aquaman. [via Jossip]
· The Prettiest Pony blog recorded the minutes from last night's The OC premiere. And while we're on the subject, did anyone else notice that sometime during the time it took for Coop to shoot Trey and for the gang to bring him to the hospital, everyone had a chance to get new haircuts?
· Sometimes we think that Britney Spears got knocked up just so she could get fat without the stigma.
· Reality TV's infamous Fat Naked Gay Guy in a Tree, Richard Hatch of Survivor, has been hit with ten counts of tax evasion and other wonderful tax-related no-nos.
· Come to think of it, yeah, that Nic Cage really is kind of a Mopey Marvin!

Friday
· More charitable boozing: "L.A. to LA - Los Angeles Supports Louisiana" hosts a wine-tasting event at Barker Hanger in Santa Monica, hosted by Harry Shearer and featuring the DJ skills of Paul Oakenfold. $100 bucks a ticket, but it all goes to hurricane relief.
· Friday's music: M. Ward and Dios Malos at the Ford Amphitheater; Maximo Park does a second night at the Troubadour; Ok Go! at the Roxy.
Saturday
· The Scratch DJ Academy is giving a free DJ lesson at their open house on Saturday. We suspect there is more to the art than listening to only one side of your headphones and being photographed by the Cobrasnake. [via Cheapskatin']
· The Apple Store at the Grove hosts "Los Angeles Video Bloggers-Meet The Vloggers" a seminar demystifying the art of posting full-motion video on your blog. A must-attend for anyone interested in becoming an amateur pornography mogul!
Sunday
· Dude—Celebrity Surf Jam. Seriously.
· The UCLA Extension Writers Faire hosts a bunch of free workshops, perhaps offering you enough help and encouragement to temporarily prevent you from giving up your crazy Hollywood dreams and moving back East.
· The criminally amusing Andy Kindler anchors Sunday Comedy at Room 5. Really, we think he has a criminal record.

Though we think it's a query better handled by their excellent "Explainer" column, Slate teases its round-up of the week in tabloids with the question, "Is Tom Cruise ugly?" Naturally, a truly sincere examination of the issue would be patently ridiculous, as we all know that Cruise is the embodiment of physical (and mental and emotional) perfection sent by an ageless intergalactic dictator to mesmerize the world with his smile, but it's always interesting to plunge ourselves into the wildly hypothetical. One doctor weighs in from the supermarket check-out stand:

The What Tian Has Learned blog noticed that one of the contestants on Rockstar: INXS (which, apparently, is still on—who knew?) smuggled a small amount of profanity past the nipple-shy CBS censors. CBS has since yanked the photos from the Rockstar website, valiantly trying to prevent sensitive surfers from snickering at this Urban Outfitters t-shirt-quality rebellion. But as we know, the internets never forget, and Adrants has helpfully perserved the screenshots. Will the FCC catch wind of this, determine that impressionable children may have viewed the show with heads tilted ninety degrees clockwise, and fine CBS back to the Michael Hutchence era for corrupting our youth? Go fuck yourself! How are we supposed to know?

Welcome to the first weekend of the Fall movie season, that post-Labor Day cinematic Siberia, when studios hope for little more than moviegoers not actively picketing the theaters showing the crap they've pooped out into the world. Fight off your ambivalence and attend the talkies in exactly these numbers:

Hollywood PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are sent in and authored by our eagle-eyed readers; send yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put sighting or PrivacyWatch in the subject line) and let the world know that you think Owen Wilson's sweet smile isn't some kind of smarmy come-on.

We extend our heartfelt (as much as that little lump of anthracite can be considered a heart) thanks to this week's sponsors, who keep us in 24-carat ball-gags and only the finest nipple clamps money can buy. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and make our readers repeatedly utter your safety word, see this page.

· Chilling factoid of the day, from a story about Rupert Murdoch's recent binge of internet-related acquisitions: "If MySpace and IGN were integrated today, News Corp. would be the fifth most trafficked network on the Web." Welcome to the RupeNet. [Variety]
· The NFL does its best water polo player impression by stomping on Seth Cohen and propelling ABC to a Thursday night ratings win. [THR]
· ABC will dub or subtitle its entire primetime lineup in Spanish, firm in the belief that no language barrier should prevent potential audiences from overrating Desperate Housewives or missing a single hilarious word uttered by Freddie Prinze Jr. [Variety]
· Comedy Central does what it can to cope with the uncertain, post-Chappelle's Show era, ordering another three seasons (42 episodes) of South Park, and hoping that Trey Parker and Matt Stone aren't going to disappear to Bolivia to chill out with a big bag of their cash. [THR]
· Tonight's multinetwork Katrina telethon won't edit out political remarks, just profanity. Acceptable: "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Unacceptable: "George Bush doesn't fucking care about black people." [THR]

Realizing that even something as normal as taking her child to Disneyland can very well result in a Scarlett Johansson or Reese Witherspoon-type altercation with aggressive celebrity photographers, Gwyneth Paltrow is taking precautions and drawing up a battle plan before the front of the Great Celebrity-Paprazzi War of 2005 can advance Apple-ward:

If you've secretly feared that Haley Joel Osment was living out the rest of his days chained to a Ferris wheel at Michael Jackson's new Neverland Palace in Bahrain, let us set your mind at ease. He's working and trying to shed that troublesome "child actor" label, not slowly chewing through his arm in an attempt to avoid another mirthless day of tending Jacko's expat llamas:

Any time a hurricane strikes the Southeast (or fatigue strikes a crew member on a Tom Cruise set), the Church of Scientology dispatches an army of volunteers to help out. Perhaps realizing that the magnitude of the Katrina disaster required a high-profile relief effort, a team of underemployed celebrity ambassadors (we assume Cruise was too busy shooting Mission: Impossible 3 to personally—personally!—visit the site) was immediately dispatched to the scene:

Since it's Friday morning, we would've been well within our rights to present this photo of Alicia Silverstone falling down outside of the GQ Men of the Year Awards in London without commentary. Falling celebrities are intrinsically funny! That split second of terror frozen onto the face of someone famous as they come to grips with their powerlessness against something as elemental as gravity makes us feel somewhat better about our own relatively meaningless lives. (Or about our superior ability to get shitfaced in public and not bellyflop to the curb. Whatever.) But we've just developed a pet theory about why Silverstone's face is twisted into such a mask of horror: maybe, just maybe, in that split second before a team of handlers descended to break her fall, she had a chilling vision of the future. Click the picture to have a look at what we think she saw in that moment of freefall.

· Oddjack sets the over-under for the upcoming season of The OC: "Number of substances Marissa abuses, season— 3.5/Number of men, boys, farm animals, Girl Scouts, etc Julie Cooper-Nichol bangs —3.5"
· We hope to God you're not getting all of your news here, but in case you didn't hear, the Governator is rejecting the gay marriage bill "out of respect for the will of the people." But how would he react if there's a public groundswell to invalidate the unions of Austrian movie stars and Skeletors?
· If celebrities realized that an end to animal testing might mean "No more Botox. No more boobs. No more anything," would they be so quick to jump on the PeTA bandwagon? Without those things, Pamela Anderson would probably just be a loose pile of flesh draped over some stripper heels by now.
· "Promises, in Malibu...is like a [bleeping] Hollywood camp resort for wealthy [bleeping] lunatics,” Ozzy Osbourne rates the rehab clinics. [second item]
· Bill and The Donald: Yet another showbiz marriage that won't last forever.

· KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic eminence Nic Harcourt signs and discusses Music Lust: Recommended Listening for Every Mood, Moment and Reason at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset Blvd. Harcourt was the first DJ in America to spin Coldplay, so this will be a great opportunity to thank him for allowing Chris Martin and company to make sweet, sweet love to our ears.
· The Weekend Is Almost Here Music Round-Up: La De Da: The Posies at the Knitting Factory; The Section Quartet at the Echo; Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the El Rey.
· It might be a little too late to get down to the Coliseum by now, but that's where Kanye West will be performing for the NFL's Opening Kickoff Event, and allegedly not offering commentary on the Bush Administration's job in New Orleans. Maybe fellow performers Maroon 5 or Good Charlotte will pick up the political slack. In any case, football season starts tonight. Between that and The OC, we doubt we'll be seeing anyone on the streets after 5pm or so.

Your blind item answers are in! But before moving on, take a minute to fall in love with One Cheap-Ass Blind Vice all over again:

It is with a heavy heart that we inform you that our beloved Taradise is no more. Our spies have told us that E! has cast out Tara Reid and her globetrotting, club-hopping crew from its movable Eden, calling them back stateside (with two episodes unshot, we hear), and plunging our televisions into a postlapsarian wasteland devoid of the party-positive innocence that only a half-in-the-bag Reid could deliver. We're not exactly sure what's going to happen to the footage that's already been shot, or if any more episodes from the aborted season will air, but let's all hope for a Wilder On Tara: The Lost Taradise Parties special (we dare not dream of an uncensored DVD); that might help ease the pain of our profound loss. We'd pour out a little liquor for Tara, but fear she'd dive on the ground, mouth agape, to prevent our maudlin waste of a single drop.

We have been very, very bad OC fans. While we should've been practicing our best Chino-hardened stares, Seth Cohen stutters, and Marissa Cooper primal screams (with optional pool furniture abuse) in preparation for tonight's third season premiere, we'd actually completely forgotten that it was on. Let's blame our Kirsten-level trouble with the sauce and move on, shall we? Luckily, many of you pointed us to this e-mail exchange between ESPN.com's Bill "The Sports Guy" Simmons, unabashed fan of all things Captain Oats, and The OC creator Josh Schwartz, a correspondence that burns hotter with passion than Crazy Oliver's crush on an emotionally stunted Coop (Disclosure: Yeah, we know we're namechecked in the column.) Rather than blockquote massive chunks of text, we'll focus on a single, tense (yet ultimately fleeting) moment, when Simmons asks whether or not any black people live in The OC:

The Defamer Special Movie Premiere Food Critic attended last night's screening of The Exorcism of Emily Rose at the ArcLight's Cinerama Dome and after-party at Cabana Club, and has once again filed his impressions of the post-movie spread. While he happily indulged in the all-you-can-eat portions of this Devil's repast, he found the culinary offerings lacking variety and imagination. As always, enjoy your meal: