• Vanity Fair contributing editor John Connolly has been informed by the U.S. Attorney's office that Anthony Pellicano has "threatened his safety." Connolly has written several pieces on the wiretap case, including the latest in the June issue, and just signed a book deal on the subject. Nikki Finke counts this as the third journo Pellicano has threatened, and the first NYC-based of the bunch. Congrats, Connolly. [Deadline Hollywood]
• Predictably, Harvard has started "gathering information" on the case of plagiarizing prodigy Kaavya Viswanathan. It's not a formal investigation, but is it ever? Also, of her book deal, she says that she "just thought everyone was being nice" to her. Har. [Crimson & NYT]
• Anderson Cooper will start appearing on 60 Minutes. That's double the silver foxiness! [NYP]
• Russell Crowe accuses of Sony BMG of leading him on before they decided against giving him a record deal; Crowe chucks phone at record exec's head. [Daily Telegraph]
• Only the classiest advertising for George Clooney. [AdFreak]
• Buddha Bar gets a death sentence: "Like Spice Market meets Ninja." [Snack]
• Enjoy information while it's free, 'cause it might not be for long. [FT]
• We'll help this kid out, but only in the name of threesomes. [HWTB]

With only three more deduction days 'til the anti-Christmas, i.e. federal income tax filing deadline, we thought we'd share some of the highlights from this ABCNews.com report from earlier in the week, in which tax experts are consulted on some creative accounting loopholes celebrities may want to explore:

George Clooney wouldn't leave us alone. Everywhere we went — us at Gawker, you the readers, everyone — he was there. Following us, menacing us, interfering with our lives. We thought about slugging him, like Sean Penn. If we drove, we would have had an accident, like Lindsay Lohan. We just wanted to be left alone, to lead our lives. But still Clooney continued his rude interruption.

When George Clooney suggested that publicists sabotage Gawker Stalker by flooding our inbox with fakes, we knew it was just a cry for attention. So we launched a contest: The first person to send us a camphone pic of Clooney, who's currently in town filming Michael Clayton (plug!), wins Ocean's 11 and Ocean's 12 on DVD (double plug!). It took a week, but we finally have a winner! From his strategically located third floor apartment, reader Peter Crosta photographed Clooney at work yesterday on West 106th between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue. Congrats, Peter — you are about to own two very rare and expensive DVDs.

Another reminder that we're still waiting for a reader to send us a camera phone picture of George Clooney; we'd love to unload these copies of Ocean's 11 and Ocean's 12 on a winner. Instead, as we sat and stared at our inbox yesterday, praying for a citizen paparazzo to heed our call, we got the following:

Sightings are sent in by readers and then recklessly, dangerously posted to our Gawker Stalker Maps. Contribute to the cultural apocalypse by sending yours to tips@gawker.com.

It's a bad time to get dressed. The weather is unpredictable, your closet is a disaster, and you're in desperate need of some stylish, statement-making threads. You certainly can't go meet George Clooney dressed like that.

• Today in the glue-sniffing adventures of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Star reports that Tom intends to keep his beloved quiet during childbirth by shoving an adult pacifier in her mouth. Childbirth never sounded so kinky! [Lowdown]
• Sources close to Whitney Houston wonder if her crack habits may have been worsened by her affiliation with a cult called the Black Hebrews. Yeah, that's right — always blame the Jews. [Scoop]
• Brad Pitt has backed out of George Clooney's plans for a casino, leaving his project in trouble. Now if we can just flood the project with false information, we can render it useless. [R&M]
• Congrats to Justin Loeber, who made it a whopping 3 months as Judith Regan's PR slave at Regan Books before fleeing for dear life. [Page Six]
• Bad news for ex-Mets pitcher Kris Benson: Your crazy-ass wife says you two are going to work things out. We're so sorry, dude. [NYDN]
• Are you a working actor without an ounce of name recognition? Stop a rapist, get on Page Six, and watch the scripts come rolling in. [Page Six]

The synergistic folks over at Chevrolet are running an online contest with the Apprentice in which users can create their own Chevy Tahoe commercial. (Why, exactly, you'd want to do something like this is beyond us.) We doubt the above will win any prizes, but someone submitted a priceless advertisement directed towards George Clooney: Make Ocean's 17 or whatever the fuck.

· Hottest Hollywood Assistants has made a bold return after a brief webhost-related absence, and now features permalinking ability for individual profiles, in case you really need to direct a coworker to the humiliating pictures you posted of him on the site.
· Bob Ross: The Video Game. No f'ing way!
· Hey! Clooney eatin' a hot dog!
· PR Masterpiece Theater Presents The Total Ignorance Ploy: "Kidman's U.S. rep told The Scoop she has 'no idea' if the story is true, adding, 'I'm afraid [I've] never heard this before!'"

Ask anyone in Hollywood where they stand on the Hillary issue, and you're likely to get an answer along the lines of, "She's, like, a way better singer than that skankbag Lindsay." Further qualify that you're referring not to Hilary Duff but to Senator Hillary Clinton's chances at a White House run, and the answers aren't nearly as clear cut. The LAT explores how the industry's love affair with the presidential hopeful has been cooling in recent months as liberal Hollywood looks for a promising candidate to lead us out of the Bush era:

• George Clooney eats hot dogs! Let's sabotage hot dogs! [Gallery of the Absurd]
• And another one bites the dust: Hachette says it'll shut ELLEgirl after the June/July issue, leaving it as a web- and wireless-only brand. [WWD]
• Folio: announces its list of the 40 most influential/ successful / annoying / evil people in magazine publishing. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart makes the list — it's a long fall from the Oscars, ain't it? [Folio:]
• Meanwhile, Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry begins his long climb up the special events ladder by hosting the Webby awards. [PR Newswire]
• Why we prefer the foreign press: They know we want to read about a dude who took 40,000 hits of ecstasy. [Guardian]
• Death Row Records head Suge Knight may have declared bankruptcy, but he's never too poor to pop a cap in your ass. [TMZ]
• Rosie O'Donnell is back in our good graces. According to her profile in New York, she shares our love for the Schtick Intuition. And last night on Leno, she called herself a 200-lb. lesbian. Good, clean fun — Rosie's back! [Fish Drink Water]
• Someone has stolen Jerry Garcia's toilet. Authorities believe the priceless porcelain may have been traded in for Big Gulp, Doritos, and two packs of Twinkies. [CNN]
• Ben Smith launches his Daily News political blog — complete with a sexy picture. Too bad he hasn't left the Observer yet. [Daily Politics]
• Drudge reports on Couric's move to CBS by reprinting the Mary Tyler Moore song. The Gay never lets us down. [Drudge]

Click to enlarge.

On Friday, via an email sent from his publicist Stan Rosenfield, Oscar-winning ER doctor George Clooney commanded the masses to sabotage Gawker Stalker by sending us fake submissions. And oh, how they've responded to Clooney's battle cry — our inbox was indeed flooded with hundreds of sightings, almost all of which were of George Clooney. We're sure that's exactly what he meant.

• Because God is inexplicably protecting Maer Roshan, Radar still looms over us. Well, kind of. Maybe not. Maybe so, with Jesse Jackson's son in the mix. And whether or not the mag that Maer built comes alive, it sure is fun to speculate and send Roshan into a secretive frenzy.
• Our sick and psychotic Gawker Stalker Maps continue to destroy the world, prompting George Clooneyto don his Batman suit and unite his flacky friends against our satanic practices. The New York Press agrees that we're bad people and, moreover, just snarkity snark snark snarky.
• Naomi Campbell assaults her staff again — and this time, it's over a pair of jeans.
• Hell of a week for masthead changes: Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal editor Amy Stevens saunters over to Conde; the Observer's Ben Smith relocates to the Daily News; more changes at Spin; and Newsweek executive editor Dorothy Kalins suspiciously heads upstairs.
• Breaking: Just like any student at any college, NYU kids like to party.
• Circulation desperation sets in, and free papers are everyfuckingwhere. And if they're free papers from the Post, you'll find them at the dump. Or China.
• It took way too long, but the Village Voice's doe-eyed young fabulist Nick Sylvester finally gets fired.

It's time to upset every celebrity on earth with our hideous Gawker Stalker Maps. Sightings are sent in by readers and George Clooney; send yours to tips@gawker.com.

According to today's Page Six, George Clooney reportedly sent an email (via his publicist, because this is really all about the publicists) asking all of the good-hearted flacks of this world to flood our inbox with as many fake sightings as possible, so that Gawker Stalker would be rendered useless. Charming, seeing as we never thought the feature was particularly useful to begin with. The moment we become useful, we've lost sight of what we're all about — glorious, time-sucking impracticality.

It's a sad Friday around the celebrity-obsessed ghettos of the internet, as two of Hollywood's finest actors have launched a jihad against the online world. Today's Page Six reports that George Clooney (i.e. his angry publicist) has hatched a master plan to neutralize sister site Gawker's newly Google Map-enhanced Stalker feature (PrivacyWatch, we assure you, will remain untainted, since we assume that a good 40 percent of it is submitted by sneaky PR staffers anyway) by flooding it with fake sightings, a plan Clooney's evil spokesman has shared with his flacky peers:

Page Six reports today that non-blogging actor George Clooney has taken action to destroy Gawker Stalker — ohmahgah he knows we exist! In an email sent by his publicist Stan Rosenfield to other entertainment flacks, "George" writes:

· Warner Bros. sets a July 21st start date for Ocean's 13 (George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh can now start salivating over what crazy, artistic thing they're going to do with their dirty Hollywood money), with celebrity choking victim Ellen Barkin joining the cast as an urban cougar whose designs on lesser gang members Scott Caan and Casey Affleck will result in several loosely plotted double- and triple-crosses necessitating that one of the young thieves has to dance through a matrix of laser beams. [Variety]
· 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Fantastic Voyage director Richard Fleischer dies at 89. Hollywood braces for the sudden loss of two more of its own to complete the deadly rule of three. [THR]
· Apple Corps, the Beatles' record company, is suing Apple Computer for violating an agreement that Apple (Computer) wouldn't operate in the music industry, thereby threatening the Apple (the Beatles one) trademark. [Variety]
· Time Warner in talks with the Big Four networks to create an on-demand "hits" channel, which would give viewers too lazy to TiVo their favorite shows access to episodes they may have missed on their first run for a reported $10 monthly fee. [THR]