• Jennifer Aniston's publicist denies Us Weekly's report that Aniston and Vince Vaughn are engaged, but he's made a lot of false denials before. Wait, does this suggest that publicists are merely paid liars? No. Can't be. [Us Weekly]
• Maxim's girl of the day: Floyd Landis. Ain't she a looker? [Maxim]
• New Observer owner Jared Kushner puts in 20-hour days. Doing what? Marveling at his fortune? Showing off how freakishly tall he is? [OAN]
• Old man Larry King drives like...an old man. [TMZ]
• After 20 years of sobriety, Robin Williams falls off the wagon and into rehab. It's the circle of celebrity life. [AP]
• Pity the Harvard freshmen who get Kaavya Viswanathan as their student advisor. Though she surely could offer guidance on how to get that creative writing assignment quickly completed. [IANS]
• NB to beauty bloggers: do NOT trust Allure. They will take your words regarding your favorite mascara, and they will destroy those words. No respect. [Beauty Addict]
• Is E! gossip Ted Casablancas getting the Star Jones treatment? We hope not, 'cause Giuliana certainly isn't any Barbara Walters. [Media Mob]
• Mel Gibson loves the girls in Philly. A little too much, perhaps. [PhillyNews]
• PowerHouse Books starts a magazine featuring content from PowerHouse books, creating an "indie media clusterfuck." Ooh, the clusterfucking means they're mainstream now. Congrats. [Animal]
• Our Los Angeles brother Defamer imagines the TomKat-n-Suri photoshoot for Vanity Fair. Chilling. [Defamer]
• Contrary to popular belief, keeping kosher does NOT protect you from tapeworms. [NYT]

Marc Cuban's poolboy Dan Rather appeared on Larry King last night to discuss his hasty departure from CBS and his forthcoming work on HDNet. As you can imagine, the interview was nothing but fireworks:

• Everyone's favorite gay escort-cum-White House reporter Jeff Gannon/James Guckert will be speaking this Thursday at the 3 West Club for the Log Cabin Republicans' monthly meeting. Hopefully, it'll be just like a Learning Annex session: how to transform your internet hobby into a viable prostitution endeavor. [Productshop NYC]
• Misguided farter Larry King tries to set up Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper. [Malcontent]
• MyTimes, the Times do-it-yourself homepage service, launches in Beta tonight for some 5,000 users. Some homeless person gave us his login info, and OMG IT IS SO TOTALLY NOT EXCITING. More on that tomorrow. [E&P]
• Shamu is more popular than Star Jones — while they may be of equal stature, one knows how to keep its mouth shut. [Eat the Press]
• New regime at Vibe results in twenty fired staffers. Bodies strewn across a dead-end street... [AdAge]
• Journalist Neil Strauss continues to pimp his pimping skills, drifts further from anything ever resembling a writing career. [iFilm]
• Suri Cruise looks increasingly fake; c'mon, you care! [TMZ]
• French soccer football captain Zinedine Zidane ended his career by headbutting an Italian player's chest during Sunday's World Cup final, and he might have the right idea: Rick Santorum certainly deserves a headbutt or seven. [HuffPo]
• Self-promoting memoirist Toby Young knows you're going to say his second book sucks. [Mediabistro]
• Precocious fabulist Kaavya Viswanathan's archived blog. [Kahini12]
• Anti-abortion blogger gets worked up over "Caroline Webber," a columnist who writes positively about her abortion and is thus branded a murderer. Nevermind the fact that the offensive, murderous column ran in The Onion. While we feign tolerance and respect of all points of view, those pro-life people sure are fucking stupid. [March Together for Life]

NBC is reporting that the 62nd street townhouse explosion may have been caused by a gas leak; the building housed doctors' offices and investigators are looking into a possible suicide attempt. Until more details emerge, let's go to the man-on-the-street interview with a notorious gas expert:

• Lil' Kim ate well in the joint.
• Rocketboom parted ways with the world's most miraculous pair of breasts. And before we got to make our "More like Rocketboob" joke.
• Even in death, Ken Lay gave life to the P.R. industry.
• Some web site made minor changes, mostly bumping up font sizes and such. No big deal.
• There's Something About Larry: He's a big-time farter.
• Benji Madden got in a fight with a MisShapes kid, which is almost as challenging as beating up someone in a wheelchair.
• Hopefully "I just wanted to touch him like a kitten" sounds less molestery in Russian.
• You never know what's going to happen when you ride the train, but it usually doesn't involve getting sliced in half by power tools. Usually.

• Today in the Wasted Adventures of Lindsay Lohan: after her birthday party, Lohan passes out on the toilet, "loses her keys," leaves her car parked in front of a drop-off spot on Pacific Coast Highway, and, in the grand finale, autistic kids can't access the beach. [Page Six]
• TomKat is keeping baby Suri so under wraps that even their fellow cult members have yet to see the baby. Until John Travolta can vouch for her, we're not convinced that baby even exists. [Us Weekly]
• Not surprisingly, Star Jones messy exit from The View was great for ratings: when she appeared on Larry King, he had triple his average number of viewers. Meaning that he also farted for an audience three times as disgusted as usual. [E!]
• A guest from Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's wedding is auctioning off mementos on eBay. [Page Six]
• Contrary to the rumor mill, Jay-Z and Beyonce did not get married this weekend. That'll help you sleep better at night, no doubt. [Lowdown (3rd item)]
• Jennifer Lopez's ex-husband Ojani Noa claims that she practiced voodoo. Which is exactly how she keeps Marc Anthony submissive. [R&M]
• Watch Paris Hilton dance, then stab yourself in the eye. [TMZ]

On Friday, a reader claimed to have heard Larry King fart on-air towards the end of his interview with Star Jones; the video presented a questionable noise that may or may not have been the sound of King's anal methane. While we may never know if he passed gas with Star Jones, we've since received more information to suggest that Larry King is a chronic crop duster:

The CNN rerun of last night's Larry King-Star Jones interview just finished airing — but they cut off the last bit of the tape where Larry King supposedly buttsqueaked. The resourceful Dr. Blogstein, however, grabbed the clip in question. Just as King says, "the tragedy of the Ramseys," you can hear an faint toot (it took us a couple of listens to pinpoint it). The noise could be a fart; it could also just be an emphysema gurgle. We're not sure but, for the sake of Summer Fridays, we're going to go ahead and call it a fart and let you pass the ultimate judgment.

It's come to our attention that in the final moments of Larry King's interview with Star Jones last night, the episode was given a special sign-off: As King was plugging tonight's forthcoming show, he took a pause and, "if you listen reeeeallly carefully," says our source, Ol' Shoulder Blades ripped an ass bomb. Or it certainly sounded like the man had gas, and ten rounds of DVR replays has our informant convinced. Because we're fucking idiots, we don't have last night's telecast recorded, so we can't confirm that Larry King did, in fact, fart at the end of his Star Jones exclusive. Granted, the flatulence could very well have come from Jones herself, what with her obvious gastro-intestinal difficulties. But unless it sounded like a foghorn, Jones is likely innocent.

Because we were out having drinks all evening last night — and, yes, we know: mah nishtanah, etc.? — we missed Liz Taylor on Larry King Live. It's rare you get to see quite so much old-person doddering in one hour of television, at least if you live anywhere north of West Palm, and, indeed, from what we understand the broadcast didn't disappoint. Some highlights, selected by a devoted reader:

Crazy With a Z [fourfour]
Earlier: It's a Gay Gay Gay Gay World: Liza With a Z at the Ziegfeld

We were actually going to do a live-blog of "memoirist" James Frey's appearance last night on Larry King but, if you saw the program, you understand why we couldn't bear to put forth the effort. To put it mildly, it may have been the most uncomfortable, uninformative, painfully banal hour of television to which we've ever been subjected. When he wasn't nervously sipping from his coffee mug every two seconds (surely that thing was empty after 10 minutes), Frey deftly handled hardball questions. For example:

"Ever wonder what dinner-table conversation between Larry King and wife No. 7, country singer Shawn Southwick-King, is like?" asks an Intelligencer item in this week's New York, and the funny is, we have wondered. More than once. Perhaps it's the simple fact she's his seventh wife, perhaps it's the 26-year age difference between them, perhaps it's that he's a cranky old Jew and she's a pert young Mormon. But we've often wondered what the hell they talk about. Thankfully, red-carpet reporter Jada Yuan finally provides the answer: intelligent design!

Every person will have their own most terrifying part of this — perhaps the singing career of a Larry King wife, perhaps the age difference between Larry and the latest wife, perhaps the simple horror of being at event thrown by Jason Binn — but for us it's an easy one: Larry. Just Larry. The meatpacking district is no place for a 71-year-old man.

An LAPD officer used police computers to sell celebrity data to tabloids. Among the records accessed were those of Sharon Stone, Sean Penn, Meg Ryan, Kobe Bryant, O.J. Simpson, Larry King, Drew Barrymore, Cindy Crawford, and Halle Berry. The offers says he accessed the records because he was ordered by his superiors to compile map of VIP residences in LA. (Hey, NYPD: you guys are holding out on us! Where are all of our celebrity addresses?)
Lawsuit accuses LAPD officer of selling celebrity data [AP via BoingBoing]

Tina Brown, former editor of Talk, is reincarnated as host of a series of talk shows for CNBC. Which gives her something to write about in this week's column in the Times. She's been studying her rivals.
· Tim Russert "grills his guests with an amphibious glare and the pointed waving of a surgical pen."
· George Stephanopoulos? "Pretty boy George looks as if he is still doing a kind of spin."
· Tina's favorite is Larry King. She's fascinated by his on-air metabolism, "which combines iron-butt stamina with a toddler-like short attention span."
As for Tina herself, she wonders whether her style will transfer to television. "I got some of my best interviews as a magazine profile writer by being a furtive, watchful presence in a low-cut sweater." The low-cut sweater, at least, works.
America's new talk-show host [Times of London]