To celebrate Katie Couric's first night on the job at the CBS Evening News, her new bosses arranged for her to present a sneak preview of the long-awaited, heavily guarded first photographs of suspiciously unseen celebrity infant Suri Cruise. The internets, of course, were already hard at work reproducing the images, which won't be officially available until Vanity Fair hits the streets tomorrow, posting stills and video of the pictures shown on the Couric broadcast minutes ahead of CBS's sanctioned stories.

Either the emotional trauma of Tom Cruise's abrupt separation from longtime partner Paramount made him suddenly introspective about how the couch-pounding, psychiatry-slamming antics of the last year might have negatively affected other people in his crazycentric orbit, or his PR team finally convinced him to do some long-overdue damage control to save what's left of his image, but the star is finally showing a heretofore unseen humbler, apologetic side. Earlier today, he sent a lovely flower arrangement to new The View host and longtime platonic stalker Rosie O'Donnell to ask her forgiveness for his continuing failure to become a lesbian, but even that touching gesture was far overshadowed by his recent, contrite housecall to his recovering street-drug-addict nemesis, Brooke Shields:

Having apparently decided that the same absurd levels of secrecy employed in keeping Suri Cruise unseen by the public during the four months since her alleged birth should be applied to preventing the curious from gazing upon the first photographs of the baby a minute before their planned publication, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter will order security guards to gun down in cold blood any malefactor who would attempt to leak the precious, highly-anticipated, Annie Leibovitz-lensed images. (Our rendering of what the photos might look like is presented here once again for your fresh horror.) Jossip alleges:

Daniel Edwards, the pop-culture-obsession skewering/exploiting artist behind the sculpted representation of a crowning Sean Preston Spears that inflicted emotional wounds that might never fully heal, has unveiled his greatest achievement yet: Beating Tom Cruise's suspiciously delayed, baby-related product to market with a bronzed version of Suri's "first poop" that will be simultaneously auctioned for charity on eBay and displayed under glass in a Brooklyn art gallery, which he claims finally proves both the possibly imaginary offspring's existence and its health. Unfortunately, neither the image nor the press release reveals the dimensions of the petrified diaper-snake, leaving us to wonder if it was constructed to a scale that would properly reflect the waste produced by a mutant, 50-foot-tall infant.

People reports that Tom Cruise, having recently earned a certificate as a Level 5 Roadside Assistance Tech after weeks of intensive night school classes at the Celebrity Centre, put his newfound skillset to use this weekend by pulling over to check on the victims of a fender bender on the 101:

Paparazzi agency X17's photographers just so happened to be circling Tom Cruise's compound in a helicopter when their telephoto-lens-equipped cameras began capturing hundreds of pictures of the baby-concealing actor's home, some of which seemed to contain barely discernible images of ghostly, imprisoned fianc e Katie Holmes and suspiciously unseen offspring Suri. Of course, at such a distance it's impossible to tell if the agency photographed Holmes and her daughter or one of the dozens of mother-and-baby decoy sets placed in various windows around the house, where they can easily draw the attention of airborne spies while the real Katie and Suri relax in the comfort of their subterranean nursery-bunker, watching their Baby Scientology Genius videos in peace.

The interminable, months-long SuriWatch saga may soon be coming to an end. Page Six reports that Vanity Fair has won a fierce bidding war with both Celebrity magazine and the Sears Portrait Studio for the rights to take the first images of the suspiciously unseen offspring of Tom Cruise and indentured incubator Katie Holmes, which VF will debut this fall in a spread photographed by legendary celebrity soft-lighter Annie Leibovitz. We hope that Leibovitz will elevate the shoot above the simplistic, new-parents-basking-in- the-miraculous-glow-of-their-loin-fruit concept used for the public introduction of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, and perhaps even take this opportunity to poignantly reinforce the power of the couple's utterly unbreakable, contractual billion-year partnership by revisiting her iconic work for Rolling Stone.

Former, homophonic Tom Cruise publicity partner Penelope Cruz is the latest to join the growing list of former business associates, Celebrity Centre detox-sauna buddies, and other trusted members of the actor's inner circle of super friends willing to bear witness to the corporeality of suspiciously unseen, possibly mythical infant Suri. While cornered on the red carpet in London, Cruz extolled the Miracle Baby's beauty:

Always eager to rise to the challenges of the incredibly competitive gossip rag marketplace, Us Weekly attempts to get a leg up on People by preparing for the very real possibility that our first look at Suri Cruise won't arrive for 20 years, hiring a forensic imaging specialist to visualize what the suspiciously unseen infant may look like two decades hence. Unsurprisingly, the magazine's "expert" subscribes to a more optimistic vision of the future than we do; in our estimation, the already 50-foot-tall baby will have matured to a full 200 feet by the time she exits her teens, and will live in a airport hangar-sized bunker that long-suffering father Tom has built beneath his compound. (She will, however, be just as hot as she appears in Us Weekly's mock-up, due to the quality of the DNA selected by Cruise's talented team of geneticists before their giantism-inducing mishap.)

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:

Tom Cruise Celebrity Centre pal and freelance OTR III Infant Actuality Verificationist Leah Remini has once again acted as peacemaker between the Suri-embargoing Cruise camp and the glossy magazines desperate for any shred of proof of the possibly mythical offspring's existence, upgrading her claim to Us Weekly to have seen the child to an intimation that she's had physical contact with the tyke for People:

Perhaps finally sensing that their deeply bizarre withholding of all physical evidence of newborn daughter Suri might be inducing widespread skepticism about the baby's existence, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes dispatched Scientologist pal and OTR III Infant Actuality Verificationist Leah Remini to enturbulate the suppressive offspring-deniers at Us Weekly with counfoundingly vague descriptions of the child she claims to have seen:

It's been fascinating (to us, at least) to watch the paparazzi/glossy industrial complex track Katie Holmes' every public movement since her trip to perpetual fiance/billion-year enslaver Tom Cruise's Telluride home the last week or so, a jaunt that did absolutely nothing to quiet speculation that Suri Cruise was ever more than a baby unicorn for the tabloid age or a beachball lashed to the onetime actress's midsection. The electronic homing device that paparazzi agency X17 slipped into well-known caffeine addict Holmes' coffee allowed their photographers to locate the peripatetic enigma-incubator on her Monday return to L.A., as they follow up the weekend's possible stroller sighting with some pictures of Holmes fleeing to the only place in the city where she truly feels safe, Barney's New York. The site furthermore passes along a rumor that the trip to her Retail Fortress of Solitude was motivated by an upsetting order that she hire a team of Scientology-approved nannies to tend to the still-unseen Suri, a bout of defiance we're sure she abandoned when she realized that she probably shouldn't lose any sleep over who pretends to babysit her imaginary offspring, despite how real it all feels sometimes.

While falling far short of obtaining images of the world's most suspiciously unseen baby, paparazzi agency X17 thinks it's captured photographic proof of possibly imaginary infant Suri Cruise's existence by snapping a picture of a stroller in the shadows behind Tom Cruise's Telluride compound. A blurry, long-distance image of what may or may not be Suri's brightly canopied conveyance (yellow circle) hardly seems evidence of anything more than a Team Cruise drone's ability to shop in a baby store; in fact, we're inclined to think that the more easily identifiable cooler (red circle) is more compelling confirmation of the Miracle Baby's actuality; it's much easier to imagine Katie Holmes placing her alleged daughter inside the plastic box and wheeling her into town for a Starbucks run, secure in the knowledge that a cooler's insulated walls can't be penetrated by even the most advanced of paparazzi technology.

· What will the photos of Suri be worth? Not much! What do Tom and Katie have to say about anything? Not much! We really wanted to complete the Rule of Three with these "not much" links, but we're just too confused by this one to think up a way to finish the trifecta.
· What if the Banker from "Deal or No Deal" were Pat O'Brien? Everything in the world would be a little better, that's what.
Just a question: If we'd titled the earlier post today "Dead Buttons," would that have been in poor taste?
You know what? It is kind of funny when Chevy Chase calls his daughter a whore.
· The fictional character that Paris Hilton has created has decided to go on whore-hiatus (whoreatus?) for a year. So if you run into her at a club, don't buy her any drinks. She's not putting out.

Yesterday, Us Weekly's blog teased the magazine's story on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' recent trip to Telluride, where Holmes revealed to a reporter that possibly nonexistent offspring Suri was "doing great!" [exuberance hers], a brief status update meant to reinforce the public's belief that the baby actually exists. The complete Us story provides some quotes from Telluride residents who claim to have seen (or know someone who claims to have seen) the possibly mythical creature that has captured a skeptical country's imagination:

Tom Cruise's unwillingness to build a replica of an upscale shopping street in his Telluride compound has come back to haunt him, as caffeine-addicted incubator-unit Katie Holmes was beset by an Us Weekly reporter during her contractually mandated, bi-monthly Starbucks run, then promptly violated Team Cruise's total embargo on releasing any information about the couple's suspiciously unseen, possibly imaginary child. Reports Us:

[Note: UPDATE follows after the jump. Please read the entire post before e-mailing in helpful corrections.] A couple of amateur document-authentic specialists (read: conspiracy-minded readers with web browsers and free time) found something potentially interesting in the Suri Cruise birth certificate that TMZ.com published yesterday, which had already set our tinfoil helmets vibrating because of the previously noted irregularities regarding its late filing, signing by a Cruise "friend," and certification by someone who apparently hadn't even seen the alleged baby. A sample of our freelance research team's efforts:

In the absence of photographic evidence that would dispel rumors of Suri Cruise's possibly mythical status, TMZ.com does its part to prove her existence by digging into the public record and retrieving the suspiciously unseen infant's birth certificate. Unsurprisingly, not even the routine filing of a simple document could escape the weirdness that has dogged the Cruise camp since Suri's alleged conception, as TMZ reports that the birth certificate was filed 20 days after the birth, that the birth was officially certified by a "friend" (read: two-hundred-dollar-a-year Celebrity Centre gift shop clerk), not by Cruise or rent-to-own incubator Kate Holmes, and signed by a nurse who "was not in the delivery room and did not see the baby." Perhaps the most distressing of the certificate's irregularities is Tom Cruise's sole occupation of the "Father of Child" field, a selfish credit-hogging that ignores the tireless work of the team of dozens of genetic technicians and DNA donors that helped bring the Miracle Baby Project to fruition.

We have a crucial piece of advice for Russell Crowe in the wake of his announcement that he's had another son: Go immediately to the People or Us Weekly and have the child's picture taken. This is not to avoid the same kind of suspicion that has befallen Tom Cruise for his refusal to appear in public with or release photos of his possibly imaginary child; no one thinks Crowe could be bothered to stage such a stunt. Rather, we think it's wise to create a public record of his infant's likeness, lest a desperate Cruise snatch the baby while the Crowes slumber (think an elaborate heist in the vein of the first Mission: Impossible, but instead of being suspended upside down over a computer, the hero is carefully lowered over the crib, careful to avoid the motion-sensitive mobile guarding the baby) for use in a photo shoot of his own, dismissing with a terse "Whatever!" anyone bold enough to ask him, "Wait a minute, isn't Suri supposed to be a girl?"