What looked like a boring business-related article to us (our limited attention span is a problem, we know) might actually be a rather interesting media development, now that a Defamer Australia tipster has put a few things in perspective for us.

Fairfax Media and Macquarie Media have joined forces to break up Southern Cross Broadcasting in a deal expected to be worth $1.3 billion. Fairfax, owner of The Age, will return to the radio airwaves in Melbourne and Sydney after an absence of almost two decades.

Under the deal, to be announced as early as this morning, Macquarie Media will buy Southern Cross - capitalised at $1.19 billion - to get its Ten Network affiliate stations in regional Queensland, NSW and Victoria, as well as Seven Network affiliates in Darwin and Tasmania.

On completion of the purchase, it will sell to Fairfax the company's metropolitan radio business, including the 2UE and 3AW talkback stations plus talkback and music stations in Brisbane and Perth. The deal comes a month after Fairfax completed its $2.7 billion takeover of Rural Press.

Sources said the deal would also give the newspaper and online operator the Southern Star TV and video production assets, allowing it to add expertise to its expanding online video products, and a satellite music business that provides subscription music channels to pay TV networks Foxtel and Austar.

What does this mean? As our anonymous tipster so wonderfully put it, "Should this buyout succeed, Big Brother will essentially be owned by Fairfax. ... Awesome. However it will mean Fairfax has a 49% ownership of Endemol Southern Star (while it has FULL ownership of the other Southern Star arms). I don't really get business so I don't know why they won't have 50% or nuffin'."

Very interesting indeed!

A NOTE ABOUT TIP OFFS TO DEFAMER AUSTRALIA! - If you've sent something in and not heard anything back from us, don't be disheartened! The embarrassing truth is... we bugger up our email settings "back in the day" and while we can receive email, we're getting nothing but error messages when we try to reply. So rest assured we appreciate and love every bit of feedback and still adore the contributions from you guys, it's just your editor is a fucking idiot. We're arranging for someone to fix it next week though, which is nice news.

This is, frankly, amazing.

Thanks to our beloved UK correspondent Will Fop for the heads up.

We salute HolyMoly for bothering to transcribe P Diddy's entire gut-churning spoken word bit during his performance at the Concert For Diana extravanganza. Prepare a sick bucket and relive the shitfulness...

It starts pretty terribly:
Sometimes in life we lose people that are close to us.
Princess Diana was close to all of us.
She was our princess.
Diana, we miss you.
If you miss Diana, make some noise!

Then gets even worse:
If you've come here to celebrate Diana,
I want you to put your hands in the air and wave from side to side.
She's smiling down on us right now.

Before Diddy starts coming out with this rubbish:
I want you to sing this with me, come on.
Say "I love you, I love you. We miss you, we miss you."
Prince William, Prince Harry, we love you, we respect you.

And finally says possibly the crassest thing ever spoken on a stage:
So beautiful, so graceful, so elegant.
Princess Diana, we'll never forget you.
Take me to the bridge.

What a cunt.

When we heard Molly "Do Yourself A Favour" Meldrum had unleashed a torrent of abuse at Australian Idol judge and inexplicably successful radio "personality" Kylie Sandilands, we were quite excited and thrilled.

After reading the article in the Daily Telegraph about their verbal fisticuffs, we are still happy Kyle copped an earbashing, but listening to the audio of the ill-fated post-Concert For Diana interview makes us kind of wish Molly sounded a little less "Stamos-y" so his brutally honest words could be taken more seriously by the general public.

Radio host and Australian Idol judge Kyle Sandilands was told he was "fat and ugly" and had no talent in a withering attack from music guru Molly Meldrum this morning.

The conversation soon descended into a slanging match between Meldrum and Sandilands, however, with Molly telling Sandilands "you've got no talent and you're fat" and asking "why don't you get off television".

Taking aim at Sandilands' role as a TV talent judge, Meldrum then said: "Your advice on Australian Idol means sweet jack s***."

Molly Meldrum - drunken beacon of truth in a messed up world which incomprehensibly allows Kyle Sandilands to molest the airwaves on a regular basis.

As we first noted back in March, select 7-Eleven's across the States have been magically transformed over the weekend into Kwik-E-Mart's - part of an elaborate promotional tie-in for The Simpsons Movie. There's a Burbank location at the corners of Olive and Verdugo, where a Flickr user has lovingly documented all the WooHoo! Blue Vanilla Squishees and Sprinklicious donuts that will be gobbled up in the days to come by die-hard Simpsons fanatics who have long cursed their lack of yellow skin. LAist, meanwhile, has a photo of their resident Apu-alike, Golam, whose sunshiny smile belies his familiarity with armed-robbery protocol.

• Kwik-E-Mart [Flicker]

One happy byproduct of John Stamos's recent Australian escapades - including an unhinged KAK visit in which the actor waxed incoherently about the size of a Tele journalist's genitalia and Princess Diana's death - is that the ER star's deformed belly button has ceased to be the most interesting about him. Still, the series of discombobulated media appearances Down Under seem to have done more bad than good for Stamos's profile, and now the actor wants everyone to know that the real culprit was just some prescription sleep-aids. From TVGuide.com:

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We know we left many of you hanging Friday, after the personal delivery of a Scary Lawyer letter heralded an all-time low in Spears Family mother-daughter relations. (That the paparazzi footage happened to kick start a hot, new jean-thong trend among fans offered little consolation.) Realising how traumatic such a public estrangement from her cherished, elder meal-ticket daughter might be, Lynne Spears had some comforting words for concerned fans, via People:

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Today, as you may or may not realise, is Lindsay Lohan's 21st birthday, an occasion which, under normal circumstances, would likely have been celebrated in Las Vegas, where the actress's passage into legal-drinking womanhood would have been commemorated by the filling of the Mandalay Bay's lazy river with hundreds of thousands of gallons of top-shelf vodka provided by a loyal corporate sponsor.

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The Wachowskis are no strangers to set mishaps, dating all the way back to Bound, where their obsessive pursuit of girl-on-girl sex-scene perfectionism resulted in a slew of bruised groins and hicky-related injuries for lead actresses Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. Today comes news of carnage on the Speed Racer set - their live action homage to the 1960s anime classic - where a chimpanzee has reportedly bitten a human co-star's hand. PETA has responded by sending a letter to superproducer Joel Silver, pleading with him to replace the animal with a CGI version, which tend to be far more agreeable and less prone to trainer-delivered beatings. Reports The Scoop:

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Sure, you may have enjoyed three-time Biggest Movie Star in the World titleholder Shia LaBeouf's fine work in Disturbia and Holes, but how much do you really know about the up-and-coming superstar handpicked by both Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg to be chased around their movie sets by giant fucking robots and old fucking archaeologists, respectively? Did you know that his unusual name, the bane of copy editors everywhere, means "Thank God for beef?," or that one of his parents was a pot-smoking hippie clown whose act once prominently featured a trained chicken?

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Over at the Huffington Post, celebrity blogger and self-described conscientious TV objector ("I need to admit that I don't watch TV ... have never seen a single episode of Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, American Idol ... well, you get the idea." Oh, we do, former star of Anything But Love!) Jamie Lee Curtis describes how her life was changed forever upon discovering the hottest trend* in end-of-Western-civilization-as-we-know-it-television, the elimination-based reality show:

There I was trying to celebrate with my friend when my eye kept being pulled to the set on the wall. There were some chefs on the screen, all standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, at attention, as a panel of people (who are they?) told them mostly bad things about, I assume, their food.

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With the highly lucrative days of (allegedly!) supplying Charlie Sheen with enough trannie valets to keep his fleet of luxury automobiles erotically parallel parked at all times long behind her, erstwhile whoremonger-to-the-Hollywood-stars Heidi Fleiss must find increasingly creative ways to leverage her unique brand for new lines of business. The latest, the cleverly named Nevada laundromat Dirty Laundry (it seems that Clean Clothes for Dirty, Dirty Sluts was already registered by a nearby competitor), should keep Fleiss solvent until she can find a place to park the trailer for her long-planned, lady-servicing Stud Farm brothel. [Fifteen Sorkin bonus points are awarded to anyone who remembered that Parumph is where the Studio 60 gang once found themselves imprisoned by a judge who taught the haughty city-folk an important lesson about prejudging rubes from the Nevada desert.]

· Rehab is easy; developing the upper body strength necessary to accurately portray a murdered stripper is hard. · John Travolta would like you to know that there was nothing gay whatsoever about his dressing in drag for Hairspray, and even if it was a little gay, his incredibly tolerant religion would be OK with it. · "Criss Angel's wife says the magic has gone from their marriage and she now wants to make him vanish from her life." Also, she is unhappy with her estranged husband's "repeated attempts to saw rumoured new girlfriend Cameron Diaz in half with his penis". · Hey, unicorns! On the JesusPhone!

· Deciding that their Ritalin-addled viewers' comedy needs are not being met by episodes of My Super Sweet Sixteen and Yo Momma, MTV is developing three American Pie/Ferris Bueller's Day Off-inspired movies to air on the network. [Variety] · Richard "Shaft" Roundtree joins the cast of Speed Racer, hopes to avoid the vicious chimp attacks that have plagued other actors on the set. [THR] · In an effort to keep its leadership intact for the world-ending, multi-guild strike about to wipe Hollywood off the face of the Earth, the DGA elects Michael Apted to a third term as President. [Variety] · Despite having Sunday night's most watched show in Some Famous People Sing Nice Songs for the Dead Princess, NBC loses the primetime race to CBS. [THR] · Shrek the Third takes the overseas box office crown with $US69.6 million, but Transformers still managed to pull in $US34.7 million. [Variety]

This Monday morning is no less painful than any other on the calendar, but at least you only have to survive 48 hours before you're rewarded with a day off. Cling to the weekend box office numbers as you try to make it through the excruciating two days that stand between you and illegal firework displays, backyard barbecues, and egregious midweek drunkenness: 1. Ratatouille - $US47.227 million Another summer, another critically beloved animated feature that tops the box office on its opening weekend, extending Pixar's years-long consecutive hits streak. But now that the studio has proven it can push to number one a movie with a premise as theoretically unsavory as filthy, health-code flouting rodents running amok in the kitchen of a French restaurant, they'll seek a challenge that will properly tax their unparalleled hitmaking talents: development has begun on Crabs, the story of some misunderstood, but ultimately lovable, genital lice making their home in the overgrown pubic hair of a Hungarian prostitute. Summer 2009 opening weekend gross: $US53 million.

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Last night we caught bits and pieces of Concert For Diana, the feel good "celebration of life" which featured the voices of Prince William AND Prince Harry (we can't remember the last time we heard their voices, but we're pretty sure they wouldn't have broken yet), footage of the young royals getting jiggy to Nelly Furtado, as well as countless musical superstars performing SMASH HIT after SMASH HIT! Like Status Quo! And Fergie Black Eyed Peas singing a song we recognised solely because it is Lindsay Lohan's private MySpazz site's profile song!

While the entire concert was obviously amazing and wonderful and representative of everything good in the world, Diddy's performance left us feeling a little nauseous, especially when he did a spoken word part during "I'll Be Missing You".

Diddy - (breathlessly earnest voice) "So beautiful! So graceful! So elegant! Princess Diana, we'll never forget you. TAKE ME TO THE BRIDGE!"

The latter part of his moving tribute to Diana leading our viewing companion to yell at the television "It's too late, she took the tunnel!"

We also thought the ads that followed Diddy's performance (White Lady Funerals, then a commercial warning against the dangers of speeding) were in marvellous taste. Applause! Applause!

We hope this is not the end of tribute concerts for deceased stars. We'd like to see -

Concert For Kurt!
Concert For Freddie!
Concert For Big Kev!

We are quite prepared to get our hands dirty, particularly for the latter suggestion.

We're still a good six weeks out from pretending to care about the Emmys, but LAT Gold Derby blogger Tom O'Neil spent some time this weekend kidnapping TV Academy voters as they left a Beverly Hills Hilton screening of... Read More »