Our favourite nutjob expat musician Sia (remember her dog escapades?) has a new videoclip to accompany her tune "Buttons" and it is both a bit mental and also fucking great.

Enjoy.

"Actor" Daniel Baldwin, aka Alec Badwin's less successful younger brother - reckons "shady" figures encourage celebrities to develop life-threatening and financial-crippling afflictions and addictions.

In case you're not aware, Danny Baldwin has spent the past 18 years battling a cocaine addiction, and has been in and out of rehab for nine years. Take that Lindsay! You've got a long way to go yet!

On Larry King Live this week, he blamed "parasites" for his problems and those of every other immature, self-indulgent drug-addicted celebrity in Hollywood.

"People that live in the public eye are approached more readily by those trying to enable them and trying to help them.

I have a friend who plays in the NBA. He had a gambling problem and the hotels in Las Vegas would send their jet for him when he was playing, saying 'by the way, sir, if you want we'll fly you back,'and pit stop him in Vegas so that he would gamble.

A lot of similar things happen to celebrities because people want to come up and give them a bag of cocaine. They want them to come and hang out with them."

Right. So what he's really saying is that celebrities are all suffering from a disability - they're physically unable to say "fuck off."

PS - We don't know anyone who would readily hand over a bag of cocaine to a celebrity. That stuff costs a bomb! We plebs don't make enough money to be throwing party favours around like that.

Now that JK Rowling's last Harry Potter books is out, the world's richest author is already planning ways to keep the money coming in. Apparently she's planning to pen an encyclopedia about the seven Harry Potter books and the movie franchise.

The British author has just released the seventh and final Potter book, Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows, but she plans to wrap up the series with an A to Z account of all things Potter.

She says, "There's always been bits that I knew about characters that didn't make the final cuts because they weren't that relevant."

After that, we can expect a series of six books that details the slightly less exciting things that happened in between the time periods covered in each of the original seven books, plus a Harry Potter biography and then a tell-all memoir from Hermione, which will be followed by a Hermione spin-off series.

As part of our ongoing inexplicable coverage of all things Jason Donovan, we'd like to draw your attention to the following story.

Singer Jason Donovan stepped down from his stage role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, because he feared he would end up like ageing British crooner Sir Cliff Richard. The former Neighbours actor and '80s pop hunk enjoyed his time as the lead role in Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's London theatre production of the biblical tale during the early 1990s, but felt he had to quit before he became typecast. He says, "The adulation and the money were incredible. But I didn't want to be a new Cliff Richard in a satin suit any more. I didn't want to stay complacent on one level and not be individual. "I want to do different things in my life, and I don't want to be perceived as the one character. God bless Cliff Richard but that was where I was going."

It's rather sweet that Jason thought he'd be typecast as Joseph of all people, especially when the majority of the theatre audience watching him strut his stuff on the boards at the time simply thought that Scott Robinson had developed a sudden taste for haute couture and musical theatre, and split their attention between watching Jim's youngest son belt out the tunes and keeping a vigilant eye on the side of the stage in the vain hope Charlene, Mike, or at the very bloody least Plain Jane Superbrain might be waiting in the wings ready to make a special cameo appearance.

In the middle of a rather sad tale regarding the suicide of Kerry Packer's ex-mistress Carol Lopes in smh.com.au - you'd never catch an Operating Thetan Level IV indulging their inner infidelity demon, now would you James? - are two particularly revolting passages which have led to all in Defamer Australia headquarters swearing off anything horizontal for life (or "4 LYF" as the kids say).

Apart from the media baron's "notorious" love of prostitutes, Barry recounts Packer's stream of mistresses given apartments and found jobs, with Packer footing the bill. After Packer died in December 2005 the Herald revealed he had transferred property shares worth at least $10 million to his long-time mistress Julie Trethowan.

This reference to Kerry Packer's extremely randy ways and hooker-dipping habits makes us feel a bit queasy for some reason.

Gerald Stone, in his recent book Who Killed Channel 9?, recounted that Packer divided the final days of his life between Trethowan and Ros, his wife of more than 40 years. He also revealed that in his 30s Packer had a brief, torrid affair with his then employee Ita Buttrose, who became a magazine editor.

Ita Buttrose. Kerry Packer. Torrid. Affair. Kerry. Ita. Sex.

Kerry Packer's head.

Kerry Packer's head while he's receiving head.

Ita Buttrose.

Kerry Packer.

Inside her.

Affair.

(rocks back and forth in traumatised manner)

Gotta love it when young cadet journos get the greenlight to do a Page 7 story on something, like, totally Gen-Y.

When Adriana Saw broke up with her Sydneysider boyfriend of 11 months, she decided to get back at him - and his city.

The 23-year-old took her modern day revenge and started a "Melbourne is better than Sydney" group on social networking website Facebook.

Started as an in-joke between her friends, word of mouth and Facebook's booming popularity has seen the group swell to more than 6000 members in four months.

Oh god, like, that's like, totally not a news story, but clearly NEWS.com.au is desperate for traffic and will resort to anything to get more office drones commenting on its articles. And what better way to send the server into meltdown that by trotting out the old "Melbourne V Sydney" chestnut.

Incidentally, other Facebook groups we love are "If You Can't Differentiate Between 'Your' and 'You're' You Deserve To Die" and "The Daily Telegraph is Only Good for Wiping One's Arse When There's No Toilet Paper" *

(* We just made that one up, but if someone wants to create it, we will totally join!)

Thirty years after dropping out of college to form Queen, Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics.

May is due to submit his thesis -- Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud -- to supervisors at Imperial College London within the next two weeks.

Jebus Christ. Does that not sound like the drug and alcohol affected ramblings of [insert Woodstock-era muso here]? In actually sounds like a lyric from a Wolfmother sing. Or even like something Phil Jameison might have dreamed up during his best* years.

Who'd have thought... all this time we assumed magical mashrooms and super strength weed were the blame for giving us the most bizzarre song names in the histry of music -- now it turns out that perhaps science was to blame.

May was an astrophysics student at Imperial College in 1970 when he joined Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor to form Queen.

He says his interest in the stars is perfectly compatible with his musical pursuits. "I enjoy having different facets to my life," he said.

But not, we assume, different hairstyles.

*quite clearly not his best years.

· Music round-up: British India in WA; Kid Kenobi at Room 680; Gotye at the Metro (check out his Heart's A Mess vid).
· Witness Gandalf/Magneto/Sir Leigh Teabing, aka Ian McKellen, in the Royal Shakespeare Company's only Australian performances of King Lear at the State Theatre, Melbourne.
· Engage with journos David Marr and Leigh Sales, author of Detainee 002: the Case Of David Hicks, at the Byron Bay Writer's Festival before the place is infested with music devotees for Splendour in the Grass next weekend.

[Note: The above video may be NSFW depending on your employer's policy regarding adult videos fetishising fat men eating produce.] During a recent appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien to promote I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, Conan surprised Adam Sandler by replacing the clip he had set up with a scene from Feed The Bears, a specialty adult film catering to the "encourager" scene: i.e., men who get off on the fattening-up of other plus-sized men. (The lusty, apple-devouring sequence in question is above.) Now, the movie's producers are mulling their legal options, claiming NBC used the footage without their permission. We're hopeful both parties might find a workable solution, however, as the impressive work of the Feed The Bears players certainly deserves to be seen by a wider audience, and sits comfortably along such other Late Night niche fetish material as HornyManatee.com's "man-on-manatee" sex.

• Conan O'Brien Airs Gay Porn Clip [AVN via Fleshbot]

· Enjoy this trailer for I Know Who Killed My Career, starring everyone's favourite self-sabotaging actress. · Wondering how that SCRAM bracelet works? Here you go. · A pretty interesting study of movie posters reveals that the dirtier a film gets, the redder and blacker the colour palette of its one-sheet becomes. [via BoingBoing] · Trust us on this one: you really don't want to follow this link unless you have an abnormally high tolerance for images of Tom Cruise dancing. · Ah, so that's what Jimmy Kimmel's ad for Matt Damon meant. Now we get it. [via WOW Report]

While yesterday afternoon's Lohan FuckageWatch focused exclusively on the legal ramifications of the regrettable incidents of early Morning morning, today we plunge the business end of our ice-cold Fuckometer into the haunches of her career to discover the degree of professional damage the actress may have suffered following her arrest. Today's NY Times liberates troubled-talent managing legend Bernie Brillstein from the "In Case Of Emergency Need Of Sound-Bite Concerning Self-Destructive Stars, Break Glass" container in which he patiently waits for a new crisis, and is repaid with this money quote about the Lohan situation:

"I hope they put her in jail for as long as they can," said Bernie Brillstein, whose company has represented John Belushi and Chris Farley. "Maybe she'll realise how serious it is. I believe she's uninsurable. And when you're uninsurable in this town, you're done."

Indeed, there is virtually no word in the industry invoked with such hushed reverence as "uninsurable," a label that can sentence a once-hot individual to the Phantom Zone of Unacceptable Liability for the duration of his or her best earning years. But fortunately for Lohan, her handlers seem to have foreseen such a potential crisis, and have adequately diversified her talent portfolio; should the actress find herself unable to find movie work while this ugly, overblown DUI mess fades from the memory of studio actuaries, she can always use the downtime to devote more attention to her promising, if recently neglected, music career.

• Lohan's Arrest Spells Trouble for 2 Movies [NY Times]

If there were any lingering doubts as to whether Britney Spears was a pop star significantly past the verge of a nervous breakdown, they were answered at her now infamous OK! magazine cover shoot, in which the celeb glossy - having witnessed their subject perform a number of highly inappropriate acts, including the defiling of designer-wear with a combination of fried chicken grease and lapdog droppings--was forced to compromise their "nice" editorial voice by splashing the unflattering photos across their pages. Spears' former pimp/fertiliser Kevin Federline is now reportedly seeking full custody of his children:

A longtime Britney pal says, "[A former Spears assistant] gave specific instances where Brit couldn't handle having the kids. Kevin was angry at Britney for putting his kids in jeopardy and immediately phoned his lawyer to investigate the claims further. He couldn't believe she had gotten so out of control."

read more »

It took five soul-deadening episodes, but Bravo's Hey Paula finally offered something by way of quality entertainment on this week's show, when unstable protagonist Paula Abdul appeared to have been relieved of her producing duties on the Bratz movie, the most hotly anticipated release of the summer (among RealDoll fetishists). Despite an amazingly convincing meltdown, in which she openly questioned the existence of God and berated her staff for daring to speak as she tried "to tell a goddamned story," Abdul now claims that the entire sequence was concocted by dastardly reality show editors. Paula wasn't fired - she fired them!

"She was not only taping "American Idol three days at week, she was also filming her Bravo reality series Hey Paula! five days a week as well. In addition, she was in the process of not only expanding her successful QVC jewellery line but also coming up with the first scent in her new perfume line "Sexy Thoughts."

read more »

We realise with all the DUI and coke-in-pants excitement of recent days, it's all too easy to lose track of Hollywood's less selfish and better-adjusted luminaries. For example, we failed to investigate what the world's most famous orphan-collecting, bee-stung-lipped beauty, her aging pretty-boy lover, and their multi-ethnic brood did over their summer vacation. Thanks to the indiscretion of a French amusement centre owner, however, the details of their afternoon bowling and air hockey adventures remain a mystery no longer:

Le Palace Vert's owner Patrick Bernard tells PEOPLE that once they arrived, the Jolie-Pitts, Pearl and the four children (Maddox, 5, Pax-Thien, 3, and Zahara, 2, and Adam Pearl, 5) hit the lanes.

read more »

· Disney becomes the first major studio to kowtow to the anti-smoking lobby's crusade against the innocence-corrupting depiction of smoking in films, banning the super-fun, status-conferring activity of enjoying a delicious cigarette from its family films bearing their flagship brand. They'll also "discourage" their Touchstone and Miramax productions from showing the act unless, of course, shooting an actor languidly puffing away on a sexy-stick somehow enhances the vaguely dangerous appeal of their character . [THR] · As previously rumoured, Jim Carrey signs on to star in the Warner Bros. comedy Yes Man, the story of a guy who "aims to change his life by saying yes to absolutely everything that comes his way" burned off the easy joke about how he's choosing his roles these days), which he hopes to shoot before disappearing into the parts of nearly every character in A Christmas Carol. [Variety] · Because we must: Variety dares to ask, "Could Lindsay Lohan's troubles affect career?" [Variety] · Woo-hoo, indeed: Fox has won back the URL thesimpsonsmovie.com from a cybersquatter who was using the address to drive visitors to a site "that included sexually explicit depictions of several characters from The Simpsons," a decision which now forces fans to find graphic images of Chief-Wiggum-on-Comic-Book-Guy action on their own. [THR] · Beware, comic fans, for the TV networks and studios have colonized this year's Comic-Con. Telling quote from a Warner Bros. TV marketing exec: "It's not just about fans of comic books. There are fans there of all kinds of entertainment. And these are people who communicate what they like through blogs and the Internet." [Variety]

When not perfecting his pursuit of the anaconda-piledriving and scrotum-stapling arts, The Ringer star Johnny Knoxville enjoys mounting elaborate pranks: Who could forget, for example, the WeHo billboard featuring the image of Jackass Number Two director luring vacationers to a fictional gay cruise line. ("Sailors board me now!" the fake signage beckoned.) In keeping with that proud tradition, when Knoxville learned his best binge-drinking buddy Luke Wilson would be visiting Malibu's corporate celebrity-clusterfuck cabana, the Polaroid Beach House, he made special arrangements for his arrival. From Page Six:

LUKE Wilson had to change his cellphone number this weekend, thanks to an annoying prank by his pal Johnny Knoxville.

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When undisclosed circumstances of a personal nature prevented I Know Who Killed Me star Lindsay Lohan from fulfilling her promotional duties on the Tonight Show yesterday, the program's harried bookers turned to chameleon actor Rob Schneider, whose seamless transformation into the troubled starlet was so convincing that the studio audience seemed to have no idea that anything was amiss. Meanwhile, an embattled, post-arrest Lohan, beset on all sides by those willing to believe every lie spewed by the publicity-hungry Santa Monica Police Department before hearing her side of the story, reached out to the last fully adequate person in this accursed town: Access Hollywood b.f.f. Billy Bush. Her Blackberried words, as always, will move you:

When Billy e-mailed Lohan asking if everything was OK and if there was anything she wanted him to get out there for her, she responded, "Yes. I am innocent... did not do drugs they're not mine. I was almost hit by my assistant Tarin's mom. I appreciate everyone giving me my privacy."

read more »

As if ABC president Steve McPherson's apparent willingness to scrap with NBC's Ben Silverman [Ed.note - Have an intern lay down $US200 on Silverman going down in the second round. Dude's got a glass jaw, I know it.] wasn't enough fun for a single day of TCA panels, the network's Cavemen event managed to generate still more excitement, as some of the assembled critics confronted the show's producers about how the pre-troubled, primetime-paradigm-shifting sitcomfomercial race-parable might be construed as insensitive in the way it appears focused on hilariously deconstructing the stereotypes of just a single group. Reports TV Week.com's TCA blog:

The show is supposed to explore race relations by the trials and tribulations of the cavemen characters, but some critics say all the "Cavemen" stereotypes - athleticism, sexually prowess, laziness, etc. - remind them of one race's stereotypes in particular. Critics ask the panel if "Cavemen" is actually a show about African Americans. "We never saw them as a stand in for any one group," says executive producer Josh Gordon.

read more »

Since there's nothing like a burgeoning feud between two of the most powerful men in television to enliven a seemingly endless string of Television Critics Association-generated reports about the coming Fall season, we're delighted to note that ABC president Steve McPherson has come out swinging about newly appointed NBC co-chairman/chime-bearer/rock-star Ben Silverman, whom McPherson apparently felt was a little less than honest in discussing his high-profile adoption of Grey's Anatomy orphan Isaiah Washington and in the way he pleaded ignorance of the bloody execucide of predecessor Kevin Reilly that cleared the path for Silverman to take control of the Peacock. TVGuide.com relates McPherson's comments about the Isaiah situation:

Silverman told reporters at his July 16 session with the Television Critics Association that he had begun talking with Washington "before he became available" and said he was shocked when ABC decided to let him go. "When he told me he was available I was like, 'You are? Wait, I don't understand. What do you mean? You're a huge star on a star television show.'" he said. "I don't quite understand what had gone on there."

read more »

Disturbed by recent Phil Spector trial testimony by "star" defence witness Punkin Pie Laughlin that his alleged snubbing of Lana Clarkson at a party had somehow driven the actress to suicide, Transformers director Michael Bay took time out from the Tokyo leg of his Giant Fucking Robots Are Coming world tour yesterday to clarify the spurious claims about his fauxteurial power over life and death. Reports the LAT:

"It never happened," he said in a telephone interview from Japan. "Wouldn't it be a big moment in one's life if you saw someone at a party, and two days later she was killed? Life's made of memories, and that would be a big memory."

read more »

Later today, angel-faced actor Matt Damon, his knees still lightly bruised from his humble reception of the gift of Grauman's immortality, will receive a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, an honour in no way connected to the imminent opening of The Bourne Ultimatum, in theatres August 3rd. As we all know by know, this special occasion demands the purchase of ads in the trade papers by the studios, agencies, and other interested parties wanting to maintain relationships with the honouree, so today the likes of Universal, Endeavor, and Jimmy Kimmel (actual text: "Dear Matt, Congratulations on the star and sorry we ran out of time. We'll try to squeeze you in soon. Your pal, Jimmy. P.S. This ad cost me $US8,512") have lavished their compulsory love upon the pages of Variety and THR. One unexpected tribute, however, is the quarter-pager taken out by Damon's beloved Red Sox; presumably, should less frequently employed creative partner and Fenway Park ubiquity Ben Affleck ever receive his own star, the team will spring for a two-page spread to thank him for so visibly filling the seats near their home dugout during his downtime. [Ad via Digital Variety]

• Previously: Clooney, Pitt, And Damon Achieve Hollywood Tourist Trap Immortality [Defamer]