Gordon Sloan, best known for being both the first male Big Brother housemate to impress the nation with his "natural gifts" (see also Saxon from Series Three, Dean from Series Five) and flying to Baghdad a couple of years after he left Dreamworld to act as part of a "human shield protest", died twelve days ago in China under mysterious circumstances.

Says NineMSN -

Sloan, who starred in the first series of the reality show in 2001, died at 1pm (AEST) yesterday at a city hospital. ninemsn understands the 34-year-old architect was admitted on September 1 and was in a coma when he died. Sources told ninemsn drugs were suspected in the death and that Sloan might have taken an overdose or been deliberately drugged by another person.

Known as "Flash Gordon" and "Donkey Boy" during his time in the Big Brother house, Mr Sloan was evicted after 35 days.

...

Reflecting on his time in the house, Sloan told a Big Brother fan site he did not consider himself famous. "Fame is a word given to people who've overachieved through natural talent and hard work, and gained the respect and admiration of firstly their peer group, then the world," he said. "We are not famous or talented. We are popular by exposure so TV networks can sell furniture and breakfast radio gets its sound bites!"

As we reported yesterday, Amy's been seen out and about at Kelly Osbourne's stage debut in Chicago, with a very sore looking finger - in fact, if we do say so ourselves, it looks like it would produce a satisfying amount of pus needs medical attention.

But the best part of all this is that it's sent the British rags into punning overdrive. From the Mirror:

Amy, digit hurt?

Amy goes to see Chicag-owww

Anyway, it's not all shits and giggles in Winegums world, with Amy's less press happy mother Janis telling Saint Victoria Newton that she no longer recognises her own daughter.

"She's lost herself. We're not talking about my Amy. It's not someone I recognise. She has become her own stage creation."

· Music Roundup: Welshmen Funeral For A Friend rock the east coast; Evermore at the ANU Bar in Canberra; the Spazzys at Revolver, Melbourne (live on Channel Ten above).

· Die (of laughter) with a falafel in your hand as Lebanon With Love returns at the Enmore.

· Stand up spectacularly with Hughesy, Charlie Pickering and Katrina Davidson at the Melbourne Comedy Club.

· Heads up: Daft Punk (on sale today) and Kings of Leon (on sale Friday) tour nationally.

Another of our favourites, Billie Piper, caught the acting bug whilst playing Rose on Doctor Who and is set to continue her reinvention when Secret Diary Of A Call Girl - based on the saucy bestseller - airs later this month in the UK.

Not content to play a high class hooker, Billie will "shock" audiences by pulling out the sweary big guns.

Billie Piper is set to prove she's a big girl now by using the C-word on TV.

The 24-year-old, who first found fame as a popstar aged 15, is set to shock with her saucy antics in a role as a high-class hooker - and her foul mouth.

Millions of East End slappers are just now crying tears of joy that their womanhood has finally been confirmed.

We've always liked Demi Moore; we think she's one of those actresses who - thanks to a few poor choices and the tendency to hang more towards the "celebrity" end of the spectrum rather than the "artist" end... oh yeah, and there was that G.I. Jane "Suck my dick!" moment - has been unfairly classified as Razzie bait. We even like her crazy Brady Bunch-meets-Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice family (pictured above at the Die Hard 4.0 premiere).

So, we were touched by her passionate interview with Red magazine in which she bemoans Hollywood's treatment of older women. Touched, that is, until we saw what the Mail had done with it - let's just examine the title, shall we?

'I've spent £226k on plastic surgery but I still can't get a Hollywood part,' says Demi

So, basically, they invented a quote from Demi based on the industry conjecture regarding her alleged plastic surgery adventures? Kicking goals!

Look, we've been doing this thing for a while now, and we're pretty hard to shock. We've seen it all, from Owen's misfortune to Howard admitting the IR laws suck - at least, we thought we'd seen it all.

Look, we might as well come out and say it... KYLIE HAS GOTTEN HERSELF ANOTHER NEW HAIRDO.

Any more earth shattering news like this and we'll have to apply for a floatation tank.

The bright September sunshine reflected the caramel lowlights sprinkled through her layered blonde bob, giving the pop star a subtle ginger look.

Just last week she kept a-head of contestants at a bowling tournament sporting a Sixties sex kitten look which would have made Brigitte Bardot jealous.

We will now retire from this "journalism" lark and apply for the post-traumatic stress syndrome pension.

On last night's Late Show, David Letterman invited shouty self-help personality Dr. Phil to speak truth to celebutard power in the wake of the latest Britney Spears meltdown, hoping that the unvarnished words of Oprah's Favourite Tough-Love-Providing Thing might help Spears and her panty-eschewing peers get their collective acts together. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Phil will countenance no talk about alcohol or drugs' role as the moral lubricant in desperate starlets' decisions to share their virtue with the public; these coddled fame-whores, argues the good fake-doctor, know exactly how much vagina they're going to flash before a single cocktail is poured or rail is blown.

• Late Show [CBS.com]
• Previously: The Britney Spears VMA Trainwreck Explained [Defamer]

It seems that the Academy Awards' Ellen DeGeneres Era, one marked by frequent tuxedo changes and playful trips into the Kodak Theatre audience for some daytime-talkshow-quality banter with nominees struggling to stay awake during the punishingly long telecast, is over, as it's been announced that 2006 host Jon Stewart has been reinstalled at the Oscar podium, allowing the comedian to forfeit his membership in Hollywood's shameful Chris Rock/David Letterman Memorial One-and-Done Club. Though Stewart's previous turn as emcee of Hollywood Biggest Night was met by both low ratings and mixed critical reaction (there's really no pleasing Tim Allen) we're willing to give him another chance: he was profoundly unlucky in drawing the coveted assignment in a year irretrievably tainted by a Crash Best Picture win, and can't be blamed for the mass rioting that immediately followed the hand-over of Paul Haggis' second statuette of the cursed ceremony, an uprising that resulted in the tragic burning to the ground of the Kodak amidst chants of "Worst! Oscars! Ever!" With Oscar's home completely rebuilt and the unlikelihood that we'll experience another apocalypse-harkening upset, Stewart's return should be a triumphant one that helps to erase the painful memories of the unfortuante events of that March 2006 evening.

• Academy to Invite Jon Stewart Back as Oscar Host [NY Times]
• Jon Stewart to return as Oscar host [AP]

Ignoring for a moment the outrageous claims that she was genetically engineered to keep her greedy gay daddies in handcrafted loafers and Bahamian houseboys well into old age, the fairytale ending we all dreamed of for Dannielynn Hope Smith Birkhead appears to have finally come to pass. Only days ago, she celebrated her first birthday, opening dozens of gifts at a lavish party. (Her favourite: a real, semi-dehydrated pony from "all your loving godparents at ET and The Insider.") Now, following in the unsteady footsteps of her mummy, she's already scored her first E! reality show:

The still unnamed reality show project is under development at the E! network. It will focus on Larry and baby Dannielynn's life after Anna Nicole Smith's death, according to a TV insider.

Read More »

Not afraid to get topical in its efforts to document the alcohol-enhanced wit and wisdom of Hollywood clubgoers as they wobbily emerge from our city's finest, most exclusive drinking establishments, TMZ TV discovered that while a long night of boozing may inhibit a person's ability to recall the exact date of the tragic 9-11 tourist attacks of the Iraq that took place between two and five years ago, it seems to have no ill effect on one's capacity for listing the names of Angelina Jolie's children. We've never been prouder to call Los Angeles our home.

• TMZ TV [TMZ.com]
• Previously: TMZ TV: Deep Inside The World Of Drunk, Incoherent Hollywood Clubgoers [Defamer]

· Just for the proverbial shits n' giggles, here's another clip from Dr. Phil's Late Show appearance last night. Panties, or the lack thereof, are discussed.
· The LAT gets to know Hoboken Beach Diet Guy, with whom you're already probably pretty well acquainted by now.
· Leave Britney Alone Guy gets his Gallery of the Absurd moment. Also, his Howard Stern moment. And his ABC News moment.
· Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone might not become a huge hit in the UK.

As we all learned yesterday through two minutes and eleven seconds of the most affecting moving images ever transmitted over the YouTubes, even though it sometimes seems as if the entire world has turned on turned on VMA exploitation victim Britney Spears, there are still those willing to reach out to her as she tries to navigate this seemingly endless dark night of the erstwhile-pop-star soul. In the interest of connecting Spears with the generous, but anonymity-valuing, individuals offering to help her through these difficult times, we pass along this note from a Craiglister:

Britney Spears please read - m4w - 29 Britney when you want your life back on track and are willing to admit you need help eail [sic] me. You have hit rock bottom and only when you realise this will you truley [sic] be able to get back on track.

Read More »

Leaks continue to spill forth from Rosie O'Donnell's upcoming memoir, Celebrity Detox. And unlike the last batch - which offered the fanciful imagery of Donald Trump as both a scarecrow stuffed with U.S. currency, and a tiny, combforwarded garden slug - the pictures conjured by this latest excerpt were disturbing enough to send us running for our Cirque du Soleil brand inversion therapy swings. From The Insider:

Among the hot topics that Rosie delves into is her painful childhood secret. She writes that as a child, she used to break her own limbs with "a baseball bat" or a "wooden hanger."

Read More »

The unveiling of the name of the next Indy installment - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - may have rendered many a whip-flinging fanboy perplexed and mildly disappointed, but let's look at the bright side: For one, we can definitively eliminate Indiana Jones and the Pink Ladies of Rydell High from the running. Also, the title's over-specificity does offer us irresponsible internet rumourmongers some tantalising clues about its top-secret plot. MTV News asked a Harvard archaeology professor schooled in ancient Mesoamerican cultures to speculate on how the movie's crystal skulls might manifest themselves into thrilling Nazi chases and the exploration of crypts containing a great many creepy-crawly things:

Read More »

· In case you haven't heard, Jon Stewart is going to host the Oscars again. Obligatory press release self-deprecation follows: "I'm thrilled to be asked to host the Academy Awards for the second time because, as they say, the third time's the charm." [Variety, THR]
· NBC greenlights a pilot for Rat Entertainment's cop drama Blue Blood, a project that will see the collision of irresistible party-boy force Brett Ratner with immovable rock-star object Ben Silverman, unleashing a wave of good-time energy that will likely reduce all of Hollywood to smoldering rubble. [Variety]
· The next time Hell's Kitchen star Gordon Ramsay sears his scrotum on a hot oven, it will be an Endeavor agent who holds the bowl of ice water into which he can dip his still-sizzling testes. [THR]
· Fight Club alter-egos Brad Pitt and Edward Norton reteam for Universal's State of Play, a feature adaptation of the British miniseries about a journalist's investigation into the murder of a congressman's girlfriend. We're unfamiliar with the source material, so we won't promise any scenes in which the duo strip off their shirts and stage a much-clamoured-for FC rematch. [Variety]
· The Weinstein Company's $US2-2.5 million purchase of George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, ahem, reanimates the Toronto Fest market. [THR]

Here's another capsule of unrepresented-artist-on-the-street interviews, lovingly captured and compiled by Defamer staff videologist Molly McAleer. At Artist Force, a wide-open mic for emerging and undiscovered talent held at Safari Sam's, it doesn't matter what you look like or what your act consists of: It's probably better than Britney Spears was at the VMAs, and that's good enough for them. Just ask Smalls, the evening's intimidatingly sized emcee, who himself looks like he may have stumbled into the showcase emceeing business after he deemed bodyguarding the bottomed-out, cooch-flashing starlet a job that offered little long-term security.

• [artistforce.com]

The Reeler reacts to yesterday's $US1.25 million sale of The Aaron Eckhart Molests A 13-Year-Old Girl Project: "Think of it like Todd Solondz remaking Crash in a cul-de-sac, but with twice the tampons and a quarter of the self-respect. Ball makes Paul Haggis look like Robert Bresson. This prick couldn't direct traffic in a two-car garage. The hi-def cinematography is barely carpet-commercial grade, slumping into a blown-out honey hue recalling dive bar urinal spatter. The actors grimace through scene upon scene of button-pushing for button-pushing's sake, from bloody panties to competing American flags to adolescent strip/rape scenarios. So controversial, I know. Or maybe I'm the one being facile; do audiences still actually fall for this 'dark suburbia' boilerplate? Is Alan Ball that cynical, or are masturbating 13-year-olds browsing porn mags the newest, freshest angle in the Are You Shocked, America? How About Now? playbook?" [The Reeler]

Today's Page Six previews W's upcoming story on the rapidly growing membership of the all-female Velvet Mob splinter group the magazine has dubbed the Rubyfruit Mafia, a faction whose influence grows each time one of the industry's power-lesbians makes the brave choice to step out of the closet:

THE lesbians of Hollywood seem to be multiplying as they come out of the closet. "Call them the Rubyfruit Mafia," W magazine says in its latest issue. Movie producer Nina Jacobson said she didn't know of one other openly lesbian executive in Los Angeles in the early '90s when she told a colleague at Universal Studios, "I actually am not straight."

Read More »

If you somehow need a justification for investing the five-and-a-half minutes of company time you could be spending trying to convince that the reservations desk at Osteria Mozza that your boss has placed a bomb under your chair that he'll detonate if you can't get him a table on six hours' notice, think of the above short as more of an instructional film on the art of the pitch than a comedy video. As anyone who's ever been through the experience can tell you, anticipating the responses of the theoretical development exec sitting across the desk from you by imagining him as a richer, better tanned, and profoundly brain-damaged version of yourself is a helpful thought-exercise that can help you quickly close a deal.

• Bob Pitches A Movie [Superdeluxe]