Over the last day or so, throughout our obsession with LOLBlunts, we have pondered the possible deeper meaning of the term "KEEP UP THE CATS", issued as it was by Frances M Benz with such unerring enthusiasm - we thought, perhaps Defamer Australia has just unwittingly tapped into a long-held relationship between tiresome whiny singer/songwriter James Blunt and cats?

Well, a cursory search of the internets revealed something that - and we don't want to scare you - could blow the whole "KEEP UP THE CATS" phenomenon to kingdom come.

In short: JAMES HAS BEEN KEEPING UP THE CATS SINCE MID-LAST-YEAR.

Don't believe it? Hold our hands and come with us over the jump, and you will finally know the shocking truth...

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We were admittedly underwhelmed upon hearing that lip sync princess Ashlee Simpson and her guyliner-sporting beau Pete Wentz were planning on tying the knot, but we are somewhat pleased to hear about all the trouble it's causing Papa Joe Simpson. Unsurprisingly, the engagement seems to be the result of Pete "doing the right thing" after knocking up his girlfriend. And in an attempt to turn a sticky situation into a pot of gold, minister-turned-Dadager Joe is allegedly trying desperately to make some quick cash by selling his daughter's story to the weeklies, conveniently timed to coincide with her upcoming album's release:

"'Joe is contacting all the weeklies and asking them to pony up $1 million to put Ashlee on the cover'...Sadly, there is some interest - but not for anything close to $1 million."

So how much is an Ashlee cover worth these days? Apparently just as little as Lindsay Lohan demands for taking her top off on-screen...

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Defamer Australia and Russian President Vladimir Putin go way back, so we were delighted to see that he's in the news again - evidently this time for schtupping some hot, young rhythmic gymnast. Apparently Putin has split from his wife and excitedly plans to shack up with the pretty 24-year-old post haste.

It seems the Daily Mail were excited, too:

We love it. We love the expanded version from the story itself even more:

So, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, what do you see in a 24-year-old, sensationally beautiful gymnast with a penchant for posing semi-naked that you don't see in your lovely, middle-aged, matronly wife Ludmilla?

We're not sure what they mean by emphasising her gymnastic tendencies, unless it's that rather sad blokey thing of discussing new babes' yoga/ballet/gymnastic skills as though they will likely lead to bedroom prowess.

The reality is, yoga/ballet/gymnastic skills are probably less likely to equal "cracker in the sack" than they are "slightly highly strung, a bit too skinny to cuddle and probably obsessed with stinky weight-loss herbal teas".

So! Remember the Marilyn Monroe article we published on Tuesday, which poked some holes in Keya Morgan's (pictured, left) claims that he brokered the sale of an alleged sex tape to a wealthy (and still anonymous) businessman in New York for $1.5 million? Well, it turns out that Keya Morgan's attorneys were none too pleased about our piece. What follows is a back-and-forth between Keya Morgan's lawyer and Defamer's incomparable house counsel, Gaby Darbyshire. While we're not very interested in getting involved in squabbles between Keya Morgan and Mark Bellinghaus (apparently, there is some seriously bad blood between these two Marilyn Monroe fans), we do stand by the story that we printed on Tuesday night. For those that are interested in reading the chain of emails, they are printed in full after the jump.

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Just last week it seemed the best thing They could come up with for Lara Bingle's career renaissance was to appear on an advertorial travel show on Nine; hardly worth all the fanfare her return to the tele was generating.

Hold your horses, then, because it looks as though Lara might have something even more spectacularly exciting in store for viewers: SHE MIGHT BE THE NEW ADRIANA XENIDES.

By that we don't mean she'll disappear from public view only to reappear in a haze of driving offences and bizarre medical conditions, but rather that Lara could well be the new "letters girl" on the revamped Wheel Of Fortune.

It's understood Nine is casting for the co-hosting gig of the new-look Wheel Of Fortune with Tim Campbell and Lara, who is currently employed by Nine as part of its Holidays For Sale program, is a frontrunner for the game-show gig.

A rep for Nine yesterday confirmed auditions for the job were being held in Brisbane but stopped short of naming Bingle as one of the starlets in line for the job.

"We are auditioning for the part of co-host at the moment but we would never say who is taking part in those auditions," the spokesperson said.

"I can't say that she is or isn't being considered for the role. I cannot say either way."

Good lord, man/woman, don't keep us hanging like this! IS SHE OR ISN'T SHE?! You are toying with the nerves of fans of crappy afternoon light-entertainment!

We feel Lara would be great for the role. It would finally afford her the chance to learn to read and spell.

We follow the literary universe quite keenly at the best of times, mainly because we're frustrated novelists and hope one day to bathe in the rich, creamery money of grants and prizes, but also because we like to stay cultured 'n' shit.

However, we also realise that it's about as "cool" as watching Question Time (which is pretty damn cool, if you ask us), which perhaps explains TheAge.com.au's front-page treatment of this story on the Miles Franklin Literary Award's announced nominees:

FULLY!!

Oh dear. It's almost as daggy as news.com.au's "Pose Like A Pro" effort from yesterday. Suggested topics for the Age Online monkeys to tackle in future include LOLNobelPeacePrize and FAILStateFunerals.

Remember Tarisai Vushe, the 2007 Australian Idol contestant who started out sounding like the new Whitney Houston, then said "thank you" an awful lot, and ended up going completely bananas?

Well, she's baaaaack!

Tarisai has returned to the news after announcing that she was kidnapped by her ex-boyfriend - but, er, it's okay, you don't have to call the police. Or something.

Vushe said she was returning DVDs at 11pm on Friday when she was grabbed.

"He grabbed me from behind and kept asking me why I left him, in a really obsessive way," she said.

"He left me in the car. I got out and walked to a service station (near Penrith) and called a taxi," she said.

Her manager, Alex Haddad, who co-ordinates Vushe's new band Method, insisted he believed her account of the ordeal.

"I've encouraged her to go to the police, but I can't make her," he said.

"When she didn't turn up for rehearsal last week, we rang her family and they mentioned she might be doing a gig interstate. But Tarisai didn't want them to tell us anything."

Hmm, we're torn. If she IS serious, then for god's sake, go to the police, girlfrien'! Too many cases of assault against women go unreported these days.

However, if she's telling fibs a la "Marcia Hates me", well, a thousand aspersions on "Method" and may all their gigs be on Wednesday nights at RSLs.

Which is probably pretty close to the reality they'll enjoy, anyway.

Noting that two cast members from TV's highest-rated procedurals—CSI's Gary Dourdan and Law & Order: SVU's Diane Neal—would be leaving their series at the end of their contracts, TVGuide.com's Michael Ausiello has reexamined the evidence, and concludes that these seemingly friendly departures were more likely the result of some less-than-amicable shitcannings:

In the case of Dourdan, an insider at the show insists that he and CSI execs "mutually agreed" to part ways for "creative reasons." However, a CBS mole claims the 41-year-old actor was essentially fired, adding that producers are trying to be "as supportive and protective" of him as possible by portraying the departure as mutual. That same mole wasn't willing to share the specific reason for Dourdan's ouster, except to say that it involves an "ongoing problem personal to Dourdan." [...]

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The task of turning five seconds' worth of compelling television—the announcement of the latest American Idol oustee—into an hour of Nielsen-trampling entertainment isn't an easy one. And yet they always seem up to the challenge, employing a wide variety of systematic dehumanization techniques to keep singers on their toes and viewers locked in until the very last moment. Take last night's episode, in which trembling, shaved-koala contestant David Archuleta was made to sit backstage for two full commercial breaks as his brothers and sisters stood in huddled groups on the stage. One was safe, the other at risk of being loaded onto Idol-branded freight trains and transported to a karaoke death camp somewhere in the San Fernando Valley.

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Victoria Beckham and her razor-sharp cheekbones celebrated her 34th birthday last night alongside soon-to-be Yeshivite husband David, and two new female friends: Eva Longoria and Kate Beckinsale, both of whom were dressed to the nines in order to live up to the immaculately glamorous appearances Posh and her cronies tend to exhibit. But were Longoria and Beckinsale also trying to fill the stilettos of Beckham BFF, a role Katie Holmes has filled for so many years? Favoured dining, uh, dieting companions Tom and Katie were noticeably absent from the festivities. Did Tom Cruise's wishes to keep Katie away from the bobble-headed Brit come true so quickly?

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Jenna Jameson's mainstream star turn in this week's Zombie Strippers seemed bemusing enough to us a while back — right around the time, probably, that dirty-minded Premiere critic Glenn Kenny undertook his massive new survey of porn-star crossover attempts. We knew a little about the wide trajectories of most performers cited here, including Marilyn Chambers, Traci Lords and obviously Jameson herself. We didn't know, however, the degree to which more worldly veterans like Ron Jeremy were slumming when they first broke into smut:

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It's been a rough week for you, the Internet-Enabled Movie Fan with Something to Say. Just a day after noted haimishe Luddite Barry Sonnenfeld's semi-hysterical vision of a Facebook-infiltrated culture in which Big Brother will monitor our every Twittered activity, comes a similarly technophobic EW.com conversation with the creative duo behind the Indiana Jones series (and possessors of 68.2% of all the world's wealth), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Playing a sort of good cop/bad cop routine, Spielberg bemoans the eroding of the moviegoing experience by keyboard-tapping chatterboxes, while Lucas tempers all the grumpy-old-man talk by pointing out that the internet is also capable of producing some good things (e.g. an audience who actually cares what Indy has been up to after his 19-year sabbatical). We quietly slip in mid-conversation:

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A Defamer operative browsing Metacritic happened to notice that 88 Minutes—in which Al Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, an FBI forensic psychiatrist who has (all together now!) 88 real-time minutes to solve his own murder!—has received a Metacritic score of 2. To give you some indication of just how bad that is, 10,000 B.C. got a 34, making Roland Emmerich's exhaustively researched recreation of the Great Mammoth Fur Trade a roughly 1700% better film. But how does it rank against releases of similar or lesser quality?

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Pictured, recent CAA defector Vince Vaughn is captured taking a brief moment out of his Griffith Park power-walking regimen to soak in the Southern California sunshine. After the jump, the Fred Claus star makes eyes at a passing fellow fitness enthusiast, then celebrates with his favourite post-workout ritual: flashing what remains of his quickly evaporating belly at his easily spooked, navel-lint-phobic driver.

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As far as directionless conversations with aloof, quasi-paranoid movie stars go, David Letterman's interview last night with Uma Thurman went about as well as could be expected. Perhaps retaining the slightest of old Oprah-Uma Oscar grudges toward our favourite joke-recycling late-night icon, Thurman deflects an odd series of inquiries about her country home for a full minute before anything resembling a punchline arrives. It could be a Pellicano trial reenactment as much as an affected celebrity sit-down, or perhaps just uncannily close to a conversation Thurman had earlier in the day with ex-husband Ethan Hawke. We knew Dave likes the studio cold, but watch after the jump and tell us if this isn't a bit much. [CBS]

• WATCH VIDEO

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Defamer HQ opens for business this morning with an apology to newly non-difficult Edward Norton, whose squabbles with Marvel and Universal over The Incredible Hulk appear to have been blown out of proportion by a naturally overzealous press. Via Entertainment Weekly, Norton himself went public for the first time this week to shout "Piffle!" at the accounts of acrimony dug up by Nikki Finke and The New York Times (and dutifully passed on by us); lest we risk decontextualization of any of his precious 257 words, we now pass along his full statement and more of our own profuse contrition after the jump:

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