Sometimes, like maybe once a decade or so, a story comes along that is so perfectly ridiculous there's nothing you can do to improve it or even make yourself look funny in the reporting - no puns, no witty double entendres, no sparkling repartee that you can add. In short, the story has written itself. Today is one of those rare days:

A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum has said.

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After getting through a remarkably quiet week without a single controversy or racketeering lawsuit, the Church of Scientology was dealt another bruising body blow with Isaac Hayes's death over the weekend. As much as the Church is expected to miss the singer/songwriter's hot buttered soul and totemic cultural presence, Hayes's "friend" and generally unreliable Fox source Roger Friedman notes in today's touching eulogy how the Church wrung every last cent from subpar live performances after his 2006 stroke.

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Following on from yesterday's Keeping Up The Cats edition of YouTube Clip Of The Day, reader Naomi kindly alerted us to the following video, and attached this little note.

Perhaps not quite the same lyrical genius as Blunt's cat screeching number, but much nicer to get stuck in your head, I'll wager.

Naomi, you're right.

Somewhere out there New Buffalo's Sally Seltmann is lying happily on a bed made of money. JUST KIDDING. She is probably writing another charming album, and thanking the good lord neither eBay nor iPod particularly minded the fact she chose to ignore the numbers 7 and 8 when penning Feist's still adorable hit song.

After Confidential speculated yesterday that Todd McKenney could be being shown the door at Dancing With The Stars HQ, it turns out it's not the acid-tongued tall poppy who is on the way out, but instead fellow judge Paul "New Steps" Mercurio who will be let go from the panel. Now who will we turn to on network television to remind us how much we all enjoy reciting lines from Strictly Ballroom? To quote that very film, that was unexpected!

Mercurio was told yesterday he was no longer required on the judging panel of Channel 7's hit show Dancing with the Stars.

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Last week we alerted you to Everett True's Guardian-enabled whining about how much Australia's music press sucks and blah blah Silverchair blah, and you reacted accordingly ("I'm surprised he's still kicking" - Born D). Well, the trickle down effect has finally made it to the offices of the Courier Mail some five days later, where all sorts of outrage and indignation is being thrown about:

Queensland's music press has hit back, with one editor of a local music newspaper dismissing the British music guru as "irrelevent".

"It's a really poor piece of journalism from a music writer who once had relevance and influence, but now he's living in Australia, he doesn't really have the knowledge or experience of the local industry to back up his opinions," said the industry source.

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· Was The Dark Knight, well, too dark for you? If so, then try this faithful recreation of the film's trailer — starring an adorable cast of child actors — on for size. [Wizard Universe via AOTS]
· You've been RickRolled, you've been ShaniceRolled, but have you ever been BarackRolled? [Videogum]
· "The new stoner is a successful career man. In a time of T.J. Mackey, The Game, and John Edwards, the successful stoner is one who can captivate women purely by making them comfortable, a functioning part of the capitalist dystopia in which we now reside." [This Recording]
· The next time you need to call a taxi to get your drunk arse home safe and sound, expect it to cost about 10% more. It'll be worth it. [LAist]
· "I wrote the first sentence--'If Dad hadn't shot Walt Disney in the leg, it would have been our best vacation ever!'--and the rest was automatic." -- John Hughes, on writing Vacation '58, the story that would one day become National Lampoon's Vacation [Zoetrope via Alex Blagg]

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Before we conclude the Defamer Day of Beefcake, we'd like to make it a threefer: hence this picture of shirtless, Middle Eastern megastar Jake Gyllenhaal squiring girlfriend Reese Witherspoon on the set of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time — which we last learned would be pushed back a full year to Memorial Day, 2010. Now that shirtless photos have emerged of Gyllenhaal's newly buffed-up body, we think that news will be greeted with the delayed, heart-rending cries of protest it deserves. Says Just Jared:

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Celebrities' complex relationships to the paparazzi who pursue them—can't live with 'em, evaporate into a puff of smoke without 'em—is the topic of Teenage Paparazzi, a documentary film from Adrian Grenier. The idea came to him as he was snapped by a "14-year-old paparazzo," reports THR—none other than intrepid adolescent shutterbug and celebrity in his own right, Austin Visschedyk: Kid Pap. (He's accompanied by his junior cronie and Porsche-driving chaperone dad in the accompanying CBS News profile.) The movie also explains Grenier's camera-friendly affiliation with puppymill proprietor/presidential hopeful, Paris Hilton:

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Though they've already missed the perfect Mother's Day window, publisher Thomas Nelson, Inc. has just released new information on a parenting guide/cautionary tale penned by Britney and Jamie Lynn materfamilias Lynne Spears and set for release next month. Dubbed Through the Storm, the book will no doubt prove instructive to any stage mother willing to milk her daughters for all they're worth, subsequently ignoring them when their pregnancies/mental breakdowns interfere with a novelty T-shirt sale at Kitson (free out-of-season Uggs with any purchase!). Says Star Magazine:

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Though J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot has been bumped from this winter to next May, Paramount has released a new sheaf of official character posters to keep the slim-pickings teaser trailer company. And what posters they are: why, who wouldn't recognise the younger versions of... um, whoever that's supposed to be... and, uh, Bones? Wait, and that ten-year-old kid is Chekov? Set our phasers on stunned.

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When we last checked in with Sunset Tan's paragons of peroxide, The Olly Girls, they were in the process of being shitcanned from their jobs at the most prestigious tanning salon ever shown on basic cable television. But as the old saying goes, time second season storyboarding sessions heal all wounds. Or do they? After wearing Pauly Shore's patience thin and subsequently being fired from their positions as his bikini-clad housecleaning staff, Holly and Molly —or is it Molly and Holly?— decided to band together in an attempt to win over the leathery overlords who control the business that made them (marginally) famous last year, Jeff and Devin. Rather than going the Al Gore route and pulling together a PowerPoint presentation to showcase the value they can add to the business, the ditzy duo decided the best approach to getting their prestigious jobs as Sales Associates In Training back would be to break out their Crayola markers and start plotting out the X and Y axes on what they called their Happiness Chart. Talk about thinking outside of the bun!

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Forget the anti-"retard" class rallying against Tropic Thunder — you know who really needs a nationwide boycott on his behalf? Corey Haim, whose long, troubling emotional slip-slide took a sharp downward turn into "exploited batshit crazy" Sunday night on The Two Coreys. But don't just take his perceptive mother's word for it ("I have seen a little bit of a decline in his behaviour. I really have"); after the jump have a look at dress rehearsals for his putative comeback, featuring the actor himself as the verbally abusive, word-slurring hat-seeker who discovers terror in his very own bathroom as Judy Haim looks on. It could always be worse, we suppose — Corey Feldman doesn't sing or moonwalk — but when we say "Save Corey," we actually kind of mean it. [A&E]

• WATCH VIDEO

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Until this week, it was taken as gospel that everything touched by peripatetic partners Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt would turn to gold; in fact, newsstand operators were ordered to wear sunglasses when the two released pictures of their Chosen Twins to People, so bright was the babies' gilded glow. Sadly, it looks like the exclusive that People paid so heavily for has resulted in a newsstand baby bump that was significantly less than they'd projected. Says Cover Awards:

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After two consecutive close calls, The Dark Knight's stunning box-office reign faces
another formidable challenger this week with Tropic Thunder. Not that Ben Stiller's film is necessarily favoured to knock the blockbuster off — at least not with its R-rating, its meta-Vietnam theme, and definitely not with Tropic Thunder RetardGate threatening to capsize the film on its maiden voyage.

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Dog Days: By August 29, the struggling L.A. Times will have laid off 150 of its employees following job cuts announced last month. Exactly what does the paper plan to do with its diminished resources now that so many of its "non-essential" employees are gone? Why, run a 35-page "Stars With Puppies" slideshow, of course! The Elizabeth Snead-penned feature, entitled, "Do Hollywood stars look cuter with puppies?" (spoiler alert: yes) is full of penetrating insights like, "Ali Simms has never looked cuter than in this photo with a tiny teddy-bear-faced Yorkie puppy." It's enough to drive a terminated employee to drink — or at least eat penis. [Los Angeles Times]

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Now that Jay Leno has entered the lame duck phase of his relationship with the Peacock network, it appears that he's decided to abuse his position as America's top-rated celebrity interviewer as fuel for his sexual reveries for many moons to come. While interviewing a crestfallen Scarlett Johansson on Friday night about Vicky Christina Barcelona (itself a rather sexually charged subject), noted auto enthusiast Jay figured he'd use the opportunity to engage the voluptuous starlet in some automobile-related foreplay. You see, he had done some research in advance of the chat and discovered that Scarlett told a lad mag that her number one sexual fantasy involved having sex in a car. But while Jay stopped just short of confessing that he has Crash playing on an infinite loop in his 17,000 square foot warehouse / garage, it was clear by reading his clearly flabbergasted guest's face that she's rather looking forward to sitting next to Conan O'Brien the next time she makes her way through Burbank. [The Tonight Show]

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We never thought it could happen, but the fanboy bloom may officially — and dramatically — be off the Star Wars franchise after 30 loving years of devotion: Ain't it Cool News boss Harry Knowles has written a scathing review of the franchise's new, animated The Clone Wars. And we mean scathing — vicious enough to not only shake our faith in geek compliance to its very foundation, but also rouse George Lucas from his afternoon cash-bath with a cease-and-desist order straight from the top.

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Though Today's addition of Kathie Lee Gifford to its fourth hour has been controversial, at least one good thing has come of it: the manic host has made the incoherent Ann Curry look like Cronkite. So constant is the ex-Reeger's chatting that even Today regular Sam the Cooking Guy erupted at Gifford, prompting him to burst out with "Can I talk?" after one babbled interruption too many. Now the New York Times has picked up on the Kathie Lee backlash, quoting enough bitter, female viewers to power a Television Without Pity message board:

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Bernie Mac's tragic death sparked a surge of postmortems around the Web over the weekend, with many invoking his role as the bad-arse mall gumshoe opposite Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa. But one perceptive observer commenting at Hollywood Elsewhere noted that the late comedian's passing is the latest in a string of similarly untimely demises for other Thornton co-stars as well:

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We'd like to think of the new 90210 reboot as America's answer to the acclaimed Canadian bildungsroman Degrassi: The Next Generation: a teen soap that "goes there" while aged refugees from the original cast cavort in the background and compare faces. Sadly, one of those taut, cheek-implanted visages might be missing from the new 90210 lineup; while Tori Spelling had been negotiating to appear on the show midseason, she's stormed off after learning that producers totally like Brenda and Kelly more. Says Nikki Finke:

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Does Death's double-dipping have you disturbed? Fret not—we have an easy way to ward of the scythe. Simply slaughter a baby lamb in your office kitchen, collect its blood, then paint that along your cubicle's entrance. The Angel of Death will then skip your workspace to reap the annoyingly high-pitched temp working next door. Enjoy these box office numbers, along with your freshly spared life:

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As if the surprise death of Bernie Mac wasn't showbiz tragedy enough, before the weekend was through we'd also be robbed of music legend Isaac Hayes. What can we say about the wocka-chicka- wocka-chicka-popularizer that hasn't already been said?

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