As you will have read this morning, Azaria and his bandmate KJ from Sydney kids The Follow have gone missing in the US where they are currently playing dates. As you will have also read, Azaria is The Veronicas' Jess Origliasso's ex-boyfriend. Both have dyed black hair and are fans of make-up and pretty clothes. Still, news.com.au, they're not that easy to confuse:

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Hello good readers,

As you may or may not be aware, I present a "cult" (that means "not too many listeners because it's on very late, although the masturbating truck driver massive are a loyal audience") radio show on Melbourne's RRR 102.7FM called I'd Rather Jack.

On this show, I get to play whatever the damn hell I like (so playlists tend to include Stiff Little Fingers followed by Kylie followed by Otis Redding followed by Girls Aloud followed by The Drones followed by Angie Hart followed by Billy Ocean followed by YOU GET MY POINT) which is sort of great - especially the Billy Ocean part. I have RRR to thank for this rare wireless-molesting freedom.

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If you're Fairfax Media, the answer would be simple: can the editor-in-chief of one of your biggest papers! That's right, just a day after Fairfax announced 550 jobs would be slashed across the board (the news, as other papers quaked in their boots regarding the apparent downturn in publishing the cuts reflected, reached as far as the UK), The Age's editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan - who'd been in the role since July of 2004 - was shown the door. Here's the official word, and more over the jump.

Don Churchill, Fairfax's chief executive for Victoria, broke the news to staff at a meeting this morning.

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There's a question I bet you didn't think you'd be asked any time soon! Yes, Chantelle Barry is back! You may remember her from the storied first ever season of Australian Popstars, where she kicked butt all the way from Perth - until she was accused of stealing from her fellow Bardot members, and summarily ejected from the group, the show and, seemingly, the industry. Well, you may or may not be pleased to hear that she's snared herself a gig on the remake of 90210! Which is all well and good, but I had to stifle a laugh when I saw how those jokesters over at news.com.au and the Tele had chosen to describe her career's turn for the better:

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In the past few months, I have made no secret whatsoever of my very firm belief that the US adaptation, via NBC, of "our" Kath & Kim, will suck harder than the annual Hoover Vacuum Company International Convention. But throughout all this, aside from the occasional ratings expert's opinion, the Americans themselves have remained oddly quiet on the topic. Thank heavens, then, for the fabulous ladies from Go Fug Yourself; this post is ostensibly about a poor fashion choice made by Selma Blair, but I think the opening salvo speaks directly to me for itself:

The promos for Kath & Kim that ran during the Olympics deeply stank.

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The media just can't get enough of golden girl Stephanie Rice (which means they also can't get enough Rice-related headline puns - Rice Steamer! Sizzling Rice! Hot Rice! - could someone who's a whiz with the old computer make them up a Rice Headline Generator? I fear they're running out - thanks in advance) and their latest topic of concern is whether or not our Stephanie has been macking with fellow golden god, Michael Phelps - and whether Rice's ex-bf, Eamon Sullivan, cares.

"No," was the emphatic reply when Rice, flanked by her former Olympian boyfriend Eamon Sullivan, was asked if she'd shared a lip-locked moment at a Beijing party with Phelps, who won a staggering eight gold medals.

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Are you, like very few people, strangely captivated by the copyright saga currently surrounding Alex Lloyd's massive hit 'Amazing'? Yesterday Clem talked about how truck driver/musician Mark O'Keefe, the fellow who is suing Lloyd, has his updated recollection of how things went down and revealed he now believes he wrote the song with Lloyd up to two years later than he originally stated when he launched legal action.

A mysterious commenter named Sam contacted us and gave us a very, very lengthy version of events from "someone who was actually there".

It's just someone's opinion, and there's no way for us to verify it (thank GOD for the legal system, eh? Imagine if Defamer Australia was left in charge of running things!) but it may prove to be an interesting read.

Please get your facts right before you crucify a brilliant songwriter and singer. Mark was not a truck driver at the time, he had only started driving a truck in the last couple of years to support his family. Maybe if Alex had of come clean with the copyright, he would not have needed to. Mark O'keefe has always been, and still is, a professional musician. You make him sound like a truck driver leaning on the bar getting drunk. Mark O'keefe wrote the song "Amazing" and this was witnessed by many people at the Bridge hotel in 1991. At the time in question Mark O'keefe and his band "What's Next" were performing to a packed hotel. When the band had finished to a standing ovation, Mark was approached by Alex Lloyd, then (Slim La Beef) or (Slim) from his Band "Slim La Beef and the Spare Ribs" as he was known.

What's Next was not just your average mediocre pub band either, and had many guest artists, including Stevie Wright (Easybeats) Paul Day (Iron Maiden) and Laurie Marlow (Heaven), to name a few.

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We invite devoted Defamer readers to think back now, to almost two years ago to the day. The U.S. dollar dominated global free markets. Whitney Houston was in the middle of a liquor-store-robbery crime spree that left dozens dead. And a little show by the name of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had captured the imaginations of the American working class, caught up weekly in its by-turns harrowing and inspirational tales from the front lines of the network sketch comedy wars. If you're still with us, you'll too recall Defaker, the Defamer-inspired mock gossip site that attempted to promote the series on NBC.com by opening itself up to visitor comments. Several harsh insights followed ("Aaron Sorkin, I'll be seeing you soon! Posted by: Crack | September 21, 2006 08:30 PM" springs to mind), the site was quickly shuttered, and the ill-conceived exercise was chocked up by the lauded series creator as yet another example of the ugliness that will inevitably spring forth from the anonymous blogging wilds.

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Sooo... I heard this about a year and a bit ago, but now the person in question appears to be doing very well for themselves, it's about time to make it a blind item on Defamer Australia, I reckon.

Which highly successful Aussie pop star used to prefer the company of her fellow ladies? Apparently it wasn't doing much for her, career-wise, so she made the switch over to powerful and influential doodle. From what I've been told, her first piece of male booty after this important decision was someone who has a tendency to drop things. As though aforementioned things had a high temperature. Clumsy!

For the 987 readers (whoops — make that 988 and counting since starting this sentence) following "Don Draper"'s Twitter feed, today was an unusually turbulent day at Sterling Cooper Ad Agency. Same thing for the 1,207 folks following "Peggy Olson." You might have been among them, frozen out when AMC reportedly turned to Twitter with complaints about the Mad Men characters posting regular "updates" on the service — discussions which, for whatever reason, resulted in Twitter admin suspending a handful of feeds today until the a fan and media backlash supposedly helped whip them back into place a few hours later.

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In the eternal battle between exes Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, the latter has just been dealt a significant setback. Though Sheen pulls down a nigh-unbeatable $800,000 for every episode of Two and a Half Men, Richards could at least boast a buzzed-about, cringe-inducing E! reality show, Denise Richards: It's Complicated. Now, according to the New York Post, she may not even have that feather in her cap anymore — it appears that the show has been cancelled.

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The LAT ran a feature today on the newest male-bonding craze to consume Hollywood power players — and no, it doesn't involve cocaine, Red Bull, or bottle service at Opera. Instead, it's an activity dubbed "Nerd Poker," and it offers almost 100 of Hollywood's behind-the-scenes talents a weekly chance to socialize while playing video games on Xbox Live. Though many use it as a fun way to score meetings and network, it can also allow its members the sort of cathartic outlet they'd typically be arrested for:

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Time's 'New Faces of Porn' Spotlights Ron Jeremy: It only took 30 years, but the buttoned-down gang at Time Magazine finally deigned to recognise the world's most famous male porn star on the occasion of his new book The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz. We think our mothers brainstormed to jointly conduct the interview — "How did you get your start in the porn industry?" "What was your path to the porn industry?" "Were your friends shocked that you were doing this?" — but the high-up, uncensored namechecking of San Fernando Jones and the Temple of Poon seems to have turned a symbolic page from staid newsweekly to prime wanking material. We'll never be bored in the doctor's waiting room again. [TIME]

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This is certainly worrying if true.

Sydney band The FolloW, recently in the news because their front man Azaria (yes, front man, Daily Telegraph!) used to date Jess from The Veronicas before she decided she preferred the company of MTV's Ruby Rose, have announced on their MySpace page that they've filed a missing persons report and contacted the Australian Consulate because members KJ and Azaria have gone missing.

On August 26th, the band's manager Gabe Deluc posted the following on the site.

WE'VE BEEN INFORMED THAT AZARIA AND KJ HAVE BEEN MISSING SINCE FRIDAY AUGUST 22ND. IF ANYONE HAS ANY INFORMATION ON THEIR WHEREABOUTS, PLEASE CONTACT US. KJ AND AZARIA WERE LAST SEEN IN NORTH HOLLYWOOD AT THE CORNER OF BURBANK & VINELAND. CONCERNED FRIENDS AND FAMILY MEMBERS SHOULD CONTACT JaK COLEMAN FOR MORE INFORMATION.

Later that day, there was another update:

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· Yup, that's it. And yet we can't help but get caught up in all the silliness, too. Wolf Blitzer? That sounds like a WWI machine gun! LOL! [Late Night]
· "Canada Remains Happily Mediocre," says Canada's official online presence. [Canada.com]
· No Nuns on the Catwalk: Eurotrash dance single, or Vatican fashion scandal? [Reuters]
· You really haven't lived until you've heard Gwyneth Paltrow make an offhand joke about getting fat she knows will never, ever come to pass...in fluent Spanish! [BWE.tv]
· "My dad's not an idiot -- he's nothing short of a genius, in my opinion," says Jack Osbourne, who's making a movie to repair his father's depiction on The Osbournes as the lovably addled Prince of Darkness and Allowance-Distribution. [RollingStone.com]
· Nic Cage, in hair and pictures. [Latino Review]

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If you thought Anne Hathaway had bad luck with boyfriends, we're hearing more today about her even trickier track record with politicians: Skeevy, lying, disingenuous heartbreakers whose hollow promises ring in her ears long after they've been exiled to retirement, disgrace and worse. Honey, we know! We even relate a bit to her early scepticism of Sen. Barack Obama, recalled this week in Denver: "I was kind of afraid of Obama the first time I saw him. ... And I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him."

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Though it pains us to say this, we think we may be over Lo Bosworth, the incipient villainess of The Hills' fourth season. When we first met Lo, she was amongst the most breezy members of Hills forerunner Laguna Beach, but there's no place for cute quips on The Hills when out-and-out bitchery will win the day. That, ultimately, is what makes Lo's transformation all the more frustrating — though she has settled into her role as Audrina's archrival for their friend Lauren's attention, her irritating machinations are actually making us root for the blank blogger (and that's saying a lot). With the help of Molly McAleer, we pored over last night's episode and put together a list of the top five reasons we simply can't support Lo anymore. Lo, you're on notice: we're officially frienemies now. [MTV]

Watch the video after the jump.

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There will come a day—maybe not in the near future, or even the distant future, but perhaps thousands and thousands of years from now—when the significance of the early 21st Century pop-cultural phenomenon known as The Hills will make itself fully known. At that time, trillions of shipbound lifeforms coasting through the universe will already have been hard at work, tending slavishly to their Heidi and Spencer Pratt Solemnity Shrines and anointing young LC-alikes in dabs of Suddenly, Audrina—the most seductively floral of all Official The Hills Scents—before sacrificing the virgins to the mighty reality Gods ensconced atop Mt. Bolthouse. Doing so will inch them ever closer to utter and complete, like, enlightenment. In the meantime, however, artifacts like the one above will remain nothing but mysteries, wrapped in enigmas, stuffed into leotards, and adorned with deeply symbolic terrycloth headbands. Tomorrow never dies. We wanna live forever. Let us hear your bodies talk.

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Going for the Bronze: Though NBC's Olympic coverage provided the network with television's most watched event anywhere, ever, in the history of the universe, that massive audience hasn't translated into major spikes of interest for NBC's fall shows like Kath & Kim and My Own Worst Enemy. The network spent 65% of its promo time on returning shows (like Lipstick Jungle Lipstick Jungle Lipstick Jungle) but failed to perk awareness for anything but the 80's retread Knight Rider. Still, before NBC shoehorns Michael Phelps into Selma Blair's thong, they've got this bit of recent history to add perspective: the Athens Olympics were used to tout quickly flushed shows like Joey and LAX. Perhaps Kath & Kim will stand on its own merits — that is, as long as they didn't advertise it during the rebellion-inducing beach volleyball marathon. [Variety]

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Hello, class. Welcome to Punk Rock 101. Today's lesson is about the seminal LA punk band the Germs, who are finally getting thanks to a new biopic called What We Do Is Secret (playing for the rest of this week at the Nuart). For those of you who are not familiar with the band or why they're deserving of a movie, here's a quick cheat sheet. The Germs made history because they were A) completely insane and B) their singer, Darby Crash, committed the self-mythologizing move of killing himself back in 1980. Unfortunately, he happened to pick the day before John Lennon was murdered to intentionally overdose on heroin, so most people didn't even notice.

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Our visit to the multiplex last weekend went well enough for the most part; we liked The House Bunny just fine, and the Babylon A.D. trailer looked suitably career-ending for our tastes. It wasn't until we exited the theatre that our nerves deadened and our hearts sank: There, in a lobby dotted with orphaned popcorn kernels and bereft souls, we had a closer look at a poster for the upcoming Al Pacino/Robert De Niro cop flick Righteous Kill. And while it might seem too easy to write the film off as a gimmicky genre exercise at first blush, it would hardly be fair to do so without seeing it. That said, we noticed five things off the bat that not only implied an alarming sloppiness, but seemed to actively discourage our viewership. After the jump, our essential wake-up call for studios, poster designers and casual fans alike.

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· The Humanitas Prize has announced its short list: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Juno, and Lars and the Real Girl have all been singled out for having explored "the human condition in a way which affirms the dignity of the human person and reveals common humanity." We love those three movies so much, we wish we could just smush them together into one movie: The Diving Lars and the Junofly, a tender story about an alienated youth with "locked-in" syndrome who accidentally impregnates his teenage physical therapist, who's actually a Resusci Annie doll. OK, we'll stop now. [Variety]
· ABC has gone on a pickup feeding frenzy. Ordered to series: Castle, about a horror novelist who solves crimes, The Unusuals, an NYPD cop dramedy starring Amber Tamblyn, Cupid, and—we're sorry, did we just say "an NYPD cop dramedy starring Amber Tamblyn?" We believe we did! And we're damned if we know how we're supposed to feel about that. Oh, what the hell. We're jazzed! [THR]

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Though teenage fans of Twilight (the upcoming vampire drama that Summit Entertainment hopes will be its own Harry Potter franchise) were initially put off by lead star Robert Pattinson's chest hair, they've since come around in a major way. Not only has the latest book in the Stephenie Meyer series debuted to huge numbers, but the movie's cast was greeted at Comic-Con with the kind of devoted squeals not heard since the Beatles debuted a song recorded with both 'N Sync and New Kids on the Block. In fact, the fans have become so ardent about Twilight that they swarm each and every online news story to debate the only thing that really matters: who should the lead heroine bang, a vampire or a werewolf?

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Whooop! Whooop! CAA Kitchen Fire! Just when you had been lulled into a false sense of Death Star culinary confidence—positive that no incendiary Chinese appetizers would again engulf the TV lit department in thick clouds of cabbage-and-pork-scented smoke—comes this CAA! Kitchen! Fire! Deathtrap! Exclusive! "Subject: CAA can't cook! they set fire to their kitchen and got evacuated!" We ask that you remain calm at this time, until we get a full headcount (just the agents, obviously—not assistants); commuters in the Century City area, meanwhile, are instructed to keep as far away from the scene as possible, regardless of how enticing those wafting, mouth-watering gusts of BBQ baby meat might be. [Defamer]

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Charlize Theron's arrival at the Denver airport last night—what TMZ says might be a trip for a local film festival, or to pop her head in at the convention, or hey, why not, a little of both—was greeting by a paparazzi swarm of one, and she was having none of it. (She may have already been in a foul mood due to the giant sign her driver was holding reading "CHARLIE THERONG - Denver Executive Limousines," though the foamcore board upon which it was written would later make a handy device with which to beat the nosey interloper over the head.) Surely, whatever good intentions the star had were quickly squandered once the footage made the internet rounds, and disenfranchised paparazzi voters chose to side with the far less celebrity-friendly candidate.

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Meow! Scratch! Or Something: Taking great care to namecheck Ron Grover and Nikki Finke, Sharon Waxman took MGM-sale rumormongerers to task on her blog late Monday, favouring the studio's official word that Goldman Sachs was just dropping by the office for a friendly "capitalization enhancement" lunch. Who to believe? No, really — with Waxman's industry/culture site The Wrap soon to encroach on Finke's daffy dominion, we need to know who to trust, and fast. May we propose a five-match Commissary Wrestling Tour of Hollywood? The series winner gets first right of refusal on MGM spin. David Poland officiates. Who's in? [Waxword]

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Though she's had her fair number of brushes with the law, Michelle Rodriguez continues to confound the industry by working steadily. She's currently filming Avatar, a grueling shoot that requires her to wear a motion-capture device not unlike an old-fashioned diving suit, as James Cameron's Jesus Cameras™ provide the required fantasy spacescapes around her. There's also her exciting Shell-truck-detonating work in Fast and Furious. But for millions of Lost fans worldwide, she will forever be remembered as Ana Lucia Cortez—a castaway cop snuffed by the cruel hand of overpopulated-island fate, plus a network head sick of reading about her latest arrests. EW.com now reports that all fences and landmass-disappearing donkey wheels have been mended, as Rodriguez is set to return for a single episode, probably as a "flashback or via hallucination," in the coming season.

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Picture it: Kate Hudson in The Secret of the Volcanic Ash! It's the hilarious romantic adventure of an actress (who may or may not be trying to kill love interest Owen Wilson) who absconds with a lucrative, well-kept secret: a vial of volcanic ash from the jungles of Vanuatu that has the potential to revolutionize women's hair care forever! There's just one problem (and it isn't the movie's predictable third act): this tale is real, and Hudson is getting sued for it. Says the Daily Mail:

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After the stirring creative success of his English-language debut Gothika — still hovering around a 15% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes — no one could really fault French filmmaker-actor Mathieu Kassovitz for expecting miles of auteurist latitude on his new film, the sci-fi Vin Diesel thriller Babylon A.D. Least of all Kassovitz himself, it appears, whose journey to the farthest-flung frontiers of studio hackery (or Eastern Europe, whichever came first) nevertheless found him face-to-face with micromanagers from 20th Century Fox — "lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots," he recently told inquiring minds at AMC.

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The saga of Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise-as-Hitler-stalking -Nazi-infidel project that we frequently need to remind ourselves is an actual movie, and not just an improbable plot point in James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning—is not one for the fainthearted. From a location shoot hindered by a cult-leery, swastika-averse German government—to an ongoing round of musical release-dates that most recently positioned its opening for December 26, 1857, a safe 40 years before the invention of movie projectors—this is not what you call a sinking studio's dream project. Now Deadline Hollywood Daily notes that 11 Nazi soldier extras who fell out of a truck during filming last summer are suing United Artists for $11 million. (That's one million per Nazi, for those not schooled in the Third Reich-championed Hitler Math.) From Spiegel Online:

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