• Jon Gosselin isn't an absentee father, you guys! No! He's doing what any good dad of eight would do, and hitting up Foxwoods Casino to try to bring eight babies home the bacon. 2:1 odds on him sucking at life like this for a while to come. [Page Six]
  
  
• Robert Pattinson, like Parker Lewis, can't lose. Or so goes the "rumor" being purported on Showbiz Spy: the guy just doesn't fuck up, and also, he keeps Kristen Stewart ridiculously happy and less crazy-brooding these days. Which is great! Until they breakup, at which point, all hell will break lose, speaking of bloodsucking. That's going to be the gossip headline for weeks, sigh, and yes: we will comply. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• And speaking of hell breaking loose: Twilight's Emo Vampire Deity Stephenie Meyer, publishing's version of a golden goose shitting out wonderful large, golden, bloodsucking teenage sexuality inspiring (or repressing) eggs, while the rest of the publishers and agents sit around being like DADDEH I WANT A GOLDEN GOOSE, is getting sued by someone claiming she stole a bunch of ideas from a novel posted online, and put them in a Twilight book. Oh noez! Maybe Meyer will sick a bunch of dreamy teenage vampires on her. Seriously. Just send Robert "The Closer" Pattinson over there to work this one out. He can't lose. [NYDN]
  
  
• R & B songstress Mya, then. R & B songstress Mya, circa 2009: going on Dancing With The Stars, wants to go to space. [Page Six]
  
  
• Here's a picture of someone holding a fan up to Jennifer Aniston's face. It is as hynotizing and pleasing as it sounds. [WWTDD]
  
  
• The Possibly Penis-Concealing Lady Gaga went blah blah again, this time, talking about how she wants to do every member of Take That! at the same time, which, she correctly counts, would be a fivesome. On that note, Robbie Williams has more talent in one testicle than Lady Gaga's most brilliant output thus far, whatever that is. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Is the not-penis-concealing Penelope Cruz preggers with the probably-penis-having Javier Bardem's child? Probably! [NYDN]
  
  
• Ugh. Roger Avery - writer-director of Killing Zoe, the Rules of Attraction film adaptation, and a credited writer on a little film called Pulp Fiction - plead guilty to manslaughter for the fatal DWI accident last January in Ojai that injured his wife and killed a friend visiting from Italy. He'll be sentenced next month. [NYDN]
  
  
• Billy Bush - yes, that one - is pushing press line of wanting another Carrie Prejean Incident to take place at the upcoming Miss Universe pageant. Billy wants to capitalize on lifelong beauty queens finally getting to speak their minds on camera and then making ridiculous noises about "opposite marriage" on live TV. He might be onto something: there could be money to be extracted from the subset of people who experience life the way one would in a Dr. Suess novel, sans whimsy. Really, I'm more the Caitlin Upton type because I personally believe that beauty queens are allowed to be entitled to things such as, maps, which are of the topographical nature, because, there are other U.S. Americans, such as the President, who have ways to tell time, and in Iraq, and Antartica, there are penguins, and they know where Panama Beach is, and we all should, too. Thank you. [NYDN]
  
  
• Hayden Panettiere is dating Hard Rock Hotel heir Harry Morton, who Lindsay Lohan once blew by a pool. Ewwww. Anyway, Page Six had to squeeze in a 'Pink Taco' reference, because that's how they roll. We will comply. [Page Six]
  
  
• What does American Idol star Adam Lambert do when someone throws a dildo at him on stage? He does what any other warm-blooded American Idol would do! He...kicks it back at the audience? Schwah? You know how sometimes you hear the term "results may vary" but you generally ignore it because as far as you're concerned the results do not ever really vary? This is one of those times when they do. [Celebrity Spy]
  
  
• Huzzah. Freaky-thumbed walking slutty Halloween costume Meagan Fox will host the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. I think they should bring back Mr. Peepers and have her play him. Just saying. [Showbiz Spy]

Theory 1: Twilight Is Chocolate
Let's get the obvious, probably-the-cold-bare-truth one out of the way. There's nothing new about young people, young women especially, going apeshit bananas over something that brings a fierce yet chaste smolder to their loins—be it the cherubic young matinee idols like Romeo + Juliet-era Leonardo DiCaprio, the crotch-twirling "baby come back" antics of a boy band (from Beatles to Backstreet), or, you know, the dark brooding eternal prick tease of sexless vampire love (Buffy! And now, sigh, Twilight!). While most boys just hairy palm their way past longings for love and post-in/out/in/out intimacy, many girls get snared and tangled in that brambly bush of idol worship, and any conduit through which they can explore and advance these tinglings is, usually, seized upon with great fervor. And Meyer wrote the perfect conduit for a certain set of young ladies—one about Changes (she moves!), School (she's awkward!), Bodies (she's clumsy!), and Boys (he's alabastery beautiful and dangerous!) Certain little women throw this shit to the curb as the fantasy garbage that it is, but others (whether consciously or not) see some great unspoken wish-fulfillment in it—that you can snare the boy by doing next to nothing, that you can fix a troubled man, that somewhere out there is a place where you and only you are special and it's up to all those other bitches to just look on in awe. Pretty powerful magicks.

Theory 2: Twilight Is Barack Obama
Yes it's true! Published in 2005, just one short year after Obama gave his ground-rumbling speech at the DNC in Boston, Twilight and the president-elect share many qualities. Both had rabid cult followings until they bled and blossomed into mainstream phenomena. Both are about love with utter abandon—to overlook or dismiss the fangs or Rev. Wrights. And both are about potential danger lurking in the periphery—Edward might eat Bella! Obama might pull off his Mission: Impossible mask and reveal himself to be Jimmy Carter, thus hurling the nation into a socialism-flecked doom of poverty and lawlessness. But in the end, both are less than what they seem. Twilight is just pat aspirational shit to please the ladies (see above) and Obama is just part inspirational grit and part just a fairly moderate Democrat who will do fine, if not well, as a two term president (we Hope). The implication here, I guess, is that Barack Obama is a vampire. It would make sense. After all, his daddy was a cannibal.

Theory 3: Twilight Is The Last Gasp Of Chic Religious Conservatism
Remember when John McCain's daughter Meghan said that being a Republican was the last way to be punk and it was really dumb and also a few years too late because the whole thing had been death rattling for a while at that point? Well Twilight is sort of the other side of that. It was timely and it was apt and it was cool, for the subset of Christian America it directly appealed to. In 2005, it was pretty righteous for a Mormon housewife from Arizona to write a long, turgid book about two hot-as-hell young people (well, "young" here is relative, I guess) falling madly in love and kissing and then screwing their brains out... after they get married (and even then they only do it twice)! There's a nice anti-abortion trope thrown into the last book, I'm told (should she carry Edward's demon baby that will probably kill her to term? Yes! Yes she should!) and a comfortable hat tip to the old Mormon idea that women can't get into Heaven without the help of a man. Bella is made vampyr by Edward in the end, and they amble off together into fuckfest eternity. What a sly devil Meyer was to try and couch all this in supposedly lush mod-period melodrama (you know what we would call Twilight in the theatre? Agitprop), trouble is, she's such a spectacularly shitty writer that the light starts to poke through, a few years later. But she got away with it for a while! Don't think she would now.

So which is it? Twilight as female soul-tickler? Twilight as political Daemon? Or Twilight as the last bit of tricky mainstream Christo-conservatism to sneak its way past the lefty sensors? Or, you know, none of the above?

The one back in August was, sure, OK, servicey enough for not in-the-know people who had never heard of this modern-goth bodice-slightly-tearer. But last week's second cover—three collectors' edition covers, actually—when factored in with all the other yammering about the silly franchise, has just laid it on way too thick. At one point in her most recent interview, the mag claims that the film's star, Kristen Stewart, could be poised on the brink of a Kate Winslet-in-Titanic fame explosion. Um, really? We don't think so. This whole Twilight craze isn't even a quarter of size of the Harry Potter megamachine, and you don't hear too many rumblings about Emma Watson, do you?

And that Kate Winslet comparison is just one bit of the endless series of fawning articles, photo galleries, and various other mentions EW has lavished on the sad girl enterprise. And now they've named the book's Mormon author, Stephanie Meyer, the Number 5 Entertainer of the Year. Wait, what? The "Talking Heads of News" (Jon Stewart, the View crazies, etc.) only placed 10th. In this election and econo-crazy year? What is the effing deal, E-weeks? At least they gave the most recent book in the series, Breaking Dawn, a shitty review. Aside from that, though, their coverage has inexplicably been lopsidedly positive and prolific. Are they just a bunch of vamp-obsessed nerds? Do they have some stake in the rickety little indie company, Summit Entertainment, that's single-handedly releasing the picture?

The real answer is probably the simplest: the Twilight covers have most likely sold like gangbusters on newsstands, as non-subscriber vamp-fiends are ever-hungry for new things to slap up on their walls or jam into their scrapbooks. Once their first coverage became internet buzz fodder (back in March, when a print-edition only photo from the film's set ran), they probably figured they'd bleed the thing dry.

And, aside from the obvious sales perspective, we suspect they're also trying to jump on a budding trend, hoping to earn those sweet got-there-first flag-planting bragging rights somehwere down the road. Trouble is, we just don't see it hitting that big. Sure the movie will probably have a good first weekend (it comes out next week), but this is the Thanksgiving/Holiday/Oscar movie season, a field crowded with some big ticket films that ought to barrel roll through this cult niche wisp of a horror-romance.

Or, heh, at least we hope so. Because we're getting tired of reading about all the smoldering steamy vampire kissing and touching and hungry looks and... and. Wait.

What were we saying?

Obviously, we need escapism more than usual these days. (There's also an upcoming HBO show, True Blood, about a "waitress and her vampire lover," says TV Decoder.)

The plot of Breaking Dawn: a teen girl falls in love with a charismatic vampire. It sounds like the classic "girl falls for the wrong boy" scenario. Here, the vampire can be a stand-in for the proverbial boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Jane's Austen's Mr. Darcy, Romeo, Jordan Catalano, or Ryan Adams.