Admittedly, it’s only mid-morning, but already, the papers are blaring on both coasts of celebrity encounters with “the help.”

Naomi Campbell has performed a Blackberry hat-trick, nearly braining her maid in the process.

The stress of a scheduled appearance on Oprah appears to have taken its toll. It makes us wonder: What the hell is in that couch? Catnip? Gamma Hydroxybutyric Acid? Pringles?

Simultaneously, Aaron Spelling‘s legal tete-a-tete with his nursemaid will be available for all to see, the LAT reports. (Spelling’s nurse alleges she was asked to dress up like a prostitute, amongst other charming anecdotes.)

Our favorite Spelling quote? Not exactly a denial, per se: “I have absolutely no recollection of engaging in any of the conduct that she alleges.”

In other words, “I might have asked you to dress like a hooker, but I was so hopped up on Cialis, who could remember?”

Look for this one to settle by mid-April.

For a celebrity whose life is presumably more interesting than ours, George Clooney sure seems to spend a lot of time surfing the internet. His new bete noir, according to Page Six, is gawker.com’s Google-maps aided real-time celebrity stalker feature. In an email to his publicist, who then forwarded it to other publicists, Clooney writes: “There is a simple way to render these guys useless… Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That’s the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride. Thanks, George.”

Wow, George Clooney in favor of deceiving the press. I am so taking ‘Good Night, And Good Luck’ off my Netflix queue.

MySpace, the Santa Monica-based corporation dedicated to making it easier for lonely teenagers to acquire gonorrhea, has removed 200,000 ‘objectionable’ profiles from its site. Although I notice that, thankfully, EmoVixenLuv666 still has her totally hott photos up. I feel like she and I would totally relate. Why doesn’t she ever respond to my IMs?

Anyway with 250,000 new users every day, it’s hard to see how MySpace’s increasing self-policing will keep up with its growth. So, tread carefully, alienated teens of MySpace!

Interesting peek at the future of the TV business today in via the AP, courtesy Comcast COO Steve Burke.

Essentially, Cablevision has been trying out a new magic box that will allow customers to retrieve recorded TV shows from their cable company’s system, rather than from a TiVo-style hard drive.

The ramifications of such a switch in content control from consumer to cable company would be substantial. For one, if the cable company is doing the recording at its ‘head end’, presumably, the cost of the magic boxes goes down, and more people might pony up for ‘em.

Said Burke,

“It’s a very good idea, very well thought through,” he said at a Bank of America conference, adding, “If it all works out, I’m sure the rest of the industry will follow.”

Well, not so fast. Whether it works out, of course, comes down to whether people are willing to trade control for cost.

TiVo‘s appeal, naturally, is all about control – not just control of time-shifting, so you can watch “Battlestar Galactica” in a drug-addled haze at 3 a.m. after you get home from your all-night raver.

It’s also just as much about control of the advertising. Presumably, a cable company-controlled TV recorder wouldn’t allow you to skip the commercials.

While this is the whole point of owning a TiVo, it’s the underpinning of most of the TV business.

From my standpoint, there’s no point in letting Brian Roberts be your wheelman if you’re just going to have to make a whole bunch of pit-stops in Commercialsville. That, my friends, is where the squares live.

Say you’re profiling Sean Penn. And say Sean Penn, at the time in which you and Sean Penn are Hanging Out Together so that you can Get To The Bottom Of His Complicated Personality, is writing up his trip to Iran for what will become a multi-part piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. But say Sean Penn is having some Trouble With The Piece and reads to you his Somewhat Overblown First Draft. Do you give him editorial advice and then brag about it in the profile you’re writing? From John Lahr’s piece in the current New Yorker:

Penn read for about ten minutes, glancing up occasionally to see my reaction. After five pages, he was just about to disembark from the plane in Tehran. I suggested that perhaps he should get to Iran earlier in the piece. He nodded, but said nothing. (Stripped of some of its vainglory and verbosity, the edited version of Penn’s essay became the Chronicle‘s most read story of the year, with more than half a million hits on the newspaper’s Web site.)

Distinction, the Tribune Co. SoCal lifestyle magazine that was slightly more vapid than Los Angeles Confidential, but a lot less vapid than, say, Brentwood, has folded

Is this the beginning of a shakeout of the overstuffed Southern California category of magazines-for-unapologetically-fich-people? Or just a market correction? Dunno. One advantage titles in this segment have over other print publications in the increasingly internetty media world: most people don’t have computers in their bathrooms, which is where magazines like Distinction are mostly read.

Chris Ayres, Los Angeles correspondent for the London Times, claims that Los Angeles drivers really aren’t so bad– compared, that is, to those in legendarily overcrowded foreign cities (and war zones). He’s right, I think, and he doesn’t even mention Atlanta. Why is it then, if Los Angeles doesn’t have the world’s worst drivers, it probably has the most complained-about drivers? I think it’s because Los Angeles has more people than any other city in the world with an overwhelming sense of entitlement, whose sense of the rightness of the world is shaken with every fender bender.

- Jeans are getting tighter. No wonder I can’t feel my legs right now.

- I don’t mean to get all Dick Hebdige on everyone, but I’m pretty sure the people who hang out at the Little Joy aren’t beatniks.

- Note to Carolyn Kellogg: try Burning Man.

Congratulations to Paul Hipp, who won the Jury Prize in last month’s Huffington Post Contagious Festival, which seeks to honor those who create the cute little internet videos that your more annoying friends email you six times a week.

Funny thing about Paul Hipp: in addition to being the Huffington Post Jury Prize winner, he is a contributor to the HuffPo and a professional colleague of jury member John Cusack.

Of course, there’s nothing in the Contagious Festival rules prohibiting F.O.H.P. from entering. And I suppose everyone’s entitled to a jury of their peers.

Pop quiz time! According to Chicago Tribune culture critic Julia Keller, the (awful) movie ‘Freedomland’, the (so-so) movie ‘Flightplan’, and the (frankly, never watched them) TV shows ‘Without a Trace’ and ‘Cold Case’ are:

a) examples of Hollywood attempting to milk tired genres;

b) much more fun when you watch them on YouTube;

or

c) examples of American culture’s post-9/11 fascination with absence, just like the work of literary giants Alice Munro, Jonathan Safran Foer and John Haskell (okay, he’s not a giant, but he’s a great novelist), all “underlie[d by a] frantic desire for the status quo, a desperate yearning for life to return to the way it used to be.”

The answer is c). I’m glad newspapers employ critics who take their work seriously, but, gee, sometimes a Jodie Foster B-movie is just a Jodie Foster B-movie.