● The end of the world won’t be coming in 2012; it’s happening September 2011, when Oprah goes off the air. [WSJ]
● Mariah Carey’s demand to be surrounded by 20 white kittens and 100 white doves for the Westfield Christmas Lighting ceremony was denied, although she will be chauffeured in a Rolls Royce and escorted by 80 security guards. [DailyMail]
● Pamela Anderson finally had "the talk" with her kids. No, not the sex talk, the "your father and I made a sex tape" talk, telling her sons that: “Mommy and Daddy were massively in love, we videotaped everything and you’re probably going hear about [it] at school.” [RadarOnline]

Inside midtown Manhattan’s Bistro Milano, television screens broadcast an Italian soccer game, around which the majority of servers and patrons have crowded to gasp, cheer, and clap in unity. But first-time actress Gabourey Sidibe, oblivious, drowns out the clatter with her frequent snort-punctuated laughter. “My roommate and I love Chipotle. It’s so awesome!” she says, chuckling. “We go around noon, and we’re like, How badass would it be if we got a Corona with our burrito -- we’re such derelicts.” Sidibe’s definition of what makes a derelict couldn’t be further from the abuse she suffers as the title character in Lee Daniel’s Precious. Alongside Mo’Nique as her bilious mother, Sidibe plays a teenager who is twice impregnated by her HIV-positive father. The film, a dark but hopeful story about urban poverty and spiritual endurance, was produced by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, and will quite possibly garner Oscar nominations for its two leads. Here, the charming and spirited Sidibe explains the magic of being in the same room with Oprah, Mariah and, um, Steve Buscemi. (For more on Sidibe, check out the upcoming December/January issue of BlackBook -- this is just the gossipy stuff.)

So last we heard, Mariah Carey's's Memoirs of An Imperfect Angel was the aural equivalent of Charlie Darwin's On the Origin of Species. A genius breakthrough so staggering that all other developments in the free world needed to be put on hold in order to truly appreciate the soulful niceties of the record. But the chanteuse is fully aware of her own octave-defying brilliance. In fact, she confides in Parade, "This album I'm loving because I took chances."

Usually this time of year, after November is off the ground and we continue our speedy race to the New Year, I declare it open season on Christmas music. Sure, it's premature to be fussing about with our playlists by keying "Christmas" into the iTunes search field. But I'm not the one releasing Midwinter Graces as early as next Tuesday. So let's just get to talking about the big mistletoe-clad elephant in the room. Also, there is no other time of year when it's socially acceptable to queue up festive holiday tunes like this, this, this, and this. Around this time of year, we all get hormonal and reflective and say things like, "It's been a crazy year, but I'm glad I made it through without any substantial rug burns and I love you, man!" Christmas is magical, y'all! More magical yet: deciding whether you'd cut a rug to the tried-and-true Mariah Carey while chucking tinsel on your tree or if you'd rather brood with Tori Amos.

And then you have those celebrity knife fights that you're secretly hoping will be rained on by a downpour of meteors because you can't sympathize with either fighter. Having successfully earned the ire of musical Mensan Mariah Carey, Eminem now creakily adjusts his dated brand of overly-macho pugilism to throw down with Madonna. And while a Madge-and-Em mash-up shouldn't work technically, from a kind of hometown solidarity standpoint, it should be inevitable. Here we have a city cratered with devastation, blight, and utter despair, where houses are go for $100 a pop. And we have a pair of pop stars who have managed to escape the thrashing tentacles of such blight just barely. Pop stars who should be jumping at a chance to make the most of their messianic complexes.

Goddamn. Pop's leading ladies have taken quite the beating lately. Okay, fine, so I was wielding the cudgel at some point. But it's not like I had a hand in dismantling the greatest girlband of the 21st century. And above all, some pop stars deserved it. But lately, not Mariah Carey, who warmed our hearts on 9/11 when we found it difficult to get out of bed on that very day. So here we are. With digital copies of her new record, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel having leaked, nay, spilled onto the internet ahead of its worldwide release. The early verdict? Well it's rather nice if you fancy a morphine drip plugged into your ears, what with all of the record's whisper-wailing and computerized blippity-bloops. To be honest, post-rehab Mariah was riding the crest of her creative high with The Emancipation of Mimi and has been slipping since.

You know who's long overdue for a Get Out of Jail Free card? No, not Courtney Love, you jokesters! Mariah Carey, naturally. Even if in the past, she had the gall to chalk up the failure of Glitter to September 11 and not the screenplay itself, the stormy weather here in New York on this solemn day lets us know that it's time to forgive Mariah her trespasses against decency, people with ears, and basically anyone who has now come to associate Mean Girls with this tune. Until her next highly-publicized stumble, anyway. So how exactly will Mariah be spending this particular 9/11?

Last night I found myself negotiating a spicy tuna roll with a pair of chopsticks when a friend turned to me and said, "Do you think she's had work done? She's obviously had work done." We were referring to Whitney Houston's radiant new look. And then this horrible tune by Mariah Carey came on over the speakers, so naturally we rounded out the trio by all agreeing that Madonna hadn't done anything respectable since 1998's Ray of Light. And lately, it's been nothing but a slow burn of setbacks, one after another and another. But somehow, we expect that despite three of pop's erstwhile heavyweights unleashing what should be three of the year's biggest records, it all looks set to go down with a dull thud.

As this week crawls toward an agonizingly slow close, New York City remains a soggy teabag in too-hot water: puffy, steamed, damp, and fraying. Frankly, we'd all rather be snacking on mackerel in Antarctic bunkers. But that's just not our reality, which is otherwise two-fold: be on the streets for too long and fumes emanating from trash or smelly people will asphyxiate you. Conversely, stay indoors and you'll probably end up doing nothing besides tooling around on Twitter, because at 140 characters, it requires minimal exertion and that means fewer puddles of sweat around your apartment. But sadly, in this post-Michael Jackson era, this means that such intensive exploration will probably yield in many sobering truths about your idols. In a world of hashtags, character limits, and no copyeditors, Twitter will kill the celebrity.

So remember Mariah Carey's "Obsessed" -- that searing polemic about sociopaths? Good. Now forget it. Undergo extensive radiation therapy in order to wipe it from your brain if you must, but the bottom line is that Carey already has. Maybe it has to do with the single's embarrassing chart tenure -- the one where it failed to scratch at the Top 10. Or maybe it has to do with the fact that it's some of the worst musical floss strung together since that time Carey e-mailed some vocals to a Irish boyband and the best everyone could slap together using Quicktime's copy-and-paste function was this horrible Phil Collins cover. But the magic of karaoke is what she's counting on to see her through this gloomy era, one plagued by continual setbacks.