• Photogs catch Harry Morton purchasing an engagement ring at Cartier. Could a proposal be in the works for his very own Pink Taco, La Lohan? Probably not, but it’s late August and the VMAs haven’t started yet, so let’s just speculate for awhile.
• Paris Hilton has managed, in a mere 24 hours, to be linked romantically with both Lance Armstrong and Travis Barker. What an unpredictable little whorecake she is.
• John Mayer denies the Jessica Simpson romance with his own patented brand of brood and angst.
• Okay, okay, okay. John Travolta just might be gay. Act surprised. Thanks to Dave at Maassive for the push.
• “Jump the couch.” A defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end. Know it. Love it. Say it.

• Kendra Wilkinson, Hugh Hefner’s adorable and beautiful girlfriend (no joke! I love her! I love all of them!), was super psyched to appear in her first rap video (okay that’s where my connection with her begins to fade), but her day was ruined when Eminem poured a bottle of water all over her. I have a feeling there’s a lot more to this story, but Kendra is so much fun to watch on Girls Next Door, and she seems like a genuine, sweet person, so I’m just going to link you to the email she sent to MediaTakeOut and let you draw your own conclusions.
• Paris Hilton’s rookie album sells a mere 75,000 copies in its first week, and projections put it at 30,000 for next week. I’ve made a chart:

  

  Are you familiar with the term “asymptote,” Paris? I wrote some code to calculate when, at this rate, your album would go platinum, and it slowed down processing on my computer for a solid five minutes before I stopped it. For comparison, Mrs. Jordan Bratman’s album debuted this week and sold 320,000 copies. Industry-speak for this sort of thing is “flop.” Nicole Richie plans to celebrate by eating the other half of that apple slice.

• John Mayer and Jessica Simpson? I’m concerned; I always end up rolling my eyes whenever I hear either of them speak. This could make me really dizzy.
• How cute are Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy? Sooooo cute.

Notable Amazon.com album rankings from today:

1. Christina Aguilera, Back to Basics [I LOVE YOU XTINA!]
2. Danity Kane, Danity Kane [Yup, that's Diddy's all-girl group from yet another interminable cycle of Making the Band. Today, as the title says, we are putting things in perpective.]
…
7. Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way [Didn't that one lead singer chick say something mean about Texas? Or the Pope? It was something like that.]
…
10. Clay Aiken, A Thousand Different Ways [insert multiple-penetration joke here]
…
12. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds [tell us again about those talentless AmIdol hacks, JT, and do it without using any spaces!]
…
24. Kidz Bop, Vol. 10
…
28. High School Musical [Amazon has Ashley Tisdale listed as the artist, but I refuse to condone that here.]
…
32. Cheetah Girls 2 Original Soundtrack [even better than the first Cheetah Girls soundtrack!]

and at #33:
Paris Hilton, Paris.

To her credit, she’s been climbing this chart all day, but when your album’s stalling out three times as far down as Clay Aiken on pre-order, something didn’t go exactly to plan.

If it makes you feel any better, Paris, Jessica Simpson’s A Public Affair promises to remain comparatively private, hanging out at the #75 position this afternoon.

I’ll have you know that Paris Hilton is my friend on mySpace. The real Paris Hilton. I know this because several months ago I received a bulletin from her pointing me to a secret page with select tracks from her forthcoming album. They were awful. Embarrassing. Perfect. I sent the link along to some close friends, all of whom essentially called bullshit. “This can’t be for real,” they said. “It can’t actually be this bad.”

Paris’s eponymous album, released this week, contained all of those tracks and more. In spite of all the Scott Storch hype, the disc is childish and amateurish. It’s predictable, I suppose. The beats are danceable, and Hilton’s voice is an amalgam of that nasal, pimple-faced darling of your local community theater and Jenna Jameson masturbating. “Scott Storch,” she whispers not ten seconds into the first track, and your stomach buckles. It’s all going to be like this.

The first single from the disc, “Stars are Blind,” which you’ve all heard 8000 times by now, is a respectable showing. The album has one other bright spot, “Screwed.” Hilton battled Haylie Duff (of Hilary fame) for the rights to this song, but the real losers here are songwriters Kara DioGuardi and Greg Wells, whose catchy, true-love-means-you-can-put-it-in-my-ass number would have been sexy and fun in the hands of a Kelly Clarkson; on Hilton it just looks bitter and slutty.

Other can’t-miss tracks include “Jealousy,” an anti-Nicole Richie tirade (in which she implies implausibly that it was Nicole whose ego couldn’t handle Paris’s fame) and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” where Rod Stewart picks up a writing cred.

Hilton cowrote about half the songs on the album (the more difficult listens, not surprisingly), and one quickly gets the feeling she put more effort into the liner notes, in which she thanks each of her pets by name — names like Napoleon, Cinderella, Baby Luv, and Kim Kardashian.

Will this album get spun on the club scene? Yeah, probably. Paris is marketing the hell out of it. The beats are solid, the vocals are on-key, and alcohol and cocaine can be serious mitigating factors in that always-on-appeal case of The People vs. Bad Music. So roll up a dollar bill and get to it, because we’ll always have Paris.

Check out the album:

When is Britney due again? This is so frustrating. Items being circulated as news today:

• Paris Hilton released the album you and your best friend recorded on an 8-track when you were ten years old. Honestly, I had pretty much made up my mind that I was not going to listen to this album; I was going to hold out for weeks, at least, and possibly months; my resolve was strong and my motives were pure; and around 3:15 pm a coworker dropped it on my desk, and it was all over for me. I’ll write a more thorough review later.
• No one will ever marry Brittany Murphy. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Makeover!
• Kate Hudson thinks she can just skip out on an overseas premiere of a movie nobody cares about just because she’s divorcing a man nobody cares about without it being big news. And any other week, she’d be right.

I know, I know, this is supposed to be a gossip blog, and I made you look at Yahoo’s (plummeting) stock chart last week, and now this headline, and it’s really not fair, and you’re getting kind of squirmy, and, like, uugggghhhhh, but this is important, so sit down and shut up.

PepsiCo (they make Pepsi, in case you were confused, in which case don’t even bother with the upcoming words) announced today that CFO Indra Nooyi will take over the CEO position from Steven Reinemund, who plans to retire; this makes PepsiCo the second-largest company based on revenue to have a female CEO (Patricia Woertz at Archer Daniels Midland leads the largest) , and puts Nooyi on a very short list of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, not to mention among the Fortune 100, where PepsiCo resides (interestingly enough, PepsiCo is #1 in revenues in the Food Consumer Products industry; position #2 is held by Brenda Barnes’ Sara Lee). Nooyi is well respected by analysts and peers, and PepsiCo stock was up slightly with the news. Thank you, Carly Fiorina.

Okay, sorry, I know that was really really painful, so to make it up to you, Paris Hilton is still getting paparazzi mileage out of that firecrotch thing. TMZ got it on tape. Hopefully watching that can help you feel a little less dirty about knowing something about the business world today.