Is New York City suddenly having a celebrity shortage? Despite the long, sort-of boring Page Six lead about celeb Halloween costumes (OMG, Salman Rushdie as Darth Vader was fending off "scantily costumed babes" with his light sabre!) it seems none of the Hollywood fixtures have been out and about in the big city.

And it truly is a sad day when the only official P6 "Sighting" is "DUSTIN Diamond, who played Screech on "Saved by the Bell," riding shotgun in a minivan near Lincoln Center, leaning out the window and spitting on the street."

Meanwhile, a sneak preview of tomorrow's 'Sighting: "The entire cast of short-lived 90's sitcom California Dreams spotted piled into a soccer-mom car SUV going south on the West Side Highway. Fortunately, witnesses say they were not carrying their instruments."

• Lindsay's 21st bday was so boring, she had to take all the exploitative photographs herself.

• Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie's rep attributes his client's impending divorce to 'too many chefs' in Padma Lakshmi's kitchen.

• Robert F. Kennedy 3rd gets freaky with a "heavyset girl" from Missy Elliott's entourage.

• Tracey Edmonds ditches Eddie Murphy after occasionally hearing or reading things that "made her wonder." Presumably, Edmonds is referring to rumors that Murphy fathered a child with Scary Spice then totally denied it. Either that or she finally watched Norbit.

CONTINUED »

• Breaking: Lily Allen arrested for allegedly attacking a photographer four months ago.

• Padma Lakshmi continues to not-cheat on her husband, author Salman Rushdie.

• Barack Obama has 99 problems, but his iTunes collection ain't one.

• German has graciously ended its boycott on ambiguously gay Scientologists.

• Nicole Richie may be on the hunt for a size triple-zero Vera Wang wedding gown.

• During a recent concert, former Fugee Lauryn Hill ("looking not unlike a bag lady") tripped, fell and landed flat on her backside. Which pretty much sums up her entire performance.

What do Salman Rushdie, Myla Goldberg and Martha Stewart have in common? Their publishes want to kill them.

None of them have met sales expectations for their books this year, which gives the New York Times Arts section plenty of reason to spit out a trend piece. This one, however, is actually quite timely: an end of the year round up of the industry's winners and losers.

Jimmy Carter, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut, meanwhile, can expect quite the gift basket from their publishers this years as they issue subsequent printings of their tomes.

The sales data all points to the continued trend of Americans favoring non-fiction over silly creations intended to let readers escape into a fantasy land. (Shut up, Harry Potter.)

"If there's any theme to the year," said David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster's flagship imprint, "it's that people only want to read the truth." So while nonfiction sales are generally good, he said, fiction sales are best defined, in Mr. Rosenthal's usual plain-spoken manner, by an expletive.

Well holy fuck! Nicole Richie's non-fiction novela The Truth About Diamonds might just be a best seller yet.

Publishers Assess the Fall Season's Winners and Losers [Edward Wyatt, NYT]