World Wrestling Entertainment — the heterosexual excuse for men to grab each other while wearing spandex — is hoping to make its programming more family-friendly, lowering its TV-14 rating for Monday Night Raw and Extreme Championship Wrestling to a TV-PG score. This will be good to attract advertisers who might be inclined to steer away from the violent programming.

But the producers behind the real-life fiction fighting promise they won't make the shows tamer. That is, they won't be doing away with breaking chairs over guys' backs and pretending to slam skulls into 2×4s. They'll just focus more on the storylines and the characters, turning the entire operation into a primetime soap opera with casual outbursts of over-muscled rage.

This "frightening" scene from WWE's Million Dollar Mania shows chairman Vince McMahon getting injured by some scaffolding, and then being "rushed to the hospital." Except as most WWE fans and the breathing American public know, stunts like these are part of WWE's fictitious plotlines — a manly alternative to, say, Desperate Housewives. That the whole scene was a well-choregraphed set up was lost on Houston affiliate KHOU, which reported the gimmick – or the press release – as an actual news item. [KHOU via BOH]

Today In Thompson is our semi-regular report on Syracuse University pop culture professor and professional quotation Robert Thompson — and the press' endless appetite to engage him in soundbite. Multiple times a day, you can find Thompson expounding on this celebrity or that TV show, ad infinitum. More to the point, it shows how lazy we can be in showing how lazy journalists can be when it comes to getting "insight" from "experts."

It's a slow news Monday (well, for some fields) which means we're digging into the weekend for this edition of Today In Thompson. Watch as everyone's favorite professor of pop culture (read that again, because it's his real title) expounds on professional wrestling, the iPhone, and G-rated movies.

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• NBC isn't thrilled that ex-Apprentice contestants Markus Garrison and Jennifer Wallen are talking on the record about producers' editing tricks, especially since they signed nondisclosure agreements. The cease-and-desist letters have been sent, threatening to collect on that little $5 million in damages clause. [Lowdown]

• If a boob is exposed on the red carpet and nobody photographs it, did it really happen? Keira Knightly almost joined the Tara Reid Club when her press walk turned explicit, but unfortunately her breasts were blocked from the flashing lenses. [Gatecrasher]

• Expect to see more of Laguna Beach's Lauren "L.C." Conrad, who's managed to turn her Teen Vogue internship into an excuse for MTV's cameras to follow her around some more. [WWD]

• It seemed like nobody wanted Kate Moss ever since her cocaine exposure, but now Burberry has reversed its decision to end its relationship with the model. First Rimmell, then Cavalli and now Burberry? Who knew drug use was such a career booster. [Vogue]

• First Paris Hilton starts dating Mary-Kate Olsen's trash and now sister Nicky is copying her sister by, uh, dating Paris' trash. [Radar]

• At last, we know what Lloyd Grove does in his spare time: read republican porno novels. The Lowdowner will be auctioning off his personally autographed copy of Scooter Libby's The Apprentice on eBay. [Lowdown]

• Quo nightclub owner Carlo Seneca has been stepping out on his wife Jessica with none other than "the world's first supermodel" Janice Dickinson. Carlo's excuse? He wanted a celeb attached to his new restaurant Pre-Post. Though, uh, Janice is already an investor. [Page Six]

• Congrats to Donald Trump Jr. and Vanessa Haydon, whose wedding on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach indicates we'll be blessed with a whole new generation of pretend wealth. [NYDN]

• Eddie Guerrero won't see the inside of the ring ever again. The WWE wrestler was found dead in his hotel room in Minneapolis, though there's no sign that Sean Michaels put him in a sleeper hold. [AP]

• Place your bets for today's Gawker v. The Onion softball game, where the odds of Weblogs Inc. liveblogging the event holds steady at 1/4.

• When Howard Stern hops on over to Sirius, you might miss his awesome visuals. Don't worry, you might still be able to get your fix .. so long as you pay for Comcast's video-on-demand service.

• Martha Stewart's lifestyle show Martha will be syndicated on TLC in the evenings, which means, like SoapNet does for Passions, you can get your Stewart fix in the evenings if you missed the daytime version.

• In order to beat Gunsmoke's record of "producing the most original episodes of any weekly fictional entertainment program ever on television," World Wrestling Entertainment will readily tout it's programming is entirely scripted.

• Not that you ever expected the city to improve subway service, but they tried. Oh, and failed, at least so far.

• Check out tomorrow's magazines today. That is if you believe they're going to be around that long.

• Leave your TomKat wedding gift shopping to the pros. Or, uh, the democratic process.

• Simon Dumenco pulls the wool from our eyes: "Journalism is just part of the larger infotainment-marketing ecosystem."