"I did LSD once, only once ... It was a very bad trip — I freaked out and called my parents and tried to explain to my dad what I was feeling, but all he said was, 'I understand what you're going through. When I was a teenager I smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and I got sick for two days.' I'm like, 'Dad, no, this is worse. You don't understand.' But they had never had any experience of the drug culture, because they were working so hard all through the 1960s." —Ben Stiller on not being a hard-core druggie [Female First]

"I started to realize 'Dickensian' was a shorthand for 'I don't really actually care about the underlying economic dynamic that is creating this nightmare. I don't want to examine that. I just want some sweet stories about some kids who are poor and are being hurt. I could win a prize in that. Be Dickensian. And I thought it was sort of an affront to Dickens almost. I mean, if Dickens heard it, I think he would have gotten mad." —David Simon channeling Charles Dickens's reactions to the state of today's journalism [PBS]

"I've got no musical abilities whatsoever. I sing if I'm listening to music. I sing along with it — I can hit the note if I've just heard it. My husband is very musical. He just hates to hear me sing — he shuts me up!" —Helen Mirren on her terrible singing voice [Contact Music]

Are you excited about Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno but worried its high jinks might not be gay enough? Director Lynn Shelton may have your number — her upcoming comedy Humpday, arriving the very same weekend (July 10), tells the story of two straight friends (played by Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplass) who reunite after years apart, fall back into their old habit of competing in increasingly outrageous dares, and, at the end of a wild night out, challenge themselves to have sex together in a gay porno. Magnolia Pictures gave us first crack at the movie's poster — see it after the jump.

Sure, everyone in publishing agrees that the Kindle will kill book sales and authors' advances, melt the ice caps, and further the spread of swine flu — but will it also impair literary snobs' ability to broadcast their intellectualism to strangers by whipping out a copy of Ulysses on the subway? Alarmingly, yes, claims the Times' Joanne Kaufman. She writes:

"The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms."

As much as we love judging people, though, we're not really concerned about any of this.

Following an extended, hilarious controversy, Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry is expected to sign an executive order tomorrow naming the Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize??" the state's official rock song. The order will overturn an earlier decision to reject the track by the Oklahoma House of Representatives, whose Republican members took issue with the T-shirt that Lips bassist Michael Ivins wore (it featured a Communism-y hammer and sickle) on a visit to the state capitol in March. Front man Wayne Coyne blames the whole flap on a cabal of "small-minded religious wackos" and says "I think we'll print up a couple of thousand of these [sickle and hammer] T-shirts and everybody who comes to [tomorrow's ceremony] will be wearing one ... We'll see if we can get the governor to wear one too." If you still feel like being outraged this morning, though, you'd probably like to know that New York State doesn't even have an official rock song, much less one about our inevitable mortality.

Flaming Lips Song Gets Oklahoma Honor Despite Controversy [Billboard]

Hamm-Westfeldt Sandwich: Jon Hamm and his lady friend Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein) have set up production company Points West Pictures. They have three projects in the pipeline, including an adaptation of the play Dusty and the Big Bad World, a dramedy influenced by PBS’s 2005 scandal “Bustergate”: Dusty revolves around an 11-year-old girl with gay dads who wins an appearance for her family on her little brother’s favorite show, only to have an influential member of the Christian right threaten to get the show’s funding pulled if the episode airs. Apparently said member did not have that kind of pull from 1987 to 1990. [HR]

Bioshocked: Pre-production on Gore Verbinski’s Bioshock, the video-game adaptation about a power struggle in an underwater city, has been stopped due to budget concerns. Verbinski and co. are looking into a few financially savvy options for the movie, now at a budget of $160 million, including shooting in London to take advantage of tax credits and making it about pirates in the Caribbean. [Variety]

For anyone who's ever sat all the way through the end of a movie's credits and wondered what the heck a key grip, assistant casting director, or sound editor does, Natalie Portman has unveiled a new online venture, MakingOf, that she hopes will explain all that. “I always wondered why there isn’t a Web site that encapsulated the experience of visiting a friend on a movie set,” Portman explained. “Our site is supposed to give access to people who don’t have a friend they can visit" — meaning pretty much everyone, and definitely us.

Even though the film industry pours millions of dollars into Washington, D.C.'s local economy on an annual basis, the Washington Times is reporting that strict laws regarding film permits are giving the city a reputation as the most difficult place to shoot in the United States. Apparently, even shooting simple exterior shoots of Capitol Hill and the headquarters of the FBI is an enormous ordeal, thanks to overzealous local authorities who seem to feel that a camera crew shooting a building façade regularly seen in postcards and tourist snapshots amounts to disclosing major State secrets. According to State of Play director Kevin MacDonald, the blame mostly rests with the federal authorities, as opposed to the district's generally helpful film commission, while former West Wing producer Michael Fountain claims that the city is a terrific place to shoot, thanks mainly to his connections with the Secret Service, who were fans of his show. Ultimately, since some estimates indicate that the District is the third-largest film economy in the country, after Los Angeles and New York City, it seems pretty unlikely that the authorities are going to change their rules in the interest of attracting more filmmakers. Lame!

D.C. rules make filmmaking a tough sell [Washington Times]

Hey, this is cool. MGMT has settled its beef with French political party UMP, sparked when the organization used the song "Kids" at its national congress without clearing it first. Nicolas Sarkozy's crew was eager to settle, because copyright infringement is one of their political pet peeves (apparently not to the point where they thought to make sure the band was properly compensated before using the song, but whatever), and they've now come through with the loot. And, in truly classy fashion, the band will use its gains for good and not for evil.