This week's cover picture is a publicity shot from 1977 of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew, and Harrison Ford in their Star Wars regalia. While Hamill as Luke Skywalker aims a blaster to the left and Ford as Han Solo aims one to the right, Fisher as Princess Leia excitedly grips the abdomen hair of Mayhew's howling Chewbacca. There are laws against that kind of behavior in some states.

One of Mail's letter-generating artificial personalities pretends to be Stephen J. Cannell this week, and it implies that EW's recent article on Ken Wahl is both cruel and inaccurate -- it seems the AP doesn't possess sophisticated enough programming to realize that its complaint is like accusing an iPod of being small and white. Another AP from grandopera.org apparently suffers from the same programming shortcomings as the Cannell AP because it calls EW's article about Bjork's latest album "neither true nor accurate". And still another AP claims that "The Apprentice is the only show I watch where I sit and take notes", which may explain the gaps in the EW AP project's knowledge base.

The lead article in News + Notes is (dis)graced by a caricature of Britney Spears by Drew Friedman that is so ugly, cruel, and unflattering that I actually feel sorry for Britney, which mental gymnastic I fear could lead to vascular dementia. The associated article, Brian Hiatt's Star Burst, details how Britney's "tabloid antics" may be "tripping up her career", as though the former could be distinguished from the latter. A short Q&A with Johnny Knoxville by Steve Daly warns the reader that "we're firmly in Parental Advisory territory" -- I think the very fact that the magazine is open already implies that. The first item on Dalton Ross' always disappointing Hit List reveals that he likes rhyming "hanky-panky" with "spanky" and I can't say that this surprises me. Tina Jordan thinks she's being cute in Hot Off the Prez by pretending to "locate the juiciest tidbits in" Kitty Kelley's Bush family exposé and then presenting the most innocuous items she can find. Tina is wrong. In The Deal Report Gregory Kirschling jams as many plot spoilers as he can into the approximately 120 words he devotes to next year's Mary Warner because Gregory is just that kind of person. Who is Fred Ebb? A dead lyricist whose Razzle Dazzler obituary somehow merits more EW page space than did Julia Child's or Jack Paar's. On the Style Sheet page, Michelle Kung's The Look of 'Tomorrow' tells me that the costumes in Kevin Conran's film, which evoke those portrayed in 1930s comic books and on pulp magazine covers, are the "real...marvels" of the movie, making me wonder if she spent too much time in a hat factory in her various style-searching investigations. I skip The Shaw Report this week because I can. In a two-sentence report, the Monitor states that an appeals court in Cincinnati has decided to seriously limit the Fair Use Doctrine -- EW must figure that such a legal precedent could not possibly interest the readers of a magazine devoted to the entertainment industry enough to merit an actual article on the subject.

Mark Harris writes Dear Mr. Fantasy and he isn't feigning his affection for George Lucas: Harris's interview with the director is nothing short of fawning. The closest Mark gets to addressing the astonishingly bad acting of Attack of the Clones, for example, is to ask politely, "Is it unfair when people say you're impatient with actors?" when "How do you get such terrible performances from such good actors?" would be a more appropriate query. I have to wonder what Mark was smoking.

Jeff Jensen calls Mark Hamill The Man Who Fell To Earth, even though Hamill's cheekbones look nothing like David Bowie's. The interview with Hamill, though, is actually fair, polite, yet revealing. Perhaps Harris needs to hang out with Jeff more.

Big Mac Attack is Gregory Kirschling's attempt at a clever title for his two-column article about Bernie Mac and his new film, Mr. 3000 even though the title refers to hamburgers and not to actors. Similarly, the piece begins with Kirschling calling Mac the movie's "leadoff man" because it sounds sort of like "leading man" even though it means something entirely different. Maybe Kirschling's been batting without a helmet again.

In Conventional Power Josh Rottenberg hangs out with Fox News folk for both political conventions. Better him than me.

Tom Sinclair hangs out with some members of The Clash to discuss the 25th-anniversary reissue of London Calling; he titles the article The Best Album in the World because he's been smoking some of Mark Harris's cigarettes.

Our 25 Most Anticipated Albums of the Fall by assorted EW writers hides 24 of the albums behind an advertising gatefold where they won't be missed. Several of the albums seem to be titled Not Yet Titled.

Nancy Miller reports that Nancy Sinatra is Still Walkin'. Sinatra comes across as creepy yet strangely likable.

Michael Endelmann spends Three Days in the Crunk Factory. As a self-proclaimed "skinny, bespectacled white guy", Endelmann feels compelled to translate Lil Jon's definition of "crunk" ("high-energy rap music that makes people lose control and have a ball in the club") to the more skinny-bespectacled-white-guy-friendly "an aggressive, low-end-heavy off-shoot of Southern hip-hop that perfectly captures that heart-pounding, goose-bump-inducing rush of adrenaline brought on by the convergence of too much alcohol, rib-cage-rattling bass, and sweating masses of horny people." Whatever.

The Must List likes the Alf - Season One DVD set. I hate The Must List.

One of the Movies that Lisa Schwarzbaum likes this week is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, so much so that it raises her to heights of lyrical alliteration and assonance ("Polly is prone to pouting as an expression of sexual tension"). Owen seems chagrined that he liked Wimbledon. He's not so chagrined with his distaste for Head in the Clouds with Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend, saying that Townsend is "a somber puppy who looks as if Theron could eat him alive. I wish she had." Of course, that would have been a very different movie. Ask The Critic gives Owen a chance to list the best movies ever directed by an actor, and he omits Citizen Kane but includes Trees Lounge. Must have been something he ate.

In DVD&Video, Dalton expresses his overwhelming geek love for the new Star Wars DVD set and the sound I don't hear is a gasp of total surprise.

The Television subhead for Ken Tucker's review of Lost says that the show "is definitely worth your isle" -- my review of the review is, Shut it, Ken. I have the same review for Ken's Ask The Critic sidebar because he uses the faux-word lotsa alot and because he would "love to see what Fred Flintstone would've done as Homer Simpson" when asked "Are there any actors you would like to see play an existing character" -- Ken, though it may be sometimes hard to tell, human actors really aren't cartoon characters. Jessica Shaw in Heaven Helps Them is amused by blasphemy as uttered by certain contestants on certain reality shows and I'm amused by the possibility that she could be condemned to everlasting hellfire for it. Nicholas Fonseca writes a guest capsule review of Still Brady After All These Years in What To Watch in which he states that at one point in the show "Anne B. Davis waddles in" -- good thing Nicholas will never become old and infirm and therefore worthy of mockery like Anne B. Davis.

David Brown in Music asks "Now that CDs can easily be dismantled with the help of an iPod's 'shuffle' function, what's more obnoxious than reviving the concept album" -- two responses: 1) you, David, 2) I guess you've never seen a CD player with a "shuffle play" function, have you, David?

Laura Miller writes the Books lead review of A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All; Jacobs, who once wrote for EW, decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover in a quest to become "the smartest person in the world" -- worthy goal, wrong approach, lightweight review (by the way, I read the Golden Book Encyclopedia from cover to cover when I was ten, and all it has done is make me a somewhat stronger Trivial Pursuit player). Whitney Pastorek's Mamas Don't Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Write Kid Lit gives capsule biographies of four troubled children's book writers, and the lesson I take from it is that the prospect of Whitney someday writing about you is reason enough not to produce any children's books.

As I might have predicted if I'd thought about it, The Great American Pop Culture Quiz this week is devoted to Star Wars trivia, and, to my shame, I find that I know almost all the answers.