My good friend and colleague Joel Bartlett just started watching Veronica Mars, starring the lovely Kristen Bell, who was voted the world's Sexiest Vegetarian this year. Joel, who has never been one to let daily life get in the way of an obsession (see, for instance, his popsicle-stick castle), has not stopped talking about his newfound love for one second all week. So, in an effort to appease him, and for those of you who didn't catch Kristen on Jay Leno in, like, July, here's a video of her talking about Veronica Mars, PETA, and some other good stuff with Jay and our old friend Kevin Nealon. As Joel says of the video,

If you caught the new episode of CSI on Thursday, you'll know that the story involved a murder at a "poultry manufacturing plant." Meaning, like, a murder of a human. But there was also plenty of footage used in the show from PETA undercover investigations of chicken slaughterhouses. We're already big CSI fans because of our friend Jorja Fox, but hooray for the number-one show in the world taking some time to let people know exactly what goes on behind the scenes in factory farms.

If you didn't catch that episode, you're probably going to have to wait until this season comes out on DVD. Sorry about that—next time I'll mention this sort of thing before the episode airs.

Look out, ladies and gentlemen, here comes Madonna. In a £35,000 chinchilla fur coat. For those of you doing the math, that means Madge needs to have more than 60 furry animals electrocuted just to keep her warm on a Wednesday night—which means that if you're planning on being anywhere near her U.K. residence this Christmas, you might want to hide your babies and your family pets. The story, such as it is, is that Madonna was spotted last Wednesday at a Mayfair restaurant called Cecconi's positively drowning in the dead animals, which had been sewn together for her by the designers at Fendi.

Why would anyone with a shred of decency ever consider wearing such a thing? The prevailing theory around here is that when it comes to making headlines, Madonna is just too old to flash her beaver like Britney Spears, so she brought out the chinchilla. (Oh, zing! See what I did there?)

Anyway, we fired off a letter to her this morning to ask her to just for God's sake, stop it, and you can read that here. If you'd like to let her know how you feel yourself, you can contact her using the following information:

Liz Rosenberg (Madonna's US publicist)
liz.rosenberg@wbr.com

Barbara Charone (Madonna's UK publicist)
bc@mbcpr.com