Quickies: Brangelina's Fantasy Island at The Insider

Pictures: Quickies: Brangelina's Fantasy Island

See More... Angelina Jolie has often talked about her efforts to keep her multicultural brood in touch with their roots, but even she has her limits. Seems reports that the sultry if spindly Oscar winner and her partner in prettiness Brad Pitt have plunked down major bucks to buy a man-made island in the shape of Ethiopia -- the place of daughter Zahara's birth -- are so much hooey. According to the Emirates Today newspaper, the eco-boosting, A-list amours hoped to use the land mass, located off the coast of Dubai, to promote a "greener" way of life. The island story, which first made the rounds more than a year ago, all sounded a little Michael Jackson-esque to us, so we checked with Pitt's rep, who assures MSN Entertainment it's "not true."

When Andrew Morton's eagerly anticipated biography (well, eagerly anticipated by us, at least) on Tom Cruise hits shelves in January, it will be the culmination of an apparently perilous information-gathering process. The author tells Britain's Sunday Express that he's faced such intense pressure from the box office-sinking star's fellow Scientologists while writing the tome that he had to sell his London home and go "underground." "I have received threats from the Scientologists and things have become pretty heavy -- to the extent that it's almost more than my lawyers can handle," Morton maintains to the paper. "I've sold my flat and I'm not telling anyone where I'm moving to. I intend to disappear for a while."

Next time you give blood and think you see Lindsay Lohan standing nearby, it might not be a low sugar-induced hallucination. People reports the double DUI-busted starlet began serving her court-ordered 10 days of community service at a Los Angeles-area Red Cross outpost on Monday. LiLo, who must also spend one day in jail as part of her plea agreement, toiled at the facility for about seven hours.

How much of a joke have Britney Spears' mothering skills become? Even Heidi Klum is scoring laughs off her. In a sit-down this week with Ellen DeGeneres, the likable model mogul-cum-hands-on mom of three reveals she chatted with the court-monitored cautionary tale after she turned up uninvited at her annual Halloween bash (both dressed up in cat costumes, but only one looked like a coughed-up hairball -- a toughie, we know). When Ellen asked what topics they covered, Heidi quipped, "You know, we were talking about babies and diapers, and she explained to me a lot of things about diapers that I didn't know." Such as? "You know these sticky things on the side? I never knew they were there," teased Mrs. Seal. "To close them in the front, I was always putting string around. I had no idea ... It's very clever. I learned a lot of things." At that point, Klum and DeGeneres both busted out laughing (and so did we).

Ellen Pompeo wasn't exaggerating when she said her wedding would be "very small" and secret. The weedy "Grey's Anatomy" star, 38, tied the knot with longtime love Chris Ivery on Friday at New York's City Hall, reports the Boston Globe. The quickie ceremony was performed by a city clerk and witnessed by a civil servant -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "They are over the moon," Pompeo's rep tells the paper, with her dad adding to People, "I'm very happy for her. She just didn't want a big thing." The actress met the music producer in 2003, and he popped the question on her 37th birthday last November, slipping a 3.5-carat emerald-cut diamond on her scrawny finger. The newlyweds, who both hail from the Boston area, took in a Knicks game Sunday night before winging back to Los Angeles.