Tiki Barber, the N.Y. Giants football player turned NBC broadcaster, has abandoned his wife of 11 years, when she was eight months pregnant, and run off with a blonde 23-year-old who used to be an NBC intern, the N.Y. Post reports.

The other woman is one Traci Lynn Johnson, and maybe it's just me but that seems to make it worse. I mean, no doubt there are plenty of blonde babes called Traci Lynn who are also able mathematicians, skilled surgeons, rocket scientists or terrific plumbers. But you don't hear about that kind of Traci Lynn too often. The ones you do hear about tend to have sisters named Brandi, and to sign their names with a little heart instead of a dot over the letter i. But I digress.

Barber responded to the Post story with a bland press release confirming that "Ginny and I have decided to separate. This decision was a painful one, but we ... will continue to work together to raise our children with the love and dedication they have always known."

No comment from Ginny. I imagine she's awfully busy pricing mashie niblicks.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody is going to be a mother, but unlike Juno MacGuff, the character who won her an Oscar, Cody is, it turns out, not unmarried.

Announcing her pregnancy the other day - via Twitter, natch - she revealed that she has been married since last summer to this guy Dan Maurio, who works for something called Chelsea Lately, a cable talk show starring Chelsea Handler.

Maurio, in his romantic way, told E! Online that Diablo is "a great lady to make a fetus with."

Tina Fey and Steve Carell, plugging their movie Date Night on Oprah Winfrey's show the other day, asked her some questions, too. Tina asked the best one: "If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, in the history of the world ... what would you order?"

Oprah's answer: "I would probably, you know, have Jesus over for fried chicken! That would be great."

This kind of spoiled Tina's joke, because she had deliberately not asked Winfrey to name a guest, just a menu. But, you know, it's Oprah's show.

Audrina Patridge, the one who isn't blonde on The Hills, has been dumped by this Ryan Cabrera, says E! News. The guy showed up on the show after they started dating; he may now have lost that gig.

The way Spike TV tells it, they were about to drop Jesse James's TV show - amusingly titled Jesse James Is a Dead Man - even before he turned out out to be a cheatin' weasel with a weakness for tattooed floozies and Nazi regalia. That's their story, and they're sticking to it.

"Even before Sandra Bullock's straying husband's purported affairs became public, Spike TV decided not to renew his show" some earnest person in business clothes told the N.Y. Daily News.

camilli@thegazette.canwest.com