MONDAY MORNING HANGOVER: WOKE UP THIS MORNING, GOT YOURSELF A GUN

Like Vito in The Sopranos, we just have to return to the scene of the crime. We can’t help ourselves. That’s what you get after spending the weekend with your Moms as the NBA playoffs tilt into full gear, the Clippers knot up the series with the Suns, Barry Bonds drags his steroid-addled body painfully towards the Ruthian finish line, Poseidon proves bottoms-up at the box office and Michael Jackson counts his spare change. Just another week as the weather heats up and hopefully, so do album sales, with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and—would you believe?—Nick Lachey leading the charge.

The Chili Peppers’ mammoth two-CD Stadium Arcadium is headed for a debut tomorrow that could reach 420-430k, the second-best for a rock record since last week’s Tool, which this week heads for between 170-190k, where it will compete with Nick Lachey, whose Jive album appears in the 165-170k range. Columbia’s Urban crooners Jagged Edge (130-140k) and Def Soul/IDJ’s Isley Brothers (110-120k) will be the week's other major debuts.

The N.Y. Times reports on the series of business deals which forced Michael Jackson to leverage his Sony ATV publishing holdings for debt relief here. Meanwhile, Fox News' dogged Roger Friedman says Jacko now has a custody battle on his hands with mother of his children Deborah Rowe here.

Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post blog site has deals with Yahoo and AOL and is close to a pact with a major video company. Can 700 bloggers change the world? The N.Y Times’ tech reporter David Carr traces the site’s unlikely rise here.

Wolfgang Peterson’s Poseidon was the latest summer blockbuster to disappoint, grossing $20.3 million for Warner Bros., and finishing second to Paramount Pictures’ Mission: Impossible III, which earned $24.3 million to top the weekend’s box office tally in its second week after it, too, failed expectations, giving it a gross of $80 million after eight days. The movie fell 49% from its opening weekend, compared with second-weekend drops of about 53% for the first two films in the series. Fox's Lindsay Lohan vehicle, Just My Luck, grossed $5.5 million to place #4, the lowest opening weekend among the teen idol’s six films. The weekend's estimated $96-million overall tally in the U.S. and Canada snapped a string of 22 straight weekends with more than $100 million in ticket sales From Jan. 1 through the weekend, overall ticket sales rose to an estimated $2.87 billion, up 5% from 2005.

Al Gore’s satirical intro to this weekend’s Saturday Night Live has insiders buzzing the pol may throw his hat in the ring for the Democratic nomination. The L.A. Times ran an adulatory story on Gore in its Sunday Calendar espousing his new film about global warming, The Inconvenient Truth here. See Fox News' "fair and balanced" take on that possibility here.

The Clippers tied up the Suns as the series heads back to Phoenix tied 2-2. The Miami Heat topped New Jersey to go up 3-1 in that series, while LeBron James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to a victory against Detroit to trail 2-1. The Dallas Mavericks edged defending champ San Antonio on Saturday to go up 2-1 in that series, with the third game in Dallas. In New York, where the basketball season ended sometime in November, the big buzz is that the Knicks are considering buying out Larry Brown’s four-year $40 million dollar deal and planting GM Isiah Thomas behind the bench to coach the players he signed that Brown reportedly refuses to.

Page Six also reports today that Law & Order creator Dick Wolf is eyeing the Anthony Pellicano story as an inspiration for Power, the new TV series he's developing about prosecutors going after corrupt Hollywood types, bringing Anita Busch and John Connolly on board as consultants. Busch is the L.A. Times scribe who had a dead fish with a rose in its mouth and a sign reading “Stop” put in her car after working on a story about Pellicano client Steven Seagal’s alleged Mob ties, while Connolly is the Vanity Fair scribe currently penning the Pellicano biography, The Sin Eater…

Could ex-Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Talk editorial maven Tina Brown be the successor to the departing Jim Kelly at Time magazine? That’s what Lloyd Grove says in his N.Y. Daily News column here.

BMI holds its annual Pop Awards this Tuesday (5/16), honoring Crosby, Stills & Nash with the prestigious ICON designation at the org's 54th annual bash in Beverly Hills.

On This Day:

In 1945: Billboard magazine inaugurated its album chart.

In 1967: Paul McCartney met his future wife Linda Eastman for the first time.

In 1968: Paul McCartney and John Lennon ended their association with the Maharishi.

In 1970: A Pink Floyd concert at London’s Crystal Palace stadium was so loud it killed fish in a nearby lake.

In 1970: Black Sabbath released their self-titled debut.

In 1973: The Pointer Sisters made their debut at The Troubadour in L.A.

In 1974: Bill Wyman released the first solo album by a Rolling Stone, titled Monkey Grip.

In 1975: Fleetwood Mac debuted their new line-up in El Paso, TX, with Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie.

In 1984: Nils Lofgren was drafted into the E Street Band by Bruce Springsteen to replace “Little” Steven Van Zandt.

In 1995: Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland was arrested in California for drug possession.

In 1995: With Bill Berry fully recovered from his aneurysm, R.E.M. resumed their Monster tour.

In 1997: Texas governor George W. Bush declared it ZZ Top Day.

In 2000: Bob Dylan received Sweden’s prestigious Polar Music Prize.

In 2003: June Carter Cash, wife of country legend Johnny Cash and daughter of Carter Family member “Mother” Maybelle Carter, died in Nashville following heart surgery complications at 73.

In 2004: The Beastie Boys played a secret show for fans at London's ICA to promote their new album To the 5 Boroughs.