Bradley Cooper, 34, must be a very kind man, indeed. That's one of the virtues his reported gf and My One and Only costar Renée Zellweger, 40, says she craves in men. But she doesn't go for dullards, however nice they are.

"I like clever folks," RZ tells People. "I like people who are concerned with [what] the path they leave behind them looks like." (Covered in bread crumbs?) RZ wants the whole package: Her potential mate also must be brimming with "empathy, humor, wit, self-reliance and honesty." Gee, sure you didn't leave anything out?

Fourteen strikes and you're thick

Sometimes you're the last to know.

Suppose you have six kids. And then you have eight more. At once. Months and months later, it occurs to you that it . . . might not have . . . been . . . that . . . good . . . an idea, actually.

This brainstorm has struck Nadya Suleman, "Octomom" to you and the media. She said so in an interview shown on Fox on Wednesday. The title of the two-hour special (whaaa . . . ?) was a hoot and a holler: Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage. The heart quails. She said, strangely, that she "resented" herself for having the octs. "I screwed up my life," she said. "I screwed up my kids' lives. . . . What was I thinking?" We don't know, but since she has secured TV contracts for all her kids, in a big reality-TV gig, maybe the raw green will assuage her bruised conscience.

Meanwhile, the mother of all mothers was in court yesterday to fight a bid to appoint an independent guardian to look over her kids' finances. Former Disney Mouseketeer and now children-in-entertainment advocate Paul Petersen thinks all the TV and international-publicity stuff may hurt the kids.

Sting's daughter tells no-fun truth

Some myths are too freakily oddball to be busted. Like the one in which Sting and wifey Trudie Styler do Tantric whatever for up to eight hours. Now Sting's daughter, Coco Sumner, 18, says it's all a bunch of hooey. (Aw, c'mon!) She tells UK's Love Magazine it was all a joke started by Bob Geldof, he of Live Aid, the Boomtown Rats, and not much else. Lest people think she's pretending to be an expert on her 'rents' private lives (ewwww . . . ), no: Coco just wants to set the record straight. We join E!Online in applauding the Stings, married 17 years and together for a total of 27. Bucks all sorts of trends. Tantric or not, that's triffic.

In fact, let's all get married!

Then we can all be as happy as Alyssa Milano, star of Charmed, who wed Hollywood agent guy David Bugliari Saturday on the Tewksbury estate of Bugliari's family. All the details appear in this week's ed of People. It was a modest affair, what somebody side-splittingly called "a traditional country-chic ceremony" (hello?). Guests included Bradley Cooper (see Renée Zellweger, above), who did a reading, and the ever-effervescent Jeremy Piven, who at one point played drums with the dance band.

. . . Or we can all be as happy as the Red Team of the second season of The Biggest Loser: Couples. That's Nicole Brewer and Damien Gurganious, who married Sunday at the Renaissance of Astoria in Queens. As of the wedding, they had, according to Us Weekly, lost a total of 200 pounds since starting the show. Other Losers were in attendance, but no grand-total tonnage was announced.

Sundered hearts healing

Sean Penn apparently has succeeded in finding solace for whatever emotional wounds he sustained in the breakup of his union with Robin Wright.

TMZ.com, the eye that never sleeps, spotted Penn afield on Tuesday night, chatting with two comely young ladies outside a Malibu bar.

Sean and Robin already have agreed on how to divide the property and on sharing custody of 16-year-old son Hopper Jack.

'Megan' nixed; manhunt on

VH1 has pulled its reality TV show Megan Wants a Millionaire, and for good reason. One of the final contestants, Ryan Alexander Jenkins, is now the subject of an international manhunt. Jenkins has been a person of interest since Saturday, when the body of his wife, Jasmine Fiore, was found in a suitcase in a Dumpster in Buena Park, Calif. Jenkins, a big-time real estate honcho, is said to have slipped off to Canada or Honduras or both. Megan was all filmed and in the can, but VH1 has enough sense to hold off. Jenkins is also a contestant on I Love Money 3, also all done, and probably also about to be nixed.

Whitney! And! Oprah! On! The! Couch!

Let the R&B-'n'-New-Age-infused therapy session begin! Her Royal Strangeness, Whitney Houston, troubled with years of bad tabloid publicity, will drop in on Oprah's show Sept. 14 as part of her gargantuan publicity tour for the Aug. 31 release of her new product, I Look to You. Reps for The Big O say this will be Whitney's first sit-down chat in seven years. (To plug her seventh album, which also happens to be her first in seven years.) Thus no hyperbole can do it justice: The show, they say, will be "the most anticipated music interview of the decade." Why not the century?

We imagine it'll be happier than Whitney's infamous "Crack is Whack" interview with Diane Sawyer in '02.

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Contact "Sideshow" at sideshow@phillynews.com.

This column contains information from Inquirer wire services.