Sideshow: Laying it on Thicke

Robin Thicke's image continues to take a pounding in the wake of his breakup with wife Paula Patton and the spectacular failure of his latest album, Paula. Now he admits he didn't really write his gargantuan 2013 hit, "Blurred Lines," saying he couldn't have done so if he tried, since he was so smashed on drugs.

So reports The Hollywood Reporter, which has obtained transcripts from an ongoing court battle between Thicke and the children of Marvin Gaye, who claim "Blurred Lines" plagiarizes Gaye's 1977 song "Got to Give It Up."

Thicke admits that producer Pharrell Williams really wrote the tune. "It became a huge hit and I wanted credit," Thicke testified. He said he had a drug problem that year and was on Vicodin and booze while recording the  song "Blurred Lines." 

Thicke also admits "Blurred Lines" was written after he told Pharrell how much he loved Gaye's song and how the two of them "should make something like that, something with that groove."

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington on Monday said it will mount an exhibit of African American art from the private collection of comic Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille.

The Cosby collection, which will be on view in November, features more than 300 pieces in various media, including works by Beauford Delaney, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

"To me, it's a way . . . to give voice to many of these artists who were silenced for so long, some of whom will speak no more," Cosby said in a statement.

Established in 1740 by founding father Benjamin Franklin, the University of Pennsylvania is considered one of the nation's most august institutions of higher learning, with an endowment of more than $7.7 billion and a stable of world-renowned scholars. Its president is no less than brilliant thinker and political scientist Amy Gutmann. (Admittedly, her annual income has raised a few eyebrows - her 2011 compensation package topped $2,090,000).

Monday, in what may not have been Penn's proudest moment, the university was named Playboy's top party school of the country. "UPenn puts other Ivies to shame with its union of brains, brewskies and bros," says Hugh Hefner's glossy rag. Playboy is impressed by my alma mater's "notorious underground frat scene." Apparently each year the frats stage a "war of debauchery."

The beloved Cheryl Burke has broken the hearts of thousands of Dancing With the Stars fans: "As of now, this is probably going to be my last season," Burke  said Monday on Good Morning America.

The Saturday Night Live purge - Brooks Wheelan, John Milhiser and Noël Wells have been dropped - seems to be over. New hire Michael Che will join the Weekend Update desk, while comedian Pete Davidson will be a featured player. "I have a problem with wind, I don't even know what race I am. I'm all miscellaneous in the face," Davidson says of himself.

215-854-2736