The New York Post reports that Brad Pitt has explained in Parade Magazine that he’s not copying Angelina Jolie by adopting a stable of international kids, "I do it because I'm a member of the human race," he was quoted as saying. Hello? Was anyone sincerely unsure of Brad Pitt’s ability to make decisions for himself? Sure, Angelina Jolie is daring, extremely beautiful and sort of like a human/jaguar hybrid but just because no one raves about Pitt’s humanitarian capacity doesn’t mean that he has none.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have gone on this long without becoming a farce which takes some real focus and talent and it also means they are very clearly the new Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They’re equally powerful in their Freudian, male/female power dynamic and without each other the extravagant wave of celebrity influence would be diminished. She’s the archetype woman and he’s the archetype man and aside from their exploding movie careers and exhaustive, relentless beauty, the component that joins them together is their love of a smorgasbord of children to carry about the world. They’re a perfect balance of cultural signifiers.

Everything is in its place with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Nothing is wrong. They are a perfect duo. A beacon of purity. One thing I haven’t thought about until now though and I’m glad I’m thinking about it finally is that Angelina Jolie HAS to use the bathroom at some point. She has to, at some point in her international travels and sampling of local cuisine in Africa or Asia say, “Oh, I’m sorry everyone – I just ate something that has made me feel nauseous and if I don’t leave and use the bathroom now then it’s going to be unpleasant for everyone here. You know, the smell etc…”

Brad Pitt has to say that kind of thing too. I think it’s safe to assume that they both probably experience digestive complications at various times. [source]

Today in Extraordinarily Odd

The Geneva-based International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have produced what journalists are describing as the most boring TV show ever in an effort to measure how much power is used by TVs and LCD screens. The article I’m citing here goes on to explain what the TV show was and they said things like “it lacked drama and coherence” but you know what? Not only did I sort of check out in the second paragraph as I read all the details of the Commission doing the project, I didn’t even get to the end of the piece because it in itself was so boring. Way to achieve multiple levels of boredom at once! [source]

China usually wins out with insane rules on a daily basis but every now and then a control freak American, usually a Christian, can act as a dark horse and race in a sweep all the honor of most inane control freakiness away. That’s what happened here. A school principle named Ms Sharts (I mean, can you get any more mean sounding? Or fecal, for that matter…) at Percy Julian Middle School has banned hugs at the school because students were running late due to too many hugs. "Hugging is really more appropriate for airports or for family reunions than passing and seeing each other every few minutes in the halls," Sharts said. Teachers are weird like that. It’s like working in a school acts as a cocoon from reasonable rational thought and they get left to stew in their own insularity. Still, in a time of unprecedented disconnectedness, it’s good that high school principals are keeping everything in check. [source]

Ramming it home that Chris Crocker is last week’s news, another youtube video sensation has popped up and this time it’s from the UK. His name on youtube is charlieissocoollike (no idea what the “like” bit means) He's been interviewed by the BBC, his little film "How to be English" is soon to appear on Oprah, he has hilarious teeth and is genuinely likeable. Crocker is a media whore and kind of isn’t genuinely likable anymore. Goodbye Chris Crocker, hello…English tea.

There’s so much happening but when you actually look at it, it’s not really anything at all. The Eva Longoria sex tape turned out to be fake – as I said it was going to be yesterday. There’s no sex between Longoria and anyone. It’s just a hilarious satire. I’m dying. Again, I’m actually really dying because this is so unbelievably dull I think I have wilted due to the ennui and when I fell, I fell on some scissors that were pointing up from the ground beneath me.

Ok, not really – I just wanted to say ennui. But, see how the word ennui is more interesting than the fake Eva Longoria sex tape?

One of the worst things that can happen in the world is cheap writers writing bad sketch comedy. It’s never ok. NEVER. Never ok. [source]

Russell Crowe has claimed that he’s over his rage and he knows why he had it: low self esteem. Who would have thought that a rage filled actor would have low self esteem?

Not me.

As a happy go lucky jokester Australian male, I always thought he was a perfectly balanced individual who just happened to fall into fame in LA. That’s what happened to Travis Fimmel. It never occurred to me that he might be insanely propelled along by crippling emotional need. Never at all. You think you know a person... [source]

Great, so Page Six is reporting - again – on details that have to do with the Sex and the City Movie – reporting this time that it’s pretty much confirmed that Big and Carrie get married. I don’t get the point of filming a movie if you’re going to allow daily leaks of the plot to appear in widely read gossip rags. Why let that information out? Why not make it a closed set? Kill anyone who leaks anything? That kid in the Indiana Jones movie got filleted and ex-communicated from Western culture for leaking info about the plot of the latest movie; why not follow Spielberg’s lead? Why not actually do anything at all because so far, the approach to keeping plot details under wraps has been pretty damned ambivalent.

That show wasn’t ever REALLY about the plot anyway, it was more about shoes, barely acceptable one liners from Kim Cattrall, New York landmarks, women feigning emotional stability in order to land partners while being completely and inhumanly obsessed with social status. In a sense us knowing the details of an arbitrarily linear plot isn’t really going to ruin it but it still makes no sense that the publicist hasn’t been fired yet. [source]

Like we couldn’t see this pearl of a story coming a mile off – the New York Post reports on a Vanity Faire article that claims that Lou Pearlman, the creator of the Backstreet Boys and several other squeaky clean musical collective products that have graced the cultural sphere over the past 20 years is not just an alleged financial fraud, he’s an alleged pederast as well.

This isn’t to say that all musical producers are pederasts but let’s just map it out slightly and see what it looks like from above.

Here you have a massively, almost freakishly overweight man whose career is focused almost exclusively on commodifying the sex appeal of young teenaged boys. It’s not a surprise that underneath his constant professional focus there lurked a personal interest in the subject. That’s why it was his career. It’s why necrophiliacs like working in morgues. Again, not all people who work in morgues are necrophiliacs, just the necrophiliacs that work there are and it makes sense that they would want to. The part about Lou Pearlman being maddeningly fat is admittedly irrelevant but sometimes it’s good to point out fat. He could have been thin and equally as hateful. I think we’re all comfortable with that.

Obviously, it’s difficult and unfair to judge someone while they’re on the ground, squealing and writhing having been pried out of their hiding place in Indonesia but it seems to be the American way. But also, I mean, hi – if you’re a pederast why on EARTH go to South East Asia? That’s the first place they ALL go. Indonesia. Wouldn’t you go to Shanghai or Russia and just get some weird underground apartment and not be found? Sure the weather’s a little harsher in both those places but so it public ridicule like the press this post is based on.

Still, it’s good he was caught and also, it’s interesting that Nick Carter’s family was almost torn apart by something that happened between Lou Pearlman and Carter and yet, everything continues as normal on the surface. How good of them not to sully the sparkling veneer of the Backstreet Boys with dark tales of destroyed childhood innocence. Good old destroyed innocence. [source]

After being ordered to give her kids to K-Fed, Britney went out and got crap fast food, dropped Sean Preston and Jayden James off two days early, visited a tanning salon and hung out at a hotel where she apparently laughed at a fight that broke out between two paparazzi photographers.

It’s also rumoured that she’s a frequent and habitual user of crystal meth but that would tear her apart in a visible, physical way pretty quickly so I’m not SO sure about that. At the same time, it’s highly unlikely that practically everyone in her industry hasn’t had cocaine at some point. Music producer types are sort of on par with advertising executives and Wall Street finance professionals; they’re all essentially cannibals on some level. What a calming thought.

Britney is actually just a megalomaniac, control freak narcissist. She likes the idea of the big picture scenario but when it comes to day to day maintenance of things like the children and her weight and her career and health and everything else, she simply fails without a staff of people surrounding her to essentially do it all for her. She’s been a product all her life so suddenly being required to understand and act as though she’s a human is totally unreasonable. Chris Crocker was entirely incorrect. Britney Spears is, in fact, not a human. She’s a rattling shell that has foregone basic humanity traits so she can be adored by millions and so she can rake in 750,000 a month. The equation is haywire right now and so everything is in chaos. [source]

Today in Extraordinarily Odd

The King of Nepal, King Gyanendra is being slowly shut out of his role as the king by the Nepalese government who do passive aggressive things like don’t arrange for proper security for him at public events so he won’t be able to show up. Rather that take it lying down, however, Gyanendra simply showed up and walked through the crowd at a recent religious festival without security and then left. It’s kind of like the moment of triumph at the end of an 80s high school comedy when the nerd finally gets the date with the cheerleader and the jocks are left sitting in a pile of manure. And everyone claps for some reason; like they’ve been following along even though that’s impossible. [source]

There’s nothing more reassuring than discourse about whether something is art from masses of people who walk through galleries and say things like, “But, I could have done that!” or “That doesn’t even look like anything”. Thankfully, the likelihood of that happening right now at the Tate Museum in London is higher than ever with an exhibition of the last 25 years of Turner Prize winners all in the same room. Actually, what’s even better than that type of discourse is when the organizers of the prize say they don’t aim for sensationalism. The thing is, all allegations are true: Yes, you could have done that, no, it doesn’t look like anything, and yes they do aim for sensationalism. [source]

Oh good, Americans are still eating. Who would have thought? Yesterday Pat Bertoletti ate 21 pounds of grits in 10 minutes at the first World Grits Eating Championship in Louisiana. It’s safe to assume that this is a world record too. Not because they’ve actually ascertained that the rest of the world has failed to produce a more accomplished eater of grits, actually because it’s a really safe bet that nowhere else in the world would ever even think of contesting it and nowhere else in the world eats grits let alone feels prompted to want to shovel inhuman amounts of them into humans and celebrate the horror. [source]

Pam Anderson and Rick Solomon have applied for a marriage license so they can get married. Well, clearly that’s why. The thing is, even though she has been married three times, this seems like it could be the one that could work the best. After all, she’s a self admitted life support system for Western culture’s most popular pair of silicone enhanced mammaries and, at heart, he’s a pimp who commodifies and sells his partners as sex objects. And furthermore, the transaction had been completely before they even met. She had sex with him to pay off a gambling debt. He bought her and now he’s going to sell her. Somehow. That’s what he did with Paris Hilton and the sex tape he leaked. His inner pimp is a genetic thing.

Rick Solomon’s been a pimp for everyone he’s dated except for when he was married to Shannen Doherty. There was very little selling going on there. After all, who would be buying? Well, people who like to abseil down some pretty prominent teeth might and then of course, the type who enjoy being screamed at, physically assaulted and then made to go shopping. Those types would be fine with being sold Shannen Doherty but probably no one else. Maybe he should have been based in New York.

But who cares about Doherty, when Solomon can now start whoring out Anderson for whatever it costs for drive through at White Castle. [source]

Speak of the devil! Maybe that breakdown isn’t too far off! Finally. OK Magazine has just reported that Britney has lost custody of her children as of Wednesday. No word yet on how much money Federline will be getting out of her per month.
So, that essentially means we should get out our splatter guards and put on our welding visors because any second now Spears is going to do something pretty messy and pretty huge. Stand by for more oil spill…[source]

Even though a rational, analytical view of anything would include the understanding that there are always a variety of possible outcomes to every scenario, Britney Spears apparently avoids that realistic inevitability by constantly and exclusively barreling down the worst possible outcome path – seemingly on an hourly basis. Anyone else would have had the breakdown and moved to obscurity to evolve out of the public glare but that’s not happened yet and I honestly can’t figure out why. There are reports that she calls the paparazzi to find out where they’ll be so she can arrive and get more press because she’s afraid of becoming irrelevant but that’s not surprising nor does it actually address how she is not actually a quivering freak in the corner who is hallucinating and needs to be put in a straight jacket.

This time, after she was booked for a hit and run and driving without a license, it was actually ascertained that not only did she not have a license that day, but she’s never actually had a California driver’s license at all which is illegal.

If Britney could sincerely transcend this little period of unpleasantness she’ll have more gay diva points than Kylie Minogue and Kylie is what, like 40?

Kevin Federline’s lawyer Mark Kaplan is back in court today hammering it out so that the Fed Ex gets the kids but it’s almost a waste of money. Surely the hundreds of thousands of dollars being racked up in legal fees are unnecessary when all K-Fed has to do in court is indicate in Spears’ general direction and say, “The defense rests” or whatever the hell you say when you’re done arguing.

Why is this still going on? How has Britney managed to keep operating under such massive consistent and internationally overwhelming levels of public humiliation? There are two options: one, she’s a super powerful weapon of a woman who should be studied and learnt from or two, she is heavily heavily medicated and she’s got so much money that she can keep plodding onward without actually feeling any real repercussion. Which could it be? Hmmm. [source] [source]

There’s a rumour that Eva Longoria and husband Tony Parker made a sex tape together and that it’s floating around the internet.

I have Limewire, so I did a check to see if I could find it anywhere and I can’t. This is sort of what happened when there were rumours of a sex tape between Paris Hilton and Nick Carter. There probably was no sex tape because it really wasn’t showing up anywhere. I mean, how hard is it to find?

The only thing I could find was a file entitled “Paris Hilton Nick Carter Sex Tape” made by a bunch of GENIUS radio shock jock announcers so that when you downloaded the file and played it these two wannabe Howard Stern morons just sat there saying, “Hey - sorry, no Paris Hilton and Nick Carter here but you can listen to suburban LA’s number one community breakfast radio show by tuning in to blah blah blah.” Which, of course, thanks to that ad I’ve now been doing religiously ever since. What utter shite.

The question here really is, why is Eva Longoria after this level of publicity right now? I guess it makes sense, seeing as she’s not been out that much or in the media recently and maybe she started to forget she exists. Wouldn’t she just turn up to an event or two in a sparkling gown rather than start a rumour that there’s a film of her and her husband having sex? Why do celebrities make these tapes anyway other than to have them leaked? Don’t they get enough of themselves through work? Oh, that’s right. No, they never do because too much is never enough.

Hardcore sex in the mainstream arena is pretty cool and edgy and has been for a while so any reference to it is going to push your Q score up. Unless you're a teenaged girl in which case it could ruin you. [source]

Week #39 in Review

The unrelenting cultural oil spill that is pop star Britney Spears continued to have her legal proceedings played out in public when former bodyguard, Tony Barretto was interviewed on the Today Show by Matt Lauer. During the interview, he stated that the reason he was coming forward with information about Spears’ drug use was because he was concerned for the welfare of her children rather than the fact that he has an axe to grind because she fired him for not picking up her hat when asked. Following that unpleasantness, Britney was charged for driving without a license.

At the other end of the cultural spectrum where the smiles are white and the conduct is virtuous, sort of, Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens were apparently so fascinating to the general public that it was reported a magazine entitled “Zanessa” would hit shelves on Tuesday, Oct 2. The magazine will feature extensive coverage of the apparent relationship between Efron and Hudgens.

Former supermodel Christie Turlington had lyme disease, entertainer Steve-O from Jackass went on the Howard Stern Show and talked about how actress Lindsay Lohan once stole cocaine from his home and the new advertisements for both Britney Spears’ new fragrance, “Believe” and Mariah Carey’s “M” came out to many people’s shock and or horror.

Girls Gone Wild producer Joe Francis was threatened with a lawsuit from some women who claimed he used footage of them without their permission despite the fact that the footage of them explicitly shows them giving their consent, model Pam Anderson was rumoured to be partying too hard and hanging out with Paris Hilton’s ex-lover Rick Solomon and the prize money being offered to former rockers Kid Rock and Tommy Lee to box in a ring over Anderson climbed from one million dollars to five million dollars.

Right wing pundit Ann Coulter stated in Esquire Magazine that she wants a fatwa placed on her, a member of the crew from actor Tom Cruise’s film, “Valkyrie” farted during a moment of silence at a German monument from the Nazi regime and Cruise fired him and it was cleared up that actually, actress Maureen McCormick did not have lesbian sex with her former Brady Bunch co-star Eve Plum, and isolated gay teen internet video sensation Chris Crocker was in Los Angeles talking about how Britney Spears should be allowed to take drugs and drive without a license.

In numbers and records news, a hotel in Sri Lanka was offering a dessert that costs $14,500 because it comes with a large aquamarine stone, an anonymous bidder paid 29,000 English pounds for a 157 year old bottle of Bowmore Scotch Whiskey, a competitive eater who goes by the name Eater X won the “World Burrito Eating Contest” by eating 10 ¾ burritos in 12 minutes and Australian John Allwood smashed 40 watermelons with his head in 1 minute breaking some kind of record.

In further news out of Australia, a woman bartender was in court for serving customers shots of disinfectant while in Asia, Japanese people were paying 43 dollars for a pint of what is called “Adult Milk”, a specific harvest of milk taken from cows early in the morning to ensure high levels of the hormone melatonin which has a calming effect and they were also paying for soap that looks extraordinarily like dessert.

In China, the government banned sexually provocative sounds and tantalizing language in advertisements on radio and television, the Starbucks that was located in the Forbidden City was shut down and replaced by a locally owned and managed coffee shop and three different people were in court for killing their lovers with rat poison; one of which put the poison in a gelatin capsule, kissed her lover and made him swallow the pill.

In Russia, the government was hard at work constructing Federation Island, a smaller island recreation of Russia itself while in Kazakhstan, outrage erupted when photos of President Nursultan Nazarbayev in tight swimming trunks were published in the media. In Africa, a Nigerian witchdoctor was arrested after he was hired by politicians to perform rituals near an election tribunal that was investigating voter fraud.

In Europe, flag sales escalated in Belgium as the Belgian inclination to show nationalistic support to their country escalated amid further discussion that Belgium may divide into smaller states and a German man celebrated Oktoberfest by becoming really drunk and then getting himself stuck in a chimney for 12 hours.

In the United States, a restaurant opened up in New York that emphatically serves collagen as a beauty treatment and meal in one and George W Bush addressed a New York school about the importance of education programs. He made this point through use of the phrase

“Childrens do learn”

Today in Extraordinarily Odd

Last week a man put the nation of Belgium up for sale on ebay as a way of getting it a little attention and maybe it worked because sales of the Belgian flag have skyrocketed since debate has been escalating about the potential division of Belgium into a series of smaller sections rather than one larger nation. Apparently people want to celebrate Belgium the way it is. What exactly does Belgium do? They give us mussels and chips, chocolate and waffles. One thing that is for sure though, is; if you were clever enough to invest in flags in Belgium, then your time is fast approaching. Belgian flag makers: You time is NOW! [source]

An anonymous telephone bidder just paid 29,000 English pounds for a 157 year old bottle of Bowmore Scotch Whiskey. That’s a world record amount. I know that people are connoisieurs of scotch and that it’s about the fact that it’s rare etc. but when are you actually going to drink it? If you’re NOT going to drink it then it’s not really about scotch because you don’t get to interact with it. You’ve just got a bottle there. It could really just be anything you’ve paid 29,000 pounds for. It’s just sitting there. And the other thing is, it’d be pretty damned crap if you actually opened it up and it was just rat juice – as in, water that had been soaking up the essence of rat before being strained and bottled. Then you’d look stupid for spending that much money on scotch. Not before though. the paradox is, of course, that we’ll never know. [source]

A German man who went to celebrate Oktoberfest, got really drunk and then got stuck in a chimney for 12 hours. Earlier this week I saw some film of a guy who had had a lot to drink and then he got stuck in his ex-girlfriend’s chimney. People had to knock down a wall to get him out of that chimney and the girl was really pissed off. She threw a bottle at his head twice and he just stood there and took it both times. Why do drunk people apparently gravitate toward chimneys? They’re not exactly the easiest things to navigate. Maybe it’s a Santa Claus fetish. Both were in their 20s, maybe that’s why. You do crap like that when you’re in your 20s [source]

Some garden variety, rancid, gold digging hos are trying to sue Joe Francis for using footage of them in a Girls Gone Wild film without their consent, reports TMZ. The trouble is, they are seen in the footage actually giving their full conscious consent so it’s clear they’re just trying to kick him while he’s down and in jail on tax evasion charges.

It’s interesting the way America does this to celebrities who are down. Britney is the target of a relentless barrage of suits and charges and rumours that are totally ludicrous but that definitely add to the freakishness of it all and they seem to multiply simply because things are so bad for her right now. Granted she’s completely lost her mind but it’s so utterly clear that K-Fed is cashing in on her delusion for his own gain. The coverage of her performance at the MTV awards was an astonishingly cruel and unusually detailed dissection of an appearance, down to the hand with the lost fake nail.

Same basic deal here with Francis. He’s in jail so people have just decided to kick him despite the fact that the actual lawsuit is essentially without basis or merit.

My question in all of this is, “Where is Candy Spelling?” Where did she go? Where did the nation’s fleeting step mother go? Surely now would be a great time for her to emerge and write another unsolicited, menopause induced advice column. People are suing, Britney is fatter than ever before. Candy is needed more than she has ever been needed. [source]

Wow – it’s a great day in unchecked ego in Divaland thanks to the release of some vastly unnecessary fragrances and all I can say is, thank crap because today is pretty damned slow. All the news is just bland sightings and critiques of Rumer Willis’ hair. Actually Rumer Willis’ hair is pretty dreadful. I’ll post about that in a second.

But first, both Britney Spears and Mariah Carey have fragrances coming out and the ads for both are hysterically tragic and kind of alarming. Above is the new ad for Carey’s new fragrance “M”.

They graciously avoid any real close ups of her face by simply flooding it with massive amounts of light in between close up shots of what is clearly someone else’s body. So all you get is a mild pain in your retina from staring at white light rather than the shocking truth about her sagging haggard jowls which would have induced some form of intellectual revulsion anyway so – assume you came out about as scathed as you always would have with partial blindness after watching this masterpiece. I love that we’re meant to believe it’s her and even more so that some people do in the same way that Sherri Shepherd doesn’t believe in Evolution.

Then there’s Britney’s fragrance, “Believe” the adverts for which I found on http://www.dlisted.com/ . I think I’ve said this before but Britney must be under an older iron clad contract with the fragrance company which states that she’ll release several fragrances over a number of years because unless that’s the case there’s no rational reason why Britney should be releasing anything at all. Including herself from a dead-bolted house. Still, the mark-up on fragrances is something like 700% so who can blame Elizabeth Arden for going in for the kill. All they have to do is churn out the cat urine, put it in a swank, green tinted glass vase and hope the teenaged girls in the fly over states don’t notice when Britney wakes up in a pool of her own vomit. Then they spend heaps of money on parties and extras and get Britney to say something poetic and bang, it’s commodified poetry for the masses.

Fragrances are incredible things. They’re nothing and everything at once.

“Believe” is an exercise in massive corporate denial more than anything else. They’ve airbrushed the reality out of Britney’s face so she looks the same as she did 3 years ago and they’re expecting us not to notice. There are people who won’t though. This will actually give hope to some kids. That’s why people like Chris Crocker exist. Well, that and massive prejudice and areas of low cultural density.

Today in Extraordinarily Odd

Courts in China sentenced three people to death this week for killing their lovers with rat poison. The most glamorous of the three is the one who put a capsule full of rat poison in her mouth moments before she went to kiss her lover and then when she kissed him, she made him swallow it. She did this because she was pretty sure he was cheating on her. That’s pretty cool film noir of her even if she is a psychopath murderer. I mean, it’s probably just your average gelatin capsule which she put together herself so she was taking a risk by doing it in the first place. What if he suddenly had to use the bathroom prior to their kiss? She would have died instead because the capsule would have dissolved. I bet she spent a lot of her life running cautiously through alleyways wettened with relentless rain at the night while wearing a black Chanel suit, black stilettos and red lipstick. Also, she ran in black and white too. [source]

A Nigerian witchdoctor has been arrested after being employed by politicians to perform rituals near an election tribunal. Politics is really interesting in this sense in Africa. In America the same basic thing happens on many levels including religious panic but even Republicans here haven’t had the gall to employ priests to stand around shrieking. Kudos to the Nigerians for cutting to the theatrical chase. The thing is though, if you’re a Nigerian politician who has managed to rig an election and the only thing you can think of doing is hiring a quack in a feathered headpiece who dances about a pot filled with a rabbit and some eggs then the problem probably goes far beyond corruption. [source]

The Japanese have been churning out the quality material of late – what with the restaurant where you can have sex with the pig you’re about to eat before it is slaughtered and the soap that comes in the shape of dessert – but they have clearly decided not to rest on their laurels. The newest offering from Japan is called Adult Milk and it is on sale for 43 dollars a pint. The Milk is designed to relieve stress as it is only collected in the morning meaning that it has three times the usual level of melatonin in it than regular milk. That totally explains why it costs 43 times the cost of a regular pint. The weird part about this is that melatonin helps you to sleep, it doesn’t relieve stress. Well, it relieves stress in the sense that it knocks you out and you don’t feel the stress. So, this should really be called knockout milk. People would buy this product in New York. Actually, let’s re-consider that. Some people would buy it and some people would base their lives on not buying it. What an interesting place New York is. [source]

The Post reports that Steve-O from Jackass went on Howard Stern and talked about how he likes inhaling nitrous oxide from whipped cream bulbs and how Lindsay Lohan once stole blow from his apartment. Not necessarily recently, but it did happen and it did involve cocaine and Lohan. Just in case you’d forgotten how well the two go together. He was filming something in his apartment the day she came over and so they even have Lohan’s signature on a release form to prove she was there.

Steve-O and the whole Jackass thing are annoyingly mindless, in much the same way that Tom Green is or used to be, but they’re not as neurotic as Green and therefore can be considered hot. Tom Green is never hot because he’s far too needy.

Still, it’s good that even though Lohan has been nowhere to be seen, apart from the shots of her sitting around smoking in the forest with her new addict friends, and in rumours that she has been busy screwing that dumb ass billionaire’s husband in rehab, that we can still fixate on her drug use anyway. Particularly because it certainly drums up some quality publicity for Steve-O whose entire career is based on being a parent’s nightmare and a professional idiot. He has quite remarkable teeth though. [source]

Ben Widdicombe reports that former model Christie Turlington has Lyme disease. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, here you have two separate parts of a story that would ordinarily probably not get that much press on their own but when you put them together it’s oddly fascinating. Christie Turlington, the extraordinarily beautiful face of Calvin Klein’s iconic 90s fragrance Eternity and Lyme disease – a disease people get from ticks.

Lyme disease is one of those old diseases too, that have a more severe sounding name because it was named a while ago, before all the diseases got mnemonics for names. So, Christie Turlington seems to have been hanging out with ticks, she got Lyme disease.

“Supermodels” aren’t generally associated with “disease” at all let alone one that involves a sort of lesion either. Well, unless you’re talking about the models that are physically ruined so they stay thin to keep working and the horror is immediately evident in their shrunk wrapped torsos.

Turlington’s husband, Ed Burns’ has a rep who says she’s healthy and happy but we all know that’s a party line. Now, for some reason I can’t help but picture her in a stone tower lamenting her ill-health, staring down sadly, while she is quarantined. Quarantined, again – just so we don’t forget – because of Lyme disease [source]

Today in Extraordinarily Odd



A clever and focused young man named John Allwood from Australia has made every Australian worldwide as proud as whatever gets really proud a lot by smashing 40 watermelons with his head in one minute. Isn’t that lovely? I’m glad someone finally DID it. There’s no doubt about it, when he dies: State Funeral with a royal visitor. [source]







The great thing about the Japanese is that they really do think of everything. They sub-divide ideas and come up with genius new ones that the plain old simple, plodding West would never have had the foresight to think of. Like cucumber flavoured Pepsi from a while back and soap that is shaped like elaborate European and American desserts. Now in Japan you can get soap that is painstakingly shaped to look like dessert. It’s actually a really great thing too, particularly for the uber-rich and completely unhinged freaked out sadists that are going to that weird assed underground restaurant where they have sex with the animal they’re about to eat before it’s slaughtered and cooked for them. With dessert shaped soaps you can eat your last sexual partner and then experience the visual delights of dessert while simultaneously trying desperately to remove the stuck on horrifying dirt that will probably never ever come off anyway. Scrub away! It looks like an éclair! Genius! I’m distracted from my own rapidly decaying sense of decency! Ok, not all Japanese people are freaks. I know. I mean, Jessica Simpson had a line of dessert smelling bathroom crap recently and she’s probably about as culturally corrupt as a Japanese bestial restaurant so, yeah, this kind of thing transcends national borders. [source]








Outrage has erupted in the Kazakh parliament because pictures of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev in tight swimming trunks were published. “For me, he (Nazarbayev) is a God-appointed person," said Bekbolat Tleukhan, member of the pro-Nazarbayev Nur-Otan party that controls every seat in the lower house. "This is not just impolite, it's pure shame. ... It goes against all our traditions." Of course. Of course this kind of reaction could only come from inane organized, institutionalized religion. But, you know what? Whatever. It’s too bad that they hate to face the reality of their physical selves but that’s nothing new. They’re religious. What’s great about this is the way Reuters has skirted the responsibility of publishing the photo by doing what the Post did with pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underwear; they published a clear picture of someone reading another newspaper that had – thus relinquishing responsibility. [source]









China is back in the saddle with some good old fashioned inane bannings again and this time they’re banning “sexual sounds” on the airwaves. "Commercials containing sexually provocative sounds or tantalizing language as well as vulgar advertisements for breast enhancement and female underwear are banned, effective immediately," said the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television notice. Well, great. Way to cripple the advertising industry. It’s good that they’ve banned “tantalizing language”. As everyone knows, advertising should never be tantalizing. [source]







Whoever the hell thought it was a good idea to get President Bush to teach a grammar lesson to some New York school kids is either a freaking moron or a genius counter operative on the inside. He actually addressed the kids with the phrase, “Childrens do learn”. This isn’t a surprise seeing as only today a copy of a speech he was to deliver was accidentally posted on the UN General Assembly website and it showed how he has to have all the “difficult” words spelt phonetically. Still, it’s odd that a snotty little New York genius kid didn’t either smugly correct him or pop a cap in his ass. Either would have been good. [source]