Fresh Intelligence
The Late Sift
IF YOU LOOK TOO CLOSELY AT THIS PICTURE YOU WILL GET PREGNANT Spears, Federline
•
Britney settles again: In a victory for serial impregnators everywhere,
Kevin Federline got sole custody of the two kids he put in ex-wife
Britney Spears' womb. Federline celebrated the settlement by knocking up a court reporter, a female bailiff, and a woman thousands of miles away in Davenport, Iowa, who will never be able to convince her friends and family that she had no idea how it happened.
•
"Quentin, your spelling is fucking atrocious": Cineaste
Susannah Breslin reviews the screenplay for
Quentin Tarantino's
Inglorious Basterds. The whole damn thing is online; hurry before The Man makes them take it down.
Read More >>
Recession Roundup
Okay, the recession may not affect celeb-y types the same way as it does the rest of us, but that doesn't mean they're not trying to get into the spirit of things. For its August issue,
Elle canvassed a few well known people and asked how they're beating the crunch. Should economic woes keep him from blogging full time,
Perez Hilton reassures us he'd "go into fashion design full-time."
Bill O'Reilly, frighteningly, says he'd fall back on his former profession and teach "high school history and English." He's also saving money by driving 15% less.
Jean Chatsky, NBC's perky financial editor, says she's switched from skim lattes at Starbucks to mistos, saving her a grande $1.50. Oh, and CNBC's frenetic money man,
Jim Cramer? He says he's buying his clothes at Wal-Mart and eating at Chili's, just like he's always done.
Kind of sweet, isn't it?
Prison Patrol
EVERYBODY HAS A BLOG THESE DAYS Peterson
Remember
Scott Peterson? Convicted in 2004 for the murder of his wife Laci Peterson and their unborn fetus, and currently sitting on death row? Well, so does an organization called Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty (CCADP), and they're allowing Peterson roundabout access to the Internet by
maintaining a web site for him in which he can communicate his thoughts on his "wrongful conviction" and respond to the support he's received while appealing his sentence. The site also links to the page Peterson's family maintains on his appeal and is chock full of pictures of the former couple. The postings, though infrequent, include his thoughts about a scholarship fund set up in Laci's name and he even refers to
Sharon Rocha as "my mother-in-law"—present tense.
Read More >>
Duly Noted
Earlier today we noted an amusing comment on David Carr's book excerpt on the Times website. It was from a Benjamin Dolnick, of Brooklyn, and he wrote: "If you ever want to lose faith in humanity, read any comments section on the internet." You know, the name sounded familiar! It took someone smarter to point out that Ben Dolnick, of Brooklyn, is New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s cousin's son. Huh!
Movie
Can a perfect movie have grievous errors? I SAY YES, and I get to answer questions like that, in such a fashion, because I am now pretending to be a film critic, something I haven't done since
Rex Reed went on vacation like two years ago and I reviewed
Snakes On A Plane, which is a shame really, because wouldn't you really have preferred Rex review it? "THESE SNAKES! BRING A BARF BAG! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MOVIES TODAY!" Can you see the posters? "REX REED: "GOD SNAKES, NATURE'S WORST ANIMAL!" I fucking love that guy, even though I was really mad at him for a while over his review of
Funny Games. Except the 30-minute rant I got from him after that
Wachowski Brothers (SIBLINGS?) latest movie was amazing. He kept talking about "Southern salads" and color palates. By which he meant like, the Jello-based salads. Anyway he didn't review Batman (OH wait,
he totally did! "Preposterous, unnecessary"!), even though he was at the screening with me, as were
Dan Kois and
Dana Stevens, both rather adorable. Dana has mastered the art of summer dressing, which you wouldn't know if you read her film reviews on whichever thing she writes for. Is it the
Slate or the
Salon? Who knows! I can't tell them apart anymore.
Salon has all that stuff about
Hillary Clinton, that's how you tell. Hey so Batman, or as he is awesomely called in the movie, The Batman. I think they do that because the populace of Gotham realizes they don't know Batman. They are just describing the guy who dresses up like a bat. So he is The Batman.
Read More >>
Style File
AGE OF QUARREL Kate
The party-ravaged
Kate Moss you know from those paparazzi snaps,
Vogue insists, is only half the story. Moss, the magazine's August cover girl, sat down for a fawning interview with writer
Plum Sykes in London, and talked business: her perfume, her clothing line for Topshop, and her gazillions of dollars.
Moss, it's been said, rarely does interviews, but she had little to fear from Sykes, who describes the 34-year-old model as "kittenish," "cheeky," with just a few "tiny creases" around her eyes before going on to laud her fashion designs as "extraordinarily desirable." Still, a few interesting details do manage to slip through.
Read More >>
School for Scandal
So, yesterday's front page of
Metro, one of New York City's beloved free subway newspapers, had as their lead story an
account of an unnamed 25-year-old woman being shoved and spat on by four black women at the subway. Big news, right? Because she was wearing a T-shirt that said "Obama is my slave." CHAOS ON THE SUBWAYS! RACE RIOTS! WHITE WOMAN DOWN! And yet ... the "victim" isn't interviewed. There are no cops. No lawyers. No nothing—except the word of a desperately ambitious T-shirt designer, whose
press-seeking ways has been ably documented before. To
New York mag, he wrote: "can you or any one else in 'new york magazine' write somthing about me and my art? even somthing [sic] really bad?" Well
New York wouldn't, but apparently others would. We don't believe a word of it.
Google Dump
If reading reviews of the
Dark Knight tells you one thing, it's that
Heath Ledger's performance is spectacular—somewhere on par with
Peter O'Toole in
Lawrence of Arabia,
Marlon Brando in
On the Waterfront, and
Tom Arnold in
The Stupids. But we're wondering, is it really
that great or is this post-mortem love a product of America's tendency to over-praise in death? Hell if we know, every showing of the damn movie is sold out until next month. At the very least, it's a question worth contemplating as you read these eulogies disguised as movie reviews:
Read More >>
War Pigs
(Photo: Getty Images)
There was a time when
President Bush would compare someone who wanted to negotiate with Iran to a big, Hitler-appeasing pussy. But that was
two whole months ago. Things are different now, presumably, since the Bush administration is quickly inching towards diplomatic relations with Iran and is, uh,
meeting directly with them tomorrow. Without meddlesome preconditions!
The president is sending a top State Department diplomat to a meeting where EU and Iranian negotiators will discuss whether or not Iran is interested in accepting a couple bribes (like this and this) to stop enriching uranium.
Read More >>
Comment Culture
"Whoa," was the one-word comment by "Emily, New York," in response to the
New York Times Sunday magazine
excerpt of their staffer David Carr's memoir,
The Night of the Gun. Which means that whatever deity might exist suggests a compare and contrast! Let's delve into the comments left for Carr versus
the comments left for
Emily Gould's own
New York Times magazine essay, back in May.
Read More >>
Clip of the Day
If you haven't yet seen this video of a little girl crying and running away from George W. Bush at the White House T-ball game, you're in for a treat. And if America's editorial cartoonists are as vapid and unimaginative as has been suggested, expect to see a raft of scribblings with a jug-eared president standing alone as Uncle Sam (helpfully labeled "America") flees his embrace. Hell, it's what we'd do if we could draw.
'Net Play
How to even describe what this means? The allure of lifecasting, or the tendency toward being divulgey (©
Emily Gould), or that thing about just not knowing what the Internet actually is, seems to have found its ultimate expression. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you
the 3,283 members of the Facebook group "Narcotics Anonymous." Also
the 95 members of the Facebook group "Narcotics Anonymous on Facebook." So someone needs to start like an Internet tutorial class for the entire world, or start it over or something. Although! It'll all be done over soon when the machines rise and John Connor goes to war with the Facebook bots.
Coming Soon: Black Dynamite
