Tanned leather belt Anthony Bourdain is a person who probably has good taste and is sometimes witty, but he is not a person from whom we would appreciate sex advice. Nonetheless, he has doled out some sex tips in a recent column for Cosmo in order to promote his new CNN show Parts Unknown, which now has a weird double-entendre vibe to its name.
We all despise Westboro Baptist Church — the GOD HATES FIGS (it's "figs" right?) people that drum up publicity by threatening to protest at the sites of America's worst tragedies — but 15-year-old hacker Cosmo the God really hates Westboro Baptist Church. So much so that he's potentially willing to go to jail just so he can take down the Twitter accounts of some of WBC's most prominent figures.
• New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson "isn't happy with the media." She'd also like to make it clear that the company is not currently up for sale, so please put your dollar bills back in your wallet, thank you very much. [MW]
• Ten movies will compete for Best Picture at the Oscars now, not 5. [THR]
• Sad: Dick Cheney landed a $2 million deal to publish his memoir. [NYT]
• Also sad: MSNBC, the illustrious home of blowhard Keith Olbermann, seems to think its tired prison docs are more important than covering Iran. [LAT]
• Director David Fincher is in talks to make a movie about Facebook. [Reuters]
• The always classy In Touch spent $75,000 to purchase photos of Kate Gosselin spanking her kids in public for its cover last week. [WWD, NYP]
♦ Armani has signed Victoria Beckham to appear in the new campaign for Emporio Armani underwear. You'll have to wait until spring '09 to see the Mert and Marcus-shot ads. [WWD]
♦ He's not crazy, he's just, uh, spiritual: Elton John apparently only eats off Versace crockery because he believes "the designer's spirit lives in every plate." [NYP via Racked]
♦ Narciso Rodriguez doesn't talk about his recent split with Liz Claiborne, but he does share a bit about his forthcoming book which will be published by Rizzoli later this month. [stylefile]
♦ Finally! Nicole Richie's jewelry line is now on sale. [The Cut]
Being a regular girl is work enough—God knows what being a Cosmogirl entails. A tolerance for fruitinis? The ability to exist on salad alone? The shamelessness required to "[come] to bed in a soaking wet white tee shirt"? We've been gleefully following Cosmopolitan blogger Leo (Smith '07)—her blog's narrative is "one socially awkward girl's attempts to transform into a sexy, social butterfly." At first, we pointed and laughed like bullies—but it was only because deep down, we all feel awkward. We teased her about her use of the word "[doing] the grown-up" as a euphemism for sex, and how she wondered aloud if playing the field was "immoral". We also said that "increasingly, watching her thirty-day evolution at the hands of people who professionally suggest 'how to be a total man-magnet' is like watching a gazelle getting torn apart by hyenas." That was bitchy. But we were rooting for her all along. Leo's written her goodbye post, and we were worried: did the Cosmo machine spit out a Cosmotini-swilling, Choo-wearing girl-droid in the shape of their brand?Writes young Leo:
Cosmopolitan (I'm assuming the British version because Gordon fucking Ramsey made the list too) says that 21 Jump Street star Johnny Depp—who's also in movies—is the hottest male on earth. Usual suspect George Clooney is runner up. And (what?!) Jake Gyllenhaal comes in third place. Gyllenhaal? Like, from Bubble Boy? The rest of the list after the jump. Spoiler alert: Manshark Michael Phelps didn't make the cut. 1 Johnny Depp, 45 2 George Clooney, 47 3 Jake Gyllenhaal, 27 4 Daniel Craig, 40 5 Brad Pitt, 44 6 James McAvoy, 29 7 JustinTimberlake, 27 8 Will Smith, 40 9 David Beckham, 33 10 Wentworth Miller, 36 11 Christian Bale, 34 12 Jonathan Rhys Meyers, 31 13 Take That: Gary Barlow, 37, Mark Owen, 36, Howard Donald, 40 and Jason Orange, 38 14 Ashton Kutcher, 30 15 Dermot O''Leary, 35 16 David Tennant, 37 17 Patrick Dempsey, 42 18 Clive Owen, 44 19 Pierce Brosnan, 55 20 Mark Ronson, 33 21 Gordon Ramsay, 41 22 Russell Brand, 33 23 Pharrell Williams, 35 24 Ryan Reynolds, 31 25 Olivier Martinez, 42 (ANI) [TopNews via OhNoTheyDidn't]
Cosmopolitan-which is a women's magazine-set some kind of record for the largest U.S. bikini shoot. Details? Nope. Since the mag's lame website is totally crippled by ads for some crap Hugh Jackman movie. Fortunately, another site is hosting the pics, some of which follow.
Well, first of all: try posting it on the internets, under your real name, on the Cosmo website! Have we learned nothing about the perils of dateblogging? For what it's worth, our favorite Cosmogirl, recent Smith grad Leo, has tried everything. Including consulting Cosmo's sex articles for advice! (Noooo, girl, those aren't real.) So just how bad was it? Details, plz!
We haven't checked in on young Cosmo web assistant Leo (Smith '07), in awhile. She's blogging about life as a Cosmogirl-in-Training; it's subtitled "one socially awkward girl attempts to transform into a sexy, social butterfly." Last time, we worried that her catty Hearst coworkers were brainwashing the sweet 22-year-old into becoming a typically snide, jaded young maglady. It's sort of working! Now she's wondering about "playing the field"—you know, dating a guy, but not exclusively. Is it "immoral"?
Christine Griffin is 26, lives in New York, and works at Cosmopolitan magazine—every girl's dream! But living said dream is not all it's cracked up to be, even if you are working for the publication that pioneered a sex position called the Wanton Wheelbarrow. In fact, she thinks she might actually be "going on 36."
Cosmo web assistant Leo (Smith '07) has been instructed by her "26 year old Cosmo pro" of a boss to blog for thirty days about the struggle of "one socially awkward girl attempt[ing] to transform into a sexy, social butterfly." Young Leo is like Angela Chase of Cosmo: earnest and endearing and totally non-evil, which is obviously holding her back in the fashion world. (Her roommate puts on her eyeliner for her in the morning 'cause she doesn't know how! Aw!) Increasingly, watching her thirty-day evolution at the hands of people who professionally suggest "how to be a total man-magnet" is like watching a gazelle getting torn apart by hyenas.
From the mailbag: "Today is Cosmo's 50 Hottest Bachelors day in the Hearst building. They were all in the cafeteria at lunch, wearing matching black t-shirts and sequestered off to the side, like cattle but with more hair gel. They were hanging over the partition scoping out the fashion girls, while all the older business-y types continued to eat their lunches and ignore them. Presume they are now off on other fun-filled events in the auditorium and around."
It's the oldest trick in the book: disarm your enemies with faux-dumbness and then stab 'em in the back while they're making fun of you—and also rake in some cold hard cash while you're at it. Today's USA Today fluffernutter sandwich about 55-year-old Cosmo girl Kate White is an object lesson in how this is done. On the "dumb blonde" front: "Cover lines on Cosmo are paramount, because they help sell, in a good month, 2 million copies on newsstands alone. On the upcoming August cover, which she's still massaging, White points to one—'Erotic sex!'—that she says is a grabber. 'We've used the word 'sex' in a lot of combinations, but we've never said 'erotic sex' before. I like the idea of the reader going, 'Oooh, erotic sex,' 'White says, a gleam in her eye." Heh. But watch out! This lady is actually sharpening her knives when you think she's sharpening her eyeliner pencil. Oh: and sticking them into Bonnie Fuller.
We're almost certain that no one's as sick to death as we are of the tired old 'Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko = inferior cunnilingus' joke (with the exception, perhaps, of "Adorable" Dave himself). So we were flooded with a mix of emotions when we learned that he'd once again provided us with a perfect setup. In an AdAge piece on how he and Cosmo E in C Kate White will edit sections of each others' respective mags' May issues, Dave describes the switcheroo like so:
Last night we took another trip to the newsstand to fetch more of the beastly September fashion glossies, but this time things were toned down a notch. Rather than haul another 9.5 pounds of aspirational crap, we went more towards the featherweights. Next round, we'll suck it up and grab the heavyweights like InStyle or the 650-page Vogue. And when we're all done? Just you wait. We're going to take all these fuckers and build ourselves a coffee table.
