No one really knows who the 5,765 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are. Yes, those who decide who gets the fetishized and neutered gold man at the Oscars were a mystery until now. The LA Times did a demographic study of who is casting the votes. Shocker: it's old white guys.
Most of the common theories surrounding Whitney Houston's descent into drugs and eventual death have to do with the influence of her husband Bobby Brown. Now there's a new interesting theory. Maybe it wasn't her marriage to Bobby that turned her into an addict but breaking up with her lesbian lover, Robyn Crawford.
Former New York Times editor Bill Keller has spent the past year pursuing a weird personal crusade against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He continues, weirdly, and to the detriment of his own reputation. Likewise, we shall continue our crusade against Bill Keller, until all of the world's readers have abandoned both of us, and we are merely talking to one another, like the cranks that we all are.
It's taken Santorum less than a day to apologize for telling an Ohio audience that Obama's agenda is based on "some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible." Today in a bumbling apology, the shaven Nicodemus look-alike (The Secret of NIMH) said that he never meant to question Obama's faith, but rather his world view.
It's true, Truecolors makeup mall kiosk that is Lindsay Lohan is all set to host SNL the first weekend in March. It will be interesting to see how the cast handles Lindz. Will they go the way of the tame show, mildly acknowledging Lindsay as a train wreck and politely moving on, or will they include her in the joke?
Sheriff and GOP candidate for Congress Paul Babeu, second only to Joe Arpaio in racism and general terribleness, has resigned as co-chairmen from Mitt Romney's Arizona committee after his affair with a Mexican immigrant man came to light. Babeu had supposedly threatened the man with deportation in an attempt to keep the affair from going public.
The would-be suicide bomber who, in 2009, failed to blow-up a Detroit-bound international flight but succeeded in burning his genitals was sentenced to life in prison without parole today.
According to one of Kim Kardashian's friends, Kim's publicist has arranged for her to go on a date with Knicks demigod, Jeremy Lin. And while it's probable that there's no truth in this, it's kind of fun to imagine. Think of the Kimsane headlines. The Keeping Up With the KardashiLins reality show spin-offs. So much would stem from this coupling, it's almost too much to take Lin.
Zelda Kaplan, the hard-partying 95-year-old socialite who has been a fixture of the New York scene since the '60s, collapsed right in the middle of the Joanna Mastroianni fashion show at Lincoln Center yesterday, just as the second model walked past her. She was later pronounced dead. This is the first time a fashion show has literally been deadly boring.
Sony Music has issued an apology for hiking the prices of two of Whitney Houston's greatest hit compilations in the hours following her death, the New York Times reports.
If you could somehow imprison a human female inside a Reddit AMA, this one with pick-up artist Neil Strauss would be my exact definition of Hell. At home in a sycophantic sea of female-phobic nerds, the Twitter-verified Strauss answers such hard-hitting questions as "Can we smell your finger?" His response:
With a $100 million fortune made from selling miniature ceramic houses, Ed Bazinet is one of New York's richest men. His TriBeCa apartment is worth $28 million, and he was featured Richistan, Robert Frank's 2007 book about the super-wealthy. Two weeks ago, he suffered a manic break and purchased a whopping $20 million worth of expensive kitsch over the course of five days at the New York International Gift Fair.
Rapper Too Short has had a moderately successful music career for more than two decades. He has not strayed far from the formula that made him famous: rhyming about sex. Specifically, how to get sex, how to have sex, how much he enjoys having sex, how much sex he has, and so forth. I was going to post up song titles to further reiterate my point, but most of the titles are too graphic, even for Gawker. You can pretty much do a madlibs line involving the words "pimp," "hoe," various body parts, and some familiar and not so familiar euphemisms for sexual acts. You get it. We can move on.
I was watching the Grammys last night because I had nothing better to do, and it dawned on me that, for all of the Grammys' shortcomings (and there are many), I enjoyed watching that telecast FAR more than I've enjoyed watching any Oscars telecast over the past 10 or 20 years. Here's why:
To many people outside of New York, fashion shows are full of glamorous people, gorgeous models, and mouth-watering clothing. They think of the goodie bags, the celebrities, and that warm fuzzy feeling you must get on the inside knowing you're part of the elite. Sorry to tell you, but it's never really like that.
In the The New York Times Style Magazine's profile of Lana Del Rey, we learn a few things that we didn't know before. Did you know, for example, that she enjoys the melody of Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA," or that she keeps a weathered copy of an unspecified Tennessee Williams paperback in her snake-skin purse? The profile is an interminable feed bag of pearls like these.
The FBI has released, and posted on its web site, Steve Jobs' 191-page FBI file. Read it here. The file consists of a 1991 background investigation conducted when Jobs was being considered for an appointment to the President's Export Council in the Bush I White House, and records of a 1985 bomb threat against him.
