“Fantasy Football” can mean a number of things: A game; a football-related fantasy; your dream football. If this fall it means, for you, “a game,” even though you don’t know too much about football and aren’t sure why you agreed to participate in the fantasy version, I have a few tips.
Ahoy, ahoy. My name is Cord Jefferson, and today is my first day at Gawker. You may have seen some of my work on the site before (and maybe on Jezebel and Gizmodo, too), but today I'm coming on full-time as your West Coast Editor. I live in Los Angeles, and thus will be the first California staffer since Seth Abramovitch left in January. I'm also the first staffer (on record) to watch hardcore pornography in Fred Willard's favorite Hollywood peep show. You can read my full bio here and see a rundown of some of my other work here.
A brand new day dawns on North Korea's City upon a Silent Hill, and with it a brand new realization that this still isn't all just a terrible dream.
This is my first post of my first day at Gawker, and this clip from a 1986 episode of the Philadelphia-based teen dance show Dance Party USA sums me up pretty well. I, too, turn feral whenever in the presence of a loudspeaker blaring Nice & Wild's freestyle classic "Diamond Girl." The girl most prominently featured starting at 1:13 is my spirit animal, especially for her self-administered blowjob head-holding move. I'm always doing that!
Hello, my name is Adrian Chen and I am your new early shift night editor! This means I will be frantically shoveling words into the 8pm-12am news hole each Sunday through Thursday night. Please welcome me.
According to her bio, Jessica Wakeman is "an associate blog editor at Huffington Post." We are not really sure what that means except that she writes totally adorable blog posts about media and all the people in media who she loves, like a little Rachel Sklar. Last time we checked in, she was distraught to learn that to "make it" in New York, "you need a strategy." Her mentor Vanessa Grigoriadis told her! Gosh! Wakeman decided she better stick with the web, a safe space for earnest and sincere young women, where Wakeman can work on writing about important cultural things, like her idol Vanessa or "Ariel Levy or Emily Nussbaum." Today, Wakeman is a little bit upset at her favoritest magazine ever!
The contested 'exclusivity' of the new shots of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's "natural-born" offspring (way to give Z and Mad even more issues, Daily News!) doesn't really interest us that much, but in case it interests you, here you have it: Hello! (a UK publication, natch) claimed that it had a World Exclusive, when in fact it only had US rights. People actually has US rights, which is why their ed in chief, Larry Hackett, was holding up the photos on the Today show yesterday. Neither publication really wanted the shots leaked all over the internet, but whatcha gonna do.
What does interest us is how the shots were sold to the publications by Trevor Nelson of the Endeavor Group. According to WWD, Nelson
[Link to picture tk — sorry, dudes. Lawyers!]
Those hotly contested first pix were tantalizing, but inconclusive. But this new set of shots from Hello!, we've gotta say, justifies that whole creepy AP "Sexiest Offspring Alive" thing. Thank goodness Shiloh takes after mom, huh? Cause if she'd taken after dad more, well . . .
For the 2000 wedding of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas, British tabloid OK! had an exclusive contract with the Douglas-Jones enterprise to run dewy styled photos of the proceedings. Rival exclamatory publication Hello! scammed and ran their own photos, resulting in years of litigation between the two tabs. This week, the dispute reached Britain's highest court — a panel of "Law Lords" in the House of Lords. OK! claims business interference, Hello! claims the journalistic right to "spoil" its rival's scoop. Concerning a particularly unflattering Hello! shot of Douglas feeding her wedding cake, Zeta-Jones says, "I don't usually like my husband shoving a spoon down my throat to be photographed." Notice the key phrase "to be photographed" — Douglas can shove a spoon down her throat all he wants, long as it goes undocumented. So amusing that the highest British court has to waste its time with such frivolous celebrity tomfoolery. Silly foreigners! Oh, wait.
The Times takes a look at last week's Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt debacle, in which evil, lawless websites like this one posted Hello! magazine's "inexplicably" leaked, multimillion-dollar cover image of the world's most important child. Says People managing editor Larry Hackett:
In his column today, merry media man Keith Kelly reports that American OK! and Us Weekly just missed winning the rights to the baby pictures of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, both bidding in the $4 million range but losing to People's $4.1 million (and to what length they'll go to get their money's worth). And since they were already tossing around the petty cash, People went ahead and bid $5 million for worldwide rights, but Getty laughed in their face. Kelly also reveals that Hello! paid around $3.5 million for British rights, then introduces us to his special brand of math:
The Smoking Gun reports that Catherine Zeta Jones is threatening Clear Channel Worldwide with litigation after several of their websites posted the infamous pictures of her pregnant, topless, and smoking, alleging that some of the sites still have the pics up. It should probably be noted that despite Mrs. Jones' reminder that she and her "cabana boy" spouse Michael Douglas won their lawsuit against Hello! it wasn't on the basis of a privacy violation. They had an exclusive contract with another publication for publication of their wedding photos, and Hello! ruined the exclusivity aspect. UPDATE: from a reader: "There is a magazine (Spanish language called Vanidades) that has a whole spread on the infamous pregnant-smoking picture...April edition.
Catherine Zeta Jones [TSG]
