MONDAY, JULY 12
If tongues are wagging, then One Day is gabbing! Here’s the week’s most HUMILIATING gossip straight from Hollywood! Fading popstress Christina Aguilera? GOING BALD! The once virginal, now sluttish Aguilera has reportedly fallen victim to a devastating hair loss disease. According to Pagesix.Com, a tut-tutting insider says X-tina may have something called alopecia–a stress related disorder that knocks the hairs right out of pampered celebrities’ heads. “They don’t know for sure if it’s alopecia, or if it’s from wearing extensions all these years… but her hair is falling out,” said the presumably concerned pal. However, Baldy’s reps are singing a different tune. “It’s absolutely not true,” yelped Christina’s publicist. “There is nothing wrong with her hair!” Oh, really? Has she looked in a mirror lately? Meanwhile! Perennially troubled ex-rocker Courtney Love? HAS GYNELOGICAL PROBLEMS! And from what we hear, that’s the least of her worries. Last Friday, a California judge was fuming when Love was a no-show in court to answer charges of felony assault, in which she allegedly attacked a woman on April 25 with a liquor bottle and flashlight (our favorite weapon combo). However, we gotta say her excuse was pretty convincing. Her defense attorney claims the rocker suffered “a gynecological condition” on her court date, after which a emergency team rushed to the scene, handcuffed her to a stretcher and whisked Love off to Bellevue. But get this! 72 hours after being released, she was said to have been transferred to an East Coast private “institution,” and is now under the supervision of a “legal guardian.” Wow! Now that’s some yeast infection!
TUESDAY, JULY 13
The preparation for Britney Spears’ tragic wedding continues! Though she has chosen to unwisely ignore our advice to sign a pre-nup which would prevent her philandering future hubby Kevin Federline from nabbing half her fortune, she is following our suggestion to switch from a red wedding gown back to the traditional white. Phew. That was the one we were really concerned about, anyway. So far the budget for this matrimonial abortion is rapidly approaching the $2 million mark. Says World Entertainment News, a good chunk of change will be devoted solely to importing a truckload of rare tulips from Amsterdam, costing a cool $180,000. And if you’re attending a Spears/Federline wedding, you’ll naturally want to get really drunk, which is why Brit has ordered 300 bottles of Cristal champagne. What is future ex-hubby Federline saying about his soon-to-be bride’s exorbitant spending? Not a goddamn word. “Kevin just goes along with anything she says,” revealed a source. Hey, that’s fine, but how’s he going to steal half her fortune if she blows it all on tulips and hootch?
WEDNESDAY, JULY 14
The constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage took it in the poop chute today, when congress came up 12 votes short for its approval. And we’d love to say it was because Democratic senators were committed to taking a strong stand against homophobia–but we can’t. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle explained his opposition to amending the constitution this way: “In South Dakota, we’ve never had a single same-sex marriage, and we won’t have any. It’s prohibited by South Dakota law. There is no confusion. There is no ambiguity.” Thanks for the support, Tom! No self-respecting gay would step foot in South Dakota, anyway. On an up note, President Bush was pissed! “I am deeply disappointed,” the President supposedly wrote in a statement, which probably isn’t the case since the word “disappointed” was spelled correctly. “Activist judges and local officials in some parts of the country are not letting up in their efforts to redefine marriage for the rest of America–and neither should defenders of traditional marriage flag in their efforts.” That’s right, gays! Real Americans support good ol’ fashioned traditional marriages–so shut up, and help us pick out a wedding present for Britney Spears.
THURSDAY, JULY 15
Remember Gary Trudeau? He’s that old guy who draws the Doonesbury cartoons. And while it’s no Snuffy Smith, Doonesbury has been successfully skewering the right wing for decades. In an interview in this month’s Rolling Stone, Trudeau relates his experiences as a Yale classmate of George W. Bush, who he refers to lovingly as “just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries.” The two attended Yale in the late ’60s and served on the same dorm social committee. “Even then he had clearly awesome social skills,” Trudeau remembered. “He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable… He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.” The cartoonist also talked about his very first cartoon, which illustrated an article in the Yale Daily News about allegations that Bush and his fellow fraternity brothers branded incoming pledges with an iron. When The New York Times got hold of the story, Trudeau remembered Bush telling the newspaper, “it was just a coat hanger, and… it didn’t hurt any more than a cigarette burn.” See? What are those Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib complaining about anyway? Trudeau then went on to comment on the President’s current job performance. “Bush has created more harm to this country’s standing and security than any president in history,” he said. “What a shame the world has to suffer the consequences of Dubya not getting enough approval from Dad.” All together now… OUCH.
FRIDAY, JULY 16
Today Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison followed by five months under house arrest–the minimum sentence under federal guidelines. She was also fined $30,000. But is she worried? No, Sir! She wants America to know that she is going to be okay. “I’m a really good camper,” she told ABC. “I can sleep on the ground. There are many, many good people who have gone to prison. Look at Nelson Mandela.” During sentencing the judge noted that she had received more than 1,500 letters from Stewart supporters across the country (1,435 of them from the textile workers who manufacture Martha Stewart sheets, the rest from Charles Manson). Stewart’s lawyers are recommending that Stewart serve her time at a minimum-security facility in posh Danbury, Conn., close to her home in Westport. Nelson Mandela could not be reached for comment.
SATURDAY, JULY 17
Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has admitted that he was wrong about the whole “information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden and can never be revealed” thing. After almost 30 years of arguing that a black hole swallows up everything that falls into it, he now says that galactic traps may in fact allow information to escape. Hawking is to announce his new findings at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, on July 21. If Hawking succeeds in making his case, he will lose a bet that he and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology made with John Preskill, also of Caltech. The winner gets an encyclopedia. It is not clear if he gets the whole set, or just A-C. In a surprising show of intellectual responsibility, Hollywood stands ready to begin production on a factually sound remake of The Black Hole, a 1979 Maximilian Schell vehicle that may just be scientifically moot.
SUNDAY, JULY 18
In a reminder that the axe could come down on any of us at any moment, CBS has fired two CSI: Crime Scene Investigation stars for refusing to show up to work in a bid for more money. And you thought your job at Banana Republic was perilous! Actors Jorja Fox and George Eads, who play winsome Sara Sidle and square-headed Nick Stokes, respectively, on the hit CBS crime drama, are out on their yoga butts. CBS chief Leslie Moonves announced today that the move was a victory for all of us–drawing the fiscal line in TV production and making America safe for fat cats to make their share without having to kowtow to mewing actors. Or something. Fox and Eads reportedly wanted an increase to their current $100,000-per-episode pay. Production will be halted this week while scriptwriters attempt to cleverly write the two characters out of the show in a manner that does not require their actual appearance at any point. Our money is on murder-suicide.