scribblista

On Vacation

We'd like to take off for the entire month of August, like all those civilized Europeans. 
However, since we're not all that civilized, we'll just be gone for two weeks. 

We'll be back in September... hopefully with a tan and a hangover.

Ah, Ecstasy

If you're not quite ready for the week yet, you can stall a bit longer with this interactive quiz at Details. Can you tell whether these people are having orgasms or foodgasms?

Starring your favorite Food Network chefs and assorted porn stars. Our only question is: How'd they forget to include Nigella Lawson?

You're No One Till Someone Thinks You're Gay

Just ask anyone who's anyone: Oprah, Jake Gyllenhaal, Marcia Cross, Anderson Cooper (er... well, nevermind), some football player named Michael Strahan, Superman, Spongebob Squarepants, pretty much everyone who's ever been on ET, and of course, Tom Cruise. (er... well, nevermind.)

The New York Times has a fun piece about the fine art of denying the gay rumor and how celebrity publicists finesse the tricky balancing act.

The article did not, however, look into whether publicists start the gay rumor themselves to get that much more buzz for their client. Not that there's anything wrong with it. 

Celebrity Playlists Rock

We spent a good hour the other day procrastinating surfing through the Celebrity Playlists on iTunes. [We'd provide links, but can't onto iTunes]

Part of our fascination with the playlists stemmed from the disconnect between the stars' personnas and their musical tastes. Sometimes, there was none [Jennifer Garner digs Destiny's Child.] But we also found plenty of surprises. Here's what we mean:

Amy Sedaris
We Expected: We lovelovelove her and secretly believe that we should be best friends. Naturally, we thought we'd lovelovelove her playlist just as much.
We Discovered: A dream destroyed... unless we were best friends in elementary school.
Big Shock: Joni Mitchell, fer chrissakes!
We Both Love Know: Windy, by The Association. It was her favorite song as a kid. I vaugely remember it. 

Russell Crowe
We Expected: Something like '70s classic rock... Hendrix, the Stones, etc.
We Discovered: He's a cupcake! A hunky, tough guy cupcake who'd beat someone silly just for us. Our long-dead crush is so rekindled.   
Big Shock: Closer to Fine, by The Indigo Girls
We Both Love: Wuthering Heights, by Kate Bush; Constant Craving by k.d. lang.

Wikiality Doesn't Bite

Reality is harsh. Wikiality is easy. 

Wikiality is what exists if you make something up, add it to Wikipedia and a bunch of people decide that it's true. [Bloggers should be ridiculously wealthy, don't you agree?]

Anyhoo, Stephen Colbert coined the term last night on The Colbert Report, just before he decided to reorder the natural order of things by super-imposing wikiality over reality.

He asked viewers to pop online, find wiki articles about elephants and add a fact that he'd invented: The world's elephant population has tripled in six months. Naturally, lots of folks went onto Wikipedia and edited the online encyclopedia to say that the world's elephant population had tripled. The video clip is up on YouTube.

We haven't verified this with the National Geographic yet, but we're pretty sure that the world's elephant population did, briefly and spontaneously, triple for about 20 minutes last night.

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert has been blocked from Wikipedia. [And the Wiki-king wants a free ticket to New York so he can appear on the show.]

We Still Like You, Jews

And in our continuing coverage of how everyone else covers and/or mocks Mel Gibson comes the following:

1) Comedy Central took out this hilarious full-page ad in Variety yesterday. No joke.

2) Some bloggers got together to conduct a controlled scientific experiment: How many drinks does it take to turn them into bigots. We believe they're still drinking.

And while you're here, please take our survey:

Who's had the most awesome crash-and-burn career disaster? 

* Mel
* Tom Cruise
* James Frey (the writer who got ripped into a million little pieces on Oprah a few months back)

The Gray Lady Tries Hard To Stay Gray

Not only is the New York Times [aka The Gray Lady] the nation's paper of record, it's also one of our favorite targets topics.

So, we're pretty amused that the Gray Lady has opted not to cover the Mel Gibson incident for the scandal that it is. Instead, they ran with a long, heady think-piece about the anatomy of a scandal. It also just happens to contain lots of juicy rumors about the drunken Nazi movie actor.

The real story here, they insist, is this: Scandals spread really, really fast these days. Especially because of this new gee-whiz thing called the Internet.

C'mon, Gray Lady, just admit: You're addicted to People.com's RSS feed, aren't you?