The GLAAD Media Awards were held last night in Manhattan, and some of our favorite, swoon-inducing stars (straight and queer) turned out to honor MTV president of entertainment Brian Graden and mother of gay rights activist Judy Shepard. I mean, just check out dreamy Mariska Hargitay and her husband Peter Hermann. Yum, both. In addition, Tim Gunn, Malan Breton, Loretta Devine, Graham Norton, and Alan Cumming were in attendance, some, of course, looking better than others. The good, bad adn ugly of the GLAAD Media Awards, after the jump.The Good:Nom nom Mariska!Dear Malan Breton, I love you, your maniacal laugh, and your insane suit. Xo.Can't help it: Love that shade of blue on Tala Ashe's dress.Tim Gunn: Then, now, always.The Bad:Pocket gay Alec Mapa is clearly not afraid of wearing white (or cream, whatevs) after Labor Day.Um, yeah: Same goes for TV host Graham Norton.Did someone forget to remind Loretta Devine that she's an icon?! Why is she dressed so shabby?!The Ugly:I don't care how out, loud and proud he is: Alan Cumming should know better than to dress like the Unabomber. [Images via FilmMagic.]
Oh, what? You thought blindnesswould be an effective antidote to the old "wandering eye" problem? Wrong! Being blind just means crap taste in hotels.But here's the part we don't get: why, after you've been illicitly screwing some broad at the 94th street Days Inndo you take your wife back there? And what's more highbrow, Days Inn for a blind man in New York, or T.G.I. Friday's for a closeted gay and his orgy club in New Jersey? Is any of this as highbrow as getting called "guido" by the Jersey shore posse of Ashley Alexandra Dupre? Glamocracy's Megan Carpentier and I discuss all this, Obama's mystery brother in RED CHINA, and how the unprecedented JP Morgan-Bear Stearns-Fed bailout came together because the JP Morgan investment banking chief and the new Bear Stearns CEO were frat brothers at Duke. Oh yeah, and Obama is about to address the subject of his insane pastor who thinks white people control everything. That's happening now! Liveblog it, folks! MEGAN:So, apparently, fidelity is just a big fat lie for everyone now.MOE:It's biology!Don't you love political sex scandal-pegged science stories?MEGAN:Best pun by a scientist ever: "Infants have their infancy; adults, adultery."But can we have a moment of silence for the end of my nascent crushon brand new NY Governor David Paterson?MOE:Did you like the detail about how he took the mistress to Day's Inn, but he's also taken his wife to the same Day's Inn? Here she is.Isn't she a beauty? Though to be fair, I've stayed in places about four diamond ratings beneath that place in this town. And I have, like, 20/30 vision.MEGAN:Like, ok, this I need to understand. Why if he and his wife live in Harlem, did he take her to the Days Inn to fuck her? Like, that's about 30 blocks from the Harlem line, right? So it's not even very far.Like, I can totallysee taking your mistress there, but your wife?MOE:Yeah I lived in Harlem. That's like a two and a half mile walk and I lived up at 149th.I bet the fuckin marriage counselor recommended it.MEGAN:Oh, God, you're so totally right. Men are creatures of habit. He was probably like, I had a ton of great sex in that hotel, I'll just go back there! Rather than, like, shelling out for the W or something.David, I have seen your wife. She deserved some high thread count sheets and strawberries and champagne from room service, I'm just sayin'.MOE:I bet you can get "room service" from that hotel. It just comes from the local diner and they will totally mess up your order but as a plus they'll charge you $7.95, no matter what you got. I wonder if the Day's Inn is one of those hotels where there is a microwave in every room and free microwave popcorn with an advertisement for a Grey Line Bus tour on the packaging.Soooooo...should we talk about Pastor KKKRazy?MEGAN:Ah, The Reverend Not-WrightMOE:The Reverend Wright wing conspiracy!According to Fox News, he's sorta like Hitler.Hitler did some great things1MEGAN:Well, he does have a 'stache, I guess that seals it. I mean, except for the whole part where he's black and stuff.MOE:He fixed the economy!MEGAN:By starting a war!MOE:Yeah well! Nicer guys have tried that and failed!MEGAN:Well, several years into Hitler's war the economy in Germany tanked, too. Apparently, it's not that great for the economy unless you win and stuff.MOE:So anyway, Obama is supposed to address the problem of the pastor who changed his life being some sort of Stalinist Che Guevara Islamofascist black supremacist firebrandand it's happening this morning at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which is only about two blocks away from my old apartment (sigh!) and I hope they air it on Fox News because, for one, the sound isn't working on any of my other news channels and two, I love Fox News. They just interviewed Mr. Feeley from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Can you IMAGINE naming a character on a kid's show "Mr. Feeley" now? No! It's unthinkable! Anyway, let's really get into the Pastor Wright thing. I feel like no one in the media has a real opinion about this guy because everyone has had at least one boyfriend who has made more ridiculous utterances and, you know, it's not like Obama touched dicks with this dude. On the other hand, he's supposed to be some sort of spiritual adviser. But, like, "spiritual adviser" -- what do any of usknow about that? So we're all circling around one another, trying to figure out whether anyone cares, whether this is going to totally sink his campaign or just fly over their heads and... and...I still don't know what I think.In other news, Obama has a black Chinese math nerd brother by another mother.Maybe if the Dalai Lama steps down the Chinese government can make him the official reincarnated Dalai Lama.MEGAN:Well, CNN keeps running the clip where he says that Hillary Clinton doesn't know what it's like to be a black man in a country run by rich white people and I'm sort of failing to see that as being controversial. Are we arguing that the country isn't run by rich white people? The median income in this country is less than $45,000 a year and Congressmembers make more than $150,000 and the President makes more than $200,000.Well, but the Dalai Lamawould still be the Dalai Lama, only he just wouldn't be the political-leader-in-exile anymore.MOE:No but he's apparently going to step down from his exiled title if the violence doesn't stop.I'm not sure what the succession plan is but I would really love it if it involved an Obama.MEGAN:That would be too much for me to handle in the morning.MOE:I do love how Roger Cohen paints the picture of this guy as a "potential problem" for Obama. Because the Clinton clan is full of such upstanding citizens.MEGAN:Lovely people, even.MOE:Anyway, so...what is the worst thing this guy Wright has said anyway? "God Damn America" or that the government created AIDS? Did you ever date one of those guys who told you crack cocaine was invented in a CIA lab? Because I have. And this was before Wikipedia, so I finally had to Nexis the fucking story and all the ensuing retractions to shut him the hell up. Not that I really felt like defending the CIA! But the thing is, it took a lot of time for me to get it up to want to refute any of the retarded things he said, even though I loved him, and I sort of feel like that must be Obama's thing, like...blah blah blah. Anyway, as it turns out it doesn't seem like Obama spent that much time in church anyway.MEGAN:Oh, but he used to say he went every week! I can't say that I dated a guy who thought crack cocaine was a CIA plot against white people (although, hello? FBI would've made more sense conspiracy theorists) but I've definitely heard it and it totally still holds sway among many people in this country. And, hell, fucking South African President Thabo Mbeki thinks we hatched AIDS to keep Africans from breeding and shit, so, you know, apparently it's pretty widely believed that we're coordinated and shit.MOE:Oh man I just rewound my Fox and they were interviewing that black republican ex Lt Governor of Maryland and he was talking about how a "spiritual adviser" is a really important force in your life, he knows because he used to be in a monastery. Um, was Barack Obama in a monastery? Because I don't remember that part. It's like his Chinese African brother! (Oh my god, Chinese African! Do you think he is involved in Sudanese blood oil??) Anyway, whatevs! I'm about to change the subject. Can you handle this?I actually read almost the entire account of the Week That Shook Wall Streetand I have a takeaway.MEGAN:Wow, no wonder we got started late. That's longer than Crappy Hour itself!MOE:Chief Executive Officer Alan Schwartz was out of pocket. Although Bear Stearns had been struggling with mortgage-related losses and problems in its wealth-management unit, Mr. Schwartz was hosting a Bear Stearns media conference in Palm Beach, Fla.On Wednesday morning, he left the conference briefly to do an interview with CNBC in an effort to deflect rumors about liquidity issues at the firm.Steve Black, co-head of J.P. Morgan's investment bank, returned early from vacation in the Caribbean, spearheading the bank's efforts with his J.P. Morgan counterpart in London, Bill Winters. Mr. Black's role was pivotal. He was a longtime associate of J.P. Morgan Chief Executive James Dimon. And Mr. Black had a long relationship with Bear's CEO, Mr. Schwartz, dating back to the 1970s, when the two were fraternity brothers at Duke University.Okay, so we've got two paragraphs. Palm Beach. Mediaconference. Media companies paying New York-based media employees to stay in Palm Beach and eat Bear Stearns-financed weak hotel coffee and fruit plates and report on what New York-based Bear Stearns has to say to the public! And what are they saying on Wednesday in Palm Beach? Oh, they're "deflecting" liquidity rumors.All right, fast foward, Friday. In the Caribbean. A much deserved vacation! Fraternity brothers at Duke University.At 5 a.m. Friday, Mr. Geithner, Mr. Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, calling in from home, joined a conference call to debate whether Bear should be allowed to fail or whether the Fed should lend it enough money to get through the weekend. At 7 a.m. they settled on the lifeline option. Would it have been so bad to just let this shit fail? You know, and let the MARKET SORT IT OUT?MEGAN:Why did we decided that they shouldn't be allowed to fail? What fraternity were they in... and WHAT FRATERNITY WAS BERNANKE IN? Maybe it's a faux-Greek cabal on Wall Street.MOE:Don't they only have, like, finals clubs at Harvard? I don't know. I dropped out. Fuck Harvard. To Ben's credit, he "worked as a waiter" throughout college. This was in the seventies, when food service positions were not so highly coveted.MEGAN:Food service positions at Harvard (or anywhere) are definitely still not highly coveted. I drove the drunk truckat my college to get out of working food service.But I don't know about Greek at Harvard.
Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripleyand Cold Mountain, has died. He was only 54. The cause of his death has not been released. He was most recently in Botswana filming The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.[AP]
The news of Heather Mills McCartney's nearly $49 milliondivorce settlement was the talk of both the tabloids and legitimate news sources yesterday, and it wasn't just because Mills' split from Paul McCartney was so acrimonious. The haggling over money when one spouse is far wealthierthan the other begs the question: How much is a marriage "worth"? Pundits and the peanut gallery alike have been griping about Mills's payday -- she will receive the equivalent of $1,300 a day for every day of her four-year marriage to Paul McCartney. During a segment about the McCartneys and the price of marriage on GMAthis morning, the implication was that a wife only deserves that kind of money when her presence helped a husband create his fortune. Lorna Wendt, the ex-wife of GE Capital CEO George Wendt, was originally offered $8 million following the couple's divorce after 32 years of marriage. Lorna thought she was worth half of the $100 million fortune George had amassed, and after taking her ex to court, ended up receiving $20 million. She told Fortunemagazine: "I complemented him by keeping the home fires burning and by raising a family and by being the CEO of the Wendt corporation and by running the household and grounds and social and emotional ties so he could go out and work very hard at what he was good at... If marriage isn't a partnership between equals, then why get married? If you knew that some husband or judge down the road was going to say, 'You're a 30% part of this marriage, and he's a 70% part,' would you get married?"Arguably, Mills never created any sort of McCartney corporation. Nearly all of her ex-husband's money and success had been amassed long before she came on the scene. But does that mean she deserves less of the pie? Then there's the couple's young daughter, 4-year-old Beatrice. In addition to the $49 million, McCartney will pay$70,000 a year for Beatrice's nanny and school fees. To this sum, Mills griped, "[Beatrice is] obviously meant to travel B class while her father travels A class."The court of John Q. Public has been, well, less than sympathetic to Mills In the comments section of a New York Timesitem analyzing the press coverage of her, reader "wendy" says of Mills, "Another money hungry 'female dog' that gives us good women a bad "name". You didn't have it when you met him and shouldn't have it when you leave him..." No one but the people involved know the real details about the Mills-McCartney marriage, though the pair's divorce proceedings will be made publicas per a court decision today, despite an appeal from Mills yesterday. But again: even if we knew the intimate details, how do we put a price on them? A Well-Covered End To The McCartney-Mills Marriage[NY Times]The Price Of Romance[Guardian]It's Her Job Too: Lorna Wendt's $20 Million Divorce Case Is The Shot Heard 'Round The Water Cooler[Fortune]McCartney Divorce Ruling To Be Released[AP via Yahoo]
Barack Obama has always been black, but since he was raised by a white mom in Hawaii and Jakarta he did not always have much in the way of a black community, and so when he moved to Chicago he started attending this black church where the pastor says the sort of hyperbolic shit pastors often say, only the media doesn't really cover the hyperbolic shit that gets said at black churches the way they cover the shit that gets said at white churches because black people aren't constantly trying to equate abortion with the Holocaust or replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments, maybe because they just aren't as bossy as white religious people because they've never been in a position of societal dominance, which is actually something of which they are both aware and not exactly stokedabout, and when you are a preacher you kinda play to that. So, like, Obama is going to try and address all of this in a speech tomorrow night. [CNN]And good luck Barry: your pastor's approval rating roughly on par with Al Qaeda's. [Rasmussen]But the church people love him! [ABC News]A leading pimp says Eliot Spitzer must have been a sex addict if he had to pay for anyof his sex. [NY Mag]Nancy Pelosi hearts Obama anyway. [NY Observer]Maybe she has sex dreams about him? [Slate]"Roger Magro thought his wife Crystal was 'full of baloney' when she told him she and her co-workers had purchased a Powerball ticket worth more than $276 million...Magro said his wife plans to continue working in the tax office, but he resigned Monday from his job as a sheriff's deputy." [Pittsburgh Channel]Was a Republican DOJ conspiracy behind the Spitzer sting? Probably. Does that make the scandal any less fun? Hard to say.You know what? I am so happythe market rewarded JP Morgan with a huge stock market gain today for its courageous decision to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share in an unprecedented transaction practically guaranteed by the government to make them shitloads of money. Yes, that is what the financial sector needed today. All that and the Dow rose twenty points. [WSJ]
Anna Nicole's son, Daniel, stole Methadone from his mother a few months before he died from a Methadone overdose. At an inquestinto Daniel's death today in the Bahamas, Anna's baby daddy Larry Birkhead testified that he saw Daniel stealing the Methadone on surveillance tapes. Daniel died from a combination of Methadone, Zoloft and Lexapro. • Here's a first lookat Britney on the set of How I Met Your Mother. Brit's cameo as a receptionist in a dermatologist's office airs on Monday, March 24. • Oh my, does Kristin Davis have a sex tape??(Link NSFW) Those photos are potentially Photoshopped, but if they are real, they could successfully break her good-girl "Charlotte" image. She'll never be typecast again! [Us, People, Scott Faynervia dlisted]
We're always lamenting the old King of Queensconundrum -- you know, the overweight, schlubby television husband paired with a hot, lithe wife. Instead of impossible standards of beauty being loosened for women, now men are supposed to live up to societal ideals as well. The dowdy husband can be a schlub-no-more with a "mirdle,"a man girdle. According to the Wall Street Journal, "A growing number of labels are launching elasticized 'shapewear,' 'bodywear,' 'support boxers' and other beer-belly-constricting undergarments for men." Spanx, the most heralded brand of women's "shapewear," is even considering a men's line, says the Journal. Jeff Lewis, an events coordinator in Phoenix, told the paper that trying shapewear for the first time "took an inch-and-a-half off my waist...It gave me an instant ego boost." Nevertheless, this doesn't seem like a trend that's going to go super mainstream anytime soon. According to the WSJ, after Daniel Hernandez got compliments about his slim waist, he showed off his mirdle and faced ridicule from his friends. "One guy was, like, 'Oh, what, are you, grandma now?'" And for real, wearing a girdle when you're stripping down to get it on would be equally, if not more, embarrassing for men as it is for women. Remember the scene in Bridget Jones when Hugh Grant's character lifts up her skirt to find those enormous knickers? Getting all hot and heavy and revealing a mirdle would probably be much, much worse. Men Go for It By Any Name Besides Girdle[Wall Street Journal]
On NPR's All Things Considered, Alison Keyes discussesCatwoman. Although the DC comics character has become, Keyes writes, "a symbol of feminine power," she started out as a villain, foil and whip-carrying burglar for Batman to battle in 1940. Later, in the campy '60s TV series Batman, Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt turned the Catwoman character into a fierce, gorgeous, smart woman who happens to be a bad girl. Catwoman has had her own comic for 15 years, and if you don't follow these things you may not know: She's changedfrom the saucy minx we once knew. Although she's still stacked as hell and not afraid to flaunt it, she no longer wears high heels. Plus! Selina Kyle (Catwoman's real name) has a backstory: She's an orphan, has a sister, and used to be a prostitute. This past was created for her in 1986. What happened between 1940 and 1986 that forty years later a woman needs to be a hooker in order to be a thief? [NPR]
Here's a little story about an exception that proves the rule: Susan Monica Kriss, 23, was arraigned today on charges she falsely accused a man of hatching a plot with Al Qaeda to hijack a plane to Egypt. The guy turned out to be Susan's ex-boyfriend; Egypt was where he planned to marry another girl. Pretty crazy, right? Yeah, she crazy. But is "Crazy Girl" really a type? The latest Detailsclaims she is. "She may have taken the form of the smoky-eyed goth brooder, the tortured heiress, or the unhinged sorority girl. Whatever her identity, chances are she was intoxicatingly sexy, intense, unstable, mercurial, and impossible to be at ease around in social settings. She was completely and debilitatingly exhausting." Hmmmm.Okay, but how may girls are really likethat? Aren't most of them going through a phase? Or acting out in response to dudes who, in the word of one "Crazy Girl"-holic, look at a girl with dark eyeliner and see "a little wounded bird"? Still, I'm sick of blaming dudes for everything all of a sudden.(Not forever. Just for today!) Who are these crazy girls? I have some friends who have gone through crazy phases-- but now they're normal. (Thank God.) Am I crazy? Aren't a lot of "crazy girl" attributes -- spontaneity, playfulness, liking dirty sex, delusions of grandeur-- really just normal dude things? Yes. I guess it is fairly easy to earn the designation of "crazy" when you're not the gender that gave the world Hitler/Rasputin/Mao/ Kim Il-Sung/ Sapurmurat Niyazovor Osama Bin Laden. Um, I guess that means we're lucky!Bogus Plane Hijack Case Due In Court[LA Daily News] Why Can't You Resist This Woman?[Details]
