Ashlee Simpson appeared on the July cover of Marie Claire magazine extolling the virtues of appreciating one’s body as it is — then she had a nose job.

Marie Claire readers erupted in fury at what they said was Ms. Simpson’s hypocrisy and the magazine’s “cluelessness.” They wrote 1,000 letters in protest to the magazine, according to Joanna Coles, the new editor of the magazine. And she agreed with them.
In the first issue (due Aug. 15) over which she exercises full editorial control, Ms. Coles gives expanded space in the letters column to readers to vent against Ms. Simpson. Ms. Coles adds in a note: “We’re dazed and confused — and disappointed — by her choice, too!”

Rare is the day when the editor of a women’s magazine will openly criticize a celebrity. But Ms. Coles is planting a flag: A new Marie Claire is in town and it is making a clean break with its past. No girly goo, no teeny-bopper covers, no blind obedience to the traditional rules of the road.

Umm, so this begs the question: What would Joe do?

[Source: NY Times]

I think there’s an unwritten rule not to blog while being wasted and barely conscious. Well, I say fuck that! I’m gonna do it anyway, because I’m punk like that! And because these asshats are starting to seriously piss me off.

And I mean, like, seriously! Read the rest of this entry »

The Lloyd Man (AKA Lloyd Grove) has witnessed the “icy” side of Barbara Walters and lived to write about it. That dude is fearless…

A few hours after a televised display of saccharine warmth and affection between Barbara Walters and Star Jones Reynolds - who yesterday surprised her “View” colleagues by announcing she’s leaving in mid-July - their relationship turned very chilly indeed. […] Read the rest of this entry »

Paris Hilton got a surprise at Macy’s last Friday when a mustachioed man turned up in the long line of women who’d bought an $80 bottle of her new fragrance. The hotel heiress asked the dude how she should autograph her photo.”Make it out to ‘The Guy Who Has My Storage Locker Stuff,’” said David Hans Schmidt, who then introduced himself as the broker of the secret diaries, videotapes and snapshots that went on the auction block when she didn’t pay her storage bill. “That stuff can’t be published,” the wide-eyed Hilton told Schmidt.

“Like your sex video?” said Schmidt, who has offered to sell Hilton’s possessions back to her. (Just to jog her memory about the Hilton family heirlooms, he showed her a photo of herself as a little girl holding baby sister Nicky.) Hilton told Schmidt she’d meet with him in L.A. She also signed his picture: “To David, Love Paris Hilton xoxo.”

That’s what happens when you don’t pay your storage rental fee. Cheapskate.

[Via: Yeeeah!]

HOLLYWOOD megastar Tom Cruise is furious royal biographer Andrew Morton is using a gay porn actor to investigate his private life. […]Morton, who collaborated with Princess Diana to produce an account of her troubled life, is paying 58-year-old Paul Baressi to help him with his warts-and-all book about Cruise.

Baressi has starred in 25 gay porn films but now works as a private investigator in LA.

“I am a key source of information regarding several things,” Baressi said.

Baressi claims to have provided Morton with documentation regarding a bizarre episode in which Cruise, 43, was falsely accused of having a homosexual encounter while shooting the film Eyes Wide Shut in the UK.

Yesterday Cruise’s lawyer Bert Fields said the actor would sue Morton and New York-based publishers St Martin’s Press if they used the letter he wrote in response to try to cast aspersions on Cruise’s sexuality.

“I wrote a letter to Mr Morton back in November and said he obviously was entitled to write the book but ‘make sure you check your facts’,” Mr Fields said. “If he tries to use my letter to create the impression that Mr Cruise did have a gay affair, we will certainly sue … because the story is false.

“Mr Cruise is not gay.”

There you go. The man ain’t gay. His lawyer said so.

BRAD Pitt (above) fired a pregnant employee from his production company because she dared speak out on behalf of his estranged wife, Jennifer Aniston. Pitt, 41, was furious that Aniston’s pal Kristin Hahn - an exec with Plan B (the film company he and Aniston, 36, founded in 2002) � told Vanity Fair it would be “beyond painful” for the actress to see Pitt and girlfriend Angelina Jolie, 30, have a baby together. An Us Weekly source claims Pitt “screamed” at Hahn, claiming she violated her contract by speaking about him without his approval - although Aniston had given hers. Hahn claims the departure was “amicable.”

Pissing off your boss is always a bad career move. Or so I’ve heard.

Fashion guru Valentino Garavani has launched a scathing attack on socialite Paris Hilton, labeling the hotel heiress “vulgar” and “not even pretty.”The Italian fashion designer “shuddered” when New Yorker magazine reporter Michael Specter suggested Hilton may wear a Valentino dress for her forthcoming marriage to Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis.

Valentino, 72, scathes, “No, I don’t like her. She is marrying the son of a friend of mine. They have billions.

“She is vulgar, and she is not even pretty.

“The Hiltons, they have nothing.”

I think they have lots of unresolved issues. Well, and ugly, vulgar daughters…

You really don’t need much else beyond that.

DEFIANT Russell Crowe is threatening to quit Hollywood over his phone rage court case.And the Gladiator star, whose trial for assault was adjourned yesterday until November, has vowed not to curb his explosive temper.

If he is convicted for throwing a phone at a New York hotel worker he faces up to seven years in jail and could be barred from working in the US. Even if he is found guilty of a less serious offence, he will face visa problems. But Crowe, 41, said: “Maybe it’s better I don’t travel to America. Maybe it’s better I don’t work in the area of the business that attracts so many flies.

“You tell me to p*** off too many times and I probably will. I don’t mind shrinking my professional life.” […]

He said: “They all want me to be examined by psychologists. I come from a different culture. If I’ve got something on my mind, you’ll hear about it. Voila, mental anguish solved.”

Okay, forgive me if I’m a little slow, but where exactly does the whole “hurling-phones-at-people” fit in? Is it before he speaks his mind or after?

*ducks for cover*

Bridget Jones is untying the knot. Renee Zellweger, who played the lovelorn Brit in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and country music star Kenny Chesney will have their four-month-old marriage annulled, Chesney’s publicist, Holly Gleason, and Zellweger’s Los Angeles-based publicist Nanci Ryder, confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.In court papers filed Wednesday, Zellweger listed “fraud” as the reason for the breakup but did not elaborate.

A phone call to her attorney was not immediately returned, nor was a call to Gleason later in the day regarding the fraud claim.

I think someone spent their honeymoon digging in the closet… and got lucky.

That’s right, Tom Cruise has managed to follow in JLo’s big-ass footsteps and carved a place for himself in the ever-expanding nerdy ‘Street’ lingo:

[C]ondos are to the real estate boom what Internet stocks were to the 1990s bull market. And like the Internet day-traders before them, the new condo flippers, with their talk of instant riches and easy money, are about to become the life of every cocktail party.

And why not? Condo prices have soared 80 percent in the past five years, making the same period’s 40 percent rise for single-family homes look almost pokey. Developers are constructing new condo units at nearly twice the pace they were in 1999, and investors are literally lining up to buy one, two, three or more. In Miami, as much as 75 percent of some condo towers are investor-owned.

No cash? No problem. Banks, with their loosened lending standards, no-money-down loans and teaser mortgage rates, are making it easier than ever to be a mogul-in-training. […]

Mix it all together — rising prices, record levels of construction, fast-and-loose mortgages and swelling ranks of new investors — and you get a market more volatile than Tom Cruise.

And a group of clueless investors dumber than Katie Holmes.

Man, I had no idea finance was this much fun!