- Poor Joe Francis, things just keep getting worse for the poor, rich, white guy. Francis, the sleazeball who created the Girls Gone Wild franchise, is now taking his b*tching in a new direction after comparing the treatment he’s received to that a terrorism suspect gets and basically claiming he’s being railroaded on charges of tax evasion. His latest complaint is that while en route from Florida to Nevada, where he’ll face those tax-evasion charges, he was abused by guards at the Grady County Law Enforcement Center in Oklahoma. During his stay at the facility, from May 17 to June 4, Francis says guards denied him food and blankets and threatened to strap him naked to a chair. Ironically, Francis only minds being strapped naked to a chair if there’s not a curvy underage girl in the chair with him performing various sexual favors on film, but I digress. Grady officials deny the claims, and given Francis’ propensity for exaggeration and dramatization, I’m guessing the truth lies somewhere in between. Was he abused? I doubt it. But Joe, this is prison, you don’t call the shots and you don’t get what you want, when you want it. Now shut your mouth, pay your back taxes and maybe you’ll get to remember what life outside prison is like some time soon.
- Score one for hot, younger news anchors. Marina Kolbe, a former CNN anchor who sued the network, alleging age discrimination after her contract wasn’t renewed, has lost her lawsuit. A U.S. District Court judge in Atlanta ruled in favor of CNN after only five hours of deliberation. The judge decided that the network’s claim that it did not renew Kolbe’s contract because of average performance and failure to improve was true and that she was not let go because of her age. She worked for CNN’s International division for four years, but in 2003 her contract expired and she wasn’t brought back. Kolbe, then 42, was replaced by a South Asian anchor. What I love about this is that you can be sure that her age did play some part in this. Make no mistake about it, networks always want to put the most appealing, attractive faces on screen, so when Kolbe looked a little less attractive than a possible alternative, you can bet her superiors noticed. Now she may have in fact been an average news anchor, but if she was 28 and really hot, suddenly she goes from being an average anchor to one the network decides to keep around. But this time, CNN had enough truthiness, as Stephen Colbert would say, on its side to carry the day.
- How do you know when you’re too rich for your own good? When you start spending $3.8 million to buy an unpopulated, one-house town in a foreign country, that’s how. An unnamed Italian bidder made that winning offer for the town of Albert, Texas, a 13-acre hamlet with no permanent residents that is located about 60 miles north of San Antonio. This rich idiot paid nearly $4 million for an abandoned town with run-down 85-year-old dance hall, a tractor shed, single three-bedroom house and a few small peach and pecan orchards. the only time this place sees any life is on the weekends, when a tavern created out of the building where the old general store used to be is open. I know there’s a certain status trend with rich people in wanting to own unique things that no one else has so you can say you’re special, but you’ve got to be kidding me. You’re really proud of the fact that you own a one-horse town in Texas with no permanent residents? People are supposed to be impressed by this? What, are you going to fly over from Italy, rent a car and hold a parade through downtown and zeros and zeros of town residents cheer you on? Give your money to charity, buy an even bigger boat, send it to me, just stop doing stupid, pointless crap like this, please.
- Best teacher ever or unfit to be a part of your local school system? You decide, because I know where I stand on the case of Anna Ciriani, an Italian teacher who has been suspended after local authorities became aware of her extra-curricular activities as a porn star under the name “Madameweb.” Ciriani/Madameweb stars in hard-core videos on the Internet and at erotic shows, practices deemed as "not compatible with educational activity," by the head of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia education authority. Ciriani didn’t deny the allegations but insists that her after-hour behavior never affected the quality of her in-class performance. "My behavior at school has always been professional and irreproachable," she was quoted as saying by the AGI agency. "I am a normal woman, with my family and my work as a teacher. I am (also) looking for transgression and sex." Here I might have to disagree with Madameweb, as much as it pains me to do so. I don’t know if your porn career ever affected your teaching, but you’re wrong in saying that acting in hardcore porno videos is normal. There’s nothing normal about having graphic sex on video and getting paid for it. That is decidedly abnormal and sick, so you’re wrong there. Also, her porn career has been a factor in her teaching to some extent, because five years ago Ciriani was transferred from her post as teacher of Italian literature in a secondary school in the north-eastern town of Pordenone after students covered the toilets with nude photos of her downloaded from the Internet. Since then she has been giving evening classes to foreign adult students in a nearby town, who I assume are also familiar with her work. Madameweb's popularity surged after a video of her shot at the Venus erotica festival in Berlin last month attracted a wide Internet following, prompting the authorities to suspend her from teaching altogether. On one hand, I think nearly every straight guy who’s ever lived would like the idea of a porn star as his teacher, whether he’d admit or not, but I can see how Ciriani continuing to teach might be a problem. After all, it’s hard to have the respect of your students when they can go home and pop in a DVD of you getting after it with some stranger on camera. Clearly, the time has come for you to make a choice, Madameweb. Either you can give up porn and try to regain your teaching career (which would be tough to do), or you can just embrace your inner slut and become a full-time porn star. Hey, maybe you can even find a role where you play a teacher in one of your pornos, then you can still find the joy of teaching. Either way, your double life is over.
- It was an awesome weekend at the box office….if you’re under the age of 13. Enchanted, the Disney flick about fairy-tale characters living in the real world, was the top earner at $50 million for the long Thanksgiving weekend. This Christmas, the holiday drama featuring Loretta Devine, was second with $27.1 million in box office revenue. All told, seven of the top 10 films over the weekend in terms of earnings were rated G or PG-13, including Bee Movie, Fred Claus, August Rush and Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (with my girl Natalie Portman). For the non-High School Musical age group, films like Hitman, American Gangster and sci-fi thriller The Mist rounded out the top 10. American Gangster is still the best movie on that list if you’re asking me, but far be it from me to stand in the way of the mega-machine that is Disney and their steamroller of family-friendly entertainment…..
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