Diddy went to the Knicks game. Game is not interesting, Diddy decides to count his benjamins. Suddenly, Diddy sees a bill he has never seen before. It has George Washington on it, who Diddy has long felt was over-emphasized in American history. Diddy is a staunch Jeffersonian. Now Diddy is shocked and Diddy is angry.
Let me emphasize, he's WEARING a question mark suit.
It’s this one. That’s right, by a factor of two, my most popular posting ever was a nonsensical bit about whether LeBron James or Spencer from “The Hills” would become a billionaire first. Since it’s not even a particularly funny or interesting post, I did a little more digging. Turns out, my blog is the #1 result when you enter this into the Google search engine.
If you’re wondering if I wrote that last sentence solely to generate web traffic, you know me well.
We had a winner. “Oh I HATE HIM!” “Great choice, that’s definitely who I would kill!!” “He’s such a sleazebag!!” Ali was kind of mad at me for taking us down this path, because he (1) hates talking about anything connected to The Hills, a show neither he nor I even watch and (2) this effectively killed the whole game, because it was unanimous (except maybe for Ali) that there is no one in the universe more worthy of killing than Spencer Pratt. In an entirely open-ended hypothetical question, I had actually managed to come up with a definitive answer. Nobody wants Spencer Pratt to live.
“Well, I'm trying to be a billionaire before 30. Once you find an open market, that's where you can make billions to trillions of dollars. Every big product, from Proactiv to the Internet—these were things that were just ideas. And I'm a free thinker. There is no box. I'm thinking about ideas that people might think are crazy, and I'm like, this world is crazy, where do you think we are? You want to tell me there's a planet and there's a universe, and gravity holding us down? It's like, okay, I'm crazy then.”
If you missed #10-#6, start here first. If you enjoyed those, here’s the rest of the list, but first...
Justin’s rendezvous with Zhang Ziyi, Min-Taik getting in the edge of a paparazzi picture of Eva Mendes, then later finding it online, and of course, Ali’s dad trying to get an autograph from “JT” on “Step by Step”.
Me: “Over where?”
Bonus points here because it was a 2-for-1. I went to lunch with Amy and there was an empty table an awkwardly close 2 feet from us. Soon after, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Michelle Trachtenberg sat down at that table. First, let me say that Sarah Michelle Gellar is extremely attractive in person, much more so than I would have anticipated. Michelle Trachtenberg, well, no. But she was awesome as Nona F. Mecklenberg on The Adventures of Pete & Pete, so I can’t be too critical. It was also kind of nice to see that Buffy and her sister are friends in real life.
Michelle how difficult relationships really are. She spoke plainly about all the effort needed to keep the romance alive in her marriage to Freddie Prinze, Jr., and how difficult that’s become since his career has become a total train wreck. (She didn’t really say that last part, I just wanted to see how that would look in print).
Our meal (which did include a few rounds of vodka shots) was well over $200 per person. Of course, you’re there for the scene, not the food. And while celebrities of every ilk flock there, Mr. Chow has reached stratospheric levels of popularity with the hip hop community. On our way to the dinner, I was treated to breathless excitement from 40-year old investment bankers.
After I sufficiently swallowed my laughter, I (and another guy who knew who Foxy Brown was) explained to the rest of the table that the woman was the famous rapper, not the guy she was sitting next to. Then people spent a few minutes debating if she was hot, and eventually our table made some dorky conversation with Foxy Brown that my mind seems to have blocked out.
My love for the Chuckster, combined with seeing him in his natural element (losing a ton of money in Vegas) would alone have made it a top-3 celebrity sighting for me. But what really put it over the top was that as he stormed down the hallway, he was being chased by two of the hottest, most scantily clad women I’ve ever seen. I started laughing out loud as I watched the two women chasing Barkley, struggling to stay balanced on their 4-inch heels. I should stress again, though – they were not just run-of-the-mill Vegas sluts. These women were extraordinary. Victoria's Secret model-esque, but minus whatever modicum of class a Victoria’s Secret model possesses.
, so I had to relegate him to honorable mention status. His name is Kelly Perdew, and he was at Princeton shortly after winning season 2 of “The Apprentice” for some entrepreneurship session. I happened to be in the right building at the time, and decided to wander around, assuming (correctly, I might add), that there would be free cookies at this thing. As I was eating my cookies, I noticed Mr. Perdew just standing there, hoping someone would talk to him. He looked kind of sad and lonely. I hope someone eventually noticed him.
“Sir, are you in line to meet Ms. Sigler?"
Cyrena knew about a party through her boss that supposedly Justin Timberlake and Tyra Banks might show up at. Sounded like we could get in, especially if we went early, but we decided not to bother. Later, on our cab ride home, her boss called to say we should have gone to the party, and that Mr. Timberlake (as well as Ms. Banks) did in fact make an appearance. Everyone in the cab went “huh, interesting” and we resumed talking about other things.
This one just happened a few months back at the Bellagio. We passed a crowd, and Weili turns to me and says, “Was that Mike Tyson? I think that was Mike Tyson.”
Jin wanted to get a table, but during a night with a major sporting event, everyone at your table has to spend like $60 or something. But I was only 20 years old at the time, and let me tell you – spending $60 at ESPNZone without alcohol is almost impossible. “I’ll start with the chicken fingers with fries, then the full rack of ribs, then a chocolate sundae, then nachos, spinach and artichoke dip, the chicken fettuccine, with extra fettuccine…”
I was at UCLA with Emilio and John, and we decided to go get burritos. Unbeknown st to us, the street had been blocked off for the premiere of the Lil’ Bow Wow (I think he still had the Lil’ back then) basketball/magic movie, “Like Mike”. Lil’ Bow Wow’s co-star in the movie? Jonathan Lipnicki of “Jerry Maguire” fame. He had this ridiculous spiked-hair, sunglasses, and a general aura of “I’m famous, I’m cool, chicks love me”. He was a little too old for that to be cute, plus his demeanor suggested he really did think he was badass, which, let's face it, is plainly preposterous. I wish you could see how ridiculous he looked. Oh wait, I found a picture! You can see too, look! He's ridiculous!
62% of voters in this poll thought Lindsay Lohan will live longer than Britney Spears. Although it was not an impressive sample size, I feel confident that people generally think Britney is closer to her demise. For me, though, it’s really a toss-up. Here’s how I assess the situation.
Of course, there’s also the “sudden death” angle. This one, you have to say Britney fares a lot better on. I assume Lindsay is doing hardcore drugs (or more hardcore drugs, at least). As Steve reminded me when Martina Hingis was accused of using cocaine, “only the pretty girls get the free cocaine.” (To clarify, I don’t think Lindsay Lohan is hot, but on a relative comparison, you’d have to say she is getting more free cocaine.) Also, judging by the swarms of paparazzi around Britney’s car at all times, it seems less likely that she can sustain a high enough driving speed to get into a serious accident. Really, neither of them should be allowed to drive, just for general public safety reasons.
The TV writers' strike continues, and I'm starting to quiver in fear. Word is they're getting close to a resolution, but if it doesn't come, and networks run out of new episodes, I'm going to demand federal intervention. Bring on the strikebreakers. The landscape of reality TV is looking pretty grim, other than perennial all-stars The Amazing Race, which this year has an Asian woman and her pops, and Ryan Seacrest's hot ex-girlfriend (what? so he's not gay?) and Project Runway, which thus far has been hysterical. If you're not down for that, allow me throw in yet another plug for the greatest television show of all time (for both genders and all ages!), Friday Night Lights.
Probably as famous as I'm ever going to be, so now is the time to capitalize with the ladies. The only difficulty is finding ladies who care. Minor technicality.
I'm not sure what this means other than that Larry King may not be the brightest bulb in the box.Remember this commercial? I remember thinking when it first came out what a great commercial it was. I also remember thinking that it was a complete crock of shit.
My opinion that "everyone" is on steroids is well-documented, and even at the time, I felt Lance Armstrong had to be on steroids. Now, I'm 100% sure. Every single competitor Armstrong ever had has tested positive for steroid use, including his old teammates. If you believe that a guy who isn't on steroids could thoroughly dominate the world's most elite competitors who are themselves all on steroids, I don't know what to tell you. Marion Jones' case reminds us that it's much more plausible to think someone is on steroids than to assume someone is the greatest physical entity to ever grace Earth.
I think everyone cuts this guy a lot of slack because (well other than the entire sport being on steroids) he is perceived to be this "good guy". A family guy, who beat cancer, and has these cool yellow wristbands and yay for America. While I know he must have used steroids, I too cut him some slack, reasoning that if he was inspiring cancer patients, well, maybe we should just all join the charade.
On the plus side, Lance continues to inspire cancer patients everywhere. Recently, he's been showing them that even cancer patients can have Ashley Olsen sit on their laps and make out with them! It's like Lance himself always says (at his $50,000 speaking engagements): "If I can come back from the brink of death to make out with Michelle Tanner from Full House - just think of what you could do!"
It's one thing for Lance Armstrong to leave his wife for Sheryl Crow, but Ashley Olsen? Sara echoed my thoughts, saying, "that doesn't even feel legal to me". I don't think people who became famous as adults should hook up with people who because famous as little kids. Celebrity "statutory" relationships are probably too much for the general public to handle.
People.com had this absolutely fascinating article today about Spencer Pratt, “star” of MTV’s hit education show “The Hills”. I don’t watch the show, but everyone I know who does absolutely detests him in a completely uninhibited way. Like, if they saw him on the street, they would actually walk up to him and beat him senseless. I didn’t find anything particularly compelling about him, outside of rivaling Adolf Hitler for lowest popularity rating. But today, I saw that he delivered the following quote:
Those of you who follow the NBA are no doubt aware of LeBron James’ stated goal of becoming a billionaire. Back in 2005, LeBron gave himself 15-20 years to do so, meaning he now has 13-18 years left. Spencer Pratt, on the other hand, has only 6 years left to achieve his goal, so he’s going to need to work really fast. Let’s break down the expected wealth of each man along his defined time horizon. For the purposes of analysis, I am going to presume no one murders Spencer before he turns 30, which is admittedly a rather large assumption.
LeBron James: He signed an extension which will pay him $60 million over the next 3 years – assuming the NBA doesn’t experience a massive increase in the total revenue pie, I estimate the pre-tax present value of his basketball earnings to be $150 million. I have him pegged for roughly another $20-$25 million annually in endorsements. I don’t think the endorsement projection has that much upside (in fact I think it’s overly optimistic) – while generally performing from a basketball standpoint, it’s apparent that he is not a compelling endorser versus the likes of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, largely because LeBron doesn’t come across with that much charisma. Endorsement pre-tax present value works out to about $100 million. Do some more number crunching from there, and I’m guessing by the year 2020, LeBron is worth in the neighborhood of $250-$300 million. I happen to disagree that if he were traded to New York, he would be worth a lot more money – the market seems pretty saturated with LeBron as it is. Maybe one of his investments hits it big (like suddenly everyone decides to ride bicycles), but I’m going to guess $300 million in the year 2020.
Spencer Pratt: I would guess that his going rate for parties is $25,000 – if he whores himself out (in this specific way) 30 times a year, he’s looking at $750k. If he has some savvy, he can probably get two-three good years of this type of income. If he leaks embarrassing photos or videos to the tabloids of either himself or his equally useless girlfriend, he can probably drum up another $250k. His own reality show should net him another $500k, and a subsequent appearance on “The Surreal Life” ought to bring in $200k more. I would ordinarily also think he could get another $300k out of stunt casting in B-movies, but he doesn’t seem to think too highly of movies.
Spencer Pratt: He’s already set to marry someone who doesn’t have all THAT much money, but that marriage should be finished within 10 months, leaving him a good 4-5 years to marry into some additional money. Unfortunately, he’s so widely regarded as a sleazebag that he probably won’t manage to marry a rich woman without a prenup. He may be able to siphon off some money, but it probably won’t exceed a million.
Brittany Murphy: This girl must have made a deal with the devil. That's the only conceivable answer to the question of why the media so badly wants to convince me she is hot. Who is behind this whole master scheme? The only realistic answer is the devil. However, I'm browsing imdb right now, and it appears that one of her post-production movies is "The Ramen Girl", (I kid you not), a "story of an American woman (Murphy) who's stranded in Tokyo after breaking up with her boyfriend. Searching for direction in life, she trains to be a ramen noodle chef under a tyrannical Japanese master." Imdb always says someone has like twelve movies in post-production, so I suspect "The Ramen Girl" is not a real movie. But if it is, she has an outside shot at redeeming herself in my eyes.
Let me establish first what I think the job criteria ought to be for a mainstream Hollywood actress. First, be attractive. Second, be good at acting. How can you fail 2 out of 2 (that's 100% if you're doing the math at home) job requirements, and still get lots of great job offers? At no point in my life has a friend told me, "You know who's hot? Kirsten Dunst" and at no point has any girl ever told me, "if only I looked more like Kirsten Dunst". And if you want to contend she's a talented actress, I dare you to watch "Spiderman 3" with me. Ordinarily, I would be able to understand her curiously high level of fame under the "Every Generation, A Completely Mediocre Woman Needs To Make It So That Girls Feel Better About Themselves" theory, only I thought that spot was already taken by...
land supporting roles in high-publicity movies (Batman Forever, Scream), Hollywood executives didn't believe she had any real individual box-office clout until the modest overperformance of "Ever After". Suddenly she's in every girl movie ever made (Home Fries, Never Been Kissed, Charlie's Angels, Duplex, 50 First Dates, the other Charlie's Angels movie, and on and on) and being thrust in my face everywhere, on TV, magazines.
I thought it was just like, this club, and to become president, she had to be elected by the members of the Selena fan club. Just like the Mira Catalina Elementary School student council, my only real frame of reference at the time. I recall thinking that it was odd that a 35-year old would want to run for "the office of" fan club president. Didn't she think it was weird that she was running against kids who were 10 years old? Even at my young age, I felt it odd that a woman so old (and especially so old-looking) would want to be in some pop artist's fan club. It seemed as strange as if my dad were to join Color Me Badd's official fan club.
I guess there's two simple explanations at work here. One is that celebrity fan clubs have simply become Internet fansites, and the second is just that I'm not 8 years old, and don't see the ads because I'm not meant to. But even so, I feel like the culture of the fan club is waning. There seem to be a lot fewer individual band/actress/actor fansites than there were when the Internet first got going. After all, what's so great about a Good Charlotte newsletter with info and pictures when you could pick up an US Weekly and get all that and more. There's no way for me to prove this, but I feel like the celebrity fan club is dying."On the show, I say stupid things, yell “Booyah” with alarming frequency, and occasionally wear a diaper or jump into a pile of lettuce to illustrate the finer points of investing. God knows why, but there seems to be a market for this kind of idiocy."
Although he professes to be something of a societal misfit, that quote almost suggests he’s not truly insane, but puts on a show because that’s what the public wants, and that’s what makes him money.
So in light of this “claim”, I’d like to share my personal story with Jim Cramer. It was a standard night at Citigroup, I got off work around 10 pm and was standing in line for a black car to go home. Suddenly this bald midget in a suit and tie storms across, with a look on his face like someone just slept with his wife. He wasn't really a midget, but looked like he was under 5’2”. As he got closer, it seemed he was making a beeline right for me. Had I slept with his wife? The bald midget continued to approach, and noticed me a moment too late, and bumped me hard in the hip.
“Hey man, watch where you’re going”, I said.
“NICE quarter,” responded the midget derisively. He shook his head in disgust at me, and stormed off down the block.
What? Nice quarter? What the hell is he talking about? At that moment I recalled that Citigroup had announced earlier that day that it would miss its quarterly earnings projections by 2 cents a share. But even so, why would some random guy tell me that? It’s 10 pm, I’m just some 23-year old kid, what the hell? Ow, my hip kind of hurts.
The people in front of me in line noticed what had happened, and started to chime in.
“What was that all about?”
“What did he mean, ‘nice quarter’?”
“I think he means Citigroup missed earnings today,” I suggested.
“What? Who the hell says something like that?”
At that point, a fairly important Citigroup employee at the front of the line looked backed at us and said, “You know who that is, don’t you?”
“No, who was that?”
“That’s that lunatic who yells about stocks on TV – Jim Cramer.”
“OHHHHHHHHHHH – whoa.” Silence.
I then stepped back and took measure of what had just transpired. Jim Cramer, current television celebrity and future insane asylum patient, had consciously walked past an inconveniently located Citigroup building, and made a point to insult random junior Citigroup employees for their "poor" performance, many of whom did not even comprehend his attempted insult. Amidst all this brilliance, he rammed his shoulder into my hip, and because I bruise like a peach, I could see the effects for a couple days.
Jim Cramer is insane.
The best moments come when one of your friends thinks someone is hot, and everyone else violently disagrees. There's two moves at this point: you can either back down and say you didn't think that person was THAT hot, you just meant in a certain way in a certain movie from the right angle plus you were trying to be nice and you're kind of hungover who knows what the hell you're talking about. The other move is to stand up, and valiantly defend your opinion of this person's hotness. I have a lot of respect for the stand-up people, misguided as they may be. One of my favorite memories of this was in my senior year of high school, when Ali claimed that Minnie Driver was really hot, and kept asking everyone if they thought she was hot. He must have asked like 70 people, and he got 65 "No way, dude"s and 5 "Who is Minnie Driver? Wait the chick from 'Good Will Hunting'? Wait, you think she's hot? What?" In his defense, he didn't mean that Minnie Driver was the hottest woman on earth, but then again, he did say she was hot and I don't think he was under the influence of any mind-altering chemicals.
When Kobe left the arena, a bunch of Miami fans high-fived him on the way out. Let's say, for argument's sake, that they know Kobe has the flu. Yet they high-fived him anyways, risking direct hand contact with someone who is very sick. I expressed some surprise to Justin, who pointed out something to the effect of "come on man, it's Kobe", at which point I realized that, in the same situation, I would also give Kobe a high-five, flu be damned. But I wouldn't have risked illness for Luke Walton, or Vladimir Radmanovic, or George Lopez.
their crack team of humor scientists ("we know funny") has tested this successfully, so who am I to quibble?
out of control that she signed a three-picture, $10 million production deal with Sony where she got first look at scripts and projects. That probably doesn't sound like a lot now, but trust me, it was a huge deal at the time to give a teenage girl that kind of money and that kind of artistic control. Silverstone wound up greenlighting and starring in "Excess Baggage", which was so bad that 1) my two friends who saw it cracked jokes about it for like a year and 2) they are literally the only people I know who have ever seen the movie.
As an aside, in trying to create the above fictionalized conversation, I struggled to think of someone who sounds like you should know them, but you actually don't. I settled on Scott Bakula - I think he's a pretty good choice. He's got an interesting-sounding, memorable name, but he's not quite successful enough where you would assume everyone would know the guy. In trying to think of who might be appropriate, I asked Vish and Dan if they ever got actors confused with one another. Vish said he sort of had a problem with Edie Falco and Felicity Huffman briefly - that's a hard one for me to understand, but I guess this is a pretty individual thing. Dan said his problem was Matt Dillon and Luke Perry, which for some reason I found hilarious, I guess because 1) I can kind of see it and 2) Luke Perry pretty much sucks now, so that's a shame for Matt Dillon.
So Ali's sister is freaking out in excitement, going on and on about how hot this guy is. Then she gets it in her head that she wants an autograph, but she's too scared to approach this guy to ask. So she makes her dad do it. So Ali's dad, this like 50+ year old Iranian guy walks up to their table, looks at the guy and goes:
