Cheryl Cole is famous in England for being one of the members of female pop group Girls Aloud, which is kind of like N*SYNC, and for being married to and then divorced from Ashley Cole, a player for Chelsea in the English Premiere League, which is kind of like the NFL only with soccer, which is like football only without hands, helmets, or games that last until your eyes bleed. She's also been a judge on Simon Cowell's X Factor, which is like American Idol and America's Got Talent and does not involve Cable, Domino, or Scott Summers' brother, Havoc. Last year, Cole (née Tweedy) released a solo album, which is kind of like an mp3 only you have to pay for it, called 3 Words that involved American producers but no American listeners. Apparently, Cole collapsed during filming of an episode of X Factory (if a pop star falls on a reality show set and no Americans are there to hear it, does she make a sound?) and has since been diagnosed as having malaria, which is like a mosquito bite, a flu, and the DTs all at the same time, and hasn't been seen much in the developed world since the advent of window screens. She is expected to make a full recovery, which is a shame because dying of malaria is probably the only way she'd ever make it onto the American mainstream's radar.
For everyone keeping score, here's how American justice is panning out this summer:
- Limited liability caps may not be raised in the wake of the BP oil spill because the oil industry is less concerned about the oil hitting Gulf Coast beaches than it is about the sand in their collective vagina.
- Lindsay Lohan will spend 90 days in jail and 90 in a rehab program for failing to attend alcohol education and, according to the judge's sentencing speech, proving she has a penchant for lying and not learning her lesson.
- The federal government is suing Arizona over its immigration laws.
- Soda taxes are struck down by the soda lobby; meanwhile Albany adds a new $1.60 tax to the already highest-in-the-country price tag of cigarettes in New York, not because they're trying to do the public any good, but because they're running in the red despite keeping 89% of New York City's tax revenue for themselves.
- The Mariners are already trying to get rid of Cliff Lee.
- At least four federal lawsuits have been brought against Apple over the iPhone 4's reception.
- Roger Ebert has sort of acquiesced on the "Video games can never be art" front, admitting he hasn't played one since the medium was in its infancy.
- George Lucas and Lucasfilm have sent a cease-and-desist letter to a laser manufacturer for selling a product that looks too much like a light saber, however no one has yet sued Lucas for ruining their childhood.
To top it off, it's roughly a million degrees outside.
Person who once had a career, Lindsay Lohan, is reportedly being fitted with a SCRAM bracelet in a Los Angeles courthouse today. SCRAM is a monitoring system that tells those with better judgment where a person is and whether they've been drinking using transdermal technology—whatever that means—and as far as we can tell, it stands for Style-Cramping Radio Alcohol Monitor. What does it do, specifically? From their website:
- 24/7 transdermal alcohol detection plus house arrest technology in one light-weight, tamper-proof bracelet
- Performs 48+ alcohol tests/day and stores data
- Provides full data vs. a snapshot view
- Tamper- and water- resistant
- Automatically collects, stores, and transfers all data via the SCRAMx base station on a predetermined schedule (at least 1x/day)
- Date- and time-stamps readings for easy reporting and analysis
Shit. If Lindsay wears one of those, it's liable to catch fire.
The only real downside to reading Get Off My Internets—aside from the sparse posts, which we're not really in a position to kvetch about—is that Julia Allison pops up from time to time, which is a gateway drug for reading Reblogging Non Society, which would be a fine blog if it didn't wield the radioactive, gene-mutating power of Non Society's banality. The three important rules that The Eastern Cynic operates under are as follows:
1. No mentioning Julia Allison.
2. Every time a Lady Gaga post is warranted, post something about David Bowie instead.
3. No mentioning Julia Allison.
Jim Carrey—who made a pretty good movie, once—has apparently lost his direction now that he and his autistic-about-autism girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, have broken up. So, naturally, being the comedian he is, he came to Tiger Woods' defense and put the onus back on Elin Woods:
There's something funny about that, for sure.
Harvey Weinstein and wife Georgina Chapman expecting their first baby isn't really newsworthy, unless—like me—you read it as "Harvey Firestein and wife."
Who knew that percipient was even a word! Bonus points to Jeremy Piven's legal counsel for using it in an email, although it's not nearly enough to climb back from the landslide of simple English errors in the rest of his missive to the Village Voice.
Hey, news organizations: even if he's just admitting it now, Ricky Martin being gay is not news. It would have been more newsworthy to find out he wasn't gay, through some sort of Vatican-sponsored gene-probe or something. Does the Catholic Church even believe in genes? We're reminded of what Paul Westerberg once said:
"Now, something meets boy, and something meets Girl.
They both look the same. They're overjoyed in this world
Same hair, revolution, unisex, evolution.
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss?"
Here's to tomorrow, when saying you're gay will be as interesting as saying you're a brunette.
Or Too Ugly; Don't Look. Either way, we're trying to retrofit the internet to our liking.
In response to Gawker's article about an alleged one-night stand with Peaches Geldof and the Church Of Scientology. Yes, there are pictures, but tu;dl.