You Know How I Know You're Gay? Joe Satriani Is Suing You for Plagiarism.

It's common knowledge that anyone who is a heterosexual male over the age of 14 and in full possession of his auditory senses is required to dislike Coldplay if he wants to consider himself hip. This unspoken standard has presented a conundrum for me ever since Coldplay first entered the popular consciousness; while I fulfill all of the aforementioned requirements (especially the one about wanting to be hip), I am bitterly protective of my self-aggrandizing belief that I stand among the precious, enlightened few who know exactly why Coldplay sucks beyond the fact that The 40-Year-Old Virgin tells me so: their songs are shamelessly derivative; their albums are overproduced to the razor's edge of unbreathable sonic mush; their lead singer allowed Gwyneth Paltrow to name his children after a fruit and Charlton Heston, respectively. And yet, at the same time...I also kind of like them.

This seemingly irreconcilable internal conflict would have likely driven me to madness had it not been for the courage of '80s-era cheese-guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani to come forward and demand that Coldplay give him all of their money.

The fact that Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" really does kind of sound like Satriani's "If I Could Fly" is beside the point. What matters is the fact that a musician who hadn't been heard from in two decades--and who was only ever known strictly for playing the electric guitar, not for playing real songs with words--suing a band that is currently quite popular--but who, based on their technical merits, could easily fail to stand the test of time--for plagiarism is super-ironic. Irony is hip; therefore, Coldplay is hip (for a few hours today, at least); therefore, I (with acknowledgment to the same caveat) am indisputably hip.

But only because I don't really like Coldplay, unlike the rest of you losers.

Matthew Mitchell Would Like His Fucking Money

When all is said and done, history will likely not regard the first decade of the 21st century as the New York Yankees' glory days. First, there was spending 400 gabillion dollars for the honor of not winning a single World Series, then there was the Mitchell Report, which outed such prominent Yankees as Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite as steroid users (thus tainting the New York teams they played on that did win the occasional postseason series)...and now this:

A fan is suing the Yankees for $221, seeking reimbursement for the money he spent on tickets between 2002 and 2007.

Matthew Mitchell's (no relation to George, I presume) argument is that since the players he watched during the five games in question were using performance-enhancing drugs, it amounts to "consumer fraud" on the part of the organization. Though I certainly want him to win this lawsuit--if for no other reason than it would compound the indignity to the Yankees--I must admit that the team has a pretty easy defense: if Mitchell only spent $221 on five games, given how terrible his seat must have been each time, how could he be sure who the hell he was watching?

(FUN FACT 'A': Freshman year of college, Metroville was in an English Lit class with the guy who played the paperboy in Better Off Dead. You know what he doesn't really like talking about? How he played the paperboy in Better Off Dead.)

(FUN FACT 'B': 200th post! Where are my balloons?)

Kate Winslet Wins Money from Magazine That Implied She Wasn't as Hot as She Could Possibly Be

Kate Winslet is totally hot and hates magazines, and now she's richer for both.

After the British glossy Grazia (which I assume is like Us but with the word "humor" spelled incorrectly) ran a story that Winslet had visited a diet doctor--a move that would appear to contradict the 31-year-old actress' outspoken stance against Hollywood's fixation with ultra-thinness--she sued the magazine for libel, and now she's getting paid. Turns out that Winslet's visit to the Chinese Healing Institute in Santa Monica, CA, was regarding a neck injury and not her weight.

Suck on that, Grazia. You don't step to the hotness that is Kate Winslet and expect to not get burned. Although there is one aspect of this story that I find somewhat confusing:

If Winslet doesn't read celebrity glossies--going so far as to, as she claims, refuse to have magazines in general in her home...how did she even know about the Grazia story in the first place?

I should work for Scotland Yard.

Lidle Shop of Horrors

You're a millionaire dentist whose home was destroyed as the result of a plane crash whose cause has yet to be determined but in which the two men on board the small aircraft were killed. What do you do?

If you answered "sue the widow of the richer of the two men", congratulations! You're Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal (and a dick)!

Apparently, being the kindhearted dentist to such low-income clients as Donald Trump, Bruce Springsteen and Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn't bring in quite enough cheddar to rent an apartment while the one that you own on the Upper East Side of Manhattan--itself worth several millions of dollars--is being repaired. That's been the situation for Rosenthal since October 11, when a Cirrus SR-20 carrying New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and flight instructor Tyler Stanger crashed into his building, killing both men inside the plane.

The National Transportation Safety Board was unable to determine which of them was actually piloting the aircraft at the time of the accident, so it's a lucky break for Stanger's family that it was the famous baseball player and not Stanger who happened to have owned the plane...because if it were the other way around, Rosenthal would surely have just as quickly slapped them with a $7 million lawsuit. After all, there's absolutely no chance that a dentist who is already suing another public figure for $5 million could be greedy or unscrupulous.

Somewhere in heaven above him, his mama's proud of him.