Ralph Fiennes Likes His Women Airborne (and Possibly Trapped)

I've always presumed actor Ralph Fiennes to be somewhat of a bore, that his commonly respectable yet stuffy choices of film roles were a reflection of the man himself. Little did I know that he had already proven me wrong last month by letting his fun side out on a Qantas Airways flight from Australia to India, where he allegedly became "amorous" with a female flight attendant in the lavatory.

The flight attendant, Lisa Robertson, who as of yesterday has been suspended by Qantas, is denying that she had sex with Fiennes--that she, in fact, thwarted his inappropriate advances. Whether or not she's telling the truth is irrelevant, for all that matters is this:

Ralph Fiennes just became a little more interesting.

The Most TV-Movie-Ready Thing You've Ever Heard NOT One Step Closer to Becoming a TV Movie; Granada America are Lying Shadeballs

NONE OF THE FOLLOWING THAT IS NOT IN BOLD, ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FRIDAY, IS TRUE.

BEGIN LIES:

Have you heard the one about the crazy astronaut lady who drove 900 miles in a diaper to try to kill another lady who was into another astronaut that the crazy lady was also into? Of course you have.

And in a development that should surprise absolutely no one (Defamer is already days ahead of the curve in narrowing down prospective casting choices), the film rights to Lisa Marie Nowak's story have been optioned [Ed. note: dead link]--specifically, the film rights to a New York Times article about Lisa Marie Nowak's story, written by John Schwartz. The production company who ponied up an undisclosed sum for the piece is Granada America--yes, the Granada America, producers of such legendary made-for-TV fare as the Jason Priestly vehicle I Want to Marry Ryan Banks and The Twelve Days of Christmas Eve, starring Molly Shannon. They have gone on record as saying that the story will be developed "either for a feature or television film".

If Granada America actually believes that The Stalker Wore Space Underpants: The Lisa Marie Nowak Story will ever see the inside of a multiplex--as opposed to the living rooms of proud, NASA-supporting Americans, where it rightfully belongs--they certainly are shooting for the moon.

Get it? The moon? That's where astronauts have gone on occasion!

END LIES.

Once the original link reporting this news had vanished, I was compelled to inquire further, and found this. Apparently, The New York Times is saying that neither the newspaper nor John Schwartz has or plans a deal with Granada. Damn you, lying producers of "But Can They Sing?"!

UPDATE (02/11/07): John Schwartz, the very man who wrote the New York Times article at this center of this story, has been kind enough to comment on this post and further clarify the matter. As you can see in his explanation of how this false report ever got out in the first place (his second comment--the fifth one down), he's taking the fact that his name and reputation were used in a big fat lie on the part of Granada America with more grace and maturity than I would have. Maybe that's why he writes for one of the most respected publications in the world and I often spent large portions of weekdays in pajama pants.

Rugby Fans, Including Russell Crowe, are Afraid of Girls

Hasn't the rap on rugby always been that it's the manliest sport that a sport can possibly be, what with the lack of protective equipment and heavy emphasis on "scrumming" making American football look like a little girl's tea party by comparison? Add Australians to the mix and you've got to figure that it's time to hide the women and children, right? Make it an Australian rugby team owned by Russell Crowe and, well...it's reasonable to assume that the women and children have no chance and it's time to save yourself. Isn't that what fans of rugby would have the world believe?

If the fans in question are fans of the South Sydney Rabbitohs club (see? rugby's ostensibly so manly that teams are called "clubs"), which is part-owned by Russell Crowe, they don't have a leg to stand on. The club has cut its cheerleading squad due to a conclusion by Crowe and the rest of the ownership that skimpily clad cheerleaders detract from the game and "make spectators uncomfortable". And with that decision, nearly 200 years of manliness associated with the sport have been flushed down the toilet in the inappropriate, non-swirling way. (Do the wussifying effects of Crowe starring in A Good Year know no bounds?)

Scantily-clad gyrating women make you uncomfortable, do they, rugby fans? So brutal violence is something to be celebrated by the whole family, while sex is something to be afraid of and hide from. Not only does that not sound like a particularly masculine point of view, it doesn't even sound Australian.

As a matter of fact, it sounds strangely...American.

[Ed. note: This blog's not even two weeks old and I've already twice posted an image of Russell Crowe on it. What's my deal?]

Me vs. My Page-A-Day Mensa Puzzle Calendar - 02/09/07

QUESTION: "A simple substitution code has been used to conceal a 'quote.' Work out the code to decipher the original words.

"Little Miss Muffet:
9 14-5-22-5-18 12-9-11-5-4 3-21-18-4-19 1-14-4 23-8-5-25 20-15 2-5-7-9-14 23-9-20-8."




MY ANSWER: "I never liked curds and whey to begin with." (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.)

ACTUAL ANSWER: "I never liked curds and whey to begin with." (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.)


CONSENSUS: Man, when they say "simple", they mean it. I suspect that my Mensa calendar's ATM PIN might be "1-2-3-4-5".

Lawsuit Won't Stop Amazon.com from Fulfilling All Your Cockfighting-Related Needs

Following up on a threat made over the summer, on Thursday the Humane Society of the United States filed a civil lawsuit in District of Columbia Superior Court against online retailer juggernaut Amazon.com, accusing the website of illegally promoting animal fighting because it offers two cockfighting magazines for sale. The Humane Society is claiming that the magazines violate federal animal cruelty laws; Amazon.com's position is that refusing to sell books or magazines simply because their messages may offend is censorship...but one particularly astonishing fact has arisen from this dispute that, curiously, neither side is paying much heed to:

There are at least two magazines in existence in the United States that are dedicated to cockfighting.

One's called The Gamecock; the other, Feathered Warrior. What I've gleaned from the customer reviews (scroll down--they're worth a read) on Amazon.com is that The Gamecock is the New York Times of cockfighting magazines--the gold standard by which all others are measured (one reviewer actually states that the monthly contains "lots of sage advice from elders")--while Feathered Warrior, despite having been around since 1903 (according to its Amazon page) (and, for my money, boasting the superior name) appears to fulfill the market role of a distant second banana (while The Gamecock currently holds the 80th position in magazine sales on Amazon.com, Feathered Warrior is languishing at #928)...not so much the Pepsi to Gamecock's Coke as it is perhaps its Shasta.

The good news for both is that, as of this writing, the two magazines remain available for purchase on Amazon.com, who stands defiant in the face of the Humane Society's lawsuit. As Feathered Warrior owner-editor Verna Dowd, 77, told reporters: "The Humane Society are crazy people...I don't know what's wrong with them."

Amen, Verna. In a world where the practice of training birds to murder other birds for amusement and profit might possibly be seen as wrong...I don't want to be right.

Anaconda 3: Anaconda vs. Old Man

A 66-year-old Brazilian man has accomplished on his own something it once took the combined efforts of the late-20's incarnations of Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube to do: defeated an anaconda.

When Joaquim Pereira came upon the sight of his 8-year-old grandson Mateus with a 16-foot-snake coiled around his neck and squeezing the life out of the boy on Thursday, he beat the thing with rocks and a knife (I wonder what his choice of alternating pattern was--bash, bash, stab? stab, bash, stab?) for half an hour until it released his grandson. Mateus survived, receiving 21 stitches on his chest where the snake had bitten him.

A 66-year-old man took on an anaconda and won! If only he could have been there for Owen Wilson back in '97. (SPOILER ALERT: Yeah, Owen Wilson gets eaten by the anaconda in Anaconda.)

Ron Artest Must Love (Not Feeding) Dogs

You would think that Sacramento Kings forward and model citizen Ron Artest (pictured charging into the stands to attack a fan in Detroit when he was a member of the Indiana Pacers in 2004) would be great at taking care of animals, or at least not have been visited seven times since July by animal control officers due to complaints from neighbors that his dogs weren't being taken proper care of, or at the very least not had his dogs impounded for a total of 77 days over that same period.

If you thought these things, you'd be wrong.

The latest showcase of Artest's mad skillz in the field of animal care came on Sunday, when animal control officers took possession of his Great Dane--whom Artest calls "Socks" but the president of Friends of Placer County Animal Shelter Rosemary Frieborn more colorfully describes as "a rack of bones"--because he wasn't feeding it. In defense of his actions, Artest stated, "I love my dogs and think they should be able to live (as) freely as possible".

Way to be, Ron. Unlike most nancypants pet owners, you understand that for an animal to truly be free, it has to be left alone for days at a time without food to fend for itself. And if they should happen to die as a result, that just means that they didn't appreciate their freedom.

Albert Pujols is More American Than You

Chances are that the St. Louis Cardinals' Albert Pujols is already a slightly better baseball player than you. If you call yourself an American citizen, now he's got you beat there, too.

The former National League MVP, Gold Glove winner and World Series winner scored 100 percent on the U.S. citizenship test on Wednesday, thus not only securing himself a position as an official American, but one that is as or more American than Captain America.

Think you could score 100 percent on the U.S. citizenship test? Try it. If you fail, don't feel too bad. I hear that the Dominican Republic recently had a roster spot open up.

Anna Nicole Smith has Died

After MSNBC.com (and a bunch of other places--your guess is as good as mine as to which news outlet broke the story) initially reported that Anna Nicole Smith collapsed at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida and was rushed to the hospital earlier today, one of Smith's lawyers has announced that the former model and Playboy playmate has died at the age of 39.

Out of respect for the recently deceased, I've gone ahead and removed all previous incidents of glibness from this post...

UPDATE: ...other than perhaps to point out the curious fact that, as of this writing, no media outlets have yet used the word "overdose", when that is the strong-money bet to be the cause of Anna Nicole's death.

UPDATE 2: Defamer.com tells us that on CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta used the phrase "too much medication" in passing...so we're getting warmer.

'Law & Order' Star (hearts) Crime

Former Tennessee Republican Senator and current star of NBC's "Law & Order" Fred Dalton Thompson (he plays the District Attorney, who gets maybe two scenes an episode, thereby rendering calling him a "star" of the show suspect) showed up at the Scooter Libby trial today, explaining to reporters that he was there because he is "a friend of Scooter Libby and his family".

You see that, extreme right-wing conservative Republicans who hold blind alliegance to George W. Bush? Hollywood's not all bad. Just because an actor might play a person who stands for truth and justice on TV, that doesn't necessarily mean that in real life he doesn't publicly support perjury, obstruction of justice and the endangering of national security in the name of getting back at somebody who criticized the president. Perhaps there's hope for the godless entertainment industry yet!

Me vs. My Page-A-Day Mensa Puzzle Calendar - 02/08/07

QUESTION: "Place the same three-letter word in each blank below to make five different words.

"___E
___TROT
___WOOD
___MA
___LEG"




MY ANSWER: "DOG"

ACTUAL ANSWER: "DOG"


CONSENSUS: Even if you're only certain of two ("DOGWOOD" and "DOGMA") out of a potential five words, a lazy guess can defeat the Mensa calendar. Hooray for lazy guesses!

White Trash from Outer Space!

There once was a time when space travel was such a significant achievement that for a person to accomplish it more than likely indicated a level of character rendering him or her exempt from ever being qualified to appear on "The Jerry Springer Show".

Apparently, those days are over, as evinced by the kidnap-and-murder-attempting, diaper-wearing, git-yo-hands-off-my-man shenanigans of NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak.

According to authorities, Nowak, a 43-year-old married mother of three, believed a woman named Colleen Shipman was a competitor for the affections of Navy Commander William Oefelein, an unmarried fellow astronaut. This Oefelein guy must be quite the catch, because Nowak drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando to intercept Shipman at the airport (where Shipman was flying in from Houston) and--disguised in a wig and trench coat--try to carjack her with alternating tactics of crying and pepper spray. She never got a chance to use the BB gun, knife, steel mallet, rubber tubing and garbage bags she had also brought along before Shipman drove away and contacted the police.

In all of this, what truly makes Lisa Marie Nowak an American hero--someone little girls all over the country can really look up to--is that she wore a diaper for the entirety of her 900-mile drive so she wouldn't have to stop to go to the bathroom. I have many questions regarding Nowak's actions--why not fly to Orlando? what were the garbage bags for, Shipman's body or her own pride? instead of going after Shipman personally, why didn't she use her expertise as a robotics specialist to build a giant robot to attack the woman for her?--but the one tactic of hers that I understand completely was the use of the diapers.

That's just common sense.