• Rihanna finally acknowledged a series of pornographic self-portraits that, until now, were merely rumored to be of her. She said in a radio interview that they were for "my boyfriend at the time" (almost definitely Chris Brown) and "if you don't send your boyfriend naked pictures, then I feel bad for him." She sent her mother flowers before calling her to break the news that the world was about to see her daughter's naughty parts. This is Emily Post's recommended method for informing loved ones of an an impending sex scandal. [People]
• 
  
• Tiger Woods Lover #2 kissed-and-told to basically anyone who would listen, including her coworkers, who she made listen to the infamous voicemail where Tiger asks her to remove her name from outgoing messages so his wife doesn't catch him making sweet mistress love. [TMZ]
• 
  
• Speaking of Jaimee Grubbs' phone records, the rumored sexy text messages are out, and they include declarative sentences like "I will wear you out" and "Hey, it's Tiger." [NYDN]
• 
  
• "The War's Over": LiLo and SamRo have made peace. It's like peace in the Middle East, but even more promising, because it has the potential to turn into hot lesbian sex any minute now. John Mayer is well aware of this, as he is the one who brokered the deal, which ended with hugs and "a scantily clad blond." (Is the use of the masculine form purposeful here?) [P6] [Gatecrasher]
• 
  
• 50 Cent carries $25,000 on his person at all times "just in case," and because he's so intimidating, nobody will ever try to mug him, anyway. [JustJared]
• 
  
• Nick Jonas : Jonas Brothers :: John : The Beatles [Us]
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• Natalie Portman was a teenage loser. Her first time drunk was at college (and she went to Harvard, so it was probably nerdy drinking) and she didn't try pot until she was in her 20's. And then she dated Devendra Banhart, a man whose life is one long psychedelic haze, [exhibit A.] so that must have been enlightening. [P6]
• 
  
• Jennifer Lopez's lawyer says her sex tape doesn't even have sex in it. Ojani Noa says he never meant to promote the footage as a sex tape, just that he wants to turn his 11+ hours of home video into a "mockumentary," which is a really stunning word choice, on multiple levels. [People]
• 
  
• Will Ferrell wants to play Simon Cowell: "I see a lot of Ron Burgundy in Simon Cowell." Genius. [ShowBizSpy]
• 
  
• Dylan Lauren, daughter of Ralph, is engaged in a sticky-sweet game of corporate espionage. Dylan, who owns NYC candy store Dylan's Candy Bar, has reportedly been "sneaking around taking photos of her rival," Sugar Factory, which has more celebrity patrons. A Sugar Factory rep's diplomatically snide response: "We are flattered Dylan's looking to us for inspiration." Burn! [P6]
• 
  
• National Enquirer has the most adorable article-thingee accepting Newsweek's recognition for the tab's contribution to "one of it's top scandals of the decade," the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair. You can almost see Enquirer Ed-in-Ch David Perel's cheeks glowing as he sings with pride: "He then engineered a cover-up that was Nixonian in its cynicism... Six months later, the Enquirer caught Edwards... Call it definitive proof that investigative journalism still matters, no matter what you think of where it originated." [Enquirer]
• 
  

  Exhibit A.
  

• Poor Sarah Palin! The former Alaska governor wants to charge $100,000 for speaking gigs, but sources say many lecture circuits think she's nothing more than a "blithering idiot" and don't want to shell out the bucks. [Page Six]

  
  

• How far they fall: Eddie Furlong's wife Rachael Kneeland filed a restraining order against the Terminator 2 star. She claims he "grabbed me, bruised me, pushed me, made threats of more violence" and smokes cocaine like a mad man. [TMZ]

  
  

• A medical examiner has officially ruled on suicide in DJ AM's death. It was an "accidental overdose." Still sad, though. [NYDN]

  
  

• Meghan McCain doesn't have the highest opinion of journalists: I am pretty much completely disillusioned with journalists after my time... I think all of it's bad." Wait, don't you write for Daily Beast? [Mediaite]

  
  

• Who knew so many people would want to see Jude Law and Hugh Jackman in the flesh? Their new play, A Steady Rain, broke Broadway's record for single tickets sold in a week. [Reuters]

  
  

• Ew! U2's current tour costs a little over $750,000 each day. And, despite Bono's Earth-friendly ways, a lot of that goes to the 200 trucks that transport equipment, lights and food. [The Sun]

  
  

• Madonna wants to get her embryonic boyfriend, Jesus Luz, DJ gigs at East Village bars, including homosexual establishment Eastern Bloc. [Page Six]

  
  

• Penelope Cruz can't — or won't — say if she prefers kissing Scarlett Johansson or Charlize Theron. They are both, she says, "pretty beautiful partners." Also, she won't say if she's having Javier Bardem's baby. [Vanity Fair]

  
  

• Let's all pray for Gwen Stefani, for some evil robbers tried to break into her mansion while she was in Singapore. Tragic. [NYDN]

  
  

• Conan O'Brien made fun of Newark, New Jersey, last week, and now the city's mayor, Cory Booker, has posted a YouTube "banning" him from the city's airport, which is basically like telling someone they can't eat glass. That place sucks. [NY Post]

  
  

• BBC executives chided gay comedian Graham Norton for making fun of lesbian haircuts. [Daily Mail]

  
  

• So, Diddy's leaving Warner Bros. for Interscope, but WB won't let him take all of his Bad Boy artists, so he's going to have to find new talent. Good thing he has a billion MTV shows that revolve around that very concept. [Page Six]

  
  

• Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction writer Roger Avary was sentenced to one-year in jail yesterday for a DUI accident in which his passenger died. [MSNBC]

It would be funny if he said "I love Boner—I mean Bono!", but that doesn't happen. No, instead his buttery day-old Red Lobster biscuit of a face just falls when discussing his beloved fellow Irishman's apparent hypocrisy and doublespeak when it comes to the president formerly known as George W. Bush. See, Bons is all about Bush's AIDS-in-Africa work (he did a lot, actually! but in a kind of creepy Evangelical way!) when in public, but in private... Well, when Dubya tries to hug Bono, Bono will not accept the charges.

This all makes Bri-Bri Kilmickles very sad. Meanwhile Steve Doocy just clucks in his corner like the Neverending Story II creepy bird (look on the right) that he is, and some Replacement Gretchen just mutters stuff.

And it's all done very, very heterosexually.

See, Bono was at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2006, which is where a bunch of world leaders (and whatever Bono is) get together to pray and have cereal and talk about how everybody wants to rule the world, and hey, isn't that the guy who sings that song? He's about to give George W. Bush a hug! Noez! Not so much, however. Bono, tricky dick that he is, sidestepped Dubya:

"There were all kinds of people in the audience," Bono recalled on Jonathan Ross' talk show. Bono admitted he didn't feel like being the recipient of a hug from a man with whom he had so many political disagreements. As the affectionate President neared, Bono tried to "dodge the hug" by jumping behind a podium. The sidestep worked, and just about nobody in the audience knew it happened - though it was all captured on camera. But - there was one sharp-eyed Senator in the bipartisan crowd who saw it all.

"When I was sitting down I was beside Sen. Obama, the star said the future President whispered to him, 'Nice work with the hug dodge.'"

Well, now you know you simply can't buy a hug from Bono no matter how many third-world countries you attempt to aid. Also, Obama likes it when you don't hug punks. Don't hug punks in front of Obama.

Finally, Bono also told a strangely satisfying story (okay, not at all "strangely") to the BBC feature The Edge punching him in the face early on in their career, which goes without saying that anybody who calls themselves Bono or The Edge should definitely be hit in the face at least once in their life, no matter how talented they are. Which is to say nothing of the "Discotheque" video.

Bono's hugs, punched face: mysterious ways, indeed.

To Obama's delight, Bono admits he sidestepped a hug from George Bush [Irish Central]

Amid SEC charges that Apple management had shifted the dates of stock options to benefit executives, including Jobs, Anderson, and former general counsel Nancy Heinen, the company took an $84 million charge in 2006. Jobs and Apple settled a shareholder lawsuit for $14 million, but avoided trouble with the SEC. Anderson and Heinen paid $3.5 million and $2.2 million in fines respectively, without admitting guilt.

The episode caused a major rift between Anderson and Jobs. Anderson had left Apple in 2004, but stayed on the board until the scandal led to his resignation in 2006. In the meantime, Anderson had joined Elevation Partners, a private-equity firm in Silicon Valley. As the stock-options scandal grew, Anderson and Jobs pointed fingers at each other, at one point issuing dueling press releases shifting the blame. Anderson has long maintained that Jobs knew more about the options chicanery than he has let on.

Elevation, which also counts famed Valley investor Roger McNamee and U2 frontman Bono as partners, backed Palm, a rival to Apple in the smartphone business, and recruited a former top Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein, as Palm's executive chairman. No one in Silicon Valley honestly believes this is a coincidence.

Forbes is another Elevation investment. The May 11 story, written by Bill Barrett and teased on the cover, centers on the 118-page transcript of a three-hour interview Jobs gave SEC examiners trying a case against former Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen, which the magazine obtained at some difficulty through a Freedom of Information Act. In the interview with SEC examiners, Jobs complained that the board was not looking out for him and he had to ask for a generous stock-options package, but maintained that he was largely unaware of the backdating and ignorant of the accounting consequences. (Backdating is not illegal by itself, but requires notice to shareholders and a charge to earnings, neither of which Apple undertook at the time it backdated options.)

Excellent journalistic work on Barrett's part. But here's the question: How did Forbes know precisely which document to ask for? It always helps to have well-connected sources. And it's hard to imagine who would be better placed to know the details of the case than Anderson.

Friend said hi and Bono was remarkably cool.

Already, Stewart Pinkerton, an old magazine hand who had overseen the integration of the magazine's newsroom with the Web team, is "retiring," though our sources believe he was actually forced out by Lavin, an ambitious Forbes.com editor who previously worked at the New York Times. Lavin's next target, according to a tipster, is Tom Post, an editor high on the print magazine's masthead, who's been "shut out of the decisionmaking process."

What journalistic accomplishment is Lavin best known for among the Forbesians? Trying to censor his son's high-school newspaper. In 2001, when Austin Lavin was being impeached as student government president at Walt Whitman High School in a Maryland suburb, Carl, then an editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, sent a letter to a school superintendent demanding that copies of a school newspaper detailing the trial be removed and that a school television-news segment about it not air. (Lavin told the Student Press Law Center that he merely raised privacy issues about the airing of the story.)

Austin Lavin now runs a startup, Myfirstpaycheck.com, which he has been busily promoting on Forbes.com.

He was walking with a female friend with black hair. He seems (as usual when you see stars in reality) a lot smaller in person. Very cool and relaxed. He looks great.

Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Following this is more drinking, of wine, from Bono's "hole-in-the-wall" cellar, which we're sure is totally working class and rock n' roll and so forth and not at all plutocratic. Also, five uses of italics , an impaired segue from "miles" of desert to "Miles Davis," plenty more material for Jeff Bercovici to mock, and several song recommendations that we totally tried to find in the iTunes Store.

Last October, Men's Vogue, for the most part, died. Now it's back, in a sense! It's been cut back to twice a year, but to boost readership, it will "appear as a reverse-bound issue attached to the April issue of Vogue." This is the magazine equivalent of your wife divorcing you but letting you ride in her Jaguar sometimes, because she has all the money. [WWD]


A local TV station in Seattle got a scoop that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will be sold or closed, something that the editor of the paper says he has no idea about, which does not help them position themselves as a vital news source, at all. Also Seattle is not big enough to be a two-paper town. Not even close. Sorry guys.

Ex-CNN anchor and avian enemy Paula Zahn signed a deal to "develop a weekly newsmagazine" on "Investigation Discovery," a television network. Currently she's doing a show on the local NYC public TV station. In television, there's always a long way to fall, fame-wise. [THR]


New York Observer owner Jared Kushner's Politicker network of websites, which was supposed to develop into a must-read go-to for political junkies in each state, is shutting three more sites, leaving only New York and New Jersey. I guess it wasn't such a bad idea in the boom times, but now it is a failure. Couldn't even work in Illinois? [Politico]

Bono's inaugural NYT op-ed column—it's coming Sunday! You can read it online without buying the paper and donate the money you saved directly to Africa, as some sort of protest. Send pics of Bono, Pinch, and Andy Rosenthal crashing The Box on Saturday night, thx. [Romenesko]


Top editors at newspapers across America wisely chose to devote large portions of their front pages today to the topic of the ass-kicking ways of your World Champion Florida Gators.

Bono is a founder of Elevation Partners, the Silicon Valley private-equity firm named after the U2 song. And Elevation just sank another $100 million into Palm, the troubled smartphone maker. Palm, which waited too long to switch its product lineup from electronic organizers to souped-up cell phones and whose Treo smartphone is showing its age, lost more than $500 million in the most recent quarter. Bono's firm now owns 39 percent of Palm.

He's also lassoed several former Apple executives into the Palm corral. Fred Anderson, a former Apple CFO and board member, is an investor at Elevation. Jon Rubinstein, a hardware executive who served as Jobs's right-hand man at Apple, resigned in 2006 — one day before the company's 30-year anniversary — and joined Palm a year ago. Rubinstein, the company's executive chairman, is working on a new family of devices that will compete with Apple's iPhone; the big unveiling is planned for the CES computer trade show next month.

The last CES was also the scene of the latest dig by Bono at Jobs. In January 2008, he appeared in a farewell video for Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Later that month, he shilled for Michael Dell, the founder of the eponymous PC maker who once called for Jobs to shut down Apple and "return the money to shareholders." (Apple is now worth far more than Dell. Ha!)

And to think they were once so close. At an Apple event in 2003, Bono called Jobs "the Dalai Lamai of integration." One year later, Bono and Jobs introduced a U2-branded edition of the iPod. Jobs, who is rarely seen in public, attended a U2 concert in 2005, and Bono praised Apple as being "more creative than a lot of rock bands." In 2006, Bono promoted a red iPod for his Product (Red) charity scheme.

So what happened? The falling out has never been publicly explained, but I have a theory on what happened.

Apple's board of directors fingered Fred Anderson, the former Apple CFO, in a probe over stock-options backdating at Apple. In a public statement, Anderson blamed Jobs. Things got messy, and Anderson resigned from the board after reaching a settlement with the SEC.

At that point, Anderson was already at Elevation helping make Bono, whose net worth is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars, even richer. So Jobs wasn't just messing with Bono's pal; he was messing with his pocketbook.

It hardly squares with the Irish rocker's saintly save-the-children image, does it?

• After starring with Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin said the Republican vice presidential nominee was not "someone who I wanted her hand on the nuclear button at any point." At least that's what he told David Letterman, before impersonating Palin. Video after the jump. [Extra]
• Courtenay Semel, daughter of former Yahoo chief Terry Semel, as quoted by a Caesar's Palace security guard in a lawsuit: "Do you even know who I am, f**king idiot?...Google me, you dumb f**k." [TMZ]
• Still in Britain, Paris Hilton showed up at a bar, looking for the nation's various strapping young princes. They weren't there, so she "tried to mingle" with the princes' friends. [London Paper]
• According to Bono, America is "Brand U.S.A.," and the election a "great chance to relaunch" that brand. The celebrity made these comments at a gathering of Starbucks baristas, probably after arriving in a hybrid limo powered by the incineration of American flags, just so the occasion could more perfectly encapsulate all terrible stereotypes about the liberal political base. [AP]
• Courtney Cox is involved with a show called "Cougar Town." Which sounds awful, but her last show was actually titled "Dirt," so kind of a step up, right? [The Insider]

Palin stuff about a minute in:

• Fashion student Andrea Feick, 19, met U2 singer Bono in a club on the French Rivieria, met up with him later in St. Tropez, walked on the beach with him, posed for a picture in a bikini from his lap and rode on his yacht. She can't believe anyone would insinuate they might be more than friends. He's "much older than I am!" Think that will work on Bono's wife? [Mail]
• Madonna was said to be in "full meltdown mode" amid her pending divorce from Guy Ritchie but still planning a trip to Malawi with alleged lover Alex Rodriguez and still attending Kabbalah meetings with her kids.
• There's talk of a biopic about Britney Spears' meltdown of a year. [Showbiz Spy]
• Jennifer Aniston was seen having dinner with Anna Wintour crush Gerard Butler. Same place where she rekindled with John Mayer. [P6]
• Someone is shameless rifling the trash of Greenwich Village celebrities. That's what you get for leaving it where Graydon Carter can find it. [P6]
• Lindsay Lohan's publicity-hound father is sorry he said her girlfriend Samantha Ronson was "hideous," "disgusting," etc. He has learned that "family matters should be kept private," which is why he told New York all about his recent communication with Lindsay. [New York]

• Forbes.com superstar Lacey Rose will move to Los Angeles and will take the lead on the magazine's Celeb List.
• Scott Woolley, L.A. bureau chief, is moving back to New York to run a team there.
• Betsy Corcoran, who runs the Forbes.com team in the magazine's Silicon Valley bureau, is stepping back from editing to do more writing — but some in Forbesian circles think she might be interested in ousting Quentin Hardy, her replacement as the magazine's Valley bureau chief, as head of the combined print and Web operations in the Valley. Corcoran says, "No, no, no. Wrong."

Our tipster adds: "Please don't buy this bullshit about how nice things are between print and dotcom."

The ongoing intra-Forbesian unpleasantness aside, one big question looms over the coming reorganization: Who's going to run the whole show. Churbuck thinks Bill Baldwin, the magazine's editor, is brainy but clueless. Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment, insiders say, is just a "puppet" of the publisher, Jim Spanfeller, and Maidment's contract is up soon. We have a suggestion: Why not just make Bono, the rock star turned venture capitalist at Elevation Partners, editor-in-chief of the whole shebang?

(Click on any image to begin gallery)

boomp3.com

Before embarking on a sailing expedition to U2 front man Bono's house, silver fox George Clooney went over all the safety procedures for the yacht with his passengers. After his presentation — which included a PowerPoint slideshow explaining which side is port and which is starboard — Clooney wore a life preserver until the seafaring vessel docked at Bono's. While some of his passengers laughed at him, The Cloonester stood firm, largely because his aunt Rosemary always told him that he should be a leader, not a follower.

[Photo Credit: X17]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.