• Initial reports cited DJ AM's death as a simple overdose, but a medical exam found 8 undigested OxyContin in his stomach, which leads at least once source to say his death was suicide. A Valentine's card from his ex-girlfriend was found near his body. TMZ, however, talked to police sources who insist it was not suicide. Still, this is sad and we don't like it. [People and TMZ]
  
  
• Britain's food-obsessed Harden Guide cited four of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants as a "disappointment." Another reviewer suggested the celebrity chef "hang [his] head in shame." [Daily Mail]
  
  
• David Beckham's so worried that his children will be America-fied that he makes them watch BBC. Isn't that child abuse? [The Sun]
  
  
• Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will speak at a memorial for fallen newsman Walter Cronkite. Oh, so will Les Moonves, Katie Couric and many, many others. [B&C]
  
  
• Rumor has it that designer Derek Lam's company has been losing about $1 million a month. [Page Six]
  
  
• Holy God, why? Spencer Pratt wants to legally change his name to "King Spencer Pratt." What a prat. [Star]
  
  
• Kate Hudson and A-Rod have only been dating for five months, but she's always at his apartment, even when he's not there. That's creepy and weird and sad. [MSNBC]
  
  
• Hahahaha! Real Housewives of New York cast members Ramona Crazy Eyes, Kelly Bensimon and "the Countess" all accosted Alec Baldwin in the Hamptons, but he didn't recognize them. Sad! When he was told who they were, he made fun of the show. But, he did ask about Bethenny Frankel, who he did want to meet. [Gatecrasher]
  
  
• Madonna's youngin' boyfriend Jesus Luz fancies himself a deejay, but those familiar with his musical selections say otherwise: "In his last gig at Pacha, in Buzios, guests at the club said his set list wasn't captivating at all, and the dance floor was almost empty." Tear. [Page Six]
  
  
• Gossip Girl actors Penn Badgley and Matthew Settle hung out with hooker-beating ShamWow pitchman Vince Offer. [Page Six]

• Is Lindsay Lohan having the worst week of her life? Probably. Papa Lohan — ever the purveyor of sage wisdom — claims that baby's house was burglarized! LAPD officers are on the scene right now, according to TMZ. Hopefully, she won't try to pin it on a bodega worker named Mohamed. Stay tuned, everyone. [TMZ]
  
  
• Lady Gags got booed in England for showing up to a set late and then having to circumcise her show after running out of time. Speaking of circumcision, PENIS OR GTFO, Gags. [The Sun]
  
  
• Page Six decides to pile on Michael Wolff's supposedly awful site traffic. I'm sorry, but with headlines like I LOVE TO KILL THE NEWS, yeah. He'll take what he can get. [Page Six]
  
  
• Postcards To Yo' Momma: Charles Dickens used to get ladies by writing letters to deh muddahs. In other news, (A) my favorite Page Six items are now the "historical gossip" ones and (B) I just stick with chocolate-covered strawberries. And thus, moms love me. If I were to write a girlfriend's mom a letter she'd be like seriously WTF and then tell her daughter to find a hedge funder or something, because This one, he writes letters? Meshuggah. He could've been a lawyer, too. A shonda. And look what he writes about Jews! [Page Six]
  
  
• Heh. Katie Holmes served as the inspiration or something for Scientology's creepy new uniforms. Also, Katie Holmes probably hates Scientology, because it's just another beard for craziness in her life she has to suffer in order to get her contract paid out. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Jeremy Piven hasn't eaten fish in a bunch of months, and is now a new man or something now that he's living an un-mercury-poisoned life. Notably, Broadway is looking much healthier too now that it hasn't had much Jeremy Piven in however many months. [NYP]
  
  
• Random for an R & M item, but: girls in Maxim's Hometown Hotties contest - which is exactly what it sounds like - say that it's fixed! There's some kind of resolution to this story, but Maxim's PR person realizes what a ridiculous gossip item this is, and takes the time to crack a joke to R & M: "We did use the same electronic voting machines as Ohio did in the 2004 election. So we fully expect George W. Bush will be our next Hometown Hottie winner." [R & M]
  
  
• George Hamilton keeps lookin' good by using stem cell injections of his own fat on his face. Meanwhile, George Hamilton! Love him. Does anybody remember "George and Alana," Hamilton's talk show he once had with his ex-wife Alana Stewart? It was really good! [R & M]
  
  
• Gah! Fuckin' bedbugs! They're now terrorizing Bubba Clinton and staff in his Harlem offices. It got so bad that they had to leave work for a few days. [R & M]
  
  
• Oh, those wacky Coen Bros. They made Amy Landecker wear a pubic "wig" for the upcoming A Serious Man because it's set in 1967. [NYP]
  
  
• Not exactly 90th percentile SAT stuff, but: Was Jill Zarin chatting up a dean at Brown to get her daughter past admissions there? Probably. [Page Six]
  
  
• Sad: Jason Preston still isn't over his breakup with Marc Jacobs. He reached out to Courtney Love over Twitter because he's sad that Jacobs is marrying his boyfriend, Lorenzo Martone, this weekend in Massachusetts. But: why are you reaching out to Courtney Love for help? There are bad terrible awful ways you can act about ex-lovers, and then there's reaching out to Courtney Love. Don't do that. Just: don't. Go listen to some Paul Simon or something instead. [Page Six]
  
  
• Anna Paquin isn't afraid to get nekkid on vampire fetishist show True Blood. So it goes! Meanwhile, talk about burying the lede, Page Six: Nylon's still having magazine parties? [Page Six]
  
  
• Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are going to spend $45M on, let's see here, a...'FRENCH LOVE NEST' reports Showbiz Spy. And here I thought they were going to write PYREX BONG. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Aw. Where does Susan Boyle take her buckets of duckets and spend them on vacation? Home. She went to take a break in Scotland. Happy things, people. [Showbiz Spy]
  
  
• Oh, this is wonderful: David Cross used a picture of the father of his girlfriend, Amber Tamblyn, as his author's bio photo on the jacket of his upcoming book. Furthermore! He wrote, on his bio: "He is currently fucking Amber Tamblyn." Forthcoming, but true. David Cross: loved by parents, I guess? [D-Listed]
  
  
• Was LeAnn Rimes involved in a hit-and-run? She was questioned by cops on Thursday night about one. [US]
  
  
• Will Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have raging ecstasy-induced sex in an upcoming possible film project? They could just pick up funding for this film by placing tzedakah boxes around the country at various male-oriented Jewish youth group meetings. Watch. They'd have a $20M budget in about three weeks. [WWTDD]

Trump has a very particular business model: Get a reputation for being a wildly successful business mogul even though you are, in fact, a failure at business; capitalize on the reputation itself—instead of your purported mogul skills—to make a living. Donald probably makes more off books and TV shows and Learning Annex courses than he ever did off his crumbling real estate empire, and that's okay. It works for him.

And it can work for Gordon Ramsay! His own little empire of fancy restaurants has been collapsing ever since this little economic meltdown stopped hedge fundies from using their little expense accounts to buy, you know, food sold by Gordon Ramsay & Co. After a rapid expansion during the boom years, he's now closing restaurants during slow hours, cutting back on staff and expensive menu items and fancy dining room trimmings, and using "more economical ingredients." And look—according to the WSJ, his business model is evolving in quite a familiar direction!

Mr. Ramsay generates about £10 million in annual revenue from television, publishing and endorsement contracts. That includes as much as $250,000 a show for the U.S. versions of "Hell's Kitchen" and "Kitchen Nightmares," which both air on Fox, a unit of News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Ramsay has poured about £12 million of his media earnings into his restaurant empire...

[Now], Rather than paying rent, Mr. Ramsay receives fees for licensing the Ramsay name, provides key personnel and advises on menus.

Licensing: that's where the smart money is. And though Gordon Ramsay and Donald Trump are both asshole, Ramsay is a lovable asshole. Big difference.

This new made-up designation supersedes our earlier proclamation that Gordon Ramsay was the "John McCain of Food.".
[Pic: Getty]

Some of the Unapproved are actually sort of funny:

Some don't know that Pareene's from Minnesota:

Some don't understand how a blog works:

Some are clone conspiracy theorists:
(He's back!)

Some like to insult people's intellect, while discussing American Idol:

Some are victims of their own desires:

And the rest are just idiots:

(OK, so yes, some of those commenters were approved. But whatever. And when I say "idiots", I mean it lovingly. Sort of.)

Because he is an idiot, Gordon Ramsay has rubbed many people the wrong way. He plays a bad boy television chef on television who likes to say cuss words and is fairly abusive to those around him often berating them for their failure while noxiously boasting of his success. That would be tolerable, if not a wee bit unpleasant, if he actually was a bad boy chef who was successful. Sad for him, he's not.

The Telegraph brings news today that the incredible shrinking celebrity chef is selling his one and only Paris restaurant, Gordon Ramsay au Trianon. "Ramsay, who has been beset by persistent rumours about his company's finances, has quietly sold the restaurant, which was awarded two Michelin stars earlier this month, to the owners of the Trianon Palace Hotel, in Versailles, west of Paris," writes the paper.

This brings Ramsay's tally of restaurants he once owned or operated but now doesn't to three. "Ramsay," writes The Telegraph, "recently sold his restaurant in Prague – Maze at the Hilton – back to the hotel. The Michelin-starred La Noisette at the Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel, in London, closed and his contract to run the restaurant at the Connaught Hotel, in Mayfair, ended last year."

Really what makes us root for Ramsay's failure isn't that he's so good at failing (and who doesn't want to reward someone for something they are good at) but that he's at root a phony. For all his big talk and bluster about being an iconoclast, his food has been rated consistently boring and decidedly conformist. After talking smack on French haute cuisine when he opened Gordon Ramsay au Trianon, he called winning two Michelin stars a "a real career high for me." Beneath all his curses and spiky hair, Gordon Ramsay is a sycophant like the rest of them and as his restaurants continue to fail, you can expect more of his pandering to the Food Establishment. Fuckie poop balls.

Ramsay, who can probably cook better than any other Tourette's syndrome sufferer, nevertheless seems to be having money problems, if you consider "not paying back loans on time" and "being forced to guarantee your company's loans out of your own pockets" to be money problems, which we do:

According to accounts filed yesterday, his main company, Gordon Ramsay Holdings, has breached its banking covenants - promises made to lenders to secure a loan. Ramsay and his chief executive Chris Hutcheson, who is also his father-in-law, have had to promise to help the company pay its debts if necessary.

Where are the expense account diners when you actually want them? It's safe to say Ramsay is just the leading edge of celebrity chefs with restaurant empires who will be forced to dramatically contract their businesses during this recession. Global networks of overpriced eateries coasting on name recognition just aren't a recession-era thing! We're looking at you, Bobby Flay. And if there are any financial experts who can explain the following in the comments, please do so, because it just sounds bad:

The holding company has also granted loans to Ramsay and his father-in-law, of £80,000 and £530,000 respectively. In a complex arrangement, the two men have also given personal guarantees of £1.6m and £500,000 to secure bank loans.

[Guardian UK]

In the U.K. to promote the British version of her BFF series, Hilton immediately stuck her foot in her mouth (only the second most famous object to grace that orifice). The Sun's Colin Robertson was witness to the cultural carnage, in which Hilton mistook Prime Minister Gordon Brown for the host of Kitchen Nightmares:

She descended on London and told me: “I love Britain. London is my favourite city in the world.” But when asked if she knew our PM, she replied, “Yes, it’s Gordon Ramsay, isn’t it?"

Her knowledge of British drinking habits was equally ropey. She confessed: “No, I’ve not heard of a pint — what it that? Is it beer?”

And in the show she tells one hopeful she is unfamiliar with the girl’s home county, inquiring: “Essex? What’s that?”

Though we fear (pray?) Hilton's strain of dimness may thwart her attempts to re-enter the U.S., at least she can use her celebrity to get in touch with President Padma. Who, after all, can forget our new leader's inspiring message to young people everwhere: "Please pack your knives and go."

• Paris: PM is Gordon Ramsay, right? [The Sun]

• Alex Rodriguez said he isn't shagging Madonna. Sure. He's just hanging in Miami, Mexico City and Brazil with her, platonically, and maybe buying an apartment with her, platonically, and meeting secretly with her in restaurants, as friends. He also denied riding on a private jet with Madonna, so I guess this is supposed to be someone else who was photographed with her?
• Breaking: George Clooney flirted with a pretty bartender in London. He first met her a year ago, so is basically stalking her. [Sun]

• Heath Ledger's old landlord can't lease his apartment, probably more because of the economy and the $26,000-per-month rent, we're guessing, than due to concerns over morbidity. [P6]
• Ron Perelman's latest messy-divorce-related lawsuit is finally over. The daughter involved in the billionaire's custody dispute is now a teenager. [P6]
• Maybe Miley Cyrus is going to divorce her parents! Sure, her publicist denies it, but someone did write into a gossip column to ask about it. And there's precedent. So let's all keep talking about. [E!]
• Gordon Ramsay's purported lover, an adultery expert and author, was kicked off an adultery website for doing adultery horribly incorrectly. [P6]

• Anna Wintour's daughter Bee Shaffer, the aspiring journalist, is graduating from Columbia in May and is "really nervous about the fact nobody's hiring right now." If she gets desperate she could take one of those awful personal assistant jobs working for a magazine editor. (She won't get desperate.) [NYM]
• Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil are said divorcing after planeloads of drugs and "gross" sex games that can't even be described in News Of The World. [News Of The World]
• The Catholic Church forgave John Lennon for saying the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus" and that "Christianity will go." It now finds his songs totally groovy and far out! [Sunday Times]
• TV chef Gordon Ramsay's purported seven-year mistress literally wrote the book on how to have an affair, and even appeared on Oprah to discuss it. Their latest tryst involved "three bottles of legal sex drugs." [Mail]
• Jon Peters, the film producer, faces jail time after allegedly failing to do community service work in connection with DUI charges. So he invited a dozen kids from the community-service program to his ranch, and for some reason the cops had to be called, and now no one's saying anything. [P6]
• After trying to argue that $7 million from a Bahrain sheik was a gift, Michael Jackson has wisely opted to settle out of court. [E!]

Spoiler alert: the men took the prize with a stellar 5.9 ounce fillet. The shouty chef has managed to make this appointment television, and I salute him for it. I also salute him for telling short and mournful contestant Craig last week, "You come down to my kitchen with a ridiculous hat on like that again, I'll stick it on your head fucking sideways."

Diners at Hannah and Mason's in Cranbury, NJ had their reservations canceled on February 14, and others were told to drop their forks and get the hell out, because Ramsay and Co. had to finish up their TV work [NJ Star-Ledger].

That's just wrong. Oh, that's so wrong. How many magical Hallmark moments of a lifetime were ruined that night? How many hearts were broken? How many people failed to get laid because of one chef's selfish film schedule? Hard to fathom how pissing off all of the restaurant's best customers will help it succeed better in the future.

By the way, how's your own restaurant empire doing, Gordon? Stretched a bit thin, maybe? Not to worry—your natural ability to make friends should pull you through any rough spots.

That leaves Tom C. as the one of the few celebrity chefs on "Top Chef" who has a restaurant but doesn't have a Michelin star. But Michelin also gave Peter Luger Steakhouse a star, though the New York Times' recently made the case that the Brooklyn institution had jumped the cow. Michelin also awarded two stars to testicle-searing and, by some accounts, boring chef Gordon Ramsay for his New York restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at the London. Maybe the Michelin Man just prefers aging twinks to bears?

2008 Michelin Guide Results

More than 4m viewers watched as Ramsay zipped himself into a rubber diving suit, grabbed a spear gun and travelled 13 miles out to sea to hunt bass, bream and mullet in his first attempt at spearfishing.

"I feel like a f****** action man," the chef declared as he prepared to demonstrate how it is possible to catch your own food.

"I have got three stunning sea bass," he boasted as he returned to shore gripping the 2ft-long, freshly speared fish. "I have never caught a fish from a spear and it's not bad for first time out."

But Ramsay didn't catch any fish at all on his trip. The prime specimens he went on to grill with saffron and fennel over an open fire on the beach had in fact been caught by a local expert taken on the trip for that purpose.

"I went in 20 minutes before everyone else to make sure we had fish to put on the barbecue," said Dave O'Callaghan, a member of the British spearfishing squad with more than 20 years' experience.

"I caught about four and then Gordon got in and we spent about an hour in the water. When we came back in we threaded the fish onto a stringer and he carried them.

"Put it like this: Gordon Ramsay caught f*** all."

After years of serving Irish-style fare—"hamburgers, steak, shepherd's pie, fish 'n' chips," he said—management decided last October to shake things up, hiring an outside consultant to help remake the place into an Indian-style eatery. "New chefs were brought in, new menus," Mr. Hyde said.

The changes, he alleged, only chased away Dillons' regulars, and few new customers have shown up to replace them. The consultant, as well as three chefs, were fired just days before Mr. Ramsay's arrival.

But perhaps the most telling forecaster of the restaurant's future was management's decision to use PR lady Amy Krakow. Remember her? She was the one boasting to the Times about the 1,000 dollars a week she spends on lady upkeep. Perhaps if she spent less time in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber and more time with her clients, the prognosis of Dillon's or Purnima or whatever wouldn't be so bleak.

As Canada's Globe and Mail reports:

The lawsuit alleges Ramsay and the producers manipulated key elements of the show: planting bad hamburger meat in the restaurant's fridge, staging a slapstick scene of Ramsay falling off a weak chair that had been brought in by the crew; and faking its new success...

On the night the transformed restaurant made its debut, only three days after Ramsay had first walked through the doors, about 100 people flooded into the place for dinner. But the suit alleges about 90 per cent of the diners that night were either friends of Ramsay or paid extras. (And there are reasons to be skeptical about the turnout: It was a Monday, always the slowest night of the week at Dillon's because their biggest draws, the Broadway theatres, are usually dark.)

Reality TV becomes one naif's nightmare space [G+M]

[Season 2 Winner Heather] West, 27, was promised a job as the executive chef of T-Bones Chophouse, the high-end steak house at luxurious Red Rock Casino Spa in Las Vegas. She now works as a senior chef at the resort's less prestigious Italian restaurant, Terra Rosa. A casino official said that West was better suited to work at Terra Rosa because it has an open kitchen that keeps her visible to patrons who occasionally recognize her from the show - and sometimes ask for her autograph.

Short Order [Post]