A source sent us the proposal, by a 39-year-old LA dog walker and yoga instructor named Edie Cortese. "The manuscript is a fictionalized version of what transpired over six months or so in my walking in front of Vince's house everyday with the dogs and dreaming of him... and how I could meet him... and get his attention and hang," explained Cortese last night.

Here is Cortese's brief proposal that is definitely fiction:

Since this was sent out, explained Cortese, she has left the agent she was with because she felt he "didn't promote the manuscript properly." She is looking for a replacement. Jason Heyman, Vince Vaughn's rep at CAA has not yet responded to an email for comment (but then it is 7.30am in LA).

I had no idea the Amish were so nasty. But according to the WSJ, books featuring shy Amish ladies befriending handsome non-Amish men—encounters which can sometimes lead to kissing before betrothal—are flying off the the motherfucking racks of the country stores.

Beverly Lewis, who sets her novels among the Amish in Pennsylvania, has sold 13.5 million copies of her books. Wanda Brunstetter's novels take place in Amish communities in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania, and have sold more than four million copies...
Barnes & Noble book buyer Jane Love said Amish novels currently account for 15 of the chain's top 100 religious fiction titles. "It's almost like you put a person with a bonnet or an Amish field in the background and it automatically starts to sell well," Ms. Love said.

This shit is even hotter than Tumblr books! Hey Naomi Wolf, A Cultural History of the Vagina? Less vaginas, more bonnets.

Yeah, Kelly Bensimon, the worst witch, was cuddling up with 300 star Gerard Butler at some sort of Details magazine party. What a big, on-the-rise movie hunk like that was doing curling up with that strip of jerky we're not sure, but evidently he enjoyed it. After consulting with Dan Abrams (of all people), Butler was heard cooing into his cell phone, "Where are you? Where did you go?" Ah, young (in spirit!) love.

And the Countess... Well, you tell the story better than I could, New York Daily News:

Spies caught ­Countess ­LuAnn de Lesseps - who's separated from hubby Alexandre - letting out her inner cougar at Georgica in East Hampton.

"LuAnn was drinking, dancing and making out with a young guy in his late 20s," says an eyewitness.

Sad. But also beautiful.

Have fun, girls!

Image via Getty

The old pattern of a cute ingénue charming the pants off an aging media tycoon seemed like a dying trope. Think Anna Wintour and Si Newhouse at Condé Nast (okay, there was no evidence they actually slept together). Or Tina Brown and Auberon Waugh of Private Eye back in the U.K. (they pretty definitely did).

And along comes Floethe to revive it! Cityfile reports (and we've also heard) that Floethe and Wolff have been carrying on an affair since she was an intern at Vanity Fair, where Wolff is a contributing writer. Floethe denies it. But the whiff of scandal at an Internet news site is energizing. Online editors, by and large, have not yet grown rich and powerful enough to command the attentions of the young, ambitious, and unscrupulous. Who is this Floethe, and what makes her such a likely target of rumors of an affair?

A self-described "femme fatale." Floethe infuriated Slate readers last year by describing a 2006 trip to the Caucasian nation of Georgia, where she and her boyfriend, whom she describes only as a "travel writer," hobnobbed with President Mikheil "Misha" Saakashvili. She unabashedly stripped down to her swimwear for Sakaashvili:

The next day, Misha, accompanied by eight CIA-trained bodyguards, flew us in a vintage Soviet chopper to what looked like a Bond villain's compound on the beach. After I changed into my femme fatale bikini, an armed guard escorted me from the dacha to the beach, where Misha was riding a jet ski. I hesitated just a moment before I clung to the president for dear life (only briefly wondering whether the travel writer had traded me for access to high places).

Likes older men. Floethe insists that she and Wolff are "great friends." She certainly has a lot of great friends. The "travel writer" boyfriend whom she never names in the Slate piece is Melik Kaylan, a widely published journalist much older than her. At the time Floethe and he were going out, Kaylan was married. He helped introduce her to Wolff, who got her an internship at Vanity Fair. According to our tipster, to Kaylan's dismay, Floethe switched her affections from Kaylan to Wolff. She's also dated Lawrence Osborne, the travel writer ex of founding Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers. And at an Interview party, she was photographed clinging to the side of English writer Adrian Dannatt (left).

Raised by a Palin voter. Floethe wrote in the Guardian before the election of her upbringing by a Republican mother:

My mother is a Republican-committee-woman type who recently moved from Buckhead in Atlanta to a gated community called Big Canoe an hour from the city in the north Georgia mountains. If she had political opinions beyond some traditional Republican bromides as well as the irksome articles and emails she forwards, I'd long ago become inured to them. To me it was just mom-ish background noise. Whatever my mother's politics, we comported ourselves like any more or less liberal (certainly for the south we were liberal), upwardly mobile family - an emphasis on culture betterment, Ivy League schools and, ultimately, an apartment for me in the East Village in Manhattan.

An ex-trust funder. In Slate two weeks ago, Floethe confessed that her trust fund was not what it once was:

My small but helpful trust fund lost 40 percent all at once, and then another 20 percent, leaving me, practically speaking, destitute. I suddenly needed something more than an Internet writing job (Internet writers need trust funds) at the exact moment when there were no jobs. Either that or a man of means.

Part of the beauty of a trust fund has been the freedom to avoid such a man, those incredibly rich but invariably dull hedge funders and private equity guys, bean counters and bureaucrats, so available in New York and urged on all single girls.

What, no mention of aging Internet entrepreneurs as an option?

(Photos via Cityfile and Guest of a Guest)

The last time we saw flirtation this shameless, Kevin Spacey was making his waiter repeat the specials on his lap. Watch as the blushing country singer fiddles with the host's tie, giggles uncontrollably at his every witticism, and marvels at how effortlessly he finishes her sentences. Ferguson—a married man—only encourages her with his seductive brogue and shameless innuendo. Jimmy Fallon, we'd love to tell you this is how it's done, but unless you want a hasty d-i-v-o-r-c-e, we'd throw some cold water on Van Morrison before things get out of hand.

Bonus flirtation:


[Late Late Show]

INF has new pictures of the smartly-dressed couple strolling around Manhattan and buying some wine last week. They're both dressed casually—he in a long coat and baseball cap, she in leggings and funny spectacles—and they look the picture of moneyed ease. Zellweger, who by many accounts is like the nicest and most down-to-earthest of Hollywood stars, is another catch for the hood-lidded Abrams, who previously dated superdupermodel Elle MacPherson.

And look how cute they are! Enjoying the winter sun together. It almost makes one feel bad for how their week was spent, including wasting away yesterday's warmest-day-of-the-year-so-far wrapped up in blankets, alone, watching Whoopi Goldberg in The Associate. Almost.

[via Adfreak]

Leaving aside the strange biblical and oedipal overtones of this match, Madonna and Jesus's date at a New York steakhouse (they're pictured leaving it here) is said to be the new pair's first public outing. Has A-Rod been benched? Is an inconsolable Guy Ritchie coping by watching TV and snorting non-macrobiotic pixie sticks? No word, yet, from Madonna's self-contradicting flack Liz Rosenberg; still, we're rooting for the dynamic duo, if only to give us the weird, fanfictiony Bible romance it had been previously sacrilegious to 'ship for.

[Photo Credit: Splash News]

• Madonna fuels romance rumours after dinner date with Brazilian model [Daily Mail]

Page Six reports that Rourke was at the Chateau Marmont the other night with Sean Penn (guess they made up!) when he was accosted by Ms. Bai, who beelined toward the actor's melty mug like a moth to a flame made of fame. Then, says the paper, they "made out and partied pretty hard." Aside from the fact that Rourke is a dog person and Bai is devoted to her cat Qiji, we think this is a match made in celebrity heaven. If this doesn't last until Bai crashes the Academy Awards red carpet, we're throwing our votes to Frank Langella.

Still, the rumors about the pair prompted us to seek visual confirmation at Bai's blog (newly retitled "Naked Seduction 永恒的诱惑" for 2009, and why not), and that's where we stumbled upon rival suitors. Sure, there was a picture of Rourke and Bai together, but the camera-hopping starlet showed off equally scorching chemistry this past week with the eclectic group of Ralph Fiennes, John Legend, and American Idol winner David Cook. This can only be settled with a massive, stapler-wielding tag team match at the Red Bank Y. Better start juicing, Fiennes!

• Beautiful weekend colored my space...... [Naked Seduction 永恒的诱惑]

A young man, let's call him Ben even though that isn't actually what his name is, writes to our cruel-yet-cuddly overlord, Nick Denton:

Nick,

Have to thank you for something you aren't even aware of yet being responsible for. Last week I got engaged to my girlfriend of a few years. Your part in this? we met through the Denton media empire. [She] was a peripatetic commenter on Gawker. I read Gawker but spent most of my time on Deadspin. Reading her comments always made me laugh, so I followed a link to her blog. We corresponded, met for drinks, fell in love, moved in together and are now planning to marry. Life is good, and a tip of my hat to you, sir.

Cockles! Warmed! Congrats you two. Shine on like crazy diamonds or rubies or complete each other or whatever it is. We're still going to be here, typing away forever.

We hear that Trump isn't happy about Jared's dad's time as a jailed felon over real-estate dealings gone bad, and the Kushners aren't happy about Ivanka's shiksa status, despite her ingratiating attempt to convert—maybe because the effort means she's serious about marrying him for real. It's so romantic—like the Montagues and the Capulets! They'll probably want to be together even more now.

• Big Brother 10 [CBS]

In the summer of 2004, a newly single professional in his early forties wanted to sleep with as many women as possible. Sex being above all other considerations — time, money, shame — he took on the persona “Dimitri the Lover” and drafted a general sexual proposition for any “attractive, intelligent woman” who happened to read it. He printed a few thousand posters and hired a postering company. Together they placed them all over the city, from family-oriented neighbourhoods like the Beaches (where mothers’ groups ripped them down en masse) to York University campus (which alerted the police).

“I got dozens of responses. Dozens. And fucked maybe 20 women, something like that. Not a lot,” Dimitri tells me. Of course, most people who saw the poster thought it was a joke. I did, until Dimitri hit on me in Starbucks two years later. I was taken aback, mostly because of the way he looked: tall and broad-shouldered, with dark, gelled-back hair. A stranger on the street might nickname him “Dimitri the Lover” as a joke.

Yes, and then he became a bonafied pickup artist! And now Dimitri is an internet sensation! Where did this come from? It's posted a couple places with various questionable "friend of a friend" descriptions, but maybe this clip is just the PUA equivalent of Viral Marketing?

Jezebel has the transcript of the voicemails, in case you are squeamish or without speakers.

This all starts roughly in early 2006, and continues through to today.
Jason Preston

• A former "rent-boy," Preston famously tatooed the Marc Jacobs logo on his arm.
• The pair kept breaking up.
• And getting back together.
• Then getting engaged.
• Then breaking up again (for good?).
• Meanwhile, they were having dirty, dirty threesomes with...
• 
  Erik Rhodes
  
• Emerging in Jacobs' life early this year, he is kind of dumb, but likes to fuck. He does porn! And used to be a hooker too!
• But, oh no, he is sad.
• Rhodes is kicked to the curb at some point, probably because he left to play Moose Mason in an Archie On Ice show or something. Enter:
• 
  Austin A.
  
• A mysterious fellow, he had lots of MySpace anger.
• He was able to define "Boy Toy" for the rest of us idiots.
• And he almost got in a fight with poor, rejected Jason.
• Somewhere along the line he seems to have disappeared, making room for this new fellow.
• 
  Phew! That is a lot. And I am sure there is much, much more.

  Image via Bauer-Griffin.

The newest name on Clemens "How to Creep" list is Paulette Dean Daly, the former wife of professional golfer John Daly. Since John Daly looks like this:

You can see how even Clemens may have looked good to his paramour. The Daily News reports:

"Clemens' relationship with Daly is said to have come after the end of her marriage to the hard-driving golfer. That was on the heels of a grim incident at the 1997 Players Championship, where the golfer was taken to a hospital with alcohol poisoning...

Daly is still involved with the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic as an organizer of famously lavish parties there."

News reports have described Clemens as being in attendance as recently as two years ago, dancing around the party with an 8-foot-long boa constrictor around his neck.

She doesn't deny it so it must be true!

But who are we kidding: Of course they did! In last night's season premiere of The Bachelor: London Calling (a title we're all but certain has the hearty endorsement of all surviving Clash members), Hunkiest British Bachelor Ever Matt Grant was floored by the non-stop parade of beauties, plucked from all 13 colonies and working in every imaginable profession—from administrative assistant to pharmaceutical sales rep to administrative pharmaceutical sales rep assistant. But only one earned our First Impression Rose (lovingly crafted out of pipe cleaners and a coffee filter), and that is contestant Stacey from Chicago. Clearly the result of a network mandate to "add a little I Love New York flavor to the season," Stacey rocketed directly into our hearts the moment she slur-relayed her life's dream of using her "Bachelors in Nutrition...to find a pharmaceutical that will cure something that no one has thought of." By the time she was passed out face-first, unconsciously humping the bare twin mattress to the rhythm of her own snoring, we knew we had found The One.

• The Bachelor: London Calling [ABC]