"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back."

A 28-year-old pregnant lady was also knocked down in the frenzy. The good news is that most people got that cheap XBox that Ricky wanted, and the "My First Sex Scandal" karaoke microphone/dildo that Amber was desperate for. So the young man didn't die in vain. What were we just saying?

Before police shut down the store, eager shoppers streamed past emergency crews as they worked furiously to save the store clerk's life.

"They were working on him, but you could see he was dead, said Halcyon Alexander, 29. "People were still coming through."

Only a few stopped.

"They're savages," said shopper Kimberly Cribbs, 27. "It's sad. It's terrible."

Prior to his stay in the country, Sheik Abdulla set up Mr Jackson with a recording studio on his Neverland ranch and sent him his own musical compositions.

A recording of a finished song will be played in court, Mr Thanki said.
Sheikh Abdulla Bin Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa
Sheik Abdulla helped Jackson settle his bills, the court heard

Mr Jackson has contested the claim, saying there was no valid agreement, adding the Sheik's case is based on "mistake, misrepresentation and undue influence".

He has also said no project was ever finalised and payments were "gifts".

The court heard that under the agreement, an album, autobiography and stage play were to be produced.

All kind of sad and weird. Sad and weird for the obvious reasons, yes. And because Jackson just lost his crazy, crazy Neverland ranch because he's kinda going broke. But also sad because I guess that means we're never going to see the "stage play" that they were going to dream up?? That's a disaster! It could have been so weird and good, who cares if we had to fly to Bahrain to see it. The lucky people in the London courtroom get to hear the song this week. I hope someone leaks it.

And really, can't you two please work it out and get this play going? After that you can retreat back into the strange shadows, Michael, and do whatever you want (well, you can't do that). But first we need the musical.

Sheik 'Planned Jackson Revival' [BBC]

She was doing a show for Sirius XM radio called Sex, Success, and Sensibility, which was about how to make love like a perpetually neurotic and self-obsessed shopaholic. But then—in these horrible, ruined economic times!—she refused to take a 50% pay cut, so the station just out and out pulled the plug. So, that's sad for her I guess? But it's kind of a relief for us.

Now if we could only stop those Sex and the City: For kids! books from coming out.

The boy we saw this past week (and the boy who chief New York Times critic Ben Brantley saw) was a fellow named David Alvarez, a beguilingly accented young son of Cuban defectors raised in Québec. He's a revelation in the ballet bits, an angry smear of slight imperfections in his tap, and a multi-culti trilingual 13-year-old trying his best in the show's more dialogue-heavy stretches. We mean to say he's terrific and pure and now well-reviewed by the biggest newspaper in the land and... what about the other two? Will they be forced to forever play catch up? Essentially they're all fighting to become... what? The next Andrea McArdle? What's sad for the fey American boy and the sternly pretty Soviet bloc chap who play Billy in rotation with Alvarez, is that their Cuba-fro'd counterpart has actually already won.

They'll all be nominated for Tonys together if they're nominated at all (as is what happened in London and Sydney when the show opened in those cities), they share interview time, and a thick veil of secrecy is kept under which Billy will be going on what night. But still, man. Alvarez bled into his shoes for all the critics, for the all the glory (and the big, pretty Times Arts page photo). The American kid tappa-tappa-tappa'd for the big Opening Night and the blonde comrade performed on The View, but you'll only get that one critics' night. And the rightful son took the mantle that evening. Which makes the show uplifting. And makes the show really, really sad.

Last month the show made mention of something called The Hummingbird sex position. People were so curious about what this wife-pleasing technique could possibly be that they made it the top Google Trends search of the day. The crusty old ladies at wowOwow even got in the game! (Though it's still kind of unclear what, if anything, it actually is. I'm assuming it means really fast sex against a window.) Oh and it bears mentioning that Lipstick Jungle did invent the Cougarnaut Position, which can only be done with a two year old pair of Manolo Blahniks and a bitter sense of life having pretty much passed you by.

So yeah, two once buzzy shows now lost to the ages. We expect more beloved but pretty much as little-watched shows like ABC's Pushing Daisies to follow fairly soon. Pie Maker Position or not. (Blackbirds required.)

Sure, OK, Out isn't exactly the arbiter of gay culture it sometimes seems to fancy itself, but still! The bulk of the little bit on Perry is pretty praising (though they do at least mention the fact that some gay activists aren't happy with the song or Ms. Perry—who also has a song called "Ur So Gay" about a po-mo/homo ex-boyfriend who like, drinks wine and drives a hybrid) and that, I think, is pretty embarrassing for the magazine. Harmless fun is only fun when it's, well, harmless. This kind of co-opting of a hard-fought cause does, I suspect, do some damage.

Both of her geigh-themed ditties are kind of "jokes" in that way where they actually aren't jokes at all but the problem is that people who are smart enough to "get" "it" (common idiots, out of work chimps) are also smart enough to, you know, not like her music. It's her impressionable teeny bop fan girls who I worry about. I worry, frankly, that when they are of age... they will go wild.

But that's not the real problem, I don't think. The real problem is that this discussion is being had at all. It's a dumb little song, and yet has sparked all of this furor and debate on both sides of the queer issue. Was "I Kissed A Girl" really popular music's most salient commentary on homosexuality this year? I mean, I don't doubt that it was, but that's just downright sad. In this time of new and fabulous Jym Crow laws, a cherry-flavored (and, you know, borderline offensive) twitter about a drunken peck is... it? That's all s/he wrote??

Pretty depressing if you ask me.

Here's a much better and older song of the same name, from folksy indie queen of yesteryear Jill Sobule, proving that not only is Perry a tiresome poseur, she's also a thief:

"I have never felt so frightened and vulnerable as the day my daughter, 7 years old, came home from school and asked, 'Mom, what is an assassin?," Lapine told the court. She also said that she maybe "made a big mistake talking to any reporters because now this billionaire is angry and attacking me everywhere." Which is probably true! You do not want to get billionaires angry. Hell, you don't want to get millionaires angry. They'll just mess with your life as long as they want because they have more money than you and you'll always have to stop first. So, whether or not Lapine was plagiarized doesn't really even matter anymore. The Seinfelds already won, as they always will.

Oh, and the saddest part of the whole thing? She'll never be on Oprah. "Four times I attempted to be a guest on Oprah. I was rejected each time." Devastating indeed.

Image via New York Times

Mojo HD, the obscure cable network for people with High Def televisions, announced it was shutting down a few weeks ago, so now Warriors producers are looking for a new home for the show. "We're filming history," said Sean Skelton, co-creator and producer the series. "It's been exciting, but also difficult to watch these people, who we've been following for sometime now, become unraveled."

I hope they find a new network for it—or turn it into a documentary feature or something—because I haven't seen quite enough terror and panic these past few months.

Us spoke with people who described the inciting incident, a fight between Hudson's brother and the man suspected of doing the killings. That story isn't really featured in any of the other five magazines we looked at, so I guess Us gets the points for that. People's is typically heavy on the personal interest, though surprisingly they didn't set aside a space for other celebrities to weigh in on the tragedy, as three others, Life & Style (they got fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama!), Us, and InTouch, did. They pretty much all have the same photos, especially the terribly cute and just, well, terribly sad photos of Hudson's seven-year-old nephew.

So, who wins? Us Weekly, we guess. Though, it also kind of feels like nobody won.

People, the longstanding classy version of the other tabloids, has a story (kinda far down the page, honestly) about Jennifer's bond with her mother, featuring recollections about Darnell Donerson from Jennifer's acting coach and from people in Donerson's Chicago neighborhood. It's the kind of sad human interest story that People has made their name doing. Expect sidebar reactions from American Idol judges (Hudson was a contestant on the show) and maybe one of the bigger gets, like Beyonce, Hudson's Dreamgirls costar.

Us Weekly reports at a more breathless, staccato clip, giving us gory details about the number of times Hudson's young nephew was shot and quoting from Hudson's sister's MySpace, in which she mourns her lost loved ones and imagines them as her guardian angels now. In your face awfulness.

InTouch, Life & Style, and OK! aren't giving the story as much prominence as Us (their older and more popular sibling). OK! does a small dissection of the dispute that lead to the whole tragedy InTouch covers Idol judge Randy Jackson's reaction to the sad news. And Life & Style has nothing about the incident on their sparsely updated site.

So, once again, it looks as though Us Weekly leads the pack toward getting the scoop, though their hand at the necessary quiet, soft-touch pieces is not as nimble as People's. Us ought to get the early lead while People follows up in the coming weeks with a punch-in-the-gut Hudson interview.

Or not. Maybe we'll get surprised with a big Exclusive. It could happen.

Colonel Mustard's new line beats the original, American Racial Profiling Problem Deftly Explored By French Canadian Circus Performers.

In 1984, Costello left for Yale Law School; Wallace was alone senior year. He double-majored — English and philosophy, which meant two big writing projects. In philosophy, he took on modal logic. "It looked really hard, and I was really scared about it," he said. "So I thought I'd do this kind of jaunty, hundred-page novel." He wrote it in five months, and it clocked in at 700 pages. He called it The Broom of the System.

Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication "made me feel like I was stoned and in hell," he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts:

You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly.

The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace [Rolling Stone]

47 year old Teresa Escamilla says she had $12,000 in cash tucked away inside a shoe box, which she stored in her closet. She had saved the money for five years working two jobs, one as a nurse's assistant, with hopes of buying a home of her own one day. But, that dream went up in smoke when flames tore through her home on Monday, leaving behind only ashes.

The mobile home Escamilla has rented for the past three years was one of 38 destroyed when the fire ripped through the Sky Terrace Lodge mobile home park in Sylmar.

"I don't feel like doing anything except staying on this little bed," Escamilla said Tuesday while resting on a donated cot at an evacuation center at San Fernando High School.

"It hurts so much," she said. "So much sacrifice so I could have something a little better."

Escamilla says she was working an overnight shift when the fire broke out early Sunday morning and was kept away from her home by firefighters.

When asked why she didn't put the money in a bank, Escamilla says he felt the money would be safer where she could see it.

So if that's not the most awful and shitty story you've heard all day, I don't want your life. Can we organize a collection or something for this poor lady?

Those online accusations claimed that Choi - who once won a government medal for her saving habit and whose name, Jin Sil, means "truth" - was a loan shark. They claimed that an actor named Ahn Jae Hwan, who gassed himself in his car last month, was driven to suicide because Choi pressed him relentlessly to repay a $2 million debt.

Choi's death followed a string of high-profile suicides attributed to cyberspace harassment. Two young female celebrities, one a singer and the other an actress, killed themselves last year after insulting comments about their alleged plastic surgery flooded the Web.

Which, ugh, is just awful. Of course critics of the Korean government, which is seeking to regulate the internet to prevent future attacks, say that the online bile isn't the root of the problem. Which is probably true in a reductionist "guns don't kill people, people kill people" kind of way. But in the actual world, the role of the internet in flesh-and-blood happenings is so vague and inhabits such a depressingly gray area of causality that maybe, I don't know, the internet is partly to blame—if by the sole virtue that we can't prove that it isn't to blame. Either way, I don't think we've quite evolved to weather personal attacks like this. The technology is moving a lot faster than, well, our souls are.

Much has been made, over and over again, about the troubling viciousness of this modern web that we've woven, so it's hard to say anything new. Hell, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has been expecting a Valleywag-related suicide for months now. But it still, every time something like this happens, makes us feel nauseous. That such a uniting thing—a free, open agora of ideas on its best days—can also be a conduit for what reduces down to sadistic cannibalism. Of, you know, the "e" varietal.

(Or maybe this is just me trying to personally exercise some maudlin guilt over what I do, on this day when we celebrate what Columbus did which was, you know, to murder thousands of Native Americans. I went to Salem, MA this weekend and it was so weird to see fried dough stands and bouncy castles and all manner of other silliness that essentially exists because about 300 years ago, some 20 innocent women were murdered by an angry mob. America! And, um, Korea!)

All images from Sad Guys On Trading Floors, and there are lots more on that site. And Men.style.com has a gallery too.

Sure there is still homophobia in the American entertainment industry (and, you know, as it presents nationally recognized symbols, Hollywood as big shiny fake microcosm of the rest of the world and all that), and some talented people are forced—or at least feel forced—to keep their sexuality private lest they lose out on work. (The alleged supergays: Tom Cruise, Ryan Seacrest, John Travolta, etc.) But, compared to other parts of the "first world," the situation here is pretty superior (I mean, it's not Europe, but it'll do. For now). We have queer-friendly science fiction! And kinda shitty but still, they're there! networks like Logo and here! and Ugly Betty on ABC, and, um, all of Bravo. Plus, this whole phenomenon exists! And in movies gay characters are slowly crawling out of the gay best friend ghetto and movies like Brokeback Mountain, yeah get snowed in the end at the Oscars, but they have increasingly big, important "mainstream" presences. Obviously we've still miles to go before we sleep—like, um, where has gay Erik van der Woodsen been on Gossip Girl?—but I just thought I'd take this opportunity to give a little appreciation to a flawed but progressing community of self-obsessed millionaires. Thanks for furtively tolerating the gays, because this thing in Korea is really really sad.

"Suppose your Sim had a tough day, or the Sim kids are out of control, maybe the Sim worked out — that could be a moment for that particular [brand of] pain relief," [a Sims branding exec] said. "And they take that pain relief and feel restored, better rested ... less on edge."

Possibly the saddest quote ever. [Ad Age]

We have Becky from Full House and that Rob Estes dude from Sleazy Guys: The TV Series moving with their Canadian redheaded twig of a thing (Shenae Grimes, dangerously slimmed down from her Degrassi: The Next Generation days) and their adopted son Dixon, a young black fellow played head scratchingly by Tristan Wilds, who was all deep-buried pain and hooded sadness as Michael on HBO's so-in-another-galaxy-from-this-it's-laughable The Wire. Jessica Walter is the aging, drunken actress mother of Estes, and is basically just doing a watered-down version of her terrific bitchy mess of a mom on Arrested Development. So that's the set-up, Kansas family moves back to dad's mom's Beverly Hills manse to take care of her (though that was so weakly explained). He will be the principal of West Beverly Hills High School, and Aunt Becky will... I dunno, stand around looking at photo shoots. The kids will gawp at their new toned, tawny, forty-three-year-old classmates.

I'm sure in some way it was a winking nod to the aged Gabrielle Carteris and Luke Perry of the original, who were well out of high school when they were cast in teenager roles, that the actress who plays queen bee bitch (with a hint of sadness and smarts!) Naomi probably graduated from the University of Oregon at Eugene in 1993. She's got a wild mane of hair, stern glowing eyes, and a knowledge of how to slink and work her curves that no fifteen-year-old girl (God help us) should ever possess. There is also Ethan, the woodchuck-esque lacrosse star, former make-out buddy of Canada St. Kansas, and current blow-job-from-another-girl-receiving boyfriend of Naomi. (That blowjob was graphic enough to elicit an "eep!" from me.) There's some sloppy romantic triangle being set up there but... yawwwn.

There is also Silver, a nasty little bloggette (at one point she says something like "blogs are supposed to cause problems") who is the half sister of Kelly Taylor and David Silver from the original. Whee! Connections! She befriends Canada St. Kansas sort of, while Dixon takes some ridiculous news class with a guy named Navid Shirazi (mmm... Shiraz) who quickly fast-talks him into a friendship, though cluckingly disapproves when Dix expresses an interest in the lacrosse team. And... would it be too sweeping just to say that various highjinxs ensue, none of which are interesting? Canada gets involved in a ludicrous high school production of Spring Awakening (upstaging the show's troubled, druggy lead), and gets jetted off by its faggy male star to San Francisco (hahhh!) for a romantic dinner. Dix gets in trouble with a school prank. Naomi cheats back and tears are shed. Srsly overloaded for the first two hours. And those are just the kids!

The adults are silly too, the parents chief among them as bland cool dad/cool mom robots who have awkward, implied sex. There is of course the hip teacher, with scruff and jeans and a tie in the style of Ryan Gosling's mesmerizing crack addicted dialectics fan in Half Nelson, who is also (conveniently!) the lacrosse coach. The old adults... oh God bless 'em, they're the only rock we have to cling to here. Kelly (who has a kid! Brandon's??) and Brenda are back, looking good and having nice conversations about nice things. I'm sure the show's depressingly young audience members were scratching their heads at these befuddling wrinkled people and their shorthand relationship with the camera, but it sure as hell beat the too-short, jump-cutty scenes of the youngs.

All told the show made me feel both giddy and sad. Giddy for jokes like Hannah Zuckerman-Vasquez (the little Latina Jewess does the news at West Bev!) and sad for blowjob and jerk-off jokes, espresso and trendy bands. My mom, sister, and I watched the original every Wednesday night for years and years. When I was younger it was the only television I was allowed to watch after 8pm. That may seem silly, but I have many fond memories of that slightly older time, and this new thing... this dreadful sunburn of a thing, just felt like a vague dismissal. "Here are those old things, batting around the periphery. See if you notice them. We're going to focus on the dull hardbodies in the meantime." I suppose nothing was owed to the show's old fans, it was free entertainment for so long, after all. But this new Beverly Hills just felt cheap and unfriendly; it had none of the glittery and warm and oddly wholesome allure of the old storied town. The whole place was a giant clothing store, stretching for miles and miles.

At one point in the episode a bunch of the characters were at The Pit, the trendy nightclub, drinking cocktails with cool teacher McGee in the background and oozing around the dance floor. I thought of the spring dance episode from the original—with its similar swirling lights and blue hues—where Brenda painstakingly weighs her options and finally decides to lose it to Dylan. How many months and years went into that one moment! And now I suspected these new kids had made that same decision somewhere between the bar and the bathroom. And, however naively, I wanted to click my heels and go all the way back—despite the current idiots milling about the place—to the safe and ancient Walsh-infested corners of dear old Minnesota.

I'm mad at Jerell who constantly looks like he's smelling something bad. Perhaps it's his own shatteringly unfunny self. I'm mad at Suede ("wackadoodle!") who just needs to shut the damn fuck up. At least he wasn't around much of last night's episode. I'm mad at Blayne for having a meth problem that makes him scratch his face all the time. Stop it Blayne! You're going to kill yourself! Also he did not know "what" Sgt. Pepper was, which made Tim Gunn sad. And he does not need more of that. Though kudos to Blayne for his soul-crushing joke about tanning and getting the bronze medal. That made my heart hurt in the right kind of way. Moving on.

I'm mad at Stella for crawling out from under her bridge or leaving the gypsy caravan long enough to audition for the show. I'm mad at buck-toothed McGee, even though she went home, for designing a uniform for the United States—FOR THE GODDAMNED OLYMPICS—that included NO RED, WHITE, OR BLUE. If that's not the most spectacularly stupid thing you've ever seen on this show, then I've missed something that you've seen. Because, damn. And Daniel... skinny little minnow that you are. Epic fail. Not epic fail? Michael Kors on your stupid, poorly made shitbox of a dress: "Where is she from? The Republic of Cocktail Land?" And later "If her event is drinking then it's a good dress." Withering, Korsy. Withering.

I guess I liked a few things. Kelli's outfit was adorable, as was Kerri's little boatsider ensemble. Stella's Space Mission to Mars Olympics 2100 outfit was fun to laugh at, as was Jerell's insane (crotch and otherwise!) be-hatted mishmash that looked exactly like this:

Korto shouldn't have won for her ill-fitting vest thing. The scepter should have gone to aww shucklesworth straight guy Joe, who rightly asserted that there were "too many queens" in America's gayest kitchen and later went on to design the only outfit that, ohhhh I don't know, correctly completed the challenge.

I don't really know what else to say. Apolo Anton Ohno looked good, I guess. My friend Sarah insisted that his face looks like a vagina. I heartily agreed. My friend Cathy said she hated Kenley's flowers in her hair (she is going to San Francisco, one assumes). Sarah agreed and said she would like to punch her. I scrawled in my notebook: "This season blows" and then I underlined that a few times. At some point during the whole blatant NBC Olympics tie-in of a clusterfuck Korto intoned: "We're back in high school. I just want to get to college." I know exactly what you mean, love. I know exactly what you mean.

"They told us we were gonna be famous, and I had a hell of a run for a while. I got a call from Playboy magazine, and I got a call from Maxim. I was on hold for a Playboy cover, but they did the Women of Starbucks instead." — Billie Jeanne Houle, Married By America

"But it wasn't tough to act gay. You just pretend that you feel about guys the way you feel about girls. You learn as you go and you watch how the gay men were acting and behaving and so forth, and you roll with the vibe of the situation. It's a deep Method acting experience." — Dan Wells, Boy Meets Boy

"[After the show] I holed up in an apartment in Santa Monica, and spent a lot of the money on marijuana and alcohol. I lived there with a girl who broke up with me. The next day I flushed a half ounce of pot down the toilet, packed my car, came home to Pittsburgh, and I got help. I haven't done drugs or alcohol for four years. Now I'm married with a new baby and a stepson. I work at a logistics company. Were things different, I would much rather be working in the entertainment business. I just went about it the wrong way." — Matt Kennedy Gould, Joe Schmo (in which he was the only actual contestant on a Big Brother-esque reality show—the rest were actors, setting him up for huge embarrassment)

We hear from gymnastics phenom Nadia Comaneci who... lives in Norman, Oklahoma. The also-limber Olga Korbut teaches dance in Scottsdale. Decathalete Bruce Jenner? Well, we know all about Bruce Jenner. He begat bulbous Hills mook Brody and is currently entangled with the odious Kardashian clan. Saddest of all, though, is Mary Decker-Slaney who had a tragic spill in the 1984 women's 3,000 meter event, which she was favored to win. Looking back she says weakly that maybe it was a good thing, because everyone will remember the lady who fell. Sigh. Though, at least she doesn't have to look at Kim Kardashian's big butt every stupid day.

Man, these folks must hate the figure skaters.

[Play]

Charles Steele, Jr., president of the SCLC, wrote an editorial which ran in several southern newspapers. The editorial was against upcoming legislation that would limit credit card fees—a bill favored by retailers (which would save money) but not by credit card companies (which would lose money in fees).

Here's the problem: Steele didn't write the editorial. A PR firm working for the credit card companies contracted a third party to write it, and it somehow got submitted to the papers without getting approved by Steele.

Fucked up, right? It's obviously a huge mistake by the PR firm. It makes the papers look foolish for running an editorial that the "author" hadn't even seen. And, of course, nobody wants to wake up one day and read something in the paper with their name on it that they've never seen.

But Steele and the SCLC aren't heroic in this. Check out their main complaint:

The [editorial that ran] reads: "The proposed law would boost the profits of Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney and Home Depot, but it would take money out of the pockets of the small businesses and consumers it's supposed to help."

Wal-Mart is listed on the SCLC's Web site as a sponsor of the organization. No one at the SCLC would want to insult a large benefactor.

It's not that the SCLC is too preoccupied with real civil rights issues; they're obviously known as a group-for-hire that various lobbies can sign on to support their various causes, in order to give them a sheen of support from the civil rights community. It's just that they didn't want to piss off Wal-Mart.

Let freedom ring.

[WP]

Deleted by 5WPR:

In July 2008, his firm 5WPR was proven to have impersonated critics of a client and to have made phony comments on a blog in other people's names. The firm at first denied the allegations, then blamed the phony comments on an intern it claimed was fired. It was soon proven that the phony comments were in fact made from the offices of 5WPR as well as from the home of a Senior Vice President for the firm named Juda Engelmayer. Engelmayer claimed that the alleged renegade intern operated from his home as well as the office without his knowledge. The coverup soon unraveled and Torossian issued a statement acknowledging his firm's unethical practices. At least one person who was impersonated by 5WPR has stated his intention to sue the firm. It remains to be seen whether any criminal charges can or will be brought against Engelmeyer, Torossian or anyone else at 5WPR. http://www.forward.com/articles/13759/

[via Failed Messiah]

"the empire struck back and laid me off. fuck the merc. fuck medianews. newspapers deserve to die. i left today with my at-at under my arm."

Flickr]