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Date archive for: November 2010

Fame and (Mis)Fortune

School’s out, wizards! After a decade of playing Hogwarts students, the cast of the Harry Potter movies has finally graduated. Part I of the final film installment hit screens last week, and Part II is set for a July release.

Stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint are said to have shed tears on the last day of filming. But Tom Felton, who’s played Potter’s pale nemesis Draco Malfoy all these years, is relieved to finally step off of the set where he quite literally grew up.

Movie stardom has drawbacks, Felton told Britain’s Daily Mail: Schoolmates teased him. He was contractually bound to avoid the sun for 10 years. And heaps of money — combined with teenage naïveté — got him into trouble with the tax man.

“One thing that people [say] to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood,” said Felton, who dismisses the idea as ridiculous. “You will never get those years back, and you can’t put a price on them.”

Indeed, young stardom is a precarious state of being. Some actors, like Natalie Portman and Neil Patrick Harris, spin early fame into brilliant careers; others, like Lindsay Lohan and Corey Haim, spin out of control before they’re even old enough to legally see their own R-rated flicks.

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Vajazzling Is Befuddling

I live to sparkle. To glimmer. To gleam. Blame it on my name, or too many formative hours spent draping Barbie in disco lamé (that’s lah-MAY, which, for the record, is the distinct shimmering opposite of “lame”). Whatever the cause, the result is that I wear sequined sneakers, carry a rhinestone-peppered purse, and shot a titanium stud through my nostril so I could have permanent bling on my face.

I’m a chick who likes to twinkle, okay? But I draw the line at gilding the lily.

A scintillating new trend in girly grooming has some gals (let’s call them “adventurous”) bedecking their vajannies with jewels. That’s right. Paving the privates with stick-on gems in custom designs: heart, starburst, fleur-de-lis.

More resplendent than the downtown display itself is the fun-to-utter name of this privates practice: It’s called vajazzling. And some celebs find it va-dazzling. D-lister Kathy Griffin, Snooki from Jersey Shore, and Jennifer Love Hewitt are all stuck on the habit like diamonds on a … well, you get the idea.

New York City’s Completely Bare salon takes credit for originating the craze, and the name — a riff on the Bedazzler, that infomercial-hawked craft tool used to fasten decorative studs to clothing.

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AWESOME PARTY!

Spewing bright purple blobs of thanks for Rori Trovato, Kate Schwab, Grant McKee, Helene Schneider, Julie Ramos, Paula Lopez Ochoa, Jen Malkin at the Independent, Kalai Kennedy, Jeannine’s bakery, John “The Wizard” Roshell and all the friends and fans who came out to make it fun and delicious! BOOK IS IN…


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Happy Meals lose weight

San Francisco supes, where ya been all my life?

In a landslide vote last week, Fog City’s board of Supervisors made it illegal for fast-food eateries to include toys in kiddie meals that fall below reasonable nutrition standards. No more can the area’s burger mills market high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium food to children with the promise of a plastic, princess-shaped choking hazard in every grease-stained sack.

It was a bold move, to be sure — a move undertaken to deflate ballooning childhood obesity rates, and a move that left the Happy MealTM-hawking McDonald’s corporation understandably unHappyTM.

But I, for one, applaud it.

Oh, I know your new law will be ridiculed. I know loud-howling liberty-lovers will call your “eat this, not that” edict an audacious obstruction of free enterprise and a bass-ackward Band-Aid of a solution to a staggeringly complex socio-economic problem. Also, let’s face it, the crap food is still being served at irresistibly low prices, and this is exactly the sort of chop-off-our-hands-to-keep-us-from-harming-ourselves legislation that makes us liberals seem so frighteningly stupid.

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Love Among the Stars

We’ve all got a dirty little secret. A vulgar habit. A nasty pastime we strive to hide from others. Because if the world knew of our crude obsession, we’d be mocked. And rightly so.

I grapple with my secret as I stand in line at the supermarket check-out, trying fruitlessly to resist its seductive call. No, it’s not the king-size bar of Milky Way Midnight Dark. Not the carcinogenic carton of Camel no-filters.

My vice is fueled by the front of a glossy gossip magazine brandishing words on which no intelligent person should find herself fixating: Courteney Cox and David Arquette split!

Let me be clear. I don’t like either one of these actors. I neither admire nor relate to them and might very well turn down an invitation to join them for tapas. And I love tapas.

Yet I feel compelled to know that the couple is ending their marriage after — apologies in advance — not having had intercourse for several months.

Why do I need this information? I don’t know. It embarrasses me that I care about celebrities’ love lives, but I can’t look away. I must know if Jake Gyllenhaal has fallen for Taylor Swift! I must know why Bradley Whitford and Jane Kaczmarek divorced after 17 years! I must know what movies Shia LaBeouf and Carey Mulligan watch on stay-at-home-date-nights! (I must try to try to find celebrity examples whose names are easier to spell … )

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