WMD and Nick and Jessica's marriage

What are . . . things that do not really exist, despite repeated assurances from official sources!


The NYTimes (via Gawker) breaks the news: the Newlyweds have been pulling a Cheney on us and promising that there was definitely, for sure a very real marriage that we would find if we just bought the DVD and watched their Christmas specials. Now, however, it appears that the strip club visits and the missing wedding rings were not marriage-related program activities at all, but just the tumbleweed blowing across the empty missile silo of their long-abandoned vows.

We might feel all chastened and wise for now, but can we trust we won't make the same mistake again? Even now, are we giving the inspectors enough time to do their job--or are we rushing to judgment on Demishton, on Brangelina, on TomKat? O America, when will we ever learn?

"They were all hungry": The Chris Klein Is Kidding Hypothesis

Normally I wouldn't spend more than a few minutes thinking about Katie Holmes' cast-off B-list Poor-Man's-Keanu-Reeves ex-boyfriend. However, in one of those weird collision-of-separate-lives incidents, the Chris Klein interview I blogged* about earlier this week showed up in an Elle magazine that existed in physical form in my very own bathroom. Small world, huh!?!!

Anyway, since I was a captive audience, I read the whole thing, and upon doing so I got the sneaking suspicion that Klein's whole "I'm A Big Asshole" thing might be a meta-joke of sorts. So you can judge by yourself, here is some more of the interview:

Q: Is there a dish that you prepare to impress women?
A: I don't need to impress, man . . . At the end of the day,
she's cooking the food.

Q: What's the one thing you could tell a woman to convince her that
you aren't Paul, the thick jock you played in Election?
A: "Hello." . . . You start making eyes across the room. Right then it's
not a Paul Metzler situation. It's a predator-prey situation.

Q: There's a lot on the web about you being a devout Christian.
A: That's because I went to Texas Christian University . . . The
ratio at TCU was three women to one man. It's an expensive
school, full of daddy's little girls. I liked it when they called me Daddy. And they did, too, because they were all hungry.

(Emphases added in case you don't feel like reading that much.)

"They were all hungry." I mean, gracious. It isn't really possible that one fairly bland-seeming individual could pack so many forehead-slappers into a single interview unless he was trying really hard, is it? Or is this one of those things that shows I've been living in a blue state (OK, fake state) for long enough that I've gotten stupid and fooled myself into thinking that people are basically reasonable? Is Chris Klein trying to tell me to leave DC?

Just one more mystery to ponder in the midst of your turkey/trytophan stupor tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving!

*Omigod, I used blog as a verb! Welcome to the 21st century, self!

Katie Holmes: lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous

News about Katie Holmes has become so bizarre that it seems impossible to link the pieces together into any kind of coherent narrative. Thus, I will just update you on the relevant information, and allow you to form your own Rohrschact-esque impressions of it.

Katie's ex-fiance, Chris Klein, who previously seemed like the good guy who got away, turns out to be a massive asswipe, telling a magazine he's an "alpha heterosexual" who won't put up with his girlfriends gaining weight: "I'm not tolerant of that at all . . . When a woman isn't feeling good about herself and you combine that with her period, eventually she'll ask you if you like her body. You have to say no."

Tom bought Katie a $20 million jet as a wedding pressent.

Katie has decided to quit acting to stay home and raise her Cruise spawn.

Finally, Katie got kicked out of a movie theater because she was disturbing other movie-goers by holding a vibrating mechanism to her stomach, in an effort to soothe said spawn.

The all-purpose Rosemary's Baby explanation helps some, but even it fails on the jet front. This is a complicated case, Maude. I'll let you know when I manage to sort it all out.

(This very strange picture comes from here).

A fake anonymity is the hobgoblin of scared bloggers

The outing and subsequent disappearance of Article III Groupie has spawned a mini-boom in blogging about the impossibility of anonymous blogging.

But enough about other people, let's talk about me! It is extremely obvious that I'm not really anonymous--probably 90% of you know who I am because I told you, I give out personal information like candy to a baby, and until recently any obnoxious self-promotional emailing I did was from my regular email address. (No more, though! T&A Lady has her own email address! Woo hoo!)

Anyhow, the real question is, Why am I fake-anonymous? The answer is that I have some vague fear that I would get fired if I wasn't. Why? I don't know really, but it seems like this has happened to other people for somewhat difficult-to-discern reasons.

Of course I would expect to get booted if I were, say, working for a Republican Senator and blogging on my work computer about prostituting myself to high-ranking Administration officials, a la Jessica Cutler, or dissing my employer by name, like this ex-Google employee.

However, what's up with, for instance, Nadine Haobsh, who tried to console herself for the uneven distrubution of vowels in her last name and the fact that she was working as a beauty editor at Ladies' Home Journal by anonyblogging about celebrity gossip and such as Jolie in NYC? Everything was going swimmingly for her, and she had even been offered another job at Seventeen Magazine, until her identity was revealed, at which point she lost both jobs in one fell swoop. Her mistake, apparently, was revealing such earth-shattering information as the fact that her boss got free stuff from Marc Jacobs. The horror!

Admittedly some bloggers, like Harold Bashman and The Union Lawyer, blog with the full knowledge of their employers. But given that I am neither brave nor my own boss, is it really feasible to ask my boss if there's a policy on blogging? What's a vaguely scared, fake-anonymous blogger to do?

PSA: Do not store contraband in your glove compartment

EDITED TO SAY: You might want to disregard the text of this post and just read the comments!

It's not like popular music has never given the youth of America incorrect information before. For instance, it is not true that love is all we need, nor that young girls should taste like brown sugar.

However, today's news that a member of 2 Live Crew is suing Jay-Z over the song "99 Problems" turned my attention to that problematic ditty. Ever since it came out this song has really bugged, because its inaccuracies might result in something worse than a lifetime of disappointing romantic encounters, namely Serious Trouble With Da Law.

So it's time for a Public Service Announcement. Readers: Your drugs and weapons are not safe in the glove compartment of your car, even if it's locked!*

To refresh your memory, here, in relevant part, is what Jay-Z tells us about 4th Amendment jurisprudence (whilst recalling a traffic stop from his past):

"Do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so is the trunk in the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack are some type
of lawyer or something?"
"Or somebody important or somethin?"
Nah I ain't pass the bar but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my shit

Now, it's true that the Constitution generally bars warrantless searches, so in general you can say no if the cops ask if they can serach your car. However, that's kind of like saying that in general the sky is blue, so there's no need to own an umbrella, or that in general human beings are kind, so you can trust strangers.

In practice, if cops can come up with a reason why they're nervous that you might have a weapon or something, even if they don't have enough reason to arrest you they can still frisk you and search your immedate vicinity, which means your glove compartment if you're in your car, and the lock is not really going to be a big impediment, I don't think. Here's an example that's not exactly what happened to Jay-Z, but close enough.

Here ends this educational interruption . . . tomorrow we will return to our regular programming.

*I'm kind of getting into footnotes here, aren't I? This one is to say: I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about here, so if any of you do and would like to correct me or elaborate, please comment away or email me!

Tom Cruise, A3G, and the value of not showing too much

Last week, Tom Cruise announced that he was ditching Lee Anne DeVette, his sister/publicist, whose reign has coincided with TC's infamous recent bout of Brooke-Shields-dissing, Oprah's-couch-jumping, Scientology-hyping, and Katie-Holmes-brainwashing-and-impregnating. Presumably this means we can expect Tom to start to act more like a sane person, and that after a couple of months we with our teeny attention spans will have forgotten all about his looney tunes era altogether.

In another development, today Article III Groupie, the quasi-official gossip blogger of the federal judiciary, outed herself (or was outed) as David Lat, a prosecutor from New Jersey.* While I am all about the smackdown of people like these commenters, who called the information "yucky" and "disturbing," I definitely agree that knowing A3G is a fresh-faced man who puts drug users in the hoosgaw instead of the fabulous drunken Miss Hannigan-type character I'd imagined is quite a let-down.**

So what can we learn from these two seemingly unrelated events? Let me relate to you a little lesson I learned as a youth. When I was in high school (OK, middle school). I had a little phase in which I liked Skid Row and considered myself something of a rebel, and thus I used to sometimes wear somewhat scanty outfits. My wise father would address the issue by saying, "Aren't you going to be cold in that?," by which he clearly meant, "Stop dressing like a little tramp." It's too bad my dad wasn't around to gently berate Tom Cruise and A3G before they started showing their metaphorical titties all over town!

*Following the release of this information, Article III Groupie's blog, Underneath Their Robes, got all mysteriously password-protected, which seems to perhaps suggest that the outing has had some ill effect on the blog, and more importantly means my link is kind of useless. In lieu of that, here's what Wonkette had to say about it, and you can read a bunch of legally-tinged info about it on How Appealing.)

**True, when I first realized A3G was a conservative, I went through a period of mourning, but I have since gotten over it. After all, Miss Hannigan was a sadist who abused orphans, but she was still pretty awesome.

California

Greetings!! I apologize for my many recent absences, but now that my long period of unemployment and computer-avoidance is ending, I expect I will be back in full force from now on.

So Mr. T&A and I just got back from a vacation in the great state of California. Although I've spent very little time there, I have always been somewhat annoyed with the idea of California. This annoyance is based primarily on the Midwestern idea that cold weather builds character and thus that Californians, living (one imagines) in constant sunshine, must be a weak and silly people.

Well, our trip confirmed that California is a strange place, but not in quite the way I thought. In fact, I really have no idea what to think. Here are just a few select events that occurred on our trip; perhaps you can help me to understand them:

One: At the Hearst Castle, we had The Angriest Tour Guide In the World. When someone asked about some lavish-boarding-on-extremely-trashy elements of the house, he said, "You know what you're doing? You're bringing down the hill ethics up the hill. When you look up at your ceiling, do you see 24-carat gold plating? DO you? No, you DON'T." He also seemed to be making fun of some Japanese tourists for not speaking English.

Two: At a German restaurant, a waiter put plastic dog poop on the plate containing our dessert. And then laughed uproariously. And then told us that in Japan, women eat vegan food for months and then eat their own poop. And then said, "Am I freaking you out?"

Finally: After days of reading about Jennifer Aniston's media appearances, I had a dream that she and I were preparing for a fashion show that was going to take place at my high school. We were at a thrift store looking for purses to give the show's participants as gifts. She asked me if I had seen Angie, by which she meant Angelina Jolie, and I had seen her with Brad Pitt but I told Jennifer I hadn't because I didn't want her to be upset. Then Jen said to me, "Well, if you see her, tell her and her new boyfriend hi for me." I nearly wept because I was so touched at the goodness of her heart.

California, you land of milk, honey, sunshine, and plastic poo, thanks for the memories.