Thank you, Adam Sandler, for showing your peers how it's done: Quietly impregnate wife, wait nine months, post self-deprecating birth announcement on website, avoiding speculation that newborn is of alien or turkey-baster provenance. Is it really so hard?
The procreative drama unfolding within the proscenium arches of Britney Spears' uteral walls has kept much of the world guessing with giddy anticipation: Is the celebrity baby-dropper indeed with child, or merely experiencing some extended Twinkie-bulge? Would she, as IMDB notes, be making a definitive announcement on the contents of her belly today? And to further complicate nursery matter, In Touch Weekly, the world's most trusted authority on fishy-smelling Britney Spears stories, is reporting that Spears has painted a room in her mansion pink, and has added a new, full-time babysitter to the payroll. This one, however, is for her husband:
In this era of Angelina Jolie-instigated family-building tyranny, all celebrities are now forced to publicly consider (if not ultimately commit to) the adoption option, or suffer a public tarring as a privileged, callous enabler of Third World poverty and overpopulation. But even in the face of this pressure, Berry's interest seems half-hearted at best; while she seems to remove an initial contingency to her intentions by quickly acquiescing to a firmer commitment ("I will adopt if it doesn't happen for me naturally...I will definitely adopt. And I probably will adopt even if it does happen naturally."), she doesn't even bother to specify a suitably exotic ethnic background for her theoretical child. We'll believe she's not just cynically milking the idea for the publicity benefit when she announces her plan for voluntary sterilization, leaving herself no choice but to fill her empty home with the joyful cries Bengali street urchins.
Perhaps the single most debated Hollywood brainteaser since "Hey, what the hell happened to Helen Hunt?", the etymological origin and significance of the Cruise child's name, Suri, has been the focus of near Talmudic levels of scholarship in the days since her birthing. We therefore update our initial Suri analysis with an appendix:
Much like everything else regarding the arrival of the Miracle Baby, her name arrives swaddled in mystery. We can already recite by heart the "official" explanation as it appears in the People-exclusive scriptures: "Suri has its origins in Hebrew meaning 'princess,' or in Persian meaning 'red rose.'" But the Hebrew word for princess is "Sarah," not Suri. While we're still standing by our futuristic seafaring vessel name theory, here's a round-up of some of the others:
Any event as momentous as yesterday's Miracle Birth is sure to have its share of unanswered questions (for the moment, we're not talking about ones of parentage), and several readers found themselves instantly curious about a strange cameo in the AP story announcing the arrival of young Suri Cruise:
It's happened.
The Sunday NY Times delves into the preposterous waters of celebrity baby naming, and all of the greatest hits get mentioned: Penn Jillette's daughter Moxie CrimeFighter, Jason Lee's son Pilot Inspektor, and of course, the reigning dumb name champion, Apple Martin. (Curiously, however, Nicholas Cage's Kryptonian superspawn Kal-el gets nary a mention.) The article interprets the trend as something of an creative-heir insurance policy: that no matter how ordinary the kid ends up being, at least something about them will be special, just like their famous folks.
Perhaps caught up in the excitement from yesterday's Baby Spears High Chair Incident, the web-enabled stalkerazzi at TMZ.com brainstormed other celebrity-offspring-in-potential-danger scenarios, and having rejected items on Moses Paltrow's possible ingestion of day-old bangers and mash and Violet Affleck's theoretical exposure to the radioactive fallout from her father's career, decided to go with a story on what disaster might befall Angelina Jolie's unborn baby in Africa:
This week's New York magazine wades knee-deep into the Messiah-level anticipation accompanying the impending birth of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's forthcoming biological offspring, the perfect being expected to emerge from Jolie's womb, cut its own umbilical cord, and toddle off into the world to take care of the business of saving mankind. No one stands to profit more from the infant's arrival than the lucky paparazzo who first captures an image of the graced rugrat (assuming, of course, that the new parents don't sell the photo themselves and donate the money to their favorite charity), and one of the photographers plays out the "bleak scenario" that could unfold in the event of a Paris-based (where the couple now has an apartment) birth:
Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin set the stupid celebrity baby name bar absurdly high on their fruit-inspired first try, dooming their second child to disappointed shrugs and "Eh, it's not that bad" indifference. But Moses? Did they even try? We were kind of hoping they were going to stay with the inanimate-objects-in-the-kitchen theme and come up with something truly inspired, like Placemat or Four Slice Toaster.
We knew that the Jolie-instigated trend of very public celebrity adoptions of foreign orphans was on the steep decline to tragic unfashionability when fading actress/recreational cosmetic surgery enthusiast Meg Ryan picked up her Chinese daughter and decided that it was OK to rename her any time a more suitably adorable moniker crossed her mind, further establishing the accessorization of rescued babies all over Hollywood. But nothing should kill the craze more completely than the public admission by Jessica Simpson's flack that his client is "exploring options," perhaps in Mexico, for her own quickie-family-building needs. We expect that the first Life & Style photo spreads featuring Simpson spray painting her new baby pink to match her favorite pair of Ugg boots is no more than six months away.
The celebrity press frequently misreports Angelina Jolie's stomach tattoo as reading Quod me nutrit me destruit, Latin for "What nourishes me also destroys me." Through the magic of Defamer photo-enhancement technology, we can now reveal the actual text of the ink (shown above), representing Angelina Jolie's latest attempt to completely crush Jennifer Aniston. Jolie is also planning another visit to her tattoo artist, who will etch, "And if it's a boy, we're still calling it Jen, bitch!" on the other side of her belly.
The tabloid tug of war over the first Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt biological offspring has begun in earnest, with Life & Style and US Weekly each interpreting their purloined sonograms in their own special way. According to mediawhore sister Gawker, L&S is going vagina, while Us cries penis. Each outlet undoubtedly has impeccable sources close to the couple, so we're forced to conclude that they're both right, in their own way. Never in the history of human evolution have two more physically flawless specimens joined to create new life, so we expect that the little bundle of joy growing in Jolie's womb is merely unable to choose between feminine and masculine perfection at the moment, and won't pick a gender until his/her mother's final contraction forces a split-second, instinctual decision. We recommend that all well-wishers refrain from choosing between pink or blue gifts for the time being, as showing up with the "wrong" color could emotionally damage the infant by making it second-guess its choice.
The first glimpses of the product of Nicholas Cage and his sushi waitress bride Alice Kim's loins, Kal-el, have hit the internets, and we are thrilled to report the adorable little tyke has inherited none of his father's perpetually mopey features. Not moments after his delivery, the aptly named Kal-El Superman's Kryptonian name began showing superhuman signs, yanking off his own umbilical cord and flying directly out of the nurse's hands and onto his mother's nipple. Above, Kal-El is dressed for a Beverly Hills outing in his trademark baby blue costume (not pictured is a red diaper with yellow elastic trim); when mom got a little too friendly with the hostess at a local cafe, baby K used his newly discovered super breath to blow the chatty serviceperson away.
Lost in the excitement of yesterday afternoon's news that the flesh-and-blood union of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's exquisite genetics has a pretty good shot at aesthetic perfection was Jennifer Aniston's reaction to the news that her ex-husband had knocked up the woman who stole her husband with the promise of a welcoming womb. Aniston's flack labeled an earlier report that Pitt called to give her the heads-up about the baby "made-up lies," and the headline above makes us believe that there was a total breakdown in Aniston's emergency Jolie pregnancy warning system. The complex relay of pager alerts, e-mail blasts, and air-raid sirens intended to give the starlet enough lead time to stage a showy public display of affection with current publicity partner Vince Vaughn malfunctioned, denying her the chance to seem too lustfully consumed with her romance to bother to have a nervous breakdown about the surpisingly rapid impregnation of her rival.
Seeking professional confirmation about an issue seemingly so obvious as to defy all questioning, namely that the baby produced by ab-rolling Ken doll Brad Pitt and exotic freak of beauty Angelina Jolie has a pretty good shot at being pleasant to look at, the AP asked some doctors for their board-certified opinions:
Not that we didn't believe People and their double-"representative"-and-an-aid-worker sourced story from earlier today, but now that Pitt publicist Cindy Guagenti, whose job it is to creatively distort reality in accordance with her client's wishes, has copped to the knocking-up, we're feeling a little better about things. Strap yourselves in for two trimesters' worth of breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of every aspect of Jolie's pregnancy: two-page-spread analyses of her bump's visible development, stolen sonograms, and expert opinions on how the happy parents might best explain to Maddox and Zahara (and to all the other adoptation-ready infants of the world waiting for their turn at a Hollywood life) that just because Mommy and Daddy are making a baby of their own, they won't love them any less. Oh, the fun we're all going to have!
When two incredibly famous, incredibly good-looking movie stars engage in a mutually narcissistic, very-public-but-officially-denied love affair, and those two people have already crisscrossed the globe collecting adorable training-wheel orphans from which to cobble together a beautiful family, it's time for those movie stars to finally round out their brood with the product of their own maddeningly perfect genes. Yes, dear seekers, People now reports (double-sourced though both camps and through an aid worker in Santo Domingo, to boot) what everyone's been whispering about for weeks: that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are adding a Caucasian baby to their impossibly photogenic, Benetton-ad-quality clan via the quaint route of Jolie's own uterus. Somehow, though, we can't let ourselves be happy yet; the cutthroat glossies have punched ragged holes in our heart before with their exuberance to break these stories. Still, we're inclined to believe, and we sadly concede our office pool, in which we foolishly wagered that Pitt and Jolie would adopt Bengali and Inuit tykes before succumbing to the urge to go halfsies on their own offspring.
Lost star Naveen Andrews was born to an Indian family and raised in South London; at age 16, he ran off with his math teacher, Geraldone Feakins, who bore him a child in 1992; heroin and alcohol addiction in his 20s nearly killed him, only to see the actor sober up, land on a hit American TV series, and live happily ever after with the much older love of his life, girlfriend Barbara Hershey. Andrews appeared to have finally found some stability in his life. Only, not so much:
