In the spirit of service journalism (and sisterhood, dammit) we're happy to provide you with the official mailing address for rapper Lil' Kim, who was recently incarcerated for perjury. Please ready your care packages and send them to the following address:
Bleary-eyed, head pounding, we rise to face another grim day.
• Esquire's geeky guinea pig A.J. Jacobs wikis the shit out of himself and his publication. Book deal TK. [News.com]
• Does South Beach need its own Bret East Ellis? And will someone please step up to the plate besides Wenner Media's Gwen Cooper? [MNT]
• If the impossibly adorable Mandy Moore is, in fact, in Silver Hill for rehab, then we're throwing in the towel. We simply cannot save these people, no matter how hard we try. [Bricks and Stones]
• New York gets movie-script level edgy. [NYP]
• That bastion of high design, Fox News, is hiring a new graphic design guru. Live the dream, young conservative art fags. [Craigslist]
• High Times Stony Awards is, none too surprisingly, more entertaining, snack-filled than the Oscars. [The Reeler]
• Us Weekly editor Janice Min is after your kids. It was inevitable, really. [Radar]
The long arm of the law has no mercy when it comes to Sandra Catena. The 47-year-old dance instructor learned that the hard way while daring to sit on a bench at the Rivington Playground. She was approached by two officers asking if she had any children with her; when she told them no, she was served with a convenient little ticket. Apparently, it's illegal for an adult to sit on a playground bench unless with children, and now Catena is looking at a $1000 fine and up to 90 days in jail.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out it wasn't so much the baby Jesus's intervention that saved the God-loving hostage who talked the Atlanta courthouse killer into releasing her.
• Tom Cruise has studied the history of psychiatry, and now he's going to speak about it at the Scientology Center in Los Angeles. Don't even think about going if you're going to be glib. Update: Apparently, the whole thing is a hoax, and our bullshit radar was malfunctioning. Nevertheless, we do maintain that Cruise will kill psychiatry with his bare hands. [Pressbox]
• Oh, how we love those crazy SanFran lefties. [Flickr]
• Park Slope is edgy, too. But to a fault. [NY1]
• Ben Affleck considers running for the Senate, and suddenly Montreal is looking really nice. [Defamer]
• As it turns out, iguanas are illegal to keep as pets in NYC, as are all non-human primates. That's bad news for Maer Roshan's boyfriend. [Gothamist]
What would it take to crown the biggest scumbag in Hollywood history? It would seem a task of Sisyphean dimensions; a single floor of any Century City highrise at any given moment could provide a handful of deserving candidates at least. So again what would it take? How about a guy who ahem, allegedly fleeces $5.5 million dollars mostly from churchgoers like "Rosa Valdez, a widow who invested almost $100,000 through her pastor at Desert Bloom Ministries church in Whittier," in exchange for the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a very make-believe "riveting television series based on the newly created U.S. Department of Homeland Security."
• Odds of Kate Moss being arrested for possession of cocaine: 4/5. We've no idea what that means, exactly, but it sure sounds stupid. [Oddjack]
• The LES Starbucks is off to a slow start. [Curbed]
• The kind of bar tab that dreams are made of. Dreams and vomit. And debt. [Young Manhattanite]
• NYC, EDGY as ever — maybe a bit too much so at this point. [Daily News]
• You know what Katrina victims need? A decent lapdance. [Sky]
• An update from the 92nd Street Y: No bomb scare, just a smoke alarm going off.
Oh, thank God. Things were almost quiet there for a second, and we thought we might have to abandon that whole NYC IS EDGY thing. We'll extend to Queens if it means we get to wear our Baseball Furies costumes for a few more days.
After nearly four months, Kuffs is finally back on the beat: Actor Christian Slater, arrested in late May for "forcibly touching" an older woman after a night-long bender famously centered around Brother Jimmy's frat-boy blues bar at 93rd and 3rd, is a free man. During a pretrial hearing, a judge dismissed the charges provided that Slater stay out of trouble for the next six months. This means no gleaming of the cube, no ass-grabbing, no poisoning cheerleaders, and certainly no Lohan. So, you know, no career, really.
A tipster reports:
• Ornery actor Russell Crowe looks into starting a job-training program for Australian prisons similar to that on Rikers Island. If Crowe is tried and sentenced for an "incident" in which assaulted a Mercer Hotel employee with a phone, we're sure this sort of activism will keep him safe from forced ass-fucking. [Page Six]
• The residences at 740 Park Avenue are so gilded, not even Barbra Streisand scored approval from the co-op board. [R&M]
• In Eddie Hayes' memoir, the litigator notes that the infamous Vogue editor is "physically incompetent." Great news for assistants who bruise easily. [Page Six]
• Meanwhile, Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley notes on Oprah that "Miss Anna don't like fat people." Big secret there. [Lowdown]
• Actress Catherine Zeta-Jones refuses a Fashion Week jeweler's gift — $50,000 ring — presumably because it didn't match her noticeably larger breasts. [Gatecrasher]
• Paris Hilton sleeps a little more soundly at night knowing that a teen has been sentenced for the hacking of her Sidekick. And so the infotainment industry exhales and Senator Durbin gets his much-needed closure. [eWEEK]
• Beyoncé pulls a David Pogue on Jay-Z. [Cityrag]
• NYC ranks as the most expensive rental market in America. We're number one! Thank you, Barbara CorcoDevil! [Forbes]
• Renée Zellwegger cites "fraud" as the reason behind her split from country singer Kenny Chesney. Huh? Did he trick her into thinking he loved her or something? [A Socialite's Life]
• Who can ever recall the name of Brooklyn's hip new band? [McSweeney's]
• Jonathan Safran Foer and Elijah Wood are extremely precocious and incredibly similar. [Radar]
• None too surprisingly, some of Fashion Week's best is far from the tents. [VV]
There's apparently a new crime wave in Manhattan, and — we kid you not — it's targeting Vitamin Shoppe superstores. Reports the Sun:
How strong is your stomach this morning? Feeling hearty? We hope so, because we've got the full complaint filed against Us Weekly staffer Timothy McDarrah, who was arrested Wednesday night for soliciting sex with a minor via Craigslist. The 10-page federal document is full of tender offers of sex lessons, golden showers, and a strange new technique of slapping one's face with a penis. McDarrah's desire for a "YOUNG hottie" just three years older than his own son is only readable so long as you remember that McDarrah was engaging in said talk (often from his office) with a federal agent and not, thank God, an actual child.
Fridays, as we all know, are for job hunting, which makes the employment troughs at Mediabistro all the more enjoyable. Today, "bespoke celebrity news agency" (we thought only Saville Row suits were "bespoke," but whatever) Viva Press is looking for some new talent:
Yesterday's statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office said that Timothy McDarrah, the Us Weekly editor arrested for soliciting a minor for sex, was snared by the FBI in a Craigslist sting has at least one emailer concerned:
