While abroad in South Africa, Katie Bryan thought she could get away with downloading a Neil Diamond album on her phone while also staying under her roaming bandwidth. Not so!, says her cell phone provider and monster Neil Diamond haters, Orange. Bryan was hit with a £2600 charge and she doesn't even like him that much.
Just like the "Kentucky Woman" Neil Diamond sang about, Melissa Harvick "shines with her own kind of light," you could say. Earlier this week, Harvick appeared at a family court hearing as the defendant in a dispute with her husband, who had filed a domestic violence order against her. While her husband tried to explain his side of the story to the presiding judge, Harvick allegedly interrupted him and wouldn't stop talking. This prompted the judge to sentence Harvick to ten days in jail for contempt of court. The jail sentence did not please Harvick very much, as you will soon come to understand by watching the video above.
Law & Order's Mariska Hargitay turns 45 today. Developer Bruce Ratner is turning 64. Broadway heir James L. Nederlander Jr. is 49. Citigroup investment banking chief (and Obama BFF) Raymond McGuire turns 52. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen is 35. Legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau is 81. And Princess Caroline of Monaco is turning 52. Weekend birthdays after the jump!
Fresh off its intellectualization of The Hills, the New Yorker has turned its attention to this American Idol phenomenon that is so big with the kids (and their parents... and their grandparents). And, hey, guess what America? You can stop text-messaging your votes to the show because it doesn't really matter who wins! What matters is that Americans are learning very important things about music. For example, wrote New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, Idol contestant David Archuleta's awful rendition of "Sweet Caroline" taught us to finally respect singer-songwriter Neil Diamond:
Godless Gothamites, meet GodTube, which according to the Times was the Web's fastest-growing site when unveiled in August and which just garnered a $30 million hedge fund investment. It's sort of like YouTube, except all videos are pre-screened by site operators in Plano, Texas; you can't promote religions other than Christianity and you can't mock Christianity, which makes sense since "God" is obviously synonymous with "Christian God" (*cough*). The whole operation is of course destined to implode when the new hedge fund investors push for less censorship to goose traffic and ads for items a bit more risque than "Bible software and degrees from online universities," but in the meantime enjoy this GodTube clip of a man "caught" looking at porn by Jesus. (In the interest of religous plurality I did run a seach for "porn" on JewTube and the only hits remotely responsive included one titled "Neil Diamond And Carol Burnett", which I refuse to watch, and this video of two Jewish supermodels in bikinis backed by a Biggie Smalls song.)
