Sex Assault Alleged at 'Real World' Home

This is what happens when people stop being polite.

10 Worst Toys

This almost sounds fake.

I think I would enjoy the Nickelodeon Gooze Soda Fountain. Wait, what's a Gooze? I'm not sure I would like any Gooze.

Note: I fixed this link.

Can't Be A Good Sign

I had one of the strangest linear dreams I've ever had last night. For the life of me, I can't piece together where the disperate elements came from. One more reminder that the brain is a miraculous thing, and also, that I am very strange.

Mel Gibson's Icon Productions had their offices downstairs in our house. We were lying in bed and Mel came in to tell us he was about to hold auditions for a movie he was doing. The movie was a biopic about the life of Charles Nelson-Reiley. "Of course," I said, because it made a lot of sense to me. In fact, why hadn't there been a CN-R movie already? The doorbell rang and Mel went to let in the first actor to try out. It was Robin Williams. Mel went downstairs to set up the video camera and Robin came in to run through his monologue in our bedroom, so we could give him some feedback because he was a little nervous. He proceeded to put on a long curly black Captain Hook wig, and do his monologue. But for some reason Robin Williams chose to play Charles Nelson-Reiley with a faux-Italian accent. When he was done I told him I didn't really understand the accent choice, but he was already committed to it.

Disheveled Courtney Love Pleads Not Guilty

My eyes! My eyes!

Christian Slater Needs Stitches After Fight with Wife

"I fell. It was my fault. She was just trying to correct my behavior. I love her. I'm bad. I'm bad!"

Sometimes It's All I Have

Funny conversation I had in my head yesterday:

"Would you like to see Love Actually?"

"No, actually."

Please. Just. Stop.

Hey, remember that day about a year and a half ago when we all, on a collective subconscious level, agreed to stop using, "yo" at the end of sentences. "I'm having a good week, yo."

Well, I would like to put forth another such request: that we agree, today, right now, to stop using one word sentences to demonstrate that we really, really mean something. "Such. An. Asshole." "Oh. My. God." "Worst. Day. Ever."

Thank you. That would be awesome.

ps: And while we're at it, can we stop the "Worst Blank Ever" thing, whether the words be separated by periods or not? I'd really appreciate it, yo.

Despair, Inc.

I got a catalogue in the mail from these people recently. I know what I'm buying everyone for Christmas this year.

Teach A Man To Fish, He'll Eat For A Day. Teach Him How To Sue, And He'll Eat Forever!

The band Arrested Development is suing the Fox show Arrested Development.

Help me understand my plan.

Via Kim.

Yahoo News: Minnie Driver May Harm Cambodia

I've been saying that for years.

See My Gold Caddy. Touch My Walking Stick.

A couple of friends to pimp today:

When I was growing up, I was friends with a kid named Tom Shimura. We used to bike around the neighborhood and watch cartoons and do normal kid stuff. As we got a little older, we started buying 12" hip hop records and listening to them in my room. There was a radio station in neighboring El Cerrito at the high school that played all hip hop and we'd lie on my floor and call the show, requesting "Bite It" or "Veronica Veronica."

Flash forward a decade and a half. Tom Shimura has, for a while now, been at the forefront of Bay Area hip hop -- and I've been quietly watching from the sidelines. As half of Latryx, Lyrics Born (Tom) has created a laid-back, experimental, no-bitches-and-hos style that, along with his label, Quannum Projects, has helped to spurn a revolution in California hip hop, running parallel to, and hopefully soon to pass, the "Throw Your Guns In The Air" bullshit.

Tom has recently come out with a solo album that is quietly becoming one of the most heralded of the year. So if you like good hip hop, if you like Jurassic 5 and Outkast, if you like dancing or trying to figure out a complex rhyme scheme, wondering, "Goddamn, how does homeboy swing like a fucking saxaphone?", you must buy Later That Day, by Lyrics Born. Word.

Secondly,

My good friend Shana Carroll, daughter of columnist Jon, has been a trapezist with Cirque Du Soleil for about ten years. Recently, she and her new husband, along with 5 friends, have "graduated" from the Cirque and are striking out on their own, forming a new company, and they will soon be playing SAN FRANCISCO. They're called... Well, I'm just going to let her say it:

"As i think most of you know, i have spent the last fifteen years of my life doing this zany circus thing, cavorting around the globe and flying through the air and all that, and, as I think only some of you know, settled down a little less than two years ago in montreal and formed my very own circus company with a group of friends. we are very proud of it; it is the only one of its kind, a collective, seven founders who serve as performers and creators of the show as well as directors of the company, a multi-media melange of circus dance and theatre, intimate and quirky and sensuous and clever and human yet world class circus skills etc etc (i'm quoting from our press release here). ANYWAY, we will be making our U.S. premiere this december and are doing so in san francisco! i am thrilled to bring this brand new show to my (nearly) home town, especially since, in my career as a trapeze artist, i have not been able to perform in the bay area since my pickle days (13 years ago).

the company is called Les 7 Doigts de la Main, but in the states we will be going under the title the 7 Fingers. you can check out our web site. we are performing at the palace of fine arts from december 17th to january 3rd. tickets are on sale at cityboxoffice.com. excellent group rates available for groups of ten or more. the tickets are reasonably priced! no religious ambiguity or boring sugar plum scenes! equipped with DJ, bathtub, refrigerator, video projections, and lots of stuff off the ground and upside down!

so i invite you to come check us out and tell several hundred friends. this is the first letter of this kind i have ever written (cirque du soleil doesn't exactly need guerilla publicity), but i promise you it will be worth your ticket price, bridge toll and airfare combined."

I Forgot To Add

To the Hate list:

Horatio Sanz. The man doesn't even try.
The Fox NFL guys for declaring a QB controversy in San Francisco during the first half of Rattay's first ever game in replacement of Garcia.

To balance, here's the Love list:

Outkast's Big Boi3000
Jonathan Lethem's book "The Fortress of Solitude"
Grandaddy's "Sumday"
My cat Olive
The Travel Channel's World Poker Tour
LA's sudden cold, rainy weather

At Least The Fire Is Out

Thing/people who are bugging stee right now:

The Save Karyn girl
Deion Sanders on the NFL pre-show
The supermarket checkers’ strike
Allergies

…This weekend we had a Halloween party. Well, I had a Halloween party. No one else wanted me to have one, including the woman I live with, but I spent so many years bugging my friends with houses to have parties, that now that I live in one, I sort of feel like it’s my duty to provide people with a place to hang out. So I bought booze and food and candy. Tons of candy. I even went out the day of and bought more candy, because I didn’t want to face the problem of last year when we learned that we’re in one of those neighborhoods where people drive their kids to Trick or Treat. Which is fine with me. However. Word must be getting out on some Craig’s List of Good Neighborhoods to Panhandle Candy because despite the fact that it was pouring rain, we ran out of candy in about two hours. Now, it’s no secret in my circles that I love candy. I’m the sort to arrive at a poker game with beer, maybe a cigarette for a break (I’ve turned into a not-really-but-sometimes-on-the-weekends smoker, which works for me so don’t show me any thetruth.com ads about how that’s not really possible), and a pack of Skittles. (Which I did on Saturday night.) So part of my buying 18 bags of candy was to ensure that I would get a few Bite Sized Butterfingers at the end of the night. But as it turned out, the kids had some sort of meter hooked up to our candy bowl—because the minute we ran out, they stopped coming. The little bastards timed it perfectly. So all I got were a couple measly caramels. Lame.

As a kid, I was the one who actually saved a few candy bars, trying to make them last all year. Pretty fucking nasty when it’s August and you’re eating a hard candy corn and a Baby Ruth from under your bed, but it worked for me. The notion then that you could just buy candy whenever you wanted from a store, year ‘round, was great, but it somehow always tasted better from that big bag in early November. I thought my friend Ben was the unluckiest kid in the world when I learned his parents would take away his entire bag of candy and dole a few bars out, throwing the rest away. How terrible is that? I remember feeling very bad for him… but not bad enough to share.

Because I decided what to dress as early, I made the theme of the party to fit my costume. It was “Famous Losers”—picked by Pamie. She was Courtney Love, bedecked with prescription pill bottles and lace. I went was Steve Bartman—the fan who kept the Cubs out of the World Series. Now, I know it turned out to be a hugely popular choice (second probably to Roy with a white tiger attached to his neck) but in my defense, I came up with it The Day After the game. I realized how popular it was when I tried to find a Cubs hat, and came up dry after going to about 10 stores. “Everyone has been asking for Cubs hats. It’s weird,” said the Big 5 guy in Burbank. Thanks, dude. And no, for the ninth time, I do not want an Arizona Diamondbacks cap. Five hours of driving around later, I bought a blank blue cap and ended up making a red and white Cubs “C” out of paper and having my girlfriend sew it on. Not ideal, but it worked. And when I put the green turtleneck and black sweatshirt and cap and glasses and headphones on, I really sort of looked like the dude. A little too much. I freaked Pamie out by asking her to “touch my ball.” Looking in the mirror, I gained a huge amount of sympathy for the poor dude. And then also for me.

At the party we pulled out all three TV’s and had horror movies playing silently on all of them. People came as everything from Bonnie and Clyde to Gallagher (and Gallagher 2!) to Perry Mason’s rival, who only won one case during the entire run of the show. The best pun-ny use of the “Famous Losers” theme was Shereen who came as “Little Bo Peep.” Hee.

…And in the Department of “No Shit, Hollywood People Are Sleazy!”—at the party, I learned a terribly upsetting piece of news. There is a producer/exec I’ve worked with before, who recently called me to ask about a script I wrote years ago, to see if it was still available. He joined a new company and they needed product. So I did some notes on how I’d change the script based on some ideas he had, and then waited. And he never got back to me. Too busy. Etc. So anyway, apparently he took a meeting recently with a writer I know, and gave him my script, intimating that this is a script they might buy, and would need someone to rewrite! In other words, he doesn’t even own my script yet, but already has decided he wants someone else to do the revisions. All together now: I fucking hate this town sometimes. He didn’t count on that information getting back to me. Oops. So now if he calls to buy the thing, knowing he’s planning on kicking me off the project anyway, I get to say, “Um… no!”

…The TV show I’m writing is nearly done. I turned my draft in to the producers last week, and soon I’ll get their notes before we hand it into the network. While I have no idea how they’ll react to it, I found it surprisingly easy and fun to write. Not only is it half a film script in length, but I was taken through so many rounds of notes on my outline, that by the time I sat down to write it, I knew every single tiny scene, including random pieces of dialogue. So: TV is easy! Unless, of course, they don’t like it, and then, it’s not.

…Speaking of Ben of the parents stealing his candy: I learned this weekend that Ben’s wife Darcie, who he married nine weeks ago, is eight weeks pregnant! Way to waste no time, buddy.

…Last night we had an Indiana Jones trilogy film festival. It lasted from 4:30 to midnight. I think Kate Capshaw’s performance in the second film may be the worst performance ever captured on celluloid. Watch it again if you think I’m wrong. Watch her running around the castle bedroom waiting for Indy to come fuck her. Watch her squealing about the bugs. Watch someone with no comedic timing or physical grace be relied on to provide the comic relief for the hundredth time. And then tell me I’m wrong.

Ashley Judd Deals With Stress by Baking

Just thought you needed to know.