Desperate Lohan Selling Gay Story? [Celebrity Science]

"Insiders told Page Six that Lohan and OK! are in talks to do a cover where Lohan 'comes out' about her relationship with gal pal Samantha Ronson, and the mag has offered her "around $1 million to do the cover." [Post]

YouTube Divorcée's Many Breakups [Disasters]

Go figure: It turns out the jilted, crazy wife of Schubert Organization President Philip Smith, who aired their messy divorce battle on YouTube, has a long history of turbulent relationships and public flame-outs involving mostly men. Judging from the profile that just appeared in New York, the wife, Tricia Walsh-Smith, has done two sensible things in her life, starting with her lucrative appearance in close to 500 television commercials, including the Hellmann's mayonnaise ad pictured at left. She also wrote and starred in a popular play in Britain called Bonkers, about "a bulimic ex-model whose husband is always having affairs." Everything else has been kind of a disaster, particularly her many breakups:

• Her first husband ran a nightclub for Hilton hotels, then was sidelined by open-heart surgery. They had a kid, she had to work, he tried to leech her money, it turns out he was hoarding a small fortune in a safe.
• "A string of quashed engagements and entanglements:"
• Canadian businessman
• UN official
• Bristol entrepreneur
• Son of a Spanish Count (three hours)
• Missed court-ordered therapist appointments, lost custody of child, tried to overdose on sleeping pills. Child starting hanging up on her.
• "The Face," a cute California surfer who lied about owning a yacht and turned out to be very dumb.
• Runs off with a "sooo dangerous" Italian yachtsman who proposed the night they met. Relationship wrecked by Hurricane Seymour.
• Becomes engaged to perfume manufacturer in New York, 30 years older. Goes into rehab. Decides she's a "man addict," attends Emotions Anonymous, forswears romance.
• Meets Smith, he of the YouTube video.

When they met, Walsh-Smith liked Smith's "sexy radio voice" but there was no sex, ever, except maybe for one time in Palm Beach (" I did candles"). She pushed him into marriage after two-and-a-half years of dating. They broke up for a year, he took her back, but insisted on the now-infamous prenup in which she has to move out within 30 days of a divorce filing and is guaranteed only $750,000 — none of his earnings during marriage.

As with her first husband, Walsh-Smith felt unable to spend as freely as she would have liked. She got to fly on the Concorde, but did not like having to shop at Nine West. She said he blocked her attempts to write for theater, saying it violated conflict-of-interest policies at his company, which owns various theaters.

She's already gone through two different divorce lawyers. The first she fell out with over her propensity for talking to the press; the second because he allegedly wanted some of the spotlight for himself (she claims he pressed to go on Today with her).

All of this — the breakups, fights, messing around — is fairly torturous and pedestrian. Walsh-Smith deserves credit, at least, for somehow making it fascinating to millions of people on YouTube and conjuring at least the possibility of a reality television payday. As embarrassing as her antics are, it is easy to imagine her arriving at a sadder, less celebrated life station had she lacked her particular, err, pluck and dramatic flair, let's say.

[New York]

(Photo by Tricia Walsh-Smith via New York)

Post Women Very Powerful, Says Post [Conflicts Of Interest]

As if its listicle of the "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" were not journalistically dubious enough, the Post also had to use the list for shameless self promotion, putting two of its own columnists on the list. Granted, some of the non-Post choices were also highly questionable, like the editor-in-chief of Cookie magazine, socialite Ivanka Trump and former hooker Ashley Dupre. But how can you even begin to take the selection of, say, Post columnist Cindy Adams seriously when the first qualification listed for her is "she's got a sandwich named after her?" The Post's self-serving choices are after the jump.

Hey, at least they didn't include any of the high-profile women on corporate sibling Fox News. Like... uh... hmmm.

Greta lives in DC still? D'oh.

[Post, AdScam]

Why My Alumni Magazine Will Never Be As Good As Facebook [College]

What are alumni magazines for? I always thought they were just a fund-raising tool posing as publications. After all, Grove City College sends mine along with donation requests, even though I dropped out a semester early to work for Gawker Media (which means I have a good twenty years to pay off my college loans before I think about handing over more money voluntarily). But the New York Times says their most important role is "dormitory common rooms for grown-ups." And now Facebook is replacing alumni magazines as the gathering place for graduates (and drop-outs!). Makes sense to me; I never thought of writing into GCC's alumni mag to report on my career, but I'll update my job title on Facebook and I do have all my college friends there. What about people who graduated before Facebook? Are you switching your social life to the site? Did you ever use your alumni mag for that sort of thing?

I can picture the sorts of classmates I had who would still use the magazine to keep up to date: the sad, provincial ones. They haven't found a closer group of friends in post-college life, because they got married early and settled down and only have a few family friends. Of course, even in this group I expect everyone's found church friends and soon they'll meet their fellow young parents at their kids' preschool. They have someone new to share their life with, and when the second baby comes they won't think to send a photo into the alumni mag.

But it's not just Facebook that replaces the magazine. I just don't get why anyone would still update their college friends through a magazine in a world of e-mail and photo sharing. A magazine is a bizarre place to share your personal story with people you already know (and I don't even want to know the people who specifically want to share their baby photo with everyone who's ever been associated with their school). I never talked to my classmates through the school paper (even when I edited it, heh), so why would I do so now? Any modern online version of the magazine would still be the same one-to-many-to-one medium, and only the least interesting members of my college community would still want to interact with it that way.

So what's left for the alumni magazine? Is there any hope of relevance? Whatever the Times offers, I say no!

Dress-Whoring Scandal Snares Sex Star [Disasters]

As though awful reviews everywhere and horse jokes in the New Yorker were not enough, Sex And The City star Sarah Jessica Parker also has to contend with infidelity on the part of her dressmaker. Designer Olivier Theyskens of Nina Ricci assured Parker no one else had publicly worn the dress he provided her for the New York premier of the Sex movie. Whoops: Turns out socialite Lauren Santo Domingo had warn it to the Met ball less than a month earlier — and Theyskens had accompanied her and posed for pictures. Also, Linsday Lohan was photographed by "throngs of paparazzi" in the dress while wearing it for a Harper's Bazaar shoot. Cathy Horyn at the Times broke news of the Santo Domingo overlap — her commenters tracked down the Lohan shot — and Parker was not happy:

“In the big picture, this is not important, but there is a relationship between the entertainment industry and fashion,” Parker said on Thursday evening, adding. “We’ve watched sales dwindle and we’ve watched people be less inclined to spend money on clothes.” To Parker, these are reasons for companies to take particular care with their relationships. “Look, my affection for the dress hasn’t changed,” she said, “but what they did was so short-sighted. It’s just unethical and disappointing that they would allow the dress to be worn again.”

Interesting. But, um, also unethical? Using your biggest fans as unwitting publicity props by giving the worthless tickets, having them line up for hours and then sending them home without the promised movie, all because your production company was too incompetent to secure the thousands of available extra seats.

And they don't have a $56 million, twice-as-good-as-expected opening weekend box office to cushion the slight.

[Times]

The Town That Was Too Good For Google Maps [Google Maps]

The town of North Oaks, Minnesota told Google Maps to get out of its nice quiet community this January, says the Star-Tribune, and Google removed the whole town from its "Street View" service. The private community, a suburb of St. Paul, is 92% white with an average income of $75,000. Of course, if the poors wanted privacy, they wouldn't get it.

As a private community, North Oaks officials told the paper, they had to enforce the town's no trespassing laws. The common people with their public streets are at the mercy of public law, which does not prohibit photographing houses from the street.

Google removes houses from public view when the residents ask. Still, according to a spokesperson this is the first instance a town has asked to be removed from Street View. What if an entire city asked the same?

Michelle Obama Said "Whitey" In Fox News Fantasyland [Race-baiting]

The rumor that the Republican Party has a tape of Michelle Obama railing against "whitey" in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church apparently surfaced two weeks ago on No Quarter, a blog operated by Larry Johnson, a self-described former CIA analyst and supporter of Obama's Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton. No evidence has emerged to corroborate the wild rumor, but Fox News went ahead and aired the charges on camera today. The justification?

To get the perspective of admitted political smear artist Roger Stone. In a neat demonstration of the media echo chamber, Stone said he hadn't heard of the purported video, but now believes it exists because so many TV news networks have called to ask him about it.

Host Geraldo Rivera said he'd bet $100 against the rumor being true, but it doesn't matter: If the Republicans can keep everyone talking about the rumor through October, when Johnson's "Republican sources" say it will surface, the chatter will have, in and of itself, hurt Obama in the same significant way spurious rumors about him being Islamic delivered votes to Clinton.

That right-wing, Roger Ailes-operated Fox News is helping to facilitate this damage via national television should come as no surprise; the real test is whether the other networks will now follow suit and further whip up this corrosive, baseless rumor, simply because there's nothing else they want to talk about.