Now, Kate Gosselin, star of Jon And Kate Plus 8, may not be from Northeast Philly, but you can bet your Crocs that her hair is. We’re kind of late to the Jon and Kate party, but lately, as press coverage of this truly horrifying woman and her poor beleaguered family has reached critical mass (our official opinion is that Jon has every right in the world to cheat on her), we’ve been fascinated by one thing and one thing only: Her hair. We’ve seen that hair before. We know that hair. We’ve seen it in the Wawa, buying smokes; we’ve seen it at Target, verbally abusing its children; and we’ve seen it at events, whispering mutedly racist tropes. In fact, anywhere where the Curiously De-Feminized Women Of The Northeast doth roam, so too does That Hair. And now that Jon & Kate are doing boffo box office, That Hair has gone national. Women Who’ve Given Up On Themselves everywhere want to know, how do I get THAT HAIR? Well, ladies, it’s easy. According to Beauty And The Bath:
The Kate Gosselin Bob is considered to be a perfect hair cut choice for busy moms. [...] Many mothers are particularly interested in how Kate manages to keep up her appearance so easily. The trick is, her great concave bob hairstyle.
What follows is an Encyclopedia of That Hair. Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask. But then again, if you live in Philly and you’ve been paying attention for the last, oh, 20 years, you already know. You already know.
PHILADELPHIA: Thursday May 28: 5:00 pm Protest @ Philadelphia Inquirer for giving a regular column to torture professor John Yoo. Waterboarding demonstration. 400 N. Broad Street. philadephia@worldantwait.org
So, er, Happy National Day Of Resistance To U.S. Torture Day, everybody! With Dick Cheney still blathering dogs of war all over the place and John Yoofinding gainful employ, fans of things like “resistance actions” and other protest activities will find a lot to love all over the country today. And Philly, of course, is no exception. We’re not sure who or what will be waterboarded outside the Inky building today, but you can probably bet it won’t be the suave, Brooks Brothers-clad Leprechaun with floppy flowing hair that you’d like to see succumb to bucket, board and towel. Sigh. Even so, good to see the heat continuing to get turned up. Fight the power, mock waterboarders!
Orchestral pop band Grizzly Bear’s attempt to promote its latest album, Veckatimest, fell flat today as the advertising campaign caused terror and confusion among Doylestown residents.
“We decided to raise our brand awareness by releasing a live bear to the tastemaking citizens of Bucks County,” said Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste.
According to Doylestown resident Dora van Couver, the bear appeared in her back yard in the early afternoon. “He tore into my petunias real bad and scared the kids playing in the street. I called animal control, but he was gone by the time they got here.”
The bear eventually made its way to the Senior Center, where local curmudgeon Herman Bickford shouted at it. “Get off my lawn, I told it, but it wouldn’t listen.” When informed that the bear was part of an advertising campaign for the band Grizzly Bear, Bickford responded, “Grizzly Bear? That wasn’t even the right kind of bear. That was a black bear if I ever saw one. Kids these days wouldn’t know a real grizzly bear from the Queen of England.”
The bear’s current whereabouts are unknown, and the band is unhappy that it will have to pay the rental company extra money for every additional day. “We didn’t know that we had to keep the bear in the cage!” says the band’s Daniel Rossen. “It seemed so friendly, and we thought that it would be able to reach more potential customers if we set it free. It didn’t really work out so well, but it was totes worth it.”
In case you missed the post earlier this week, on Friday evening, Philebrity, 2424 Studios and Weathervane Music Organization are getting together to host a special, early-evening show with Austin, TX’s Sunset. And we’re stoked. We’ll have a Q&A with Weathervane’s Brian McTear tomorrow, but in the meantime, we wanted to let you know that we’re only about 24 hours away from capping off the list. To RSVP, email ihopeiwin[at]philebrity[dot]com with “WEATHERVANE” in the subject header. And as for why we’re so stoked, just dig the sounds of Sunset.
>>> We like that band The 1990s because at some point early on in their career, they were like, “Fuck it. We are going to sing exclusively, explicitly about the taking of the drugs and the having of sex. Nothing else. We’re the 1990s.” (Video for their new single “59″ at right.) So give the fellas a hand: They have no songs wherein they pretend to be Southern roots rockers, they don’t wear Sgt. Coldplay uniforms, and they don’t even read books, we don’t think. They play with the legendary Photon Band at Johnny Brenda’s.
>>> Oh, but it was disco, funk and roller jams you were looking for? Try Family Affair at Silk City. Naked Prince is on their flyer.
With SugarHouse all but a lost cause, now would be a good time to devise a backup plan for liberating yourself of those pesky excess dollars. Locally, you could turn to Harrah’s Chester and Philadelphia Park (or whatever it’s called now), but you’re probably bored with those already. A little over an hour away, the flashy new Bethlehem Sands Casino sings its siren song, but at that distance, would you be better off just heading down to good ol’ standby Atlantic City? Let’s take a look… (more…)
Jesus Christ, it’s like a Mike Leigh movie, except instead of it all being quaint and beans-on-toasty English, everything smells like bacon-egg-n-cheese sandwich farts and Wawa coffee. For the love of God, somebody hook this guy up and show him a good time while you’re at it.
Do you know any senior citizens who own the Jitterbug phone? Did you get stuck with your grandmother’s Jitterbug after she found it too high-tech and reverted to a rotary landline? Regardless, just be aware that despite having a lindy-hoppin’ commercial, certain Jitterbug models are being recalled because they do not connect to 911 in certain areas. The most shocking thing about the story is that the Jitterbug sells for $150! People are willing to pay $150 for an oversized, low-tech cell phone? Now might be a good time to check eBay and start a business reselling ‘80s brick-style cell phones to seniors.
A week or so back, we took note of how Arthur Kade’s blog entries have been going to an increasingly dark and darker place that smacks of nothing so much as Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis; Bateman was played quite memorably in the film version by none other Christian Bale (pictured) with whom, of course, Kade sees himself in a line of new classic Hollywood actors. See how that works? Anyway, one of our commenters picked up on this, and posted this fun game called Arthur Kade or “American Psycho?” on the Facebook group “Arthur Kade-holics Anonymous.” Let’s play a round, shall we?
“A girl who can’t handle her liquor is so unattractive because she looks like a slobbering idiot, and if she’s anything less than a 9, than it’s death”
” I was sharing a room with my boy (We had old-style bunk beds) and one of the girls kept coming in the room to ask if she could sleep with us. It was so annoying because I told her to show me her body first, and finally I decided to let her sleep in bed with me, only if we hooked up.”
Got your guesses ready? OK. They’re both Kade! Ahahahaha. Hoo boy. Just for good measure, let’s throw an American Psycho quote in, just for good measure, that could have just as easily come out of Kade’s mouth:
“I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.”
Now that Bizarro Nutter has officially, definitively buried the anti-casino rhetoric that Real Nutter ran a decent portion of his campaign on, you’ll notice that the process to get Philly’s two proposed slots casinos built is going along like a hot knife through butter. And nobody’s feeling that easy, breezy process more than Sugarhouse right now. Remember that “Interim Casino” we told you about a while back? Well, it’s going to be permanent. One architect working on the project told City Council yesterday:
“This interim facility is to be the initial phase of the permanent and much larger casino development. This is to be a permanent building right from the outset. This ‘interim casino’ will be the cornerstone of the rest of our project.”
Council responded by handing over the required technical and zoning planning changes to SugarHouse and then going back to sleep. On the bright side, Sugarhouse’s Magical Fun Tent will go really nicely with the little Hooverville Mall across the street right now at Frankford and Delaware, where crusty old dudes sell broken bikes and old VCRs out of an old RV. It’s all very Carnivale, don’t you think?
Well, voters don’t seem to, as Seth Williams walked away with Democratic primary for Philadelphia District Attorney fairly handily a couple weeks back. But ask around, or look around, and you can find plenty of evidence that Williams is more or less pretty much loathed by his immediate peer group of attorneys and local politics wonks. This PhillyMag article published at the beginning of the primary season detailed the still-raging animosity between Williams and current D.A. Lynne Abraham; Williams, once mentored by Abraham, ran an unsuccessful campaign to unseat Abraham in ‘05, and there’s been (boiling) blood in the water ever since. And not just between Williams and Abraham; one reporter we talked with recently described Williams as being “hated by everyone he works with” in the D.A.’s office. Next comes the news detailing how Dan McCaffery’s campaign might have worked directly in conjunction with the District Attorney’s Office to do Williams dirty in the press immediately before the primary election. And we’ve heard worse, to the point where some of this malignant scuttlebutt about Williams is unprintable at best and at worst, some of it patently untrue. It’s a mess, to be sure, and our question is this — provided Williams trounces Republican D.A. candidate Michael Untermeyer in November, which is, in this city, a fairly safe bet — what kind of relationship will he have with, well, everyone he’s clearly going to have to work with… who hates his guts? Williams’ website flies the flag of “A New Day, A New D.A.,” echoing Nutter’s progressive campaign. But if anything, it seems to us that a Williams-led D.A.’s office runs a high risk of being acrimonious and highly dysfunctional. You know, just like they used to do it in the old days.
On Monday night, TLC aired the season premiere of Jon & Kate Plus 8 — the pride of Wernersville, PA — and the fourth wall came tumbling down. Jon and Kate got all meta on us, going on the record about the scandal that has descended upon their brood. They talked about the paparazzi and what it’s like to show up on tabloid covers (in case you couldn’t guess, it sucks). Kate cried. Jon became withdrawn. This has all been reported extensively elsewhere. But what got buried beneath the scandal is that the season premiere was originally set to be a celebration of the sextuplets’ fifth birthday. If not for their parents’ indiscretions, it would have been their day, not a platform for a parental standoff. How would it have been without the “scandal?” Perhaps something like this… (more…)
Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s amazing house in Highland Park, IL, is for sale. Opening bid: $2.3M. No word on whether they ever fixed the glass tho.
We were gonna hold off on writing about this until Thursday — when, we’re told, the piece will go online — but apparently, the new issue of Philadelphia Magazine has a big piece on fameball/future murderer/repressed somethingArthur Kade. And our pal/Kade obsessive Brian Hickey got his grubby paws on it, and is, as we speak, alternately convulsing with glee (we think it’s glee) and typing passages out, you know, the way Hunter S. Thompson once typed out the whole of The Great Gatsby, just so he could get into it more. And as far as getting into it more, you can’t really tap into the meta-psyche of one Arthur Kade than this:
“[Arthur's father] Leonard is, apparently, a full-fledged character in his own right; five years ago, according to court papers, a state committee found he had unfairly fired a salon colorist after repeatedly sexually harassing her, touching her breasts and rear, and telling her that he would perform an abortion on her himself if she ever became pregnant.”
Shh. If you listen quietly, you can hear us all performing abortions on ourselves. In our souls.
It was a place where nobody wore shirts, the 300 block of Market St. was utterly desolate, gay rollerblade dancing was a viable occupation, and the debate of Punk Rock versus “Hamburger Music” raged in the streets. This utterly amazing video was shot and edited by videoblogger Jimmy CraicHead; but the sense of longing and lost awesomeness belongs to every last one of us.
So, unfortunately, the California Supreme Court just, er, upheld the sanctity of “Opposite Marriage,” as though and as if this was a real thing and any governing body in the world could quantify one kind of love versus another. Here’s the silver lining, though: In the decision, the CA Supreme Court kinda tipped its hand in the whole debate, more or less ‘fessing up to the fact that, when equal rights are granted and protected, the civil union versus Godly Marriage thing is a kind of tomato/tohmahtoe deal:
Today’s decision, written by Chief Justice Ronald M. George for a 6-to-1 majority, said that same-sex couples still have the right to civil unions, which gives them the ability to “choose one’s life partner and enter with that person into a committed, officially recognized, and protected family relationship that enjoys all of the constitutionally based incidents of marriage.”
Translation: Unless some God Thing is propelling you to wrap your life decisions around a delicious Magical God Blesses Everything I Do Bar, the issue is at this point kind of moot. So if your intellect allows you to then live a happy life accordingly, you’re kind of OK. However, what we continue to object to is the Court’s continuing to cowtow to the God Squad on this because, frankly, it’s stupid and it only encourages them. Both sides will appeal this decision, of course, so there’s plenty more Miss USA questions where that one came from.
Now, Kate Gosselin, star of Jon And Kate Plus 8, may not be from Northeast Philly, but you can bet your Crocs that her hair is. We’re kind of late to the Jon and Kate party, but lately, as press coverage of this truly horrifying woman and her poor beleaguered family has reached critical mass (our official opinion is that Jon has every right in the world to cheat on her), we’ve been fascinated by one thing and one thing only: Her hair. We’ve seen that hair before. We know that hair. We’ve seen it in the Wawa, buying smokes; we’ve seen it at Target, verbally abusing its children; and we’ve seen it at events, whispering mutedly racist tropes. In fact, anywhere where the Curiously De-Feminized Women Of The Northeast doth roam, so too does That Hair. And now that Jon & Kate are doing boffo box office, That Hair has gone national. Women Who’ve Given Up On Themselves everywhere want to know, how do I get THAT HAIR? Well, ladies, it’s easy. According to Beauty And The Bath:
Orchestral pop band 
With 
Do you know any senior citizens who own the
Now that Bizarro Nutter has officially, definitively buried the anti-casino rhetoric that Real Nutter ran a decent portion of his campaign on, you’ll notice that the process to get Philly’s two proposed slots casinos built is going along like a hot knife through butter. And nobody’s feeling that easy, breezy process more than Sugarhouse right now. Remember that 
Well, voters don’t seem to, as Seth Williams walked away with Democratic primary for Philadelphia District Attorney fairly handily a couple weeks back. But ask around, or look around, and you can find plenty of evidence that Williams is more or less pretty much loathed by his immediate peer group of attorneys and local politics wonks.
We were gonna hold off on writing about this until Thursday — when, we’re told, the piece will go online — but apparently, the new issue of Philadelphia Magazine has a big piece on fameball/future murderer/repressed something 
