Saturday, January 07, 2006

Celebrity 2005! Remembering July-December

July: who smells Oscar? Alan Thicke does, sniffing all over Oscar's golden little body after a sensitive and powerful turn as Wassily Kandinsky in the biopic "Blue Rider."

August: mercurial bridge phenom Tony Takitani is kicked off his team by his aunt. Takitani shocks the media during an impromptu press conference in his driveway, accusing his aunt of storing the remains of Idi Amin in a box of potpourri on the toilet. "Like my boy says, if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by golly, it probably is a rat," Takitani proclaims, doing kneebends. Omar Sharif issued a statement calling Takitani "a cancer."

September: Christmas comes early for pop idol Laria, whose fiancee surprises her with a live narwhal during a taping of their reality show. Who can forget the rapture on her face as the glistening beast flopped about on her driveway in the failing light?

October: the Manchester-based quartet The Louchebags, having been crowned the heirs to The Beatles by NME, fail to make a splash in the U.S. with their debut LP, We Are The Louchebags. Frontman Jamie Armitage makes bigger headlines by eating supermodel Naomi Plissken.

November: the movie Pommes Frites opens, provoking a firestorm of self-congratulation in Hollywood. It features a controversial portrayal of a love affair between two Belgians, though the Belgians are played by Icelandic actors. Gunnar Blondal's agent denied that Blondal's subsequent role as Leif Ericson was calculated to distance him from Belgians. "Gunnar has great respect for the Belgian lifestyle, but this role plays to his core competency: being a great, strapping non-Belgian."

December: the septum enhancement craze reaches new heights, as starlet Winnie Culpepper's distinctive look is copied by young women across America. Surgeons work overtime to graft extra inches of ethmoid bone onto millions of faces. The "Winnie look" features a ridge or crest of bone that protrudes through the skin and dominates the face.