Blather

Jennifer Garner to Present Tech Oscars...

...Roomful of nerds to brush their hair and sit up really, really straight.

...Then they came for my breasts and there was no one left to speak out for my breasts

Jeff Jarvis rounds up the latest news in the Janet Jackson breast flap, which is a really unappetizing combination of words that just looks worse and worse the longer I stare at it. (By the way, isn't it about time somebody started a Janet Jackson Breast Flap weblog?) Charles Taylor at Salon singles out Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico for special mention in the competitive "Helen Lovejoy 'Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children'" category, where she's been doing some very nice work, and points out an inherent flaw in the morality crusaders' argument. The scariest news of the day, though, comes not from Salon or even the Hindustan Times, where they're just flummoxed by this whole attraction/repulsion thing we Americans have going on with breasts, but from the tiny Delaware County Times: A local art dealer has a nude in her window. Area bluenoses complain. Cops come calling. Art dealer removes painting from window.

Uh oh.

Okay, You Can Be Mad. Everybody Else Just Simmer Down.

At last, someone who has a legitimate beef with Janet Jackson over the Super Bowl stunt: Staffers at DeMask, a Manhattan fetish shop, say Jackson altered the now-infamous bustier she bought there so it would rip away. They're "furious" that the incident has fostered an impression their clothes are cheaply made. "We're known for putting together solid, long-lasting pieces," manager Sam Hill told the New York Post. "People use our stuff for mind-altering, body-altering experiences. It has to be good quality." A recent poll conducted by Harris Interactive backs this up, ranking "Durable" and "Well-made" ahead of "Hot," "Boy, That's Hot" and "Sleaze-tastic" as qualities most sought after by DeMask patrons.

Nearly-Unbelievable Coincidences, Pt XIV

Amazingly enough, the new Janet Jackson single was rush-released today.

"Psst. Justin. Are They Buying It?"

The FCC is shocked, shocked at yesterday's halftime hijinx, in which Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jackson's Mylar body armor to reveal what may have been a small portion of her right breast. I say "may have been" because it was broadcast in a very, very long shot and cut away from immediately, almost as if it had been choreographed or something. Also, at the Super Bowl party I attended, somebody (okay, it was me) grabbed the Tivo remote and ran the video back and froze it, and golly if there didn't appear to be a tiny strip of something like aluminum foil covering the naughty bit in question. Anyway, here come the public watchdogs of the FCC, thundering to the defense of the great American TV viewer, threatening investigations and fines and gosh, just a whole lot of that sincere disappointment and regretful clucking of tongues you tend to get about issues of public morality under Republican administrations in election years. If they want to investigate something (and man, just try and stop 'em once they get that crazy "We gotta investigate this" look in their eyes), here's a suggestion: Why don't they investigate the last time there was an actual moment of unscripted spontaneity at a Super Bowl halftime show? It wasn't yesterday. And with the budget left over, they can look into the cow-eyed credulity of anybody who actually believes that Janet Jackson is embarrassed by being on every front page in America the day after the Super Bowl... or maybe the fact the signal-to-noise ratio in American pop culture has plummeted to such depressingly low levels that two people who are already really, really famous feel like they have to do something this dopey and desperate just to cut through the clutter.

So a priest, a rabbi, a professor of early Christianity and a Baptist go into a screening room

The New York Post nicked a copy of Mel Gibson's upcoming "The Passion of Christ" and screened it for a small, religiously-diverse panel of viewers. Doing its bit to counter a climate in which complicated socio-cultural issues frequently get reduced to tiny, meaningless soundbites, the Post asked each viewer for a one-word review. The priest's exquisitely calibrated response: "Unhelpful."

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Governor-Elect of the Great State of California

Sure, you're laughing now. Just wait until Arinamin V is on every elementary school lunch menu from San Ysidro to Stockton. (Thanks to Jeff Cohen for the link.)

The Trouble With Tigers

You've got to find this Reuters report on the Roy Horn mauling incident a little troubling: According to AP, Siegfried & Roy manager Bernie Yuman says the attack may have happened because "the tiger got distracted by something in the audience." Apparently the problem with white tigers isn't that they're wild carnivores and therefore somewhat unpredictable in a dinner-show context; it's that they're distractable. In fairness, no one in the Siegfried & Roy organization, which employs 267 people at the Mirage Hotel alone, could have been expected to predict that the tiger might be exposed to provocations like a guy with a pinky ring signaling for another Dewar's.

What's Norwegian For "No, Seriously"?

Scandinavians are naturally reticent, and the members of the Norwegian Nobel Institute are more close-mouthed than most. So it's no surprise that the Institute's director, Geir Lundestad, is reluctant to handicap this year's crop of 165 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Except when it comes to Michael Jackson.

This Week in The Wide World of Obits

You don't want to make light of things like the sad life and recent death of Stanley Fafara, who played Whitey on "Leave It to Beaver." But obits make fascinating reading, and sometimes your eye lands on a detail you can't shake. In Fafara's, for example, the sticky detail isn't that the former child star once lived in a house "with members of the rock band Paul Revere and the Raiders." (No, that's just a bonus.) It's this one: When his family found out Fafara had a drug problem, they sent him out of the country to live with a sister. The country they sent him to was Jamaica.

Everybody Renegotiate Now

The five stars of "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy," which is making money all over the world for Bravo and its corporate parent, NBC, aren't seeing much of it. The Fab 5 pull down $3000 each per episode, with bumps of 5% for each of six, count 'em six, option years. This isn't the worst of it, though: the deal memo obtained by The Smoking Gun specifies that when traveling on show-related business, Carson & Co. fly coach.