Category: people

“The lawsuit — filed by two California residents, a Montana man and an Illinois woman who bought the books — list more than two dozen alleged fabrications and accusations of wrongdoing by Greg Mortenson, publisher Penguin Group, co-author David Oliver Relin and the Central Asia Institute.”

“Chinese artist and government critic Ai Weiwei said Friday he was suing Beijing’s tax bureau for violating the law when it imposed a multi-million tax evasion fine on a company he founded.” (That company’s name: Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd.)

“Mr. Goldstein, a slender six-footer, performed his antics at Grossinger’s, perhaps the premier Catskills resort, from 1948 until the hotel closed in 1986. He’d hold absurd exercise classes. He’d have a circle of grown men don silly hats and maneuver them onto one another’s heads, with one hand and without letting the hats tumble to the ground.” He was also probably the world’s master practitioner of the game Simon Says.

“Microbes can come and wipe us out. It can happen fast. Avian virus or mad cow disease, you name it. … Or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption which would darken the skies for 10 years … Trilobites died out, dinosaurs died out. Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish.”

“A Los Angeles County jury Thursday found the former business and personal manager of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen guilty of violating restraining orders, making harassing phone calls and sending thousands of harassing emails” following her firing by Cohen in 2004 for embezzlement.

“After a somewhat heady and hilarious dissection of Franco’s short film Dicknose in Paris (a clip was shown), the conversation ricocheted among topics, including Franco’s love of Faulkner; insider stories about director Nicholas Ray; Natalie Wood and Dennis Hopper during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause; and the upcoming MOCA show called ‘Rebel.'”

Panuk published The Museum of Innocence in 2008. Since then, he’s built it: “The small museum mainly comprises a sequence of little cabinets, each corresponding to one of the novel’s 83 chapters: 10 are missing and will be added later.”

Alexandra Shulman hasn’t had a movie (or two) made about her, like her U.S. counterpart Anna Wintour, and she’s not worried about being a fashion leader in her personal life. “The way I dress could be political, but it’s not. I made a decision very early on that editing Vogue couldn’t be about what I wore. I didn’t want to set myself up to be something that I couldn’t deliver.”

Whedon has two Hollywood movies hitting theatres now and in coming weeks, and one of them is the biggest sequel of the summer – The Avengers. How did he suddenly go from T.V. series genre guy to Hollywoodland? (Hint: It wasn’t so sudden.)

“Pauline’s greatest weakness, her failure as a person, became her great strength, her liberation as a writer and critic. She truly believed that what she did was for everyone’s good . . . . This lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint or hesitation gave Pauline supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice”.