Strollerderby : new york post

Explaining Plaxico Burress To A Seven Year Old

Brett Singer — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:45:00 GMT

This past week, my son, who is not a big football fan, asked me the following question:

"Dad, did Plaxico Burress shoot himself in the thigh?"

Yes, I said.

"Why did the New York Post call him a Giant Idiot?"

Well, said I, he plays for the Giants. ("I know that, dad.") And he did something really stupid.

"What did he do, dad?"

At this point I had a decision to make. Where do I go with this? I could have avoided the issue I guess, but that seemed pointless since he clearly had heard about the incident at school. Just to make sure, I asked. And yes, kids at school were talking about Quick Draw Burress, the Giant Idiot.

So what did I say? I told him that Plaxico was carrying a gun, which wasn't a great idea but that wasn't the main problem. The main problem was that he was carrying a gun and it went off. Luckily it only hit him, but it could have hit someone else. And the best way to avoid that would be to not have a gun at all.

"Why did he have a gun, dad?"

I don't know, kiddo. Some people think it makes them safer. That if something happened, they would be protected. The thing is, in this case, if Plaxico couldn't even take the gun out of his pocket without it going off accidentally, what makes him think he would be able to use it to defend himself? Plus, if he's afraid that something will happen to him when he goes out, maybe he should stay home. I think I threw in something about how Burress is a good football player, but probably not a very smart guy, since its hard to play football after you shoot yourself in the thigh. If memory serves, that got a laugh.

This isn't exactly what I said, but I think it's pretty close. What I didn't say to my son, but I will say here, is that I think it's really dumb to have guns around children. Plaxico has a 2 year old child at home. This isn't a case of someone trying to protect their home. This is a handgun. It's also an unlicensed handgun, which is a crime. I think I said something about the fact that Plaxico had a gun that he "wasn't supposed to have", without getting into mandatory sentencing laws or other legalities.

I understand that a lot of sports figures feel like targets. But everyone, no matter what they do for a living, have to be responsible. Someone could have gotten hurt. I know it's easy to say that, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." But if there's no gun, the likelihood of someone getting hit with a bullet decreases exponentially.

When I was a kid, I don't think I ever asked my mother these kinds of questions. Reggie Jackson may have been an egomaniac and a womanizer, but as far as I know, he never shot anyone. Or himself.

Image: ebay

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Rare Condition Makes Boy Look Like Werewolf

Brett Singer — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Ordinarily I would expect a headline referring to a child as "Wolf Boy" to appear in the Weekly World News and to be completely false. This time, however, it's real.

Pruthviraj Patil, an 11 year old boy from India, "suffers from a rare genetic disorder known as hypertrichosis - or "werewolf syndrome" - which causes a thick coat of hair to grow over every inch of his body except his palms and feet," according to the New York Post. This video from "My Shocking Story" on TLC shows other people who share Pruthviraj's pain. (Warning: it's slightly disturbing and very sad since these are real kids suffering from a rare and bizarre condition, which is " estimated to afflict fewer than 50 people on the planet," according to the Post.)

However, a group of scientists at Columbia University may have discovered a cure, which came out of their research on baldness. Pruthviraj has started on a treatment program the scientists have developed, and hopes that the excessive hair will go away. While the Post says that the boys' "friends and neighbors grew to accept him over time," he is far from pleased by his condition. "When I look in the mirror, I see that I have hair on my face and no one else does. Why is it only me?"

It's like the X-Men, except this time it's real. And no fun at all. Hopefully the treatments will help the poor kid and others like him.

Source: New York Post

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Denise Richards Reality Show Canceled

Brett Singer — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

It's official – you won't have Denise Richards to kick around anymore.

The E! channel has canceled the unwatchable "It's Complicated," which followed Richards as she tried raising her kids and a lot of pets… or something like that. I watched the first episode and found it mostly dull, but also somewhat depressing, since she had her young children on camera all the freakin' time. Remember that it was her ex-husband Charlie Sheen who wanted to keep the kids off of the show, but Denise took him to court and won. It's an old joke now, but when Charlie Sheen is the good parent, something is very, very wrong.

The reason for the cancellation isn't very complicated at all: nobody was watching. Page Six quotes "a source" who said, "The numbers started out pretty good - just over 1.5 million tuned in for the premiere episode…But the audience has dropped off." In other words, people would have been interested, but she just wasn't that interesting.

It's worth remembering that Denise Richards had a career as an actress for awhile. Granted, it was largely based on her looks, but she was considered one of the hotter young starlets around (think Megan Fox). Things were already on the decline career-wise when she married Sheen, so it would be easy to say that she is a victim of Hollywood ageism. But I have a feeling that some of the behavior she displayed on her reality show – the Post cites one "her confrontation with an editor for a magazine over how she [was] portrayed in the tabloid press" as a "low-light" for the series – was also her behavior in real life. That's just a guess, of course. Oh well. At least her kids won't have their lives on display anymore. Maybe she can do "Dancing with the Stars."

Source: NYPost

Image: LATimes.com

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No dinero for Dina

Brett Singer — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

What do you call a couple that spent $1 million on lawyers while getting divorced, and the result was that the wife got $100,000, plus $1,075 a month in child support?

You would call them the McGreeveys. (Well, not anymore, they're divorced.)

Yes, Mr. "I Am A Gay American" and the former first lady of the Garden State are finished with their contentious divorce proceeding. NYMag describes the courtroom drama as, "incredibly public, ugly, and drawn-out," which is kind of true, although it didn't quite have the legs of the Christie Brinkley / Peter "19 is legal, dammit!" Cook case.

What's fascinating to me is that Dina is getting almost nothing. She gets a one-time payment of $109,295 from Jimbo, which is half of their shared investments, so it kind of doesn't count in my book. $1,075 a month in child support is, if I may be so bold, bupkis.

So why no dinero for Dina? Jim don’t have no money. NYMag says, "since McGreevey argued that he only makes $48,000 per year while he is in seminary, the judge ruled him 'underemployed.'" So he's studying to be a priest. I guess his book didn't sell as well as people had hoped. Jim is living with a "super-wealthy financier" but those assets don't factor in. ("Jim's in love with a Jersey boy..." OK, don't go there.)

Judge Karen M. Cassidy said that both Jim and Dina, "clearly had agendas," and "their anger seemed to override any ability to testify credibly or to be reasonable." At least she went after both of them, unlike the judge in the YouTube cuckoo-wife case.

I have to wonder how angry you have to be at your spouse to spend $500,000 on attorney's fees - each - when you must have known that there was no pot of gold at the end of the divorce rainbow. Sure, Dina was married to a guy that was sleeping with, well, another guy, so she's mad. And Jim… well, he's mad at her for something, I guess. According to the New York Post, the couple will do some swapping of 401k plans and other relatively minor assets, like a $1500 checking account. She was only asking for $2500/month. So how do you rack up half a mil worth of legal bills? Fuzzy math, at best. They have a daughter together; hopefully they'll be able to deal with each other somewhat civilly.

image/source: NYMag

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What about his taste in women?

Brett Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Remember when Christie Brinkley and Peter "Hey, she was nineteen, that's legal, right?" Cook got divorced, and the judge said that Brinkley needed to "examine her taste in men"?

Well, apparently that doesn't go both ways. In the recent divorce of Shubert Organization honcho Philip Smith and Tricia Walsh-Smith, known to the tabloids as the "Youtube Divorce" because of Tricia's bizarre video rant, there's something I don't recall reading.

What is it? That Smith, 25 years older than his now-ex-wife, needed to examine his taste in women.

If you've never seen the original video, it's posted below. Tricia is, in my unprofessional psychiatric opinion, in desperate need of a good shrink and several thousand Zolofts (not all at once, of course). She makes Peter Cook look like a candidate for Husband of the Year – well, not quite, but you know what I mean. Still, I'm always intrigued when a woman who marries a schmuck somehow has questionable "taste", but a man who marries a loony-tunes just, you know, made a mistake. He didn't know she was crazy.

In other Tricia Walsh-Smith news, she's leaving town because New York is "full of liars," thinks that Kathi Lee Gifford wants to have her killed (which is, to put it mildly, a tad inaccurate), and is just generally a great big pile of crazy. You can read it all on her very own web site.

Image: NYPost

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Patricia Duff's daughter wants an order of protection against her

Brett Singer — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Continuing with our theme of ugly high profile divorce cases, here's a real doozy: Patricia Duff and Revlon billionaire Ron Perelman's daughter is trying to get an order of protection against Duff. Perelman's lawyers are backing the request, with Adria Hillman citing "incredible amount of emotional abuse"; she also says that the girl "stated that she does not want to go back to her mother." Patricia Duff's attorney Yoni Levoritz says that Duff and daughter are having, "typical mother-and-teenager disagreements, noting that children of divorced parents often pit one against the other." Sure, but they don't usually ask for an order of protection, do they?

Interestingly, the New York Post has a photo of Duff entering the courthouse alone, but Perelman is with their daughter. So I guess we know which side she's on.

The couple has been divorced for some time now; Perelman has since married and divorced actress Ellen Barkin. Here's my favorite line from the article: "Perelman and Duff have each been married four times." If this kid winds up even somewhat well-adjusted, it'll be a miracle.

image: NYPost

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Denise Richards still trying to prove she's insane

Brett Singer — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

It's Friday the 13th, which must be why I'm drawn to stories about weird, evil people today.

Denise Richards isn't in the same league and Josef Fritzl or Charles Manson, but she does seem to be trying to prove to the world that she's out of her gourd. Showbiz Spy reports that the former Mrs. Charlie Sheen is, "pleading with the star to stop publicly bashing her now he has re-married…'He loves to trash me in the press and discredit me and has tried to sabotage my show. I hope that now that he's married, he can move forward and be civil.'"

Now, we're not excusing Charlie Sheen, who has his own issues, to put it mildly. Back in May he claimed that Denise emailed him asking for a sperm donation. Denise's reply was, shall we say, something less than "civil": "I don't want Charlie's prostitute-tranny-infested sperm." Nice.

She also accused Chuck of exploiting, "our entire situation." Um, you have a reality show on E! that features your kids. Pot? Kettle? Neither one of them is winning parent of the year, but I think when you put your toddler-age children on a reality show you kind of lose the right to accuse your former husband for "exploiting the situation".

I have a wacky, wacky idea for Denise and Charlie. Yes, you hate each other. Yes, it's an ugly divorce. But you have kids. Stop talking to the media for awhile. SHUT-UP.

image: Page Six

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Moms of the Famous Tell Us How To Raise Successful Kids

Brett Singer — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Page Six reports on a new book where the mommies of various famous folks reveal how they raised their offspring.

If the rumors that Brett Ratner is a jerk are true, we may have his mother to blame. Momma Marcia Ratner apparently "coddled, pampered and ultimately embarrassed her son Brett." (Just in case Brett is hiring for "X-Men 4," I would like to point out that I'm not saying he's a jerk. Just that other people say he's a jerk.) Derek Jeter's mom Dot forced him to get good grades if he wanted to play baseball, and Steven Spielberg's mommy thought he would maybe work in a supermarket when he grew up.

The book is "Mother Nuture: Life Lessons from the Mothers of America's Best and Brightest," and while author Stephanie Hirsch did land some good interviews with moms, there are other good stories out there. On the Howard Stern Show, Richard Lewis talked about the time he called his mother to tell her some exciting news: he was going to be on The Tonight Show. Her response? "Who else is on?" Shocking that he's a bit neurotic.

Howard Stern's own relationship with his mother is well documented, including that she raised him "like a veal." Stern's father famously yelled at him in a recording studio when he was 7, something that Howard has turned into a bit on his radio show.

Then there's Eliot Spitzer's dad Bernard, who reportedly used Monopoly to teach life lessons to the future Tainted Gov: during a game of Monopoly, Bernard ordered Eliot, then 7 or 8, to sell him a piece of property, then reduced his son to tears when Eliot couldn’t pay the rent. The lesson he was teaching? “Never defer to authority,” Bernard said. Nice.

I'd actually rather hear from people like Bill and Hillary, since Chelsea seems to have turned out so well. As long as we never have to hear parenting advice from the Spearses.

Firefighter's Wife: I Killed Him Because He Called Me Fat

Brett Singer — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Ah, the New York Post. Where would we be without you? This story isn't exactly "Headless Body in Topless Bar," but it's still quality tabloid fodder.

Here's the scoop: in December of 2007, Janet Redmond-Mercereau called 911 and reported that her husband, Staten Island Fire Marshall Douglas Mercereau, was dead. Two days later, the Post referred to her as "the elephant in the room" because of suspicions that she had murdered Douglas because of "humiliating fat jokes he made at her expense." On Saturday (3/22/08) she was charged with murder.

Now comes the defense. Her lawyer says that "her husband had been verbally abusive after she gained weight because of a thyroid condition." The prosecution says, "We believe [the abuse] not to be true."

I know it's just a quote and could be out of context. But let's say, just for a moment, that it was true. That her husband had called her "Fatty McFatso." That she was wearing a t-shirt from Guess and he said, "I don't know, 245? 260?" (That last line I swiped from a comedian whose name I can't remember.) If he did that, she can kill him?

Well, no. But Andrea Peyer has a column warning guys to "be careful" when they poke fun at the little woman for not being so little. Still, to me it seems like a pretty thin defense strategy. (Pun intended.)

It does seem that the accused is a tad, shall we say, unhinged. A The New York Times story says that she had an oak tree in their yard chopped down because Douglas' family compared him to it at the funeral. The Staten Island Advance quotes Janet as saying, "I feel like a model," to a photographer when he arrived at her home to get a photo. And The Post describes her as "winking" to her family at the arraignment.

For the record, Janet is listed at 5' 3" and 240 pounds. But I'm not saying a word about that. Just in case she's acquitted.