Friday, November 9, 2007
Curtis Stone Fires Donald Trump Before He Gets The Chance To Fire Him (i.e Curtis… Oh, Never Mind)
2:00PM Clem Bastow | Local chef and TV whiz Curtis Stone has been faring well since he left our shores for the USA, so well, in fact, that all manner of opportunities have come knocking – including one from The Donald himself.
Trump thought Stone – who hosts Take Home Chef in the States – would be a good The Apprentice contestant – it’s just that Curtis didn’t share his enthusiasm.
“I’m pretty busy and had a couple of concerns. I didn’t want to get fired. I’ve never been fired yet and I don’t want to get fired now.”
It may sound like the TV chef is looking a gift horse in the mouth and then sending it to the glue factory, but we’re inclined to agree with Curtis: getting fired on The Apprentice is tantamount to being fired from life.
Just ask Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth. More » 
Greg Mclean Is A Caring, Sympathetic Director
1:00PM Clem Bastow | Wolf Creek director Greg McClean’s follow-up frightfest Rogue is hitting the cinemas today.
The old-school-ish “nature peril” flick, features over-sized crocodiles gobbling up Northern Territory tourists while a cast of all-good Aussies give their best Mick Dundee impressions, so it should be another winner for the filmmaker.
(Incidentally, the NT’s tourism commission must be delighted with all this great publicity McClean’s giving them; first psychotic rapists/murderers and now killer crocs! Sure beats Daryl Somers standing in front of Uluru and chuckling, “You’ll never, never know if you never, never go”!)
This junket story has the usual “oh the laughs we had” fluff that comes with a movie premiere, but we couldn’t help but feel a lovely bit of schadenfreude at McClean’s obvious delight in putting US import and star Michael Vartan through his paces:
“Michael had just come out from America and was scared of spiders, snakes – all animals really – so it was a new experience for him,” [Radha] Mitchell, 33, explains.
McLean adds: “I realised very quickly he would be great for the character.
“He is from LA, he’s never been to Australia and had no idea what the Outback was. When we arrived in the Northern Territory, that’s when he realised it was real. It was a huge shock for him, I mean here he was on a boat with real crocodiles and Radha Mitchell driving and she couldn’t drive a boat. It was very different to anything he has ever done in America.”
That’s the spirit, Greg!
Hopefully they also took Vartan to some only-accessible-by-road-train pub and made him shotgun a few Fosters, before telling him that “all Australians” eat kangaroo balls while threatening him with a sugarcane machete. More » 
All The Semi-Nude Backflips In The World Can’t Save Jamie Durie’s Relationship
11:30AM Clem Bastow | We all know Jamie Durie is Oprah’s new favourite plaything, but has he been doing the dirty on his long-term GF while working in the US?
That’s the word on the streets, if you believe Confidential, who received an anonymous tip-off stating that the reason Durie has parted ways with Nadine Bush (his partner of ten years) is because he’s been seeing another woman in the US.
Naturally, Durie is denying the claims.
While the Channel 7 star yesterday confirmed that his romance with Bush was over, he denied any wrongdoing – instead putting the break-up down to the difficulties of his constantly working overseas. “We’ve been working through a lot of issues in the past few months and one of the biggest ones is that it’s very hard to have a relationship when you’re working in two countries,” Durie said.
“Nadine and I have enjoyed some great years together and she’s a very special girl who does and will always mean the world to me.
“There is no animosity in our break-up but obviously it’s not easy for either of us.”
What’s our take on it all? Well, we just refuse to believe that the fresh-faced, earnest young man of this video would turn out to be a bounder.
Then again, we all thought Heath and Michelle were going to stay together forever and that Phil Spector was a bang up dude, so who are we to judge! More » 
Amy Winehouse Round-Up: Things Go From Worse To Whatever Comes After Worse
10:09AM Clem Bastow | Poor old Winegums. Just when things were looking up – gained a US work visa, husband not looking so much like a cut of raw fish, getting back in the studio – something comes along to knock her back down again – and this time it’s a bunch of G men!
Yes, not long after Amy was out and about celebrating dad Mitch’s birthday (he delivered her home in his black cab, aww!), the police broke down Winegums’ door and spent a good three hours rifling around in her stuff.
What were they looking for? Who knows!
Police were refusing to comment on the 5pm raid, only saying: “It is part of an ongoing operation.”
Three armed officers and ten plainclothes officers broke into the house, which was empty at the time.
Miss Winehouse had earlier fled to her father’s home in Kent while her husband left the house an hour earlier.
The officers left carrying several boxes.
Four men, two aged 25, one aged 22 and a 19-year-old, were later arrested in east London in connection with the raid.
Winegums’ spokesperson later told the press it had “nothing to do with drugs”, so god knows what it actually was to do with!
At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, however, we’re sure it has plenty to do with that no good husband of hers.
Boy, when did we turn into a 1950s town gossip? More » 
Charity Says Kerry Katona Probably Shouldn’t Keep Smoking While Pregnant; Sticking Fork In Toaster Not Great Idea Either
10:00AM Clem Bastow | The saga of Kerry “Chipshop” Katona’s current pregnancy continues, with a charity weighing into the hoo haa regarding her mother-to-be activities (that is, drinking, smoking, and possibly taking drugs).
The UK’s Foundation for the Study of Infant Death has advised that Katona would be wise to give up the fags if she’s keen on having a trouble-free pregnancy and healthy baby.
Not to cast aspersions on the fine people’s advice, but, well, duuhh.
FSID Director Joyce Epstein said: “When we heard that Kerry Katona is pregnant and struggling to quit smoking, we wanted to offer our support.
“Many women who smoke find it difficult to quit, but it’s important that they know the harm it can cause as an incentive for giving up. As Kerry has won mother of the year more than once, she has the opportunity to show that it can be done, and set an example for mothers in the same position.”
Whether or not Katona actually listens to their advice is another thing, obviously.
Given her exemplary behaviour as an expectant mother so far during this pregnancy, she’s just as likely to be seen pushing a bag of potatoes around in a stroller while asking strangers, “Isn’t my baby beautiful?” and then going into post-traumatic shock when she actually gives birth (which will likely happen at an Absolut-sponsored vodka drinking contest), because she thought babies came out of your nose. More » 
Former Writer’s Assistant Calls Bullshit On Ellen DeGeneres’s Crocodile Tears
7:45AM Defamer Hollywood | Deciding delivering smiles to the faces of the tourists who had travelled great distances just to dance in her aisles was more important than delivering platters of Nate’n Al’s lox to her striking writers and marching alongside them, Ellen DeGeneres chose, like many other daytime talk shows, to cross picket lines. Deadline Hollywood Daily printed what she’ll say about the issue on tomorrow’s show – a declaration of the love she feels for the drones who put the funny words in her mouth that amounts to no less than 1/10,000th of the love she feels for r.gifted rat-dogs. Unmoved, however, is blogger Surgical Strikes, who worked as a writer’s assistant on her sitcom The Ellen Show in 2001, and remembers a far different DeGeneres/writer relationship: I don’t know how Ellen treats her current writers, but I can tell you about how she treated the previous batch: Like shit. More »
Baby-Napping Accusations Mar Tom Cruise Celebration
7:30AM Defamer Hollywood | Though Museum of the Moving Image honouree Tom Cruise escaped a NY dinner celebrating his cinematic accomplishments without being mercilessly roasted by his important friends (apparently, nobody there could be bothered to bring their best “Hitler haircut” or “he who smelt the mystery fart, dealt it” material), a former co-star did manage to shock the event’s attendees with this disturbing anecdote from the set of Magnolia, as reported by Rush & Molloy: Magnolia co-star Julianne Moore told Tim Robbins, a red-eyed Oliver Stone and Hollywood bigs like Terry Semel, Bob Shaye, Ron Meyer, Bert Fields and Kevin Huvane that ‘I ate lunch with Tom one day on the set – he eats from catering, which stars at that level never do – and my baby-sitter was so frozen in awe of him that she couldn’t even bother to pick up my baby. More »
Rosie O’Donnell Only Has Her Big, Haiku-ing Mouth To Blame For Killing Her MSNBC Deal
7:15AM Defamer Hollywood | No sooner had we reserved some room in our increasingly spacious DVR boxes (now occupied by season passes for Meerkat Manor, C-Span 3’s America’s Most Smartest Lobbiest, and not much else) for Rosie O’Donnell’s upcoming MSNBC talk show, it turns out network executives have pulled out of the project after O’Donnell blabbed about the deal on her blog and at a Miami book signing. A new poem at Rosie.com explains what happened: the show that never was msnbc one hour live following keith olbermann More »
