Friday, May 11, 2007
Wait, People DON’T Like Stupid, Shallow Chatter About Fashion And Celebrities? We’re Screwed.
2:16PM Jess McGuire | We’ve never felt much for Channel 9’s rip off of US chat show The View, cleverly dubbed The Catch Up. Well, we felt the sensation of our eyes rolling back in our head when we caught half an hour of it when it first began, but since then? Nothing at all.
That was until today, when we read this.
The panel show Beauty and the Beast, pioneered in the 1960s and revived by Foxtel to enormous success during the past decade, tackled big issues with intelligence, poise and bravura.
The Catch-Up, on the other hand, presumes too easily that women prefer stupid, shallow chatter about fashion and celebrities.
Suddenly, we can’t help but feel a kind of kinship with The Catch Up. Sure, we’d never excitedly “cross live” to Peter Timbs in the Woman’s Day office to discover the latest on Lindsay Lohan (we’d be reading it online, for fucks sake) but still. If people stop caring about stupid, shallow chatter about fashion and celebrities, then it’s not going to be a good Christmas for Timmy and the other crippled orphans here at Defamer Australia headquarters.
As a direct result to this new found feeling of empathy towards The Catch Up, we’re going to attempt to adopt the show for a week starting Monday, and really try to convince you of its good points. It’ll be our very own (temporary) Maddox/Zahara/Pax/David!
Until we get bored, which will probably be about one post into the project, fickle fools that we are. More » 
Sting Interrupts No Doubt Marathon Sex Session* To Express Shock At Court Ruling.
1:34PM Jess McGuire | It’ll take a helluva lot of meditation before Sting calms down over this, we reckon. You see, everyone’s favourite yoga devotee and his missus have been found guilty of unfair dismissal. Unfair dismissal? How un-hippy of them!
Celebrity couple Sting and Trudie Styler face having to pay record damages to their former chef for unfair dismissal after a tribunal found them guilty of “shameful conduct”.
The singer and his actress wife – formally known as Mr and Mrs Sumner – broke employment law by sacking Jane Martin, 41, after she became pregnant, the panel has ruled.
In a devastating judgment, Styler is accused of using “subterfuge” to get rid of Ms Martin, and of using “minions” to do her “dirty work”.
The employment tribunal was told that staff at the couple’s country estate lived in a climate of fear because Styler subjected them to abuse to make her “feel royal”.
Good lord. The story is especially disturbing if we choose to only pay attention to the words appearing within quotation marks. In fact, we’ll re-type them in caps and make them bold just to add an air of authentic UK tabloid reporting!
More » Hands Up If You Want To Work For Defamer Australia?
1:34PM Jess McGuire | Now put those hands down, you silly buggers, and instead focus your digital energies on banging out a fucking dazzling resume and cover letter, because Allure Media is hiring, yo!
Here’s the official spiel.
Administration and Editorial Assistant
Allure Media is in the business of building great websites. Our gossip site Defamer and gadget guide Gizmodo are the first of many, and we’re looking for an administrative and editorial assistant to join us for what’s sure to be a wild ride.
The role is a unique blend: two-thirds administration and sales support, one-third editorial.
The successful applicant will capably respond to reader and advertiser enquiries, manage advertising campaigns, maintain financial records and produce regular reports.
The right candidate will also have an opportunity to write for our websites, producing regular features and scouring the web for the juiciest news.
To apply for this Sydney-based role, send your resume with a covering letter to jobs@alluremedia.com.au. Include two short posts in the style of either Defamer or Gizmodo.
Unofficially, you will spend most of your day bouncing emails containing vaguely entertaining YouTube links and completely libelous and false gossip back and forth with us, regularly spend at least half an hour giggling on the phone about our respective love lives, and eventually we will take you out, get you drunk, and we’ll all take saucy photos of each other.
FUN! More »
Music
1:24PM Jess McGuire | We’ve not even been “live” a month, and we’re already resorting to buying your affection with gadgets. Well, not all of you. We’re not mad, nor are we made of money. But we do have a snazzy piece of technology to give away to a very lucky (and clever) reader, as well as tickets to the no doubt celeb-riddled (if the US equivalent shindig is anything to go by) launch party of Telstra’s new HipTop3! All the details on how to enter are here. Go nuts.
UPDATE: The competition has now closed. Congrats to David Hall-Johnston of Canberra! More »
If This Post Were An Episode Of Friends, We’d Call It ‘The One Where We Buy Your Love Through The Ancient Art Of A Giveaway’
1:24PM Jess McGuire | We’ve not even been “live” a month, and we’re already resorting to buying your affection with gadgets. Well, not all of you. We’re not mad, nor are we made of money. But we do have a snazzy piece of technology to give away to a very lucky (and clever) reader, as well as tickets to the no doubt celeb-riddled (if the US equivalent shindig is anything to go by) launch party of Telstra’s new HipTop3! All the details on how to enter are here. Go nuts.
UPDATE: The competition has now closed. Congrats to David Hall-Johnston of Canberra! More » 
You Didn’t Really Think Paris Was Going To Do The Whole 45, Did You?
11:13AM Defamer Hollywood | Unable to come to grips with the idea that it might lose its favourite local socialite for the full 45 days of her recently handed down prison sentence, the LAT embarked on a quest to find someone willing to envelop it in a warm hug, gently stroke its hair, and reassure it that those scary men don’t really mean all their nasty talk about Paris Hilton serving every last minute of her hard time: Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Whitmore said Hilton’s sentence could be cut nearly in half by state law allowing for credit for time served for good behaviour. In addition, he said, overcrowding in the jail system could further reduce the time she spends in custody. Overcrowding has been a major issue in the L.A. County jail system, with some inmates – even violent ones – serving as little as 10% of their sentences. (If that standard was applied to Hilton, she would serve less than a week in jail.) More »
Cameron Diaz Just Wants The Same Preferential Treatment 300-Pound, Wart-Covered Actresses Get
10:34AM Defamer Hollywood | A whirlwind promotional tour for Shrek the Third has, unfortunately, given all of us an unsolicited glimpse into the well-ventilated mind of Cameron Diaz: She recently described to Meredith Viera on Today the fascination with her personal life as being “like high school, isn’t it? We as celebrities are like the popular kids. People want to know our business.” (Yes, that’s exactly right! And Justin is the QB, and The Ivy is the cafeteria, and Variety is the student newspaper!) Now comes this curious quote, shared with rarely seen paleolithic Hollywood gossip entity Jeanne Wolf: “If a woman who’s a successful actress weighs 300 pounds and has warts, nobody ever asks her, ‘Do you think you made it because you’re ugly?’ So why should there be prejudice against someone who’s had some success in films and looks a little better than average. More »
When Headlines Take You To An Unnecessary Visual Place (Part 3679 In A Series)
8:22AM Jess McGuire | “Will Eddie McGuire bone himself?” asks news.com.au. We do hope so.
And further to that, we hope that there’s some sort of website where we can sign up to watch grainy footage of aforementioned self-boning, and then we will pay $20 per minute to watch Eddie McGuire bone himself, and then we will gouge our eyes out with a rusty fork, stop speaking English, and choose only to communicate with others through a combination of sharp grunts and prodigious piano playing abilities – an almost miraculous side-effect of watching (and being horrified to the core by) Eddie’s money shot.
Hmm. We’re going to stop blathering on and instead focus our energies on acquiring coffee. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from the surprisingly – and happily – sexless article about Eddie’s desires to solo-bone.
Channel 9 chief executive Eddie McGuire could be about to “bone” himself and head back to Melbourne after a reshuffle that has angered the media company’s shareholders.
McGuire, also Collingwood Football Club president, yesterday said Nine’s Melbourne boss Gary Pert had resigned to take up the chief executive’s job at the club.
The 1 Vs 100 TV host now needs to fill the Nine job in Melbourne – and he’d need look no further than himself to find a perfect match.
More » 
MPAA To Now Designate Movies As Rated Light, Ultra Light, And Menthol
8:15AM Defamer Hollywood | As his first major order of business since the passing of his larger-that-life predecessor, current MPAA honcho Dan Glickman has announced that the federal ratings board will take the unprecedented measure of factoring in on-screen cigarette smoking into their ratings decisions. But rather than risking penalising a worthy, smoke-filled-room movie like Good Night and Good Luck with a rating of “LC-17: Parents Strongly Cautioned Some Material May Indirectly Lead to Lung Cancer,” the board has established several mitigating circumstances: He said the ratings board will ask three questions: Is the smoking pervasive? Does the film glamorise smoking? More »
Drunk Fox Employee Issues Late Night Call For Designated Driver
6:40AM Defamer Hollywood | While it’s far too late for us to offer to help the following anonymous Craigslist poster find a lift so that he wouldn’t miss his obscenely early call time, we feel we nonetheless should pass along his admirably responsible, late night plea for a designated driver (or, as the job is commonly called in the industry, a “PA”): Need PA to drive me to set Date: 2007-05-10, 12:31AM PDT I have a 3am call and I’m way too drunk to drive. Can someone give me a ride from the westside to the Warner Lot? Can try to get you an internship or PA job on hit Fox episodic (not 24). Need to leave soon. # Location: Westside # it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests # Compensation: Possible internship or paid work Assuming this isn’t just a hilarious fake, we hope that if the poster found a go-getting Good Samaritan to give him a ride, he wound up rewarded with the coveted gig; in ferrying shitfaced talent to the set (we’re going to assume it’s talent because only a coddled actor would reflexively refer to a stranger doing him a favour as a “PA”), he’s already proven he can handle the most important part of any low-level Hollywood assistant job. Need PA to drive me to set [Craigslist] More »
