Celebrity Bog Aficionados

Celebrities in Sydney have become pretty clued up when it comes to spotting paparazzi on the prowl. Some of it is down to the sixth sense that celebs inevitably develop for sniffing out lurking snappers. But there’s one particularly determined Aussie pap who has made himself rather easy for tabloid stars to spot.

He’s a devoted Harry Potter fan and his car has the number plate HEDWIG1. So whenever they see that magical hatchback, they always know there’s a photo op afoot.

With all the other scandals that have rocked Hollywood in recent years, one that kind of fell off the radar a bit was the one where animals kept getting mangled on film sets. A tiger nearly drowning on the set of The Life Of Pi. A chipmunk getting squashed on Matthew McConaughey’s Failure To Launch. A husky getting punched on one of Paul Walker’s films.

It was vicious out there for a while, but the good news is that things appear to have turned a corner. The animal handler who provided the snails for erotic thriller Deep Water says that not only did none of the snails die by Ben Affleck’s hand, but that he was “exceptionally good” with them.

(Ana De Armas hated them and thought they were “gross” – but she also managed not to kill any.)

Which Brit-winning band is currently preparing itself for a potential #MeToo scandal breaking? Someone they worked closely with seems to have been leveraging his proximity to the band to sext their young female fanbase. Claims are now appearing all over Twitter and TikTok, and taken seriously enough for the band’s management to start an investigation.

We learned a phrase we’d never heard before this week: the “Strawberry Filter”.

It’s used when camera crews are out filming members of the public and end up interviewing someone they feel is too boring, too unattractive or otherwise too weird for actual broadcast but can’t easily break away from them.

Instead, the camera operator will be asked to put on the “Strawberry Filter”, which is their cue to pretend to turn the camera on and act as if they’re shooting. Not only does this discreetly spare everyone’s feelings, it saves them the hassle of having to wade through too much unusable footage later in the edit.

Any other good industry jargon to share? Email: hello@popbitch.com

As J-Lo and Ben Affleck prepare to move into a new $50m mansion that features a whopping 17 bathrooms, it seems the A-list now prides quantity over quality with their shitters. A very sad day for celebrity bog aficionados, who include:

* Barbra Streisand, who insists assistants scatter her bowl with fresh rose petals before she offloads

* Oprah Winfrey, whose Florida penthouse once boasted a crapper made of imported white marble with a golden seat

* Miley Cyrus, who was given a $10,000 toilet when Wrecking Ball got to No.1, with Bluetooth connectivity and surround sound speakers so she can stream while she streams

* Mel B and Meghan Trainor, who are both fans of the side-by-side his’n’hers toilets, so they can enjoy a chat with their BFF while curling one out together

After Paul “Double Cunt” Dacre failed to get the job as Chairman of Ofcom, the position has since been filled by Lord Michael “A Cunt” Grade.

Chris Morris famously paid tribute to Lord Michael by including a subliminal, single-frame shot in an episode of Brass Eye which displayed the words “Grade Is A Cunt” on screen. And it looks like the catchphrase took off around the Channel 4 offices.

Someone dismantling the huge wooden desk in the C4 boardroom a few years back was charmed to see that the same words had been scrawled in huge letters all across the table’s underside.

Is it us or does “BuzzFeed Lays Off Its Entire Newsroom” season get earlier and earlier each year?

The company has gained a reputation for the tone-deaf handling of its redundancies (letting a bunch of staff go in a meeting room called ‘Black Mirror’; giving unsuspecting employees the passcode ‘spr!ngisH3r3’ to access the virtual announcement of their impending lay-offs, etc) and it’s evident that Jonah Peretti still struggles to run a newsroom cost effectively.

Never was this more clear than in BuzzFeed’s London office where – in trying to go toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley, rather than keep pace with Fleet Street’s standard trappings – the company’s free lunch budget would regularly run to £15K a month and once included an all-you-can-eat oyster buffet.

Ahead of her new album coming out, Sigrid gave an interview earlier this month about the music industry and why it still needs its #MeToo moment. The topic comes around with depressing regularity and we try to push it along wherever we can – but you may be wondering why nothing ever seems to result from it.

Well, it’s not for want of trying. To the best of our knowledge there are currently three separate investigations into various accounts of harassment and assault within major record labels by different newsdesks, but much of it has been caught in limbo for over a year now.

It’s a bit of a perfect storm holding things up too. Record execs have been hiring expensive lawyers to put the frighteners on anyone who dares touch the story. This means the story can only realistically be carried over the line by a media organisation with pockets deep enough to fight a big legal battle. The trouble is, any media organisation big enough also tends to have TV and radio interests, which rely even more heavily than newspapers on maintaining good relationships with record labels. Which makes them less inclined to pick a fight in the first place.

Compounding the issue further? The fact that many newsrooms in the UK have their own unresolved #MeToo issues to deal with too – such as the one currently trying to quietly clear up the fall-out from a recently imploded extramarital office affair, the handling of which could go pound for pound with any of the stories circulating about record execs. And which resulted – with grim familiarity – in the younger, less senior woman taking the biggest career hit.

There’s a wild story brewing in the Philippines after a huge spate of mystery disappearances around the country have been connected to cockfighting.

The official local name for the bloodsport is ‘sabong’ and it’s absolutely massive there – particularly for underground betting. To stop people attending fights in person during the pandemic, authorities licensed ‘e-sabong’ so that live cockfights could still take place and be streamed online. But since the streaming started, as many as 31 e-sabong fans and workers have just vanished – without a trace.

Police made some arrests this week after a gruesome abduction video circulated on the internet, but the mystery still stands. The leading theory at the moment is that there are a couple of Mr Bigs in the Filipino cockfighting world, and one of them is having people abducted or bumped off for fixing fights for the rival. The enigma is unlikely to be resolved any time soon, as these Mr Bigs are so big that even the police are too scared to go near them.

Last week we wrote that former Mailonline editor Martin Clarke had suffered a peculiar indignity at his old office, having his portrait removed from the editors’ Hall Of Fame next to the canteen.

We have since been assured by a spokesperson for dmg media that the removal of Martin’s portrait was only temporary, done so that they could have the inscription on it updated to include his date of departure. He has since been returned to his rightful place on the wall.

Jeffrey Epstein’s Paedophile Island is coming to market
[$125m – o.n.o.]

A curry kitchen with Smiths-influenced dishes
[This Charming Naan]

A rubber chicken sings Led Zep
[Watch on YouTube]

An interesting story as to why Catherine Tate’s Nan Movie has no director’s credit
[Read on Bleeding Cool]

Pusha T’s weird Fillet O Fish diss track
[See on Pitchfork]

In case you missed Bono’s Ukraine poem last week
[Brace yourself…]

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is playing Lollapalooza this summer
[DJ D-Sol back on the decks]

Chaotic Nightclub Photos
[See on Twitter]

Mundane gossip is taking over the internet
[Read on The Face]

Still Bored?
A recap of the American Song Contest, ft. Michael Bolton, AleXa and – the one song that came closest to nailing the weirdness of Eurovision – New Boot Goofin’…
[Read on Gawker]