Nothing Left To Spay

Seems like those rowdy West End audiences we heard so much about last year aren’t settling down. Rod Stewart was at the Kit Kat Club last Tuesday to see Cabaret and was evidently very taken with the show’s immersive atmosphere.

Not only was Rod singing along with all the songs, he was shouting comments to the performers as they went on and off stage (including a hilariously hearty “There she is… Go on, girl!” at Fraulein Schneider ahead of her big number).

He got so stuck into the chorus of Tomorrow Belongs To Me that, during the interval entertainment, one of the ensemble sidled up to him to tell him to pipe down. But Rod didn’t pipe down. And a few dozen refunds were issued to neighbouring punters as a result.

Last year was pretty rough for celebrity mega-agency YMU. First there was all the Phillip Schofield fall-out. Then the company’s global chair, Linda Yaccarino, started publicly and perpetually humiliating herself as Twitter CEO. Then the celeb client exodus started.

Sadly, YMU’s established habit of hiring their clients’ nearest and dearest hasn’t worked out too well. The idea was to keep everyone as one big happy family – but now the ship’s hit choppy waters, it’s had the opposite effect. Martha Atack walked recently, taking her sister Emily with her. Amanda Holden went a few months after her husband quit as a director too.

Other names have been eyeing up the exit so, to keep some of the bigger ones sweet, the agency has offered to reduce the percentage they take. A bold move given the rumours that YMU is up to its neck in debt.

We’d have loved to have looked over the official numbers but, alas, for some reason their most recent financial paperwork appears to be overdue at Companies House. So it’ll have to wait.

Which Oscar nominee has been scouring the internet for one-star reviews of their film and passive-aggresively replying to them with “Thanks for watching my film” and a little prayer hands emoji?

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard any stories about celebrity pets – and after hearing this one, we aren’t sure we want to hear any ever again.

Jemima Goldsmith has a dog called Brian. Like many dogs, Brian has been fixed – but he wasn’t fixed in the traditional way. Instead, the horny little mutt licked his balls so much that he got a tear and had to be taken in for an emergency orchidectomy (i.e. testicle chop).

Josh Widdecombe was in one of the more hipster Vietnamese restaurants on Kingsland Road this week, talking loudly to two male companions about a new project of his.

As he rattled off a long list of at least ten people that they needed to ask to be involved (“Ivo, Clarky, Frank…”) he was briefly snagged by a moment of self-reflection when he asked “Do we care they’re all white men?”

Judging by the two second pause that was left before they all swiftly moved on to the next point of business it seems that, no, they do not.

AM writes:
“I know someone who worked with the CEO of Fujitsu, Paul Patterson, who has been speaking to ministers about the Horizon scandal.

“When he was a project manager with Hewlett Packard in the 90s, his nickname was ‘Sam’ on account of how he looked (and still looks) like Sam Eagle of The Muppets.”

Hands down, the best celebrity story this week was Julio Iglesias being detained at Punta Cana airport after luggage inspectors found him trying to carry a stonking 42kg of fresh produce through security. Strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, meat, lettuce – a full pantry’s worth of gear.

It’s funny in its own right, but it also fits perfectly alongside the other tales in the Iglesias canon.

1/ Julio once had five gallons of water flown from his home in Miami to LA so he could wash his hair in his “own” water.

2/ Once on tour, Julio boarded the crew’s tourbus one evening for an aftershow drink. After a short while, he excused himself, disappeared for five minutes, then made his farewells. The reason for his visit became transparently clear when the next member of the crew popped to the lav and saw the boss had left behind a log of such gargantuan proportions that “Doing a Julio” has long since become shorthand among members of that crew for particularly eye-watering shits.

BJM writes:
“Back in the summer of 2000, I was doing some work at a video editing facility in NYC in an old industrial building with excruciatingly slow elevators. While I was waiting for the lift after a midday ciggy break, two women came into the lobby to wait with me. I smiled and nodded at them and we all stood silently while waiting. No indication that I was in the presence of greatness.

“The elevator finally arrived, we all got in, and the older woman urgently and repeatedly pressed the button to their destination floor as she purred, ‘I haaaave to peeee so baaaadly.’

“It was the absolutely unmistakable voice of Ms Eartha Kitt.

“I laughed and said that I couldn’t understand why we didn’t have public pay toilets like in London. While doing the pee-pee dance, she readily and robustly agreed that the US was very uncivilized in comparison.”

Saudi Arabia has announced with great fanfare that it’s going to be relaxing alcohol sales and opening up a booze shop in Riyadh. The catch is that it’s only for diplomats and booze will be dished out in strictly “specified quotas”.

Just how thirsty is your average diplomat? Well, each registered individual will be able to buy up to 240 litres of beer, 80 litres of wine or 40 litres of spirits per month.

Which works out at roughly 14 pints, 3.5 bottles of wine or two bottles of gin. Per day. Every day.

Last year, we learned that notorious Australian bunny-fucker Brendan McMahon had changed his name, moved to Auckland and turned his gruesome attention to New Zealand’s rabbits. Now the South Island is getting some bizarro animal happenings too.

Christchurch’s floppy eared inhabitants appear to be safe (so Brendan’s not a suspect) but the city’s possum population has been the subject of some macabre ritualistic murders this month.

The first scene involved three dead possums arranged artfully over the roadsigns of a city centre roundabout, arranged in a perfect semi-circle. In the next, a driver found another three dead possums laid out on a rock by another central road. And then in the third (and weirdest yet) a pram was found beside a river, containing two dead possums, dressed up in clothes.

Hopefully there won’t be a fourth…

Rufus Wainwright’s house is up for sale
[Listing here]

Want a blast of old internet nostalgia?
[Search on Old’avista]

A new paper in the Journal of Zoology shows that there are more Bigfoot sightings where there are bears
[Who’d have thought?]

The strange life – and afterlife – of TikTok’s illness influencers
[Read on Vox]

Want to understand what makes an Original or an Adapted screenplay at the Oscars?
[Good luck!]

A catalogue of films on Wikimedia
[Watch them here]

Still Bored?
Michael Bise is a Texas schoolteacher who worked at Gap from 1992 to 2006. He still only dresses in Gap clothes and he spends his free time finding Gap CDs and in-store playlists and converting them to Spotify playlists.
[The link to his playlists is in the story]