Larry Ryanvisits some celebrity websites
The strangely inevitable death of Anna Nicole Smith provided copious fodder for the incessant sniping of bloggers such as Perez Hilton(http://perezhilton.com), who straddle a fine line between celebrity worship and hatred. A similarly themed blog, the bitchy, funny Superficial(www.thesuperficial.com), summed up this sad case: "It sounds like some terribly written cartoon where even the writers are worried they've taken the story too far. Halfway through the police investigation they're gonna discover a giant rubber-chicken suit and it's gonna somehow play a vital role in all this. And then a man with one glass eye will step forward and throw the entire case off the trail."
Paper Magazine's blog (http://blogs.papermag.com) picks up on another star languishing in the tawdry nether regions of fame. It reports that R Kelly, the R&B singer, missed a court appearance on child-pornography charges as he needed an emergency appendectomy - news that inspired the site to find other stars who get by without their appendices, among them Alan Alda, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner (http://blogs.papermag.com/2007/02/09/ we-ve-got-appendix-fever). Because there are some things that you just have to know.
Gallery of the Absurd(http://galleryoftheabsurd. typepad.com) skewers the famous in other strange ways, offering satirical cartoons of famous people. Given the week that was in it, it had one thing on its mind: love. The results included a heartfelt St Valentine's Day rhyming couplet to a bottle of vodka from Linsday Lohan, a loving message from George Bush and Valentine's sweets from Donald Trump, with messages such as "You're fired", "You make me sick" and "I'm happy when you fail". Something to warm the cockles of a frozen heart.
The Onion, the legendary US satirical newspaper, has an equally excellent arts and entertainment section, the AV Club(www.avclub.com). It's home to the spot-on pop-culture musings of Amelie Gillette, in her column The Hater, which she regularly updates in blog form. Over in the cinema section, Scott Tobias writes one of the more damning openings to a film review that you are likely to read, on Norbit, Eddie Murphy's latest comedy: "It probably isn't possible for a single movie to reverse all social progress made since the civil-rights era, but [ this] does its best to turn back the clock . . . Hideously offensive black stereotypes are merely the tip of the iceberg."