Xtra (882)
Doggone … and back again
SITKA, Alaska (AP) — An Alaska family had given up hope of finding their blind, elderly golden retriever who wandered away from their home three weeks ago, but a construction crew found Lulu in salmonberry bushes after initially confusing her for a bear.
Lulu was barely alive after being found Tuesday, but she is being nursed back to health and is back home with her family, the Daily Sitka Sentinel reported.
“She means everything,” owner Ted Kubacki said. “I have five daughters and they’re 4 to 13 years old, so they’ve spent every day of their life with that dog.”
The Kubacki family searched for weeks after Lulu wandered off June 18.
“She’s just so helpless, and you kind of imagined that she can’t get real far because she can’t see,” he said.
It didn’t help when the family was the subject of a terrible joke when someone claimed they found Lulu a few days into the search.
“We put the kids to bed and got a text saying, ‘We found your dog,’ or ‘I have your dog,’ and we’re like, ‘Oh my god, this is incredible,’” he said. “Then the person texted me, ‘Just kidding.’ This happened, yeah, that was all part of this terrible story.”
After searching weeks, the family had given up hope.
But then a construction crew this week spotted Lulu lying in the brush alongside a road not far from the Kubacki’s home. She was about 15 feet (4.57 meters) down an embankment, and at first the crew thought it was a bear.
“They got a closer look and they realized that it was a dog, and they got her out of there,” Kubacki said.
TME – This is like four Disney movies in one.
In the years that Celebrity Slam has been gracing these pages, we’ve spent a lot of time taking shots at a LOT of celebrities. Hundreds of famous people have been on the receiving end of our own brand of snark and nonsense … and we’ve had a heck of a time.
However, there are a handful of celebrities who have been vital parts of this space. These are the celebs whose words and deeds have been so utterly and consistently Slammable that they have appeared multiple times. We’ve got love in our hearts for this handful, to be sure.
And then, in the tier above, we have the pantheon, the Mount Rushmore of Celebrity Slam. These are the celebrities who had iconic runs in this feature. Famous folks who spent weeks on end regularly doing and saying the sorts of crazy things that landed them here. Even when taking into account the escalation necessary to go on a big run, these are the people who power through it, offering up Slam-worthy content extensive in both quantity and quality.
Charlie Sheen was one such celebrity.
However, while his Celebrity Slam star burned white-hot for a goodly stretch, it burned out. He receded into the background – in our eyes, yes, but also in the eyes of the public.
So we were delighted to see his name pop up again for a potential item this week – particularly because it’s a story where he (eventually) comes out looking OK.
Urine for it now!
BOSTON (AP) — Urine trouble no more, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority hopes, with a new program to tackle public urination in system elevators with technology.
The MBTA, which services Boston and the surrounding area, is launching a pilot program this summer in which urine detection sensors will be placed in four downtown elevators. The sensors alert transit ambassadors, who can dispatch a cleaning crew, the Boston Herald reported.
The sensors on the ceiling of an elevator have an attached fan, which allows them to suck in air and “basically smell what is present,” said Meghan Collins, a program/projects manager for MBTA.
The pilot kicks off in August. Data will be collected for several months before the agency makes a decision about whether to implement the program by year’s end, the newspaper said.
It’s not a new concept.
Nearly a decade ago, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority launched a pilot program that, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, triggered strobe lights, alarms and alerts to MARTA police when urine was detected in an elevator. The elevators were then inoperable until a cleaning. That program, deemed a success, was eventually expanded.
The MBTA hopes the program helps alleviate problems: Public urination is not only unsanitary but can also damage elevators, Collins said.
TME – Un-pee-lievable!
Celebrity Slam - A tale of two copyright lawsuits
Written by Tim Bissell
Every once in a while, there’s a week where Celebrity Slam pickings are pretty slim.
It’s not that famous people aren’t getting up to stuff – they totally are – so much as it is that the stuff they’re getting up to isn’t all that funny. It’s like, sure, we know that many of these celebrities are sh—y people – but when the events in question are bleak and sad, well … our hearts just aren’t in it.
We thought we might have something when we saw a story about how a movie chimp that died a while back actually didn’t die and it turned out that its handler had faked its death, but then Alan Cumming (who had worked with the chimp) and PETA both got involved and then the story stopped being funny and started being sad and … well, you get it.
So when we have weeks like this, we sometimes find that we need to put a couple of less-vital items together and call it a day.
Hence, we are poking fun at a pair of years-late efforts by non-famous people to sue famous people in an effort to get paid. These suits are both rather dumb, though one is far dumber than the other (we’ll let you decide which is the dumber of the two).
Dog gone …
An Iditarod sled dog was found safe after disappearing from a checkpoint in the race three months ago and covering nearly 150 miles, the Iditarod Trail Committee said Saturday.
Musher Sebastien Dos Santos Borges of France was picking Leon up and returning with him to France, the trail committee said in a statement.
Leon went missing in March after what the trail committee said was his “escape” from the Ruby checkpoint. In May, residents of the Alaska city of McGrath, over 120 miles south of the checkpoint, reported to Race Director Mark Nordman that they’d seen Leon frequently near a cabin.
The resident of the cabin and another musher left food for Leon in the hopes of catching him, according to the trail committee. He was captured early Saturday morning and was safe, alert and “understandably skinny but seemingly healthy,” said Iditarod spokesperson Shannon Markley.
Leon was expected to see a veterinarian in the coming days and needs a health certificate before he can fly back to France, Markley said.
The nearly 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race across Alaska began March 6 just north of Anchorage. The route took mushers along Alaska’s untamed and unforgiving wilderness, including two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and Bering Sea ice along the state’s western coastline. Brent Sass won the race March 15 when he crossed under the famed burled arch finish line in Nome.
On March 12, a dozen dogs had arrived with Dos Santos Borges in Ruby, a checkpoint just under 500 miles from the start of the race.
Dos Santos Borges left Ruby on March 13 with 11 dogs, and scratched days later with nine dogs after the checkpoint in White Mountain, located just under 900 miles (1,448 kilometers) into the race.
TME - …and dog back.
There are many different types of celebrity. You’ve got your movie stars, your pop stars, your reality stars – it’s a real famous person buffet. But sometimes, we forget to include sports stars in that equation. For whatever reason, when we think “celebrity,” we neglect athletes, even though a pro player is just as much an entertainer and performer as anyone else who we see on our screens.
Still, every once in a while, we get a sports-related story that is outlandish enough to merit inclusion in this space. The dudes involved are baseball players – good ones, but not superstars – so you know that if we’re talking about them, things got weird.
And reader – weird is what we got.
The incident we’re discussing happened last week before a game between the San Francisco Giants and the Cincinnati Reds. As the Giants players were in the outfield warming up, Reds outfielder Tommy Pham went up to Giants outfielder Joc Pederson and slapped him. Just straight-up smacked him across the face. Strange, right?
Not as strange as the reason behind it.
There can be only one
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A couple hundred people grabbed their pool noodles and headed to a Nebraska park again this weekend to battle over the right to the name Josh.
The event started as an online joke when Josh Swain from Tucson, Arizona, sent out a tweet challenging anyone who shared his name to fight over it. After it took on a life of its own, Swain turned it into a real event last year at the random coordinates he included in his original note, which happened to be in Lincoln, Nebraska.
“The enthusiasm from everybody here was just incredible,” Swain told the Lincoln Journal Star.
Several of the competitors this year donned costumes, including masks, animal suits and football helmets, before heading out to Bowling Lake Park. But that wasn’t enough to dethrone 5-year-old Josh Vinson Jr., who defended his title as the No. 1 Josh.
Saturday’s event raised nearly $21,000 for Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, and the owners of the Josh Cellars wine label pledged to match that amount with a donation of their own. The hospital said it plans to share some of the donations with the Joshua Collinsworth Memorial Foundation that promotes water safety with its Josh the Otter mascot who attended Saturday’s battle.
Swain said he’d like to make the Josh Fight an annual event but he’s not sure if he’ll be able to keep it up.
“There’s a number of factors in this crazy world,” Swain said. “I think that the hope is to keep this trend going so that we can keep the good times rolling.”
TME – I am immortal, I have inside me blood of Josh/I have no rival, no Josh can be my equal.
It’s no secret that hip-hop beefs are among our favorite things to cover here at Celebrity Slam. One, there’s always plenty of info out there – these guys love putting each other on blast via social media and diss tracks and what have you. Two, they’re almost always relatively low stakes – with a few exceptions, these conflicts tend to be mostly or entirely all talk. Three, these folks are REALLY good at it.
And so when we get to spend a little time on a beef, whether it is newly cut or long-simmering, we tend to enjoy ourselves.
The latest involves Gillie The Kid, Mack Maine and Lil Wayne. This is a long-term conflict that has recently been revived in the public eye. Buckle up, because it gets a little complicated.
Come on, Vogue!
LONDON (AP) — The owner of a rural English pub says he was asked to change the bar’s name by a fashion magazine because of the village where it’s located: Vogue.
Mark Graham, who runs the Star Inn at Vogue, said he received a letter from British Vogue publisher Conde Nast, saying the name could “cause problems” because members of the public might confuse the two businesses.
He said the letter from Sabine Vandenbroucke, chief operating officer of Conde Nast Britain, asked if he would change the name, adding: “Please reply within seven days or we will take remedial action.”
Graham stood his ground.
“There’s always too much a case of the big boys trying to stomp on the little boys, and as soon as I realized what they were trying to do, I went ‘you’re not having me, my handsome,’” he told broadcaster ITV.
He sent a reply noting that the village, in Cornwall County about 250 miles (400 kilometers) southwest of London, is considerably older than the magazine, whose British edition was founded in 1916.
“I presume that at the time when you chose the name Vogue … you didn’t seek permission from the villagers of the real Vogue,” he wrote.
“In answer to your question whether we would change our name, it is a categorical NO.”
Graham said that on Friday he received another letter from Conde Nast saying that it regularly monitors use of the name Vogue but acknowledging that “we did not need to send such a letter on this occasion.”
TME – Makes you wonder if they went after Madonna this hard.
We here at Celebrity Slam are here for the drama. Of course we are – drama is what gives us the sorts of items that allow us to do what we do. We love it when famous people get up to their usual shenanigans so we can have a little fun at their expense.
But sometimes, we get something that feels almost TOO perfect. The sort of item that is seemingly tailor-made for what we do here. And so it is this week.
Before we get into the details, we should do a refresher on the Celebrity Slam Theorem. For those unfamiliar with the rough math of CS, here’s a quick refresher. The more famous a person is, the less outlandish their actions need to be to warrant inclusion here. Also, the inverse is true. This is important information due to the fact that we’re going to be talking about a soap opera star whose name you probably don’t know, so, y’know … it’s gonna get weird.
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