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Stupid lawsuits are filed every day, and Lindsay Lohan does stupid things every day. But is she really behind the E*Trade lawsuit that bears her name?

According to a complaint filed in New York’s Nassau County Supreme Court on Monday, Lohan claims that the E*Trade advertisement that refers to a “milkaholic” named Lindsay appropriated her name and image without her consent, and she is seeking a whopping $100 million in damages and an injunction against further broadcast of the commercial. It’s a ludicrous claim, as former Gawker editor Joshua Stein, who happened to be reporting on the development of that very ad for Esquire and has produced documents showing that the “milkaholic” character was originally named “Deborah,” has demonstrated.

But the strange thing about the suit is that the lead attorney on the case, Stephanie Ovadia, has done legal work for Michael Lohan in the past, and Michael has repeatedly posted fulsome praise of Ovadia’s legal skills to his Twitter feed as recently as January. Last we checked, Michael was still in the midst of his famous feud with Lindsay—just last week, father and daughter were lobbing tabloid insults at one another, with Lindsay saying she didn’t speak to Michael and calling him “nuts.” So why would she seek out her dad’s lawyer just a few days later to file a $100 million lawsuit? Sure, the high-end Hollywood lawyers that Lindsay has employed in the past wouldn’t be stupid enough to draw up the E*Trade complaint, but surely she could find a bottom-feeding attorney of her own to embarrass themselves for money and attention.

And she could probably find one who is a member of the state bar in which the suit was filed. According to the web site of the New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, which is responsible for admitting attorneys to the New York bar, no one going by the name “Stephanie Ovadia” is currently entitled to appear before New York courts (which may explain the presence of Ovadia’s co-counsel Anand Ahuja, who is admitted to the bar, on the complaint).

According to press accounts posted on Ovadia’s web site, she has practiced law in New York in the past. But she certainly doesn’t seem like a go-to lawyer for a multimillion dollar case—unless you can sue people for $100 million over parking tickets.

Ovadia didn’t return a phone call and e-mail asking how she got involved in the case and whether she’d ever spoken to Lindsay Lohan about it. And we don’t really know where to go to ask someone from Lindsay’s side about it, considering the fact that her long-time publicist is on a “hiatus.” Her mother Dina Lohan told the New York Post today that Lindsay was outraged by the ad, adding, in a telling use of the first person, “I’m just basically glad I took a stand.” And to to complete the circle, Radar Online quoted Michael Lohan just two days ago saying that he and his ex-wife had reconnected and were “crying to each other” on the phone after he took a heart-related trip to the hospital.

A cynic might suspect that Lindsay’s money-grubbing parents recently started talking again and hatched a plan to attach their daughter’s name to a bullshit lawsuit filed by a provincial lawyer that one of them knows. But we can’t imagine what sort of parents would treat their daughter that way.

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Kristen Cordle is stoked: The young executive assistant has abandoned the scary pirate captain of dying Yahoo to work for the CEO of red-hot Twitter Inc. She’s already dissing her lame old company, and the competition.

Cordle made appropriately sentimental noises when she left her job working for potty-mouthed Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, tweeting that co-founder “Jerry Yang just gave me a good-bye hug :: tear::,” and, under a picture of Bartz, ” I’ll miss these ladies…and many many more.” But once Cordle was a safe distance from her fire-breathing boss, the truth came out: Twitter is SO much cooler:

That was after approximately one workday at Twitter. After one more, Cordle was ready to diss rival social network Facebook:

Cordle, a San Francisco resident, hints that she took the Twitter job in part to avoid the lengthy commute to Yahoo’s HQ in Sunnyvale. But there’s no question the gig will help the former Logitech program manager further ascend the professional ladder she’s made her way up so quickly and adroitly thus far:

Cordle will be assisting Twitter CEO Ev Williams, according to blogger and Silicon Valley startup advisor Louis Gray, and was press-savvy enough to send repeated shout-outs to longtime tech journalist Kara Swisher while re-tweeting the tech bloggers at Mashable, including Twitter chronicler Ben Parr.

Maybe she’s an internet celebrity in the making. It’s not every company that gives executive assistants enough free time to become a fameball, but Twitter’s not your typical sort of place.

(Pic: Corlde with Bartz, via Cordle’s Twitter)

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Seven Muslims were arrested Tuesday for trying to kill yet another Muhammad-doodling European cartoonist. Among them was Colleen LaRose, a blond-haired green-eyed suburbanite who met her co-conspirators on YouTube and online forums, under the name JihadJane.

According to a federal indictment, the 46-year-old LaRose began her jihad in June of 2008 when, under the username JihadJane, she commented on YouTube that she was “desperate to do something somehow to help” Muslims. She began corresponding with like-minded people in South Asia and Europe, two of whom advised Jihad Jane to take advantage of her imperviousness to racial profiling so they could attack a target CNN identifies as Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who earned a fatwa for depicting Muhammad astride a donkey.

Instructed a conspirator: “go to sweden… find location of [Vilks, presumably]… and kill him… this is what i say to u.” Jihadis: They resist the ’shift’ key, just like us. Later, the same conspirator would note that LaRose “can get access to many places due to ur nationality,” asking her to “marry me or get me inside europe.” Romantic.

Jihad Jane went on to raise funds and recruit more co-conspirators for her mission, the indictment says. She infiltrated an artist colony Vilks frequented and, in the fall of 2009, was revved up for the kill.

The New York Times describes Jihad Jane’s now-defunct MySpace page. From the cache for myspace.com/BeyondPrincessForever, here it is. Click images to enlarge.

Meanwhile, some other white lady named Colleen LaRose is having a really shitty day.

Pennsylvania Woman Tied to Plot on Cartoonist [NYT]
‘Jihad Jane’ Indictment Alleges Threat from Within U.S. [LAT]
U.S.: Pennsylvania Woman Tried to Recruit Terrorists [CNN]
Jihad Jane’s MySpace [cached]

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We’re sorry, but it’s coming. Rumor is that the shaggy Office star has the role of Captain America pretty much in the bag. It’d be “a multi-film deal,” which means Jim Halpert is about to get big. This is bad.

Look, as actors go, Krasinki is mostly fine. He’s certainly better than an Ashton Kutcher or a Dane Cook. Of the current crop of shaggy-sarcastic funnymen, Krasinksi is definitely not the worst. But his whole hangdog cutie shtick has gotten unbearably tired and downright smug on The Office of late, and his equally grating work in movies like Leatherheads and It’s Complicated — mugging to the camera, oddly broad comedy strokes — have shown that his range doesn’t extend much past the whole cute guy you don’t notice until you do and then you really dooooo acting style. And though Captain America does begin as a nerdy little art student, pretty soon he’s buff and shield-wielding. We don’t see that really working with this muppetish fellow.

And besides, the real problem isn’t Krasinski playing the hero in some comic movie that probably won’t be good. It’s that the series could make him a bonafide star, which means more gangly manboy to come — in sadsack modern dramas, in corn-blue romantic comedies, in paranoid urban thrillers. Krasinski is suited well for the small box, and now it seems that he could soon be foisted upon our megaplexes like a great messy-haired American Gerard Butler, an idea that sends an ironic slacker chill through our bones.

[Photo via Getty Images]

Continued here

A judge might send Andrew Young to jail for lying about his handling of the John Edwards sex tape. It seems the tape was distributed more widely than it should have been, like every sex tape ever.

Young swore the only copy of a video of his former boss getting it on with mistress Rielle Hunter was in an Atlanta safe-deposit box, and that Young had shown it only to a select few. But that testimony didn’t square with Young showing the tape to ABC News and also to freelance journalist Robert Draper, the Associated Press reports. Finally, someone is about to be punished for sleazy John Edwards having an illicit love child behind the back of his cancer-stricken wife, and lying to the world about it. And naturally that someone is a campaign aide whose last name is not “Edwards” or “Hunter.”

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This may seem like an easily answered question — people get plastic procedures hoping to look young and beautiful forever — but given a recent spate of cosmetic surgery horrorshows, we increasingly just don’t understand why anyone gets “work done.”

Look at how plastic surgery is trending, right now!

Remember Heidi Montag? She’s a character from MTV’s The Hills who used to be a person. That was many moons and several faces ago, and now Heidi looks like this:

Bahhh! That’s a new highly humorous PSA about credit card regulations or something, the joke being that Heidi is now entirely made of plastic and chemical, just like the credit cards she’s saying bad things about. You know who directed this thing? Ron Howard. What an enabler! But also, why is Heidi joking about her face and not being able to smile and things like that? I mean, she actually can’t smile and things like that. And she seems to know that. So why would she get the surgeries done in the first place?

In her case the reasoning is, yes, fairly obvious. Because she’s dumb and vain and on TV. But she’s also young, only twenty-three years old, and used to look like this. She wasn’t ugly at all! She had nice sorta WASPy, horsey Kennedy features. She’d have fit right in at Hyannis Port! But now… Oh now it’s all an ugly, too-smooth, melony mess. But again, she’s a vain and vapid reality star, one who is paid to be vain and vapid, and who is told by the likes of Ron Howard that if she keeps augmenting herself, we’ll keep paying attention. This is depressing, but vaguely understandable.

But what I truly don’t get is how normal people, regular folks like you and your mom, could see those results and still say “Yes, sign me up!”

How could they hear about Mexican singer Alejandra Guzman winding up in the hospital, severely unwell, after a botched butt injection, and want to go in themselves. Only to be shocked and horrified when something goes awry for them:

Ha ha, a doctor was putting caulk in their ass. (Get it?) I know that people can be, like famous-ish Heidi, vain and dumb creatures (so blinded by vanity they are), but come on. When people found out that Olestra might cause you to poop your pants a little, they dropped that product like a hot potato. Are people really more frightened of the idea of something coming out of their butts than they are with the idea of their butts, in entirety, simply falling off? That’s disheartening. In 2010, that is very disheartening.

Call me naive, but so much noise has been made lately about plastic surgery disasters — a conversation resurrected from the ’90s after a brief lull, it feels — that I’m just staggered that so many people, women especially, are subjecting themselves to the possibilities of, at best, having their faces ending up looking like mangled Laffy Taffy and, at worse, contracting fatal butt fall-offitis.

Watching the Oscars on Sunday, there were some celebrities who have maybe gotten work and pulled it off — Kathryn Bigelow, at 59, can’t possibly look that good naturally, can she? — but those cases were very rare. Mostly, even in Hollywood circles that can afford the most expensive and exclusive doctors, you get Nicole Kidmans and Meg Ryans. Once-beautiful women who now look like sad, Twilight Zone wax versions of themselves. It seems better, more dignified, to admit to America that, yes, you are in fact a mortal who is affected by time, and let yourself look your age (Meryl Streep), than to strut down a red carpet with an embarrassing bulbous death mask of make-believe skin grafted onto your skull.

I guess I just don’t get why, when so much evidence seems to suggest that most of this tucking and stretching and squeezing rarely ever works (the Bravo television channel does a whole series about this fact), we’re still hearing all these nightmare stories about people who willingly went under the knife. I generally like to think that we aren’t that broken of a culture. But maybe we are?

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After a long, long (but not long enough?) winter away, our good friends from the Upper East Side have returned to us, dressed all in black and hunting for ghosts. There is no power in the afterlife.

Well, only one fellow was looking for an actual ghost, but other people were pursuing things that long ago disappeared in the past, trying to reclaim and rekindle old loves.

Guess who’s doin’ it? Yes, of course, it’s young Nate and Serena, whose daring and illicit sexcapade basically kicked off the entire series. It’s doubtful that their new pairing is serving as some sort of bookend and thus the series is ending, so don’t get your hopes up. No, it’s just another excuse for Serena to pout and for actress Chace Crawford to deploy her usual salvo of droning line readings. And for, you know, sexy writhing around.

For her part, Blair has sanctioned the fledgling couple, but doesn’t think that they should rush into anything. Chiefly she didn’t think the kids should be doing sex to each other just yet, mostly because, like the rest of us, she found the idea of those two genital-less HardBodyBots mashing their smooth crotchal regions together unbearably repulsive. Try as they might, and beautiful as they are, Blake Lively and Chace Crawford just aren’t terribly attractive, are they? Or, at least, they simply have no chemistry with together. “Hello, pretty.” “Oh, hello pretty.” “You are looking pretty.” “You are looking pretty too.” “Shall we scissor without purpose for an hour or so?” “Yes, we shall.” Ew.

But of course the wacky lovebirds couldn’t keep their whirring porcelain hands off of each other, so we were subjected to lots of sexy doin’-it music while these two clowns squeaked against each other like vinyl. There was some kind of supposed drama about Nate wanting to take it slow, because he took some stupid advice from the pile of chins that is Dan Humphrey, and Serena getting pissy. But for the most part their portion of the episode was about sexlessly rubbing up against one another, all of us weeping hot human tears at the grotesqueness of the whole thing.

Throwing a monkey wrench into Serena and Nate’s fruitless nontercourse was, as always, little Pirate Jenny Humphrey, quickly evolving as one of the most hands-down annoying characters on television. Remember in the books when Jenny was a nerdy frizz-head with huge cans and was likable? Well, she’s not on this show, she’s just thin and board-like and blonde and wears increasingly bizarre goth clothes. Why are they styling Jenny like this? All these black garments and heavy dark makeup. It just makes no sense. I know trends recycle themselves every twenty years, but are we really at pop-goth again? Oh molasses I hope not.

Anyway, last night Lydia Deetz was still doing drug running with her wicked Eurobrat diplobrat friend, the kid from Airbud. The Kid from Airbud, being a Eurobrat diplobrat, is a total ass. See, the Party this episode (there is always a Party, no matter the episode, always some social Something to attend or muck up or wear special clothing to) was a big French Ambassador’s Dinner. And, as French Ambassadors tend to be some kinky motherfuckers, exclusively teenagers were invited to the occasion. Just wall-to-wall teenagers and the French Ambassador looking creepily content and humming “Les Poisson.” So the Kid from Airbud wanted to do a big drug deal with the French Ambassador’s Daughter and needed Jenny’s help. She came up with the brilliant and spy-level idea of switching coats. Put drugs in a lookalike coat and have the FAD take the one stuffed with drugs home at the end of the evening. Jenny is basically Mary McDonnell in Sneakers. She is that good.

So all was on track with that plan until Nate and Serena fizzed and sparked and said “Malfunction. Malfunction.” and had a fight about the pace of their relationship. Upset about the fight, Serena, as rash and slatternly as Kate Keepdown, ran and asked the Kid from Airbud to go to the French Ambassador’s dinner with her. See, they used to know each other “at boarding school” (a robot factory outside Concord, NH) and he always had a crush on her. But that was in her wilder days and she is different now, but he doesn’t know that!

The Kid from Airbud goes and meanly tells Jenny that shit is off with them, he got Sereneer van der Woolens to go on a date with him, so old Depeche Mode Humphrey can go cram it with cloves. But Jenny is never one to back down, her heart pumps black and relentless in her otherwise hollow chest, so of course she went to the French Ambassador’s sweet sixteen and saw Nate and was all “Let’s be dates.” The couples tried to make each other jealous but really nobody cared and in the end the Eurobrat diplobrat was proven to be a rake and a scoundrel, Serena was pulled into a coat closet and robot raped by Nate, and the French Ambassador’s Daughter got her meth manteau and all was well. The Kid from Airbud will stick around a little longer perhaps, and will maybe live to perform an Inserting upon Jenny, unless she has a Cure cover band concert to go to. We’ll see! Serena and Nate, meanwhile, are happily trying to interlock and interface with each other, sadly unaware that their mutual creator, the wispy and whimsical and wife-grieving white-haired Dr. Lacrimoso made them in such a way that they can never be truly together, because that is his pain, that is all of humanity’s pain.

Another story line happening this week had to do with those old people that sometimes tell Dan, Jenny, and Serena what to do (though it never actually works). Nobody cares about this storyline except for the fact that Dan got in a fight with the old man character and said, as means to a sad/angry thing, “Make your own damn waffles.” Mm. Powerful words. Make your own damn waffles, Rahm Emanuel. Make your own damn waffles, Interrupting Oscar Witch Lady. Make your own damn waffles, scary kids who smoke weed outside my front door. Thanks for that, Dan.

Speaking of Dan, he wants to perform an Inserting upon Vanessa, but she was nowhere to be found this episode. Sadly, unbeknownst to Dan, cavewoman Vanessa has been gored by a woolly mammoth and is using her last strength to draw her pictograph story on the walls of a cave in France. Either that or she thinks he’s gross and chinny and just doesn’t want to call him back.

Finally we turn to Chuck and Blair. Blair was wearing a big furry hat and underpants at one point and made an Anna Karenina joke, which is fine. Chuck was all moopy and sad, scouring the riverbed for silt and other detritus as all good catfish do. One piece of detritus he was especially eager to find was his momz. Remember his mom who died in Chuckbirth but who is maybe secretly alive and putting flowers on Bart’s grave? Well, Chuck sadly tracked this mysterious lady down and she lied and said “No, my dear, I am not your mother.” And Chuck’s face fell three sizes that day, and he shuffled off and went to go throw pebbles into a pond and pick at his scabs and sulk, and you wish you could do something, put your hand on this little boy’s shoulder and tell him that he is good and that there will be better days, but he’s such a stubborn boy and he won’t listen, so you just let him sit there, squinting obstinately at the setting sun, occasionally muttering angry little boy things to no one, to everyone.

After the big mom disappointment, insightful Blair held back and approached the woman again. She knew she was lying. And Blair was right! This lady is Chuck’s mother, if the picture she had of a lady holding a baby is to be believed. (The baby was wearing a purple dandy suit and scowling.) What role will Chuck’s secret mom play on the show? Oh god. I can only imagine.

That’s basically it folks. Oh, except. At the very end of the episode we caught site of Erik, another thwarted and angry little boy, kicking cans all alone down by the railroad tracks. We walked up to him and said “Do you need any help, son?” And he muttered “No…” and kicked another can and so we left him there, train whistles moaning in the distance, this abandoned little fellow not deserving to be lonely and ignored. But that’s just sometimes how the world works, people get left behind, trains miss stations. And trains keep running.

But what did it all mean for their power standings? Our continued tabulations are below.

Dorota:
Power Play: Everything falls to shit when she’s away: +2
Sexual Intrigue: Romantic getaway with her boyfriend Vanya: +1
Total: 3
Season to Date: 58
Power Position: Up

Blair:
Family Secrets: Finds Chuck’s necklace and knows something is fishy: +1
Fashion Points: The Anna Karenina hat and negligee: +2, Her sparkly jacket at the ambassador dinner; +1
Personality Flaw: Stupid enough to think that Serena can stay chaste: -1, Gets back on the “Serena is a skank” train: +1, Knows that Nate is functionally illiterate: +1
Power Play: Cares more about meeting the French ambassador for her secret club than her man Chuck: -2, Is scared of the beautiful girls surrounding her target: -1, Has the balls to approach the French guy on his smoke break: +2, Gives up her chance to talk to him to run off with Chuck: -1, Her high-society coffee klatch idea is stupid anyway: +1, Figures out Chuck’s mother is full of shit and tells her if she doesn’t stay away then she will fuck her shit up: +3
Sexual Intrigue: Gives Serena advice about Nate: +1, Ew, she fucked her best friends boyfriend: -2, Chuck has no interest in playing her aristocratic role play games: -1, Rightly counsels Chuck to be cautious about this woman he thinks is his mother: +2
Social Schemes: Using Chuck to get to M. Doree, some dude who runs some lame secret society she wants to join: +2, Does anyone care about joining her Babysitter’s Club?: -1
Total: 8
Season to Date: 35
Power Position: Up

Chuck:
Family Secrets: Keeping secrets from Blair: -1, Discovers his mother: +3, She lies about being his mother: -2, Has to feel the hurt of losing his mother all over again: -1
Fashion Points: Purple!: -1, Excellent coat with a faux fur (PETA hopes!) collar: +1
Money: Finds the only jeweler in the world with a confidentiality agreement: -1, Pays him for his secrets: +2
Personality Flaw: We knew he had daddy issues, but this new Oedipal Complex is something new and scary: -2
Power Play: Gets to have a fancy lunch with the French power broker Blair wants to impress: +1
Sexual Intrigue: Turns down a date with hot-to-trot Anna Karenina: -2, Makes up with Blair: +1
Total: -2
Season to Date: 27
Power Position: Down

Jenny:
Family Secrets: Doesn’t tell Lily that her dad is avoiding her: +1
Fashion Points: Combines fashion and drugs, her two favorite things: +3, Her drug mule bolero is something you would buy at the Urban Outfitter’s remainders sale: -2, Hello spider web gown at the ambassador’s dinner!: +2
Personality Flaw: Gets called out for her unnatural love of board games: -2
Power Play: Has a drug-dealing best friend, Damien, which is pretty rad: +1, But he knows that she is now a character out of an after school special and can tattle on her at any time: -2, The French ambassador’s daughter knows she is a waste of time: -1, Tells Nate he is a retard for taking relationship advice from Dan: +1
Sexual Intrigue: Gets dissed by Damien for Serena: -2, Gets Nate and Serena back together so she can have her drug dealing man: +2
Social Schemes: Show’s up and forces herself on Nate. Long live the queen!: +2, Saves the druggie sweater: +2
WTF: Fuck, the closer Jenny gets to being the living embodiment of the lyrics to “Cherry Bomb” the more we like her: +2
Total: 7
Season to Date: 8
Power Position: Up

Rufus:
Personality Flaw: Hip enough to video chat: +1, Feeding people: -1, Takes relationship advice from Dan: -3
Power Play: Ignoring Lily’s calls: +1, Ignoring Lily in general: +1, But she is his meal ticket: -2
Sexual Intrigue: Finally comes back to Lily: +1, He’s all angry and calls her a skank: -1, But wait, Lily is a skank: +3, Stops by his new lover’s house: +2 (bow chicka wow wow!)
Social Schemes: That hot black heiress lady totally wants his jock: +3
Total: 5
Season to Date: 1
Power Position: Up

Nate:
Fashion Points: Manbangs looking mangey: -1, Amazing tux shirt: +2
Personality Flaw: Is functionally illiterate: -1
Power Play: Takes romantic advice from Dan: -2, Gets upstaged by Damien, a short jerk with even worse hair: -1, If he had known there were drugs in that coat, he wouldn’t have thrown it away: -1
Sexual Intrigue: Is the 9 millionth person to sleep with Serena: -2, Has to go on a first date with Serena, even though they had sex already: -1, Is getting laid on the regular: +3, It’s by a lady: -1, He is dating his best friend’s ex: -1, Blowing it with Serena: -1, Really? In the coat room? Is he some pervy exhibitionist?: -2
Social Schemes: Let’s Jenny be his date: -2, She brings Serena and him back together, so it’s not a horrible decision: +2
Total: -11
Season to Date: 0
Power Position: Down

Vanessa:
Fashion Points: Wherever she was she still had lady dreads: -2
Power Play: Imagining a world without her is sweet indeed: 0
Total: -2
Season to Date: -10
Power Position: Up

Dan:
Personality Flaw: Gives everyone crappy relationship advice: -3, Owns a Cabbage Patch doll, which we find strangely endearing: +1
Power Play: Everyone keeps invading his Brooklyn pussy den: -1
Sexual Intrigue: Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan! You need to get over this whole Vanessa thing: -3
Social Schemes: His best friend is sleeping with his ex and he wants to sleep with his best friend. Do these people have no boundaries?: -2
Total: -8
Season to Date: -21
Power Position: Up

Lily:
Family Secrets: Both Jenny and Dan lie to her about Rufus’ whereabouts: -2, Her secret is totally lame. She spent the night in a hotel and kissed her ex-husband. Boring: -1, Also, everyone knows now: -1, There must be something more to this story, and if she is convincing people otherwise, good on her: +1
Fashion Points: Does that white dress double as her bathrobe?: -1
Personality Flaw: Continues to neglect her depressed, gay, suicidal son: -1
Power Play: Tells Jenny to keep the door open when she’s in there with a boy, which is sound parenting advice, for a change: +2, Jenny still does what she wants anyway: -1
Sexual Intrigue: Rufus doesn’t believe she could keep it kosher with her ex: -1, She totally fucked her ex, so at least she’s getting some: +1
Total: -5
Season to Date: -27
Power Position: Down

Serena:
Fashion Points: Nice white cowl-neck sweater dress, which is surprisingly not too slutty: +1, The cleavage in her party dress isn’t too outrageous: +1,
Personality Flaw: Someone needs to tell her that her boyfriend is gay: -1,
Power Play: Damien knows she is a skank who can’t keep her clothes on: -1, She gets all huffy and runs off when he says this: +2, But then she ends up taking her clothes off about 72 seconds later, so he was absolutely right: -3
Sexual Intrigue: Her chastity with Nate lasts about -29 seconds: -2, On the floor at the Waldorf’s, on a couch, is she some kind of public sex fetishist?: -1, We’re kind of into that: +2, Is dating her best friend’s ex. Ew: -1, Nate only wants to sleep with her once a day: -1, Her vast sexual appetite is like a black hole, pulling in everything close by and rendering it into cold, dead anti-matter: -2
Social Schemes: Doesn’t need Nate to go to no fancy French embassy party: +2
WTF: After diddling Nate in the coat room, she steals someones coat: -1, It is ugly: -2, And she doesn’t even bother to put her dress back on. God, Serena. You are the worst!: -3
Total: -10
Season to Date: -35
Power Position: Up! This isn’t rock bottom yet, people.

Originally posted here

If you were like me, last night you were watching the show with plenty of questions. Why so long? Why so bad? Who is that weird red-haired lady crashing the stage? Well, we found some answers and even more questions.

Mystery: Who the hell was that red-haired lady crashing the stage during the Best Documentary Short acceptance speech?
What Happened: Some crazy lady in a purple dress pulled a Kanye and hopped up to the mic and just started talking over director-producer Roger Ross Williams. She made no sense at all.
Status: Solved. That woman was producer Elinor Burkett. She and Williams had a bitter feud over the direction of the film that resulted in a lawsuit. Salon has the full, awesome story. She accuses Williams’ mother of tripping her with a cane to keep her from getting on stage. The Oscars needed a lot more of this.

Mystery: What was up with George Clooney’s face?
What Happened: The silver fox was acting squirrelier than usual and making strange grimaces at the camera.
Status: Solved: As we told you earlier Clooney was drunk from his secret flask. Who knows if the faces were because he was pissed (drunk) or pissed (upset) but we venture it was a combo of the two.

Mystery: Did the Academy leave Farrah Fawcett and others out of the Dead People Montage?
What Happened: The video collection of dead people highlights seemed shorter than usual this year (if you don’t count the entirely separate shout out to John Hughes who was never once nominated for an Oscar in his life) but they left several people out, like Fawcett, Bea Arthur, and Ed McMahon.
Status: Solved. Yes, it was intentional. The Academy felt that in all three instances their work didn’t qualify them for inclusion, even though Michael Jackson and Brittany Murphy made the grade. They are not apologizing for skipping them either, saying every year some people must be left out. We smell Betty White’s hand in this.

Mystery: Did Sandra Bullock diss Meryl Streep?
What Happened: When she got up to accept her trophy, Sandy B made a move toward Meryl, who tried to hug her or something, and then Sandy walked away and Meryl made the “Oh, never mind” gesture. The video is here.
Status: Solved: Yes, she did. It doesn’t seem intentional, but the hug clearly didn’t connect. Maybe that is why Sandy repeatedly called Meryl her lover in her speech, to make up for causing her to look a fool on television.

Mystery: What was up with those lamp shades?
What Happened: At various points in the broadcast, a giant wall of lamp shades descended from heaven to make the stage look like the party room at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Wilkes-Barre.
Status: Solved: It was a mistake—a very bad mistake.

Mystery: Does Cameron Diaz not know how to read?
What Happened: When she came out to present the award for Best Animated Feature with Steve Carell, they read their little banter and Cameron called Steve “Jude” by mistake before he corrected her and said their skit was originally written for Jude Law and they never fixed the Teleprompter
Status: Solved: It was just a really bad joke, people. See, they talk about how Animated Features keep their beautiful faces off screen, and then we find out that it was supposed to be written for Jude Law, because, of course, no one would ever call Steve Carell attractive. Ha! Jokes. Too bad the show was so lame and riddled with mistakes that their very plausible meaning was a little too plausible.

Mystery: What the fuck happened to Judd Nelson?
What Happened: When a bunch of brat packers, including a radiant Molly Ringwald, came out to pay tribute to John Hughes, it was apparent that all of them had aged, but none as badly as The Breakfast Club bad boy, who was practically unrecognizable.
Status: Unsolved. He’s still working as an actor, so no one thinks he is destitute or drug-riddled or something. Everyone noticed he looked crazy but no one knows why. Yet.

Mystery: Was Kathy Ireland drunk or on drugs?
What Happened: The former supermodel was one of three co-hosts for ABC’s 30-minute red carpet special before the show began. She was horrible. Bad interview followed bad interview, she seemed semi-coherent, and her non-microphone-holding arm barely moved.
Status: Solved. She was not on drugs. Now we have even more questions. Considering she has a billion (yes, that’s a b) dollar design business and we have never seen her host on TV before, what the hell was she doing there? Of all the people that ABC could have tapped to do the gig, why choose an inexperience lady who looks like she has a prosthetic? Is Kelly Ripa too normal or something? And if we wanted some crazy old lady with lots of plastic surgery on the red carpet, why not bring back Joan Rivers? Our mind is still boggling.

Mystery: Will people watch again?
What Happened: Last night’s telecast had the highest ratings in five years with 41.3 million viewers. It was also one of the worst productions in recent memories. Will people bother next year?
Status: Solved. Of course. It’s the Oscars. Maybe not as many, but you know they’ll be there. And please, please, just let Neil Patrick Harris host next year. He promises his tux won’t be nearly as shiny.

Mystery: Why the hell was there street dancing at the Oscars?
What Happened: A troupe of television dancers were given the stage to do strange hip-hop contortions to the classically-influenced music of the Best Score nominees.
Status: Unclear. We solved how it happened—director Adam Shankman who is a choreographer and TV dance show host—but we will forever be asking why. Why, why, why?

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Ben Huh’s media startup is focused on LOLcats and other internet animal memes. Things are less cute behind the scenes, where underpaid and overworked humans lurk, according to several company veterans who answered our recent request for information.

Cheezburger Network might be the internet’s largest “meme aggregator,” according to Wired, with upwards of $4 million per year gleaned from other people’s pet pictures, supplied to the company for free. But that doesn’t mean the 30 or so employees share fairly in the bounty; as we reported last week, Huh has blogged about proudly offering jobs at Seattle’s minimum wage of $8.55 or slightly higher, at $10.

Those low wages permeate the company, insiders and their associates tell us, with some former workers also describing worker misclassification unpaid overtime.

On the bright side, it sounds like people have fun with their co-workers, as even some detractors tell us, and one employee wrote in to say his experience at Cheezburger Network beat the pants off her/his (other?) minimum wage jobs — not exactly a high bar, but, given the state of the economy, a practical one.

After hearing from seven different people, most of them current or former employees or contractors of Huh’s, we’ve broken their comments down into a few categories below (some sources have multiple quotes). We’ve also included a company-wide memo Huh sent to his staff about our original post, saying he wanted to “solve” any labor issues.

Hey Huh: If you’re feeling reformist, we know another Web publisher who might be able to lend you some guidance.

Pay and overtime
Former worker:

In 2009 I made less than $15,000 and would have had to pay a couple hundred dollars to the IRS if it weren’t for a friend who is a crafty accountant/tax preparer.

Current worker:

I’m paid hourly, but am encouraged to never bill more than 30 hours a week, although I routinely work 40 to 45 hours. If I could find a place that would pay me fairly, I would do it .. but right now, you take the work you can find.

Yet another tipster said Cheezburger Network expects staff and/or contractors to work “extensive hours without overtime pay,” a statement we quoted in our last post.

Work status
Former worker:

Huh’s practice of paying “contract employees” is borderline illegal and I’d love to nail his ass to the wall for it. The work that he has his employees doesn’t fall under the qualifications listed on WA state’s contract employee Web page.

Another former worker:

I can confirm you’re right [with statements in prior post]. Not only was the pay slightly higher than minimum (some positions were outsourced to another country altogether[...]), but he’s skating a fine line between employees and contractors—we did have regular assignments, we did have our own desks, and working from home wasn’t acceptable—in short, most of the things that would cause the IRS to classify one as a regular employee. But in a crap economy, who’s going to report this?

Office culture

He is shrewd and cheap and I recommend staying away from Cheezburger HQ if you value your sanity and pocket book… The co-workers at Cheezburger are fun, cool people, but Huh and his wife (who is the HR Manager), have a stifling presence in the office and aren’t shy about letting you know whether or not you’re in good or poor favor with them.

Someone else:

We are expected to be available at all hours, work off the clock and receive very few benefits.

Didn’t work for the company:

I know someone who interviewed for one of their open jobs. Minimum wage, no benefits, a surprisingly hostile interview that asked what the applicant’s “biggest fail” was without also asking them to describe their career successes, might have been a cute reference to failblog but came off like a retail job “personality” test question. The office was a bunch of workers crammed together at long high school cafeteria-looking tables, not even a cubefarm’s worth of personal space.

Happy camper enjoys coworkers, lack of feces and punching:

1. Do I feel exploited, no; 2. Do I work a lot, yes… I love my job, I like coming in to work and I love the people I work with…. Reading through the Gawker article didn’t really anger me; I would describe my response as irritated. The irritation stemmed from the over-inflated sense of entitlement the spy had. I worked crappy retail cause I needed to pay rent and my ever expanding bar tabs, those jobs paid worse, had more hazard and conflict and caused a sense of self loathing that will probably never go away (I imagine it’s a similar sensation with herpes)….. Most of my previous work experience was spent drifting from one retail job to then next, trying to avoid cleaning up other peoples feces, getting punched by the elderly and sworn at by children.

Hypocrisy (alleged!)

Huh is also stingey about giving his employees learning opportunities. Even when there were relevant conferences in the city of Seattle, Huh wouldn’t send his employees, however, he wasn’t shy about bragging to the office that he was flying to San Fran, LA, or New York for the day to do an interview or meet with an investor. If you really want to talk about a slap in the face, you should ask Huh how much money he spent on booze for Fail Blog fans at the FOWA meet-up in London in 2008 and the Fail Blog night in Seattle later that year. Combined, he probably spent more on those parties than what one of his contract employees makes in 6 months.

Huh response

The email Huh sent to staff:

You can also read the CEO’s comments in this contentious TechFlash thread from February. In it, Huh says he has lost (as of February) only four employees out of 30 in the past two years, counting both voluntary and involuntary departures. That’s not bad considering how little Huh pays at least some of his workers, but it remains to be seen if he’ll fare so well when the unemployment rate falls significantly from the present 10 percent. Some excerpts:

(Top picture: Huh and his wife Emily, who also works at the company. Getty Images)

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The most important day in the gay calendar, Oscar Sunday is important not only for the glorious shining awards handed out to a lucky few. There’s also the dresses! Here are some red carpet low/highlights.

All images via Getty

Anna Kendrick doesn’t look like Fritzi anymore.

Amanda Seyfried: “It’s that whole country club formal dinner napkin look that I’ve always loved.”

Zoe Saldana: “I’m doing a whole ‘Under the Sea’ musical number with Vera Farmiga.”

Vera Farmiga: “Yeah, I don’t know. I was drunk.”

Mo’Nique’s blue heaven.

Zac Efron would like to borrow your daughter for a moment.

True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll promises to do better next time.

The always-poised Sigourney Weaver struggles to remain calm as red carpet devours her.

If it worked for Jason Smith, 1995 Midland High School Prom King, Jeremy Renner figures this lucky shimmer-tie will work for him.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is so hip she’s wearing Urban Outfitters curtains to the Academy Awards.

Tinker Bell not the same since spending the summer at her goth cousin’s house. (That’s Carey Muligan, slowly disappearing from the boobs up.)

Diane Kruger run over by band of unruly teenagers on their Huffys.

Sandra Bullock’s lovely look for the 1994 Golden Globes.

Who invited Miley Cyrus to the Oscars?

Sarah Jessica Parker came dressed as an elaborate birdbath.

Kinda wish Tina Fey would change her spots.

Is Molly Ringwald there for John Hughes-related reasons?

It’s a shame that Penelope Cruz is so ugly and dresses so terribly.

Rachel McAdams is beginning to realize that driving that truck full of water colors down a bumpy road while wearing her Oscar dress wasn’t such a good idea.

All hail the Queen Latifah.

Hasn’t Helen Mirren worn this dress before?

Tonight is the debut of the new clothing line Vagina Explosion by J. Lo

Charlize Theron traveled to the show on a gust of wind.

Look out behind you, Gabourey Sidibe! The plants! They’re attacking!

Meryl Streep: If you bring the bathrobe back after the Oscars, does the hotel still charge you for it?

Charlize Theron take two: It’s Edvard Munch meets that Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover.

Robert Downey Jr. looking puckish as always.

Kate Winslet: Love the dress, hate the brassy hair.

As much as I hate to say it, Kristen Stewart looks terrific.

Don’t worry, Cameron Diaz. It happens to lots of people. 2 out of 5 dresses are known to succumb to Gown Mold.

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