Bill Ralston catches up on the showbiz news

Endless rain and a book drought find our columnist caught in the web of celebrity goss.

Getty Images/Listener photo illustration

While the southern half of the country spent much of January basking and baking in desert heat, the northern bit (where I am building an ark) has endured almost constant monsoon-like rain since the week before Christmas. The long deluge has meant I’ve abandoned any of the usual summer outdoor pursuits and taken to reading voraciously, with the unfortunate effect of now finding I’ve read every book in the house, twice.

Normally you could count on a daily dose of readable new material from the morning newspapers, but because of the seasonal news drought, every edition seems to chronicle 101 ways to die in New Zealand. Death or mutilation by drowning, driving, flying, plain old-fashioned murder and shark attack are just some of the horrors spread across the front page. The New Zealand Herald capped off this lethal parade with a timely warning on the risk of attack by poisonous tropical sea snakes now loose in our waters. As a result I’m not leaving the house to go the library in case I’m mauled by a rogue Dewey classification number.

Consequently, I’ve been roaming the web looking for new and interesting things to fend off cabin fever. After a while stories about the state of the Middle East and the endless US presidential primary election campaign lose their thrall and you find yourself reading entertainment industry news that turns out be extremely interesting and quite weird.

I’ve discovered singer Beyoncé and rapper Jay Z have had a daughter and a rush of blood to the head, naming her Blue Ivy. This would mean the poor child would have to go through life named Blue Ivy Z, if it weren’t for the fact the parents rendered her some clemency by giving her Daddy’s real surname of Carter.

Jolly old Angelina Jolie solved the universal problem of what to get her husband for Christmas by buying Brad Pitt a waterfall. Apparently Brad, who she complains is “hard to buy for”, loves Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater, so she bought him a beautiful northern Californian waterfall and a parcel of land around it so he could build his own. Better than a socks and tie set, which is the usual Christmas shopping act of desperation in our house.

Rapper Snoop Dogg is crying “Why me?” after being arrested on his tour bus in Sierra Blanca, Texas, for the possession of a small amount of marijuana. Police claim it was a random standard inspection of the bus, but it’s worth noting it was the same police in the same town a few years ago who busted country singer Willie Nelson for dope, and Snoop Dogg said publicly at the time, “They better leave Willie the f— alone.” For a black rapper travelling the back roads of redneck Texas in a bus emblazoned with his name, having already insulted the local constabulary, Sierra Blanca was probably a town best avoided.

A Tesco store in Henley-on-Thames in England was the site of another celebrity bust when TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson was nicked for shoplifting, fittingly, wine and cheese. He pleaded guilty and was let off with a caution, but I think he had a reasonable defence as he’d been using one of those damnable self-scanning checkout devices. I refuse to touch the cursed things as I can never get them to work properly and have no idea what I’ve paid for and what I have not.

Besides, with the self-service system you miss out on scintillating conversation with the checkout operator.
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
Zip, zip, zip.
“You wanna bag for that?”
“Yes, please.”
Zip, zip, zip.
“Gotta FlyBuys?”
“Thank you.”
Those chats are the highlight of my week.

In Hollywood, there is news that George Clooney is to star in a World War II movie about a troop of art historians who charged ashore in Normandy to save treasures stolen by the Nazis. It’s a sort of Saving Private Rembrandt kind of film. Clooney says the art historians’ advice to invading Allied forces was invaluable. “Don’t aim your tank over there, that’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa!”, he suggested, hopefully with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek.
In a spectacular piece of miscasting, Hollywood has decided to have Demi Moore play the role of feminist Gloria Steinem in a movie about porn star Linda Lovelace. I find that idea a bit hard to swallow.

Still, Hollywood is an unreal place with unreal ideas. Tom Scott once told me, while seeking to do a movie on Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest, an American studio executive asked him seriously, “Does Hillary have to be a New Zealander? What about Tom Cruise in the role?” Perhaps with Whoopi Goldberg playing Tenzing, was my suggestion. If you read enough showbiz news anything is possible.