Tag Archives: rumormonger

Which Tabloids Lie the Most? [Exclusive]

In the constantly-contradicting world of tabloid journalism, is anyone reliable? We analyzed 20 months of reported break-ups, marriages, and pregnancies to tabulate our first-ever Tabloid Reality Index , batting averages for America’s five major celebrity glossies and the rumors they monger. More

Bomb Scare in Midtown Manhattan? (Updated) [Breaking]

Tip! “There is some sort of bomb scare on 51st & park. They closed down the street and put police tape around this sweet black Mercedes. They also blew out the tires. We are not aloud [ sic ] to leave the building.” More

Has Steve Jobs Been in Hawaii Trying To Relax? [Nerdspotting]

As the iPhone’s reception problems exploded into a major controversy, Steve Jobs was trying to enjoy a vacation on Hawaii’s Big Island with his family, according to a spy who says he saw the Apple CEO at Kona Village Resort. More

Did Bristol and Levi Reunite to Make a Reality Show? [Rumormonger]

Last week, a rumor made the rounds in the Alaskan blogosphere: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston were getting back together. They would announce their engagement , then they would wait a couple weeks—and then announce a reality show. More

Googler’s Barely-Legal Party Scandal [Geeks Gone Wild]

They say money can’t buy happiness, but Marissa Meyer sure has been trying. And now the Google VP’s hedonism/masochism roller coaster has, we hear, earned her a police spanking after a birthday party went too wild. More

Ex-Employee Dishes on Life Inside Oprah’s Empire [Horror Stories]

This week we brought you excerpts from the gossipy new Oprah biography by Kitty Kelley. Today we heard from an ex-Harpo staffer who shared with us all sorts of juicy details about what life’s like working for the daytime diva. More

Peaches Geldof’s Heroin-Fueled One-Night Stand at Hollywood’s Scientology Center—With Pictures [Rumormonger]

Rockstar progeny and Brit scenester queen Peaches Geldof makes a cameo in a Reddit forum for “WTF one-night stand stories.” A commenter describes a heroin-fueled Thanksgiving Eve sex party—and waking up in the Hollywood Celebrity Scientology Center. Here’s Reddit user Thatcoolguyben’s story about what transpired that evening, followed by the NSFW photos he allegedly snapped, neither of which we’ve been able to authenticate: Last Thanksgiving I was staying at a friends house for a few days before a trip to South America. I’d been spending most the time on the couch for the three days I was at the house. My friend lived with her boyfriend and one other girl who was “recording” her “album.” I would occasionally see this girl leaving early in the morning and coming back late at night while I was on the couch. On my final day at the house, Thanksgiving day, the girl returns at about 2:30am (Thanksgiving festivities would start in a few hours.) I’d kicked back a few beers already and was having fun sitting watching TV. She comes in and pauses for a moment looking at me. She says “have you been living here the whole time I have?” I laughed and thought this question strange, she was showing how oblivious she was to the world. I said that I had only been at the house for 2 days. She sits next to me and we begin talking about tattoos, which both of us have a good amount of. She had a cute English accent and wasn’t bad looking at all. The tattoo discussion leads to us deciding we should get each others names tattooed on each other. At 3am I grab my friends car keys, and head out. We drive all over Hollywood looking for a tattoo parlor, with no luck. While driving around we get on the topic of drugs. At this point in my life I was very into all drugs, as was she. She told me she had a bit of heroin she brought with her from the UK and asked me if I was game. I was so the hunt began. We drove all around LA looking for the supplies we needed. We drove to various pharmacies looking for needles and cotton. We finally found one, which as a look back on would be a funny sight. A well dressed guy and girl walk in an 4am looking for a 10 pack of diabetic syringes. We get them and begin the drive home. On the way back she mentions this is heroin base, meaning we need to dissolve this in lemon (I guess this is a British thing, I never have seen this in my years in NYC.) We stop at a Dennys, asking them for a stack of lemons. Once again we got strange looks but it worked. We get back to the house, where I was promptly yelled at for stealing my friends car, and getting warned what I was about to get myself into. Once all the commotion settles down, we go to the girls room and rig up. At about 5am I was high as a kite and we start to watch a movie. Things get hot and heavy and before I know it we’re naked. I go down on her while we’re still having odd conversations about mutual friends and past hookups. I was too high to get hard and she knew it. After blowing me for a few minutes she asks if I was ok. I tell her I’m to high to get it up. I then immediately remember I’d packed a Cialis in my bag. I run out of the room, bring it back, and pop it in front of her. She laughs as we continue to have a naked dance party on her bed. I finally feel the blood rush to my member and the action begins. We did it every way possible, and for a young girl she sure knew how to work it. This is where things get weird. Close to 8am she starts saying how someone was coming to pick her up. We’d continued to use all night so I was quite foggy about the happenings. I faintly remember her asking me for a ride and me driving her somewhere. I awoke at about 1pm in a sauna, throwing up all over the place. I started freaking out. I look around and see her on an exercise machine outside the room, looking in about the same shape as me. I get out of the room and people come past me cleaning the puke like it was nothing to them. I’m standing in the room groggy, in a speedo, and confused as hell. I look around and read some stuff realizing I’m in the Celebrity Scientology Center in LA. This girl ended up being a hardcore Scientologist and a D-List celebrity, and we were doing a process called Purif. I showered, got my clothes on, got her, and drove back to my friends, nodding out and puking the whole way. Needless to say when I got back my friend and her boyfriend were pissed. I had “ruined” Thanksgiving. I sluggishly passed the day along and at 11pm went to LAX and flew to South America. Not until days later when I looked through my camera of the pictures of that night did I fully realize everything. TL;DR: Did heroin, fucked a minor celebrity, woke up in a Scientology center, ruined Thanksgiving, left the country. Is Thatcoolguyben’s story real? Here’s what tracks: The girl in these pictures certainly looks like the 21-year-old, oft-naked Peaches , right down to the embarrassing tattoos . Five months before his tale takes place, Peaches was photographed outside Hollywood’s Scientology Celebrity Center with someone carrying a pamphlet entitled “CELEBRITY CENTRE TAKES CARE OF THOSE WHO ENTERTAIN FASHION AND TAKE CARE OF THE WORLD” The timing is also right since Peaches was working on her first album at the time. It’s possible these photos have been posted online before. (Since googling any permutation of “Peaches Geldof naked” gives you way more results than you care to see, there’s a chance we missed them.) And it’s always possible this rather elaborate tale was invented. Then again it’s pretty impressive that the notoriously party-hearty Peaches has made it this far in life without an amateur sex photo scandal to her name. The NSFW pics that Thatcoolguyben posted are below:

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Peaches Geldof’s Heroin-Fueled One-Night Stand at Hollywood’s Scientology Center—With Pictures [Rumormonger]

How Bitter Infighting May Break Up One of Tech’s Most Lucrative Conferences [Nerdfight]

High revenues and relatively low costs have made TechCrunch 50 the envy of its rivals, competing tech conferences like Demo and the Wall Street Journal ‘s D. If only its founders could stop fighting like rabid dogs. TechCrunch 50 , a Silicon Valley conference where hungry startups strut their stuff, is as volatile as it is profitable. The event nearly broke up last year amid a spat between co-organizers Michael Arrington , publisher of the blog iteration of TechCrunch, and Jason Calacanis , the Web entrepreneur. ” We fight like rabid dogs ,” Calacanis told VentureBeat, but would not “throw an amazing event like this out the window.” Or maybe they will: We’ve heard from multiple sources that a chasm has opened between Arrington and Calacanis again. Though we’ve had some help from said sources, it’s not hard to figure out what sorts of little feuds might derail one of the industry’s most lucrative conferences. We catalog some of them below, if only to provide other media-event organizers with a nice overview of traps to avoid. For their record, neither Arrington nor Calacanis would comment about their dispute for this post. Kidding around with puppets: Last year, Calacanis confirmed the conference series was finished in an interview with a puppet controlled by blogger Loren Feldman. He later unconvincingly tried to say he’d only been kidding . Purportedly his public statements about his spat with Arrington remain a point of irritation. Participating in rival events: Calacanis’ participation in Silicon Alley Insider’s Startup conference supposedly rubs Arrington the wrong way, even though it’s ostensibly a different sort of event. Conflicts of interest : Calacanis’ newly-launched Open Angel Forums are designed to help select startups get investment funding. At TechCrunch 50, Calacanis helps award prizes, potentially to the some of the very startups he helped raise money for. As for Arrington, one could argue he has an incentive to help reward startups who have been especially helpful to his coverage. That’s certainly enough basis for petty bickering (you don’t need much!). Big pointless online flame war: Calacanis became enmeshed in a big complicated online controversy and Arrington supposedly found his behavior in said fight tacky and classless. Which it kind of was. The gory details, if you care: A teenaged TechCrunch writer asked a startup founder to give the writer a free MacBook Air in exchange for an article on TechCrunch. The writer was publicly busted but the startup founder remained anonymous for a while. The startup founder, Sam Odio, emailed Calacanis out of the blue to ask advice on going public. Calacanis for some reason forwarded his email to Calacanis’ venemous blogger friend Loren Feldman, who promptly threatened to expose Odio’s not-so-terrible secret — he had originally promised to give that TechCrunch writer his bribe, “but not right now.” Odio blogged about Calacanis’ behavior and a shitstorm ensued . Just plain mean : Supposedly Calacanis has been gratuitously and exceptionally rude to some of the startups at TechCrunch 50. We’ve heard stories about Arrington being that way at other events. So, hey, maybe everyone just got on each other’s nerves, with the rudeness to other people. So there you have it: Avoid these pitfalls and your conference/event/sausage fest just might possibly avoid descending into vicious infighting. In the meantime we’ll see how long it takes before Calacanis and Arrington realize that only by taming their egos in the near-term can they play Silicon Valley kingmakers in the long term, thus allowing their egos to gloriously balloon to their fullest potential. [Photo via TechCrunch 50 on Flickr ]

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How Bitter Infighting May Break Up One of Tech’s Most Lucrative Conferences [Nerdfight]

Is the LOLcat Empire Built on Exploited Humans? [Cubicle Culture]

Ben Huh ‘s Cheezburger Network has been crowned the largest “meme aggregator” on the internet and gleans more than $4 million in annual revenue from other people’s animal pictures. So why can’t Huh throw more bones to his humans? Huh rubbed some prospective employees the wrong way with a recent blog post , issued just as Wired was lauding him for turning internet “junk into gold” as proprietor of I Can Has Cheezburger and a maze of other pet-pic sites like FAIL Blog. It seems Huh was offering to pay people the state minimum wage or just slightly more. “I don’t even wipe my ass for $10 an hour,” one applicant wrote. Huh found this greedy: The worst candidates focus on money the most… Higher advertised wages resulted in much higher level of noise from candidates who really didn’t care about the job. (FYI: Advertised pay and actual pay are two different things.) It’s become clear to me that bad candidates focus on money like that’s the only thing they’ll get out of the job. A good candidate, Huh says, will try to pull himself up by his bootstraps, just like Huh did, clawing his way out from a minimum-wage job and his $40,000 in debt, landing “back on my feet” in less than a year and eventually bringing 200 million pageviews a month into the Cheezburger Network . A Cheezburger spy tells us says Huh’s work ethos is deeply felt and permeates his company; our tipster said there are a significant number of minimum-wage employees within the company expected to work “extensive hours without overtime pay.” The tipster: [Huh] seems ignorant of the reason people devote their lives to startups is because they have OWNERSHIP in the company-not because they get to look at pictures of cats… Mr. Huh seems to want to create the APPEARANCE of a great workplace while paying his workers as little as possible. It’s a good point: If Huh’s sites made people happy to earn just $16,416 a year before taxes—the current minimum wage in Washington State, where Huh’s company is based—labor costs in this country would positively plummet. UPDATE: A self-described Cheezburger Network contractor who has spent a fair amount of time with the company wrote in to tell , ” I can confirm what was said in your story.” We’ve asked for more details, but that does remind us to ask: if you know more, do clue us in .

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Is the LOLcat Empire Built on Exploited Humans? [Cubicle Culture]

Google’s CEO Demanded His Mistress Take Down Her Blog: Source

Eric Schmidt might advocate for making information ” even more open and accessible ,” but not when it comes to his mistresses. We’re told the Google CEO’s aggressive lawyers brought down ex-girlfriend Kate Bohner ‘s online recovery diary this weekend. We flagged the blog on Friday , reporting that Bohner had repeatedly mentioned Schmidt in a blog tied to a planned book about her recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and predicting Schmidt, who is married, wouldn’t be thrilled. Now the site has been removed from Google’s Blogspot , where it was hosted. Bohner removed the site after threats from Schmidt’s lawyers this weekend, according to a source close to the situation. “When a billionaire threatens you, you get in line,” this person said. It made for a frightening weekend for Bohner, and no wonder: Not only is the former CNBC and Forbes journalist trying to come to terms with her sobriety and past addiction, she doesn’t appear to be swimming in the money it would take to mount a plausible legal challenge to a powerful and well-connected tech executive worth $4 billion . A public records search indicates her four-month-old pad in Delray Beach, Florida is the latest in a series of apartments and, according to a sign visible on Google Maps Street View, located in a tidy complex of smallish one- and two-bedroom units. The nuking of the blog seems especially extreme because Schmidt played such a small part in it. The executive did appear in three different posts ( see quotes here ), across maybe five paragraphs of text. But Bohner’s entries were long ; the three most recent averaged more than 30 paragraphs each, which was typical. Yes, there was the tidbit about Schmidt (aka “Dr. Strangelove”) giving Bohner an prototype iPhone, and being a “genuinely caring, concerned boyfriend.” But almost everything else was about Bohner’s yoga, time in a Buddhist temple in Thailand, friends in recovery and past addictive escapades. If Schmidt is so concerned about his privacy, why not just ask Bohner to stop mentioning him? His extramarital dalliances, including with Bohner , are hardly fresh news any more ; the Google chief is rumored either separated, as we’ve reported previously, or in an open marriage, as our Bohner-blog source insists. The Google CEO should be more concerned about the release of any fresh details about his sex life. Concerned, that is, assuming he won’t take his own advice and avoid having embarrassing secrets in the first place . Bohner’s blog and book project seemed to have really inspired the ex-addict. Her entries were long, but also formed a potential lifeline for other addicts. In other words, they had merit aside from the bits on Eric “Not the Center of the World” Schmidt. So it’s too bad they’ll be gone. You can read them for a bit longer; they’re here, on a Web caching server provided, as fate would have it, by Schmidt’s company.

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Google’s CEO Demanded His Mistress Take Down Her Blog: Source