Season of Giving

With his most recent film The Artist racking up 10 Oscar nominations, doggie actor Uggie is calling it a career.

According to his IMBb page (yes, he has an IMDb page) Uggie has two film credits to his name: The Artist and Water for Elephants. But according to his Wikipedia page (oh yeah, he has one of those too–and it’s pretty extensive) Uggie has been in six movies–including Larry Clark‘s Wassup Rockers. Of course how could anyone forget his performance as a beautiful, shirtless, bi-sexual ingenue, exposed to the drugs, sex and violence of the underground LA punk scene.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Today in Van Nuys, students at the Daniel Pearl Magnet High School will gather to watch Charles Evans Jr.‘s documentary Addiction Incorporated, all about the tobacco industry’s original whistleblower Victor DeNoble. Evans will be in attendance for a Q&A with former LA Times reporter Myron Levin and lunch with members of school newspaper The Pearl Post.

Evans will also be applauded for his private donation of $15,000 to the school. As first reported by Levin’s former employer and expanded upon this morning by KPCC, the money has already been earmarked:

It’ll go to create a much-needed broadcast news class, 11th-grader Ellie Batchiyska, editor of the campus newspaper, told KPCC. “Our journalism program has been underfunded for a while now,” Batchiyska said, “and journalism is the main component of our school, so I think it should be one of our top priorities, and when I heard this I couldn’t help but imagine all opportunities we’d get.”

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This Santa has a rap video, a beard insured by Lloyds of London and a long list of Hollywood celebrity clients. The story of Brady White–a.k.a. “Santa to the Stars©” (pictured)–never gets old and thus is part of a look at seven different North Pole specialists by CNN religion reporter Jessica Ravitz.

White has copyrighted the term “Santa to the Stars” and generally insists that journalists and others make sure to append all print mentions with a ©. It’s a long way from where this guy found himself in the 1970s:

White first entered the Santa game about three decades ago out of desperation. He was an unemployed actor in Los Angeles and nine months behind in his rent when he took a job as a mall Santa in Beverly Hills. That season the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner polled children to find the best Santa around. Guess who won?…

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There may be no better way to get into the Christmas spirit this year than to purchase a digital copy of the theological thriller Cloning Christ by Peter Thomas Senese.

Not only does the story crucially involve Jesus Christ, or at least the DNA-laden cross upon which he was crucified. But for the e-book version, which has just been released, author Senese is promising to donate all profits to the International Child Abduction Research and Enlightenment Foundation (a.k.a. I C.A.R.E).

On his personal website, Senese explains the genesis for Cloning Christ:

The book was conceptualized during the time I spent at New York’s ‘Ground Zero.’ During one particular night, I lost my faith in God and did not understand how HE could and would allow for such a disaster to occur. While spending the evening inside the Trinity Church, essentially speaking my anger-filled mind at God, I soon realized that HE did not abandon us. And so, at sometime in the middle of the night and into the early part of the morning, I wrote a very detailed outline and synopsis of Cloning Christ.

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Greetings loyal Fishbowl readers. It’s holiday time, and we’re feeling the Hanukkah spirit. So all you fans of Chelsea Lately (or of comedy in general) listen up. We have five pairs of tickets to giveaway to see The Comedians of Chelsea Lately perform at Club Nokia on December 16. Ross Mathews, Heather McDonald, Josh Wolf and Jen Kirkman will all be performing.

First five people to email us will get tickets. The show starts at 9. More info here.

*Three of our winners have since told us they can’t make the show. So keep emailing if you’re interested. We have three pairs of tickets left.

Legal mumbo jumbo after the jump.

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It’s not often I’ll plug a local promotion, but this one is too good to pass up.

If you “Like” ABC7 on Facebook, $1 will be donated to the Spark of Love Toy Drive, which collects new, unwrapped toys for underserved children in Los Angeles.

Spark of Love collected over 500,00 toys last year for the holidays.

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It’s going to be quite the 50th high school reunion next June for former Hollywood studio exec Sherry Lansing (pictured). Thanks to her pledge of $5 million to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, she will be basking in not just the glow of her Fox, Paramount and philanthropic success, but also that of a major financial backer.

Lansing’s donation to the “Laboratory +” $55 million drive will go mainly towards the Sherry Lansing Theatre, a 250-seat auditorium to be used as the primary rehearsal space for the high school’s theater and other peforming arts programs. Per today’s announcement:

“Attending the Lab Schools was one of the most important experiences of my life,” said Lansing. “It shaped my value system. I think what I remember most is that the Lab Schools were a non-judgmental environment, where we were totally free to be ourselves. What was important was academics–not other values that people might think are important, such as social status or how you look.”

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In the form of a pair of November 24 posted articles by reporters Rosanna Xia and Jessica Guynn, the LA Times essentially sent the greeting card industry the equivalent of a prank item. Watch out for the carving knife and don’t trip over the bone-chewing dog on your way out, the paper might as well have written.

Turkey doomsday Exhibit A was titled “Internet to Greeting Cards: Sorry for Your Sales Loss”, while Exhibit B came with the equally concerning headline, “New Smartphone Apps Let Users Create and Send Greeting Cards.” However, despite a steep decline in annual U.S. Christmas season greeting cards, there are still a few glimmers of hope. Per Xia’s piece:

“The biggest change we’ve noticed is that more people are now willing to buy a $3 to $5 paper product online,” said Susan January, president of the Greeting Card Assn. “For a long time, greeting cards were considered a personal tangible experience–people felt like it was a product you had to hold and choose in person. You actually had to feel the card.”

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Just how does a 17-year-old kid from Stratford, Ontario get this big, this fast? That’s the still worthwhile industry-side question underpinning Billboard‘s candy-striped cover story by Kerri Mason. The publication calls “Under the Mistletoe,” a Christmas-themed album arriving November 1 that is already responsible for a Facebook app and Bieber’s first-ever number one iTunes single, the singer’s most musically mature work to date.

The first cited explanation comes from Teen Vogue entertainment editor Danielle Nussbaum, and it’s a pretty good, albeit obvious, one. Her take:

“Justin Bieber is a pop culture phenomenon, and he got that way through social media. His fans made him famous, and he’s responded in kind by giving them every single piece of himself that he can. He’s created a brand, but also granted his fans a level of access that a lot of musicians just don’t.”

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Heading into Labor Day weekend, there continues to be much written about the absence of Jerry Lewis from the MDA telethon. In an op ed today in the Las Vegas Sun for example, Robin Leach suggests that the lack of a Lewis mention in the last two MDA press releases is “not only downright rude and disgraceful, but also a tragedy.”

Hmmm, that may be overstating it a bit. But we get Leach’s overall point, as echoed by many others. What the heck happened between the MDA and its former celebrity champion to trigger such an ugly, public divorce?

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