Posts Tagged ‘Rabbi Richard Rushfield’

The Boss Pimps Obama: Bruce Springsteen joins the red carpet-worthy list of celebs pimping for Barack Obama. Springsteen, y’all. Now can we stop talking about elitism and snobbery?

DarynKagan.com: A tipster wanted to make sure we told you all about this AP piece, profiling Daryn Kagan, a former CNN daytime anchor who has turned poignant stories into a media empire. It’s like Chicken Soup for the Soul except … well, there is no “except.” It’s like Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Rabbi Rushfield’s Office Hours: Rabbi Richard Rushfield will sermonize directly with his congregation today. The American Idol blogger will discuss “the ups and downs of the season so far” during a live chat at noon.

Digging Up The Dirt: Charles Ornstein discovers the identity of the UCLA Medical Center employee who is said to have snooped the private medical records of 60 celebs, including Paris Hilton and Maria Shriver. Lawanda J. Jackson, a low-ranking administrative specialist who resigned in July, told Ornstein she didn’t sell the info: “It was just me being nosy.”

Mike Ovitz To Take The Stand, Avoid Awkward Encounter: Michael Ovitz is set to take the stand in the Anthony Pellicano case. Ovitz is said to have hired the private eye to snoop on former LAT reporter Anita Busch and former NYT reporter Bernard Weinraub. Favorite paragraph:

After Ovitz leaves the stand, depending on how quickly he gets to the elevators, he could bump into his alleged adversaries, Busch and Weinraub, who are expected to testify as well. However, the FBI agents who escort witnesses in and out of the federal courtroom are pretty good at timing. Like a psychotherapist who allows patients to enter one door and exit another to prevent unwanted encounters, an agent sometimes waits for one witness to disappear into the elevator before signaling to another agent down the hall to bring on the next witness.

Rabbi Rushfield’s Opening Line: Rabbi Richard Rushfield begins his account of Idol Gives Back with the line: “It is said that every generation gets the telethons they deserve.” Richard, we’re falling in love.

Serial Novel: Steve Lopez’s experiment in reader participation continues, with Chapter 4 of his reader-written serial novel. The Orange County Register did something like this five or six years ago. It sucked.

Rabbi Rushfield’s Latest Sermon: Rabbi Richard Rushfield quotes Wms Blake and Gibson before he even mentions the words American Idol. We wonder what he’ll recite during his first weekly Idol chat today at noon at www.chat.latimes.com.

No Joke: Mariah Carey has surpassed Elvis Presley with more No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and is now second only to the Beatles. Check the date, boys, this story was filed April 2. It’s for real.

Rabbi Rushfield Quotes Hardy: We are totally and completely in love with Rabbi Richard Rushfield and his ever-weirder recaps of American Idol. This week, he quotes Thomas Hardy’s poem Convergence of the Twain and generally makes us wonder whether he’s writing under the influence of God or scotch.

Kiss of Death: Richard Widmark, the dashing leading man of 40 films (and father-in-law of Sandy Koufax) died after a long illness. He was 93.

Clint Eastwood Canned: Clint Eastwood and Bobby Shriver have a laugh about the fact that their friend (and in Bobby’s case, brother-in-law) Arnold Schwarzenegger yanked them from the state parks commission.

“I talked to him the day we were not reappointed, or as Donald Trump would say, ‘You’re fired,’ ” Eastwood said in an interview, his gravelly impression of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent producing a kind of Dirty Harry-meets-the Terminator effect.

We live in a weird state.

Is It Just Us … or is the amount of time before reporters turn from a Big News Story to start reporting on themselves getting smaller and smaller?

And On The Seventh Season, God Rested: Rabbi Richard Rushfield rends his garments over the lack of drama in this season’s American Idol, saying: “The mood on the second night of the Great Season, promised in Idol scriptures, remained remarkably buoyant, although for an elimination night it lacked the drama that these nights will have later in the season.”

Game Over? Gibson Guitar Corp. claims Activision Inc.’s Guitar Hero violates a 10-year-old patent Gibson owns for a virtual reality music system. Activision counters with, “um, no.”