So, as everyone knows, Anna Nicole Smith is dead (dead at 39, cause still unknown) after a 12 year legal battle with her dead husband’s now dead son and with a paternity battle brewing regarding her infant daughter. It’s an opera, and a not very good one at that. But it gets better.
Enter: Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband: I could be Smith baby’s father — “The husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor said Friday that he had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her infant daughter’s father.”
The husband, Prince Frederick von Anhalt, is 59; Zsa Zsa is 90, and they’ve been married for more than 20 years, the article says. A great sex life, I suspect. Call me shallow.
The claim by Prince Frederick von Anhalt comes amid a paternity suit over Smith’s 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn’s father as attorney Howard K. Stern, but former Smith boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father.
“If you go back from September, she wasn’t with one of those guys, she was with me,” von Anhalt told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.
He said he would file a lawsuit if Dannielynn is turned over to Stern or Birkhead.
This is a wonderful circus, coming as it does near the approaching Carnivale season, the low made high and the high made low.
Smith evidently wanted to be made a princess (like Zsa Zsa) and the prince agreed: “But short of divorcing the actress, he said the only solution would have been adopting Smith. Von Anhalt said he did consider that and even filled out adoption papers, but Gabor refused to sign them.” No, really?
In other disgusting news: Tennessee.
Fire extinguisher called for in lethal injections — “Tennessee’s procedure manual for executing prisoners is a jumble of conflicting instructions that mixes new lethal injection instructions with those for the old electric chair, an Associated Press review found.”
It continues in the next paragraph with “Before a lethal injection, the 100-page ‘Manual of Execution’ instructs prison officials to begin by shaving the condemned prisoner’s head — as if preparing him for electrocution. They would also need a fire extinguisher nearby, it says.”
There would need to be a fire extinguisher. Poor copy-editing is supposedly the culprit here, but I can imagine that with the “right” chemicals in the “lethal” injection mix that one might indeed need a fire extinguisher … but that would definitely go in the direction of “cruel and unusual punishment.” I’m still not quite sure how execution doesn’t qualify as “cruel” — I can understand how it’s not “unusual,” at least in this country, except for the fact that the rest of the civilized world does not employ it. It’s unnecessary. It does not deter crime. It’s a waste of tax-payer a dollars (the least important argument, but one of the few that middle-class sheeple listen to — they’re more interested in their pocketbooks than what is just or right or decent. Duh — “It’s a noble sentiment,” I’ve heard regarding many moral matters, “but it’s too expensive,” or “but it’s not practical”).
I finished “F” and moved to “G,” finishing Fury and the Slaughterhouse, experiencing Garbage and then some Genesis, and now I’m most of the way through George Michael. I’m not a huge fan, and much of it is sentimental, overproduced schlock. But I’ll give him this: when he’s on, he’s on and has a good voice, and his cover of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” (last track on “Ladies & Gentlemen”) is almost as good as the original; he does a decent Freddie impersonation and he just about has the range. I’ll take Queen any day, but this is pretty good.
Next up: Gipsy Kings.
I have a real soft spot for the Gipsy Kings, especially for the eponymously titled album, to which I was introduced in the 9th grade when taking Spanish with Mr. Totorica. From time to time we held class not in the economics classroom but in the choir room and he played this album for us a few times. I loved “Bomboleo” and “Bem, Bem, Maria” so much that I bought the cassette for my mom as a birthday gift. It was meant for her, not just as a gift for someone that I meant to use for myself, but it made little impact on her, and years later I ended up with it on my own.
After a week in Germany the first time I went with my host family to Braunschweig and a “Monster Truck” competition. Later in the day we ended up at a small restaurant/bar and in the background I heard music from the Gipsy Kings, and while they were well-known at the time they were not as ubiquitous then as they later became, so that my host parents were unfamiliar with the music. It was for me, however, an uncanny moment, being in northern Germany with this French/Spanish kitsch of sorts that I knew from a choir room in Idaho playing quietly in the background.
When I went to college I found others who knew the CD, such as Jo across the hall, Leena’s 1st semester roommate, and although none of us had much in common with Jo, it was the one thing to which she and I could both relate. It did not, however, help me in getting to know her — I don’t think any of us ever really did.
In later years I myself got the CD, and then a few others of theirs (“Roots” and “Tierra Gitana”), but as they say you always maintain a special place in your heart for your first.
