Gawker - Knock knock knocking on Ellen's door

She's two-stepping into the great beyond now

In honor of Ellen Degeneres’s show, The Ellen Degeneres Show, coming to an end after 19 years on May 26, we are chronicling its farewell season each week. These are the Last Days of Ellen.

My beautiful Ellenistas, our day has come. Today, the final episode of Ellen Degeneres’s daytime talk show aired. I was never quite sure if it was The Ellen Show or The Ellen Degeneres Show, but that actually does not matter now. It is dead, may it rest in power. Continue reading

The sequel to 'The Idiot' loses steam when its narrator starts doing things

What is a novel? Towards the end of Either/Or, the narrator Selin offers a theory: a novel is “a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, meditating between them and weighing their views.” By the time readers get to that point in Elif Batuman’s second novel, it doesn’t feel like a navel-gazing question.

Batuman, in a 2006 essay for N+1, offered another definition: “A novel says ‘I looked for x and found a, b, c, g, q, r, and w.’ A novel consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself.”

Either/Or picks up where Batuman left off her previous novel, The Idiot. That book, which was exceptional, very popular, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, tracked Selin’s freshman year of college at Harvard. It centered on her tumultuous relationship with Ivan, an older student. Either/Or covers Selin’s sophomore year. Ivan is still an occasional obsession but never appears in person. Without the conventional will-they-or-won’t-they pull to drive the narrative, we are left with a question: what, exactly, are we doing here? Continue reading

Their quarantine attempts at cooking were disgusting

The darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic were hard for everyone, but they were particularly hard for the Real Housewives. They had to carry their own luggage, for example. They had to clean their own houses, and sometimes drive their own cars. Their lavish parties were downgraded to lavish outdoor-only parties featuring just other cast members as guests. Devastatingly, they had to make their own meals.

And we had to watch.

Filming during the quarantine days of the pandemic often necessitated the cast holing up together at someone’s vacation house or rental. In a notable string of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episodes, that meant staying at Kyle Richards’s La Quinta estate, where Kyle was the designated chef, and where no one except Sutton could read the LA Times exposée about Erika Girardi and her attorney husband’s misuse of money that was designated for plane crash victims. (The rest of the ladies couldn’t read it because it was too long.)

There, the group dined on what had become unfortunate quarantine staples: Kyle’s famous sloppy lasagna and large wooden bowls of romaine lettuce. (These then turned into disgusting plates of old food covered in bugs because the ladies were also unable to have people there to clean up after them.) Continue reading

Salad Queen is the toast of the town

The Queen’s got a lot to celebrate in her 70-year reign. Taking the reins at the tender age of 25, completing a state visit to the Republic of Ireland, becoming a beauty mogul, and donating $13 million of her own money to charity are just a few of her accomplishments. But her most exciting honor — besides the known bridge and tunnel luvver recently getting that tunnel named after her — hits supermarket shelves this week: Salad Queen.

And oh, what a creamy distinction it is!

According to Sky News, Heinz is releasing a play on the British condiment Salad Cream, dubbed “Salad Queen” (although the fervent ass-eaters among us got to the term before Heinz did), to pay tribute to Lilibet’s extraordinary emulsive reign.

To this Yank, salad cream seems to be a bit like a globby aioli that a Brit may deposit over an anemic iceberg and tomatoes. Before Heinz started bottling the stuff in 1914, Victorian orphans would make it for themselves and their roving gang of tattered tuffs by pureeing hard-boiled eggs with cream, mustard, salt, and vinegar. Continue reading

Kate Moss says Johnny did not kick her down the stairs, so there's that

Johnny Depp’s $50-million defamation case against his ex-wife Amber Heard is sputtering to a close this week, but not before an appearance from one more celebrity witness. Last week, actress Ellen Barkin testified against the actor, claiming that when she briefly dated Depp in 1994, he was “controlling” and constantly using drugs. In one instance, she said he threw a wine bottle across a hotel room at her during a fight. But this week, Depp’s legal team called another of his former girlfriends, Kate Moss, as a rebuttal witness, after Heard mentioned her in testimony earlier in the trial.

In her testimony, Heard said she had heard of an incident involving Depp, Moss, and a flight of stairs. Today, Moss testified that she did fall down some stairs while she was dating Depp, but that he did not push her. Depp and Moss dated from 1994 to 1998, and she said the incident happened when they were on vacation in Jamaica.

“We were leaving the room and Johnny left the room before I did,” she testified, via videoconference. “There had been a rainstorm. As I left the room, I slid down the stairs and I hurt my back. I screamed because I didn't know what happened to me and I was in pain. He came running back to help me and carried me to my room and got me medical attention.” Continue reading