Category: Defies a category!

‘American Idol’ Reject Gets Record, Video Deal
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Only in America could a bad singer become so popular that he gets a recording contract and a music video deal.
Independent music label Koch Records said on Monday that William Hung, who has become famous for his less-than-stellar performance of the song “She Bangs” in an audition for the Fox reality TV series “American Idol,” has agreed to a record deal. Hung was first offered the contract in February.
Koch said Hung’s album, tentatively titled “The True Idol,” will be released April 6, and cable channel Fuse Music Network said it would air Hung’s “She Bangs” music video.
The album, which will also include versions of Ricky Martin’s “Shake Your Bon Bon” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” will initially ship with a 40-minute “making of” DVD.
With his bad singing and stiff dancing featured in commercials for “Idol,” Hung has become a pop culture icon in recent weeks. The University of California at Berkeley engineering student has been spoofed on “Saturday Night Live” and is set to appear on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” next month.

FRIEND OR FAUX?
Some people pay money to receive emails, letters and photos from pretend lovers.
For just $50, you can rent a girlfriend for a month.
You’ll never get to kiss her, give her flowers or even meet her, but at least she’ll send you a few letters and maybe even scent them with perfume.
Imaginary girlfriends – and boyfriends – are the latest sensations on eBay, which currently lists more than 80 entries from men and women who want to be your baby – if you’re willing to pay the price.
If you’ve got $100, you can bid on “Let Me Be Your Imaginary Girlfriend,” who promises “a nice & sweet letter or a hot & naughty letter every week for two months,” along with e-mails and digital pictures.
For $14.99, you can get a “secret admirer” box of chocolates from an imaginary boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. And for just $4.99, you can land an “Imaginary Stalker Ex-Boyfriend,” who will e-mail you “on a daily basis, asking where you’ve been all day and who you were with.”
What’s going on here? Are people really that desperate to be in a relationship?
“Some guys are just paralyzed with dating. It’s like a phobia,” says L.A. clinical psychologist Robert Butterworth.
“If this gives them a boost of self-confidence, then it’s not so bad. It’s a step to building a relationship.”
The bidding is currently up to $51 on “Online Imaginary Girlfriend,” who boasts that she’s “great if you want to make another girl jealous or to prove to your friends that you do have a girlfriend.
“At the end of the four weeks,” she continues, “you can dump me however you’d like to, and I can beg you to take me back if you wish!!”
In real life, “Online Imaginary Girlfriend” is Amanda, a 22-year-old college student from Nova Scotia who posted her first auction on eBay last week.
“At first, I just did it as a joke,” Amanda told The Post.
“But then some guy paid me $100, and I thought, this is a lot better than working at Dairy Queen.”
Amanda is more revealing than most imaginary girlfriends – she gives out her cell phone number to whoever wins the auction. The guy who won her faux affections last week, a business student in Boston, has called three times since, and he and Amanda trade e-mail several times a day.
The original on-line imaginary girlfriend – a 22-year-old college junior named Judy in Wichita Falls, Texas – only promised four letters and a picture in her first auction, which she posted on eBay late one night last September.
“It started as just this off-the-wall idea at, like, 2 in the morning,” Judy told The Post.
She had been watching the 1987 movie “Can’t Buy Me Love,” starring Patrick Dempsey as a dorky high schooler who pays a cheerleader $1,000 a month to date him.
“I thought, what a great idea, but I wanted to do it in a way that I wouldn’t have to see the guy.”
That first auction netted $40, and Judy, who wants to be an elementary school teacher, now sells her services through her own Web site, www.judylovesme.com. Since September, she’s made about $300.
Meanwhile, her copycats have been raking it in on eBay – and the auctioneer isn’t about to stop them.
“This isn’t against our policies, because basically it’s just a pen pal service,” says eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.
“We’d draw the line if someone was offering to meet with the person, because that gets into selling human bodies, which is definitely against our policies.”
EBay doesn’t promise to protect buyers against deceptive imaginary girlfriends – and they are out there.
“Used to Model Panties,” a self-described “naughty college girl (theater major)” advertises herself with a picture that looked like it was ripped out of a lingerie catalog.
The first e-mail from Panties, which was signed “XOXOXO, Shari,” also contained a receipt for a payment made out not to Shari but to some guy named Brian, who runs the Internet site at a Ford dealership in Omaha.
A phone call to Brian ended up getting returned by his wife, Shari, who admitted with a laugh that Brian had written the XOXO note and that the picture on eBay was not her.
“Brian’s just a creative guy, always looking for easy ways to make money,” said Shari, a mother of three who works part-time as a phlebotomist at an Omaha hospital.
“We heard about this imaginary girlfriend thing a couple weeks ago, and we said, ‘Well, that sounds easy.’ ”
Since then, Shari and Brian have communicated with five men, writing them one letter and several e-mails once a day.
“They’re just lonely guys looking for a friend,” she says. “It’s safe companionship for them.”
For the most part, the guys have relatively tame e-mails, but one asked for a pair of Shari’s panties, and she complied – sort of.
“There’s no way I’d send him mine,” Shari says. “Those were fresh panties we bought at Wal-Mart.”

Angelina Jolie voted America’s top New Year’s Eve date: survey
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Film star Angelina Jolie is the woman most American males would like to date on New Year’s Eve, according to a survey by movie rental chain Blockbuster Inc.
Results of the survey released Monday, showed Jolie in the top spot with 35 percent of respondents saying she would be their number one pick for a hypothetical New Year’s Eve candle-lit dinner.
Rival star Catherine Zeta-Jones gained second spot in the online survey conducted by Blockbuster November 11-24. The survey had 31,969 responses.
Jolie, 28, has a string of films to her name, and is well-known for her lead role in the “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” franchise.
Ashton Kutcher, star of “Dude, Where’s My Car?,” and recent flame of Demi Moore, was the male lead most women wanted to see under the New Year’s Eve misteltoe, garnering 31 percent of responses.
Kutcher, 25, pipped Johnny Depp for first place in the survey.

Tipsy Popcorn
Odeon Cinemas in the UK are set to launch alcoholic popcorn. Yep, thatís right you didnít miss here me. They held a poll of what else people want from their kernels and alcohol was the winner. They are going to start off with Sambuca and Irish Cream and if these go down well, who knows what will be popping.

Wedding Party Shoots Down Plane
BELGRADE (Reuters) – A two-seater sports plane on an unauthorized joyride was apparently shot down by mistake when it flew over a Serbian wedding party where guests were firing guns into the air, local media reported Sunday.
Two men were reported to have sustained serious injuries when their aircraft burst into flames and crashed near Kraljevo, central Serbia.
“I heard shots from a wedding party which was very close to the crash site. Then I saw the plane in flames. It was shot in the left wing,” witness Zoran Vukadinovic told reporters.
“A few moments later, while attempting a crash landing, it was caught in overhead power cables,” he said.
Local media said neither of the men held a pilot’s license.
Firing guns into the air at weddings and other celebrations is common in Serbia.

Paper Apologizes for Spears-Madonna Photo
ATLANTA – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution apologized to readers Monday for using a picture of Britney Spears kissing Madonna on the front page.
The picture, not much bigger than a postage stamp, was near the top of Friday’s front page. It showed Spears and Madonna in an open-mouth kiss they shared at the MTV Video Music Awards the night before. A larger version of the picture was in the Living section.
The sloppy kiss picture elicited a deluge of complaints to the newspaper. In Monday’s editions, managing editor Hank Klibanoff apologized, saying the picture should have been inside but not on the front page.
Klibanoff compared the Spears picture to graphic images from the war in Iraq.
“We ran images we otherwise might not have run. But that was war, and war was news. The photo we ran Friday was neither, and I wish I had limited its display to the inside of the Living section,” Klibanoff wrote in a response to letters on the opinions page.

Texas Man Wakes Up After Operation, Penis Missing
DALLAS (Reuters) – An out-of-court settlement has been reached in the case of a North Texas man who woke up from bladder surgery only to find that doctors had amputated his penis without permission, lawyers said on Thursday.
Terms of the out-of-court settlement were not disclosed but Hurshell Ralls, 67, had been seeking over $5 million in a civil suit he filed in Wichita Falls, Texas, against the two doctors who removed his penis. They did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.
The hospital where the surgery was performed was also named in the suit.
Ralls’ attorney Steve Briley said that his client was having surgery in 1999 to remove a cancerous bladder, which would likely include the removal of his prostate gland.
He contends that doctors removed Ralls’ penis after they mistakenly thought the cancer had spread to the male sex organ. He charged the doctors — John S. Dryden and Farid Khoury — with not seeking consent for the penis amputation and negligence.
He also said a pathology test indicated that Ralls’ penile tissue was not cancerous.
Joel Steed, the attorney who represented the doctors, said Dryden had informed Ralls that his penis might have to be removed to treat the cancer he had in his bladder. He also questioned the results of the pathology tests on the amputated penis.
Steed said during surgery the two doctors saw tissue indicating the cancer spread from the bladder to the urethra, and they felt removing the penis would provide the best chance for Ralls’ survival.
Hearings in the case before a jury of eight men and four women had started earlier this week and were underway when the out-of-court settlement was reached.
Ralls and his wife have not been able to recover from the anger and shock they felt after the surgery, his attorney said.
“Mr. Ralls was not informed that he was going to wake up and not have a penis,” Briley said.

1) Go to Google.com
2) Type in (but don’t hit return): “weapons of mass destruction”
3) Hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, instead of the normal “Google search”
button
4) READ what appears to be a normal error message carefully

SMART ‘N’ SASSY
Timo Kaukonen won the Sauna World Championships in Heinola, Finland, stayed in a 110C steam bath for 16 minutes, 15 seconds.
†
Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times remarked, “Kaukonen wouldn’t divulge his secret for unseating three-time champion Leo Pusa, a fellow Finn, but longtime tournament observers insisted it was a classic case of who got hot at the right time.”

Drunk Admits Driving on ’20 Beers at Most’
BERLIN (Reuters) – An inebriated German driver’s honesty cost him his license after he told police he had drunk “20 beers at most,” authorities said Monday.
During a routine traffic check in the western city of Essen, police asked if the 25-year-old man had drunk anything. He answered: “Twenty beers at most if you want me to be perfectly honest, officer. But that’s it, really.”
Police carried out a breath test, confirming the man’s claims, and confiscated his license. “I’ve no idea why he told them,” said Raymund Sandach, a spokesman for Essen police. “Maybe because he was drunk.”