May 27, 1999 | Buckingham Palace is going royally apoplectic over the publication of a 10-year-old topless photo of Prince Edward's bride-to-be, Sophie Rhys-Jones, in the Sun newspaper, calling it "premeditated cruelty" and a "gross invasion of privacy."

"This has ruined my engagement. This [wedding] was supposed to be the happiest day of my life," whimpered Rhys-Jones to the Daily Mail after staying home from work to nurse her sense of profound humiliation.

Might I suggest that the shame-faced Brits take a lesson in putting their best breast forward from a Norwegian woman named (Oh! It's almost too good to be true) Anne-Mette Smette? Smette, a 58-year-old former hospital midwife, is using her cleavage as a nest to incubate a bird's egg apparently abandoned by a curlew last week and rescued by a farmer. The speckled green and brown specimen, rejected by a hen Smette tried to lure into nursing it, will remain tucked snuggly between Smette's ample gazongas, day and night, for the next few weeks, when Smette expects it to hatch.

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But the unborn birdie's good news isn't so great for everyone. Smette's husband, Knut, is under strict instructions not to come too close so as not to risk any premature cracking. "Now it's look but don't touch," he told the daily Verdens Gang. The heck with Rhys-Jones' getting egg on her face, it looks like the yoke's on Knut.

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Someone's feelin' fat 'n' sassy now

"What a bunch of wimps."

-- Susan McDougal's lawyer, Mark J. Geragos, on Ken Starr's decision not to retry his client and Julie Hiatt Steele.

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Giuliani's just a good ol' boy

As usual, Rudy "Nasty Man" Giuliani is banking on the fact that nice guys finish last. Appearing at a New York fund-raiser earlier this week, the mayor of meanness showed political tease Hillary Rodham Clinton what kind of sweet words she can expect from him if both she and he do finally opt to compete for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Sporting a red Arkansas jacket and cap, Mr. Just Say Hillary-No announced that he was off to Little Rock. "I'm going to say, 'I've never lived in Arkansas, I've never worked in Arkansas, I've never been to Arkansas, but I love Arkansas,'" he told the crowd of nearly 1,700. "In fact, I love it so much I'm going to be running for the Senate. And do you know how I'm going to prepare for it? I'm going to come here and take a vacation, in Arkansas."

Bet all the porn shop and peep show operators of Arkansas are shaking in their shoes right about now ...

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Shhh ... Don't tell Sophie Rhys-Jones

"The clergy thinks the images of half-naked women will offend the pope."

-- Polish state television, reporting on the removal of billboard lingerie advertisements showing scantily clad models in time for Pope John Paul's visit in June

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I think HoorayforNothingPersonal.com has a nice ring to it, don't you?

The political domain-name purchasing madness continues. An enterprising reader named Ted Weinstein tells Nothing Personal he's gone ahead and registered not only bushpataki.org, bushpataki2000.org, bushdole.org and bushdole2000.org, among Bushy URLs, but also variations on gorebradley.org, gorefeinstein.org, gorekerry.org and goredaley.org.

"I got into this because I noticed months ago that Mr. Internet himself, Al Gore, still hadn't done any preemptive registering," chortles wicked Weinstein. So what does he plan to do with his impressive batch of forward-looking domain names? Sell them for a tidy sum, of course. "Gotta get a Salon tote bag and T-shirt, right?" he says. (Hey, man, don't drag us into your Web of deception.)

And those crafty creative types over at RTMark, the folks behind Bush-baiting gwbush.com, continue to impress us with their fine original thinking. Tipping their hats at rival domain-name speculators who've snapped up such URLs as gwcocainejr.com and bush-lite.com, they themselves get the prize for coming up with (and securing the rights to) such gems as justsayyestobush.com, amanamissionabush.com, highonbush.com, greatwhitebush.com, hoorayforbush.com, winwithbush.com and -- dotcom-drumroll, please -- bushisnicelydressed.org.

"We'll be doing this registration thing over the next several weeks," says RTMark's Ray Thomas, who also tells me that since George W. himself called the site's operator a "garbage man" and demanded "limits to freedom," the site's traffic has gone from a few thousand hits a day to nearly a million hits a day. "We don't have a staff person we can afford to dedicate full-time to this chore, like the Bush campaign does."

Excuse me, Ray dear, but don't you mean the bushisnicelydressed campaign?

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Juicy bits

Owen Hart wasn't the only pro wrestling icon to fatally fall last week. On Friday, Jesse "The Body" Ventura's televised life story got badly body-slammed by critics (who called it "breathtakingly dreadful," "trite," "lamely conceived" and riddled with "laughable inaccuracies") and the television watching public, who tuned out in droves, hurling the TV movie headlong into a dismal 58th place in Nielsens weakly ... er ... I mean weekly prime-time ratings.

Phew! Menomonie, Wis., residents can sleep soundly, without fear of sticky-fingered phantom menaces, once again. The two men who allegedly swiped a copy of "Star Wars: Episode I" from the State Theater last weekend turned themselves and the whopping spooled film in Wednesday. "We think we got all of it back, at least it sure looks like it," said Menomonie police Lt. Doug Briggs. Next time, fellas, ignore that breathy voice beckoning you to "come to the Dark Side."

Here's hoping the New Jersey firefighters who pulled up outside a Ticketmaster outlet on Saturday, pretending to be doing an inspection and then cutting in line for coveted Bruce Springsteen tickets, will get more than a slap on the wrist. When the firefighters swaggered out with their tickets, "People who had been waiting in line for hours started yelling and cursing at them," said one Boss fan. "One of the firefighters said, 'This is one of the perks of the job.'" Right, and so is dying a fiery death.
salon.com | May 27, 1999

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