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June 25, 1999 |
Recently in Nothing Personal, we met an eloquent British
fellow who exclaimed that he was "gobsmacked" when his wife
unexpectedly had a baby. (She thought her labor pains were onaccounta something
she ate.) Now, perhaps we'll all be gobsmacked to learn that that gobsmacked
fellow was just the tip of the gobsmacking iceberg. Everybody's doing the
gobsmack! It's the latest craze! It's a fast-moving gobsmacking glacier! To wit: London's Daily Mirror reports that a charity called Pilotlight is threatening
to sue Prime Minister Tony Blair for, its staff alleges, swiping the group's
idea to publish a Yellow Pages of voluntary groups and launching an all-out effort
to encourage a more caring society. A spokesperson for Blair denied that the PM
nicked the concept of good deeds, but one do-gooder-done-wrong squawked, "To
say we were gobsmacked by the hijacking of our ideas is an understatement." Spin it any way you want to, Mr. Blair, sir. It's a gobdamn, gobsmacking
hijacking's what it is! - - - - - - - - - - - - They don't call her Scary
Spice for nothing "It's me hormones. All through my pregnancy my skin was fine, then I had my
baby and it was like all my spots decided to come out at once. There was all these
boils, like lumps under my skin. I had this facial done by this neurotic Spanish
woman in L.A. She had this big spotlight with a magnifying glass so she got to see
everything. She goes to me, 'You're pretty but your skin is terrible.' I thought, 'Well
that's nice.' She did it with needles. I tell you, I've never been in so much pain in
my life! I was shouting '****!' But she wouldn't stop. She was like, 'My darling,
you be quiet. You're going to frighten away all my customers!'" -- Spice-y (and spotty) Mel G on her gobsmacking dermatological
troubles, in the Daily Telegraph - - - - - - - - - - - - A gobsmacker of Olympic
proportions I was a teenage sex slave. Amy Reiter Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday.
Got a hot tip? Tell Amy! So says Olga Korbut. The erstwhile ponytailed gymnastics icon and Soviet propaganda tool, who won legions of far-flung fans and scads of gold at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, recently threw a czar-size dose of cold water in the face of her former Cold War cronies via a Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda. (Let's all say it together, shall we? Komsomolskaya Pravda!) According to the Times of London, Korbut told the paper she and many of her teammates were trained to be "teenage concubines" as well as athletes -- and that her own coach, Renald Knysh, terrorized her, beat her and forced her to have sex with him starting when she was 15. (He plied her with cognac before completing her training, the lousy lout.) "The truth is that many of the gymnasts were not just 'sport machines,' but sexual slaves to their trainers. Many of my teammates were forced to become sexual slaves for their coaches, and I was one of them," said the former champ, who now coaches gymnasts in Atlanta and is preparing her memoirs. Korbut says she hid the alleged sex abuse because didn't want to shock the world. Now, I suppose, with her book coming out, she's not only ready to shock; she's going for gobsmacking gold. - - - - - - - - - - - - And good ol' Yoda sounds like Fozzie, oh my ... "My, my, this Anakin guy/ May be Vader/ Someday later/ Now he's just a small fry." -- The beginning of the chorus of the title song of Weird Al "I may be scarier-looking than Scary Spice, but at least I don't have all those gobsmacking spots" Yankovic's new CD, "The Saga Begins," which sets the plot of "The Phantom Menace" to the melody of Don McLean's "American Pie." - - - - - - - - - - - - Gobsmackingly juicy bits Maybe censoring offensive Internet content ain't such a bad idea after all. That everlasting gobsmacker Lucianne "I love scandal" Goldberg has jumped headlong into cyberspace with the verve she usually reserves for jumping into controversy by launching a brand-new Web site, Lucianne.com. Mostly a series of links to excerpts and articles from the conservative press, the site already features a bevy of bizarre-ish postings from readers (thanks to a link from the Drudge Report) reacting to gabbin' Goldberg's mission statement, in which she promises, "We will be doing some hard reporting. We will be doing some delicious leaking ... We are unredeemably conservative and not particularly compassionate ... We will shamelessly promote those we agree with and love. Our eye will be constantly trained on the Hillary Clinton (maybe) campaign in our back yard." Kiss, kiss, Rudy Giuliani, a bully after Lucianne's own cool-in-the-middle heart. A knife-brandishing U.K. robber was completely gobsmacked (as were his intended victims) when a cashier at a building society he was holding up hit a button on a security screen that lifted him high in the air and left him dangling from his arm and neck. The building society staff supported the hapless heister with a stepladder to keep him hanging in there until the local fire brigade could rescue him. "There could be an argument for leaving him there," said a fire department spokesman, "but we had to get him down somehow." By hook or by crook. Achtung! What could be more gobsmacking than to find yourself serenaded by
your condom in the throes of passion? Musical condoms with tiny sex-activated
chips are being marketed in Germany. Their randy repertoire reportedly includes
"Love Me Tender," "Here Comes the Bride" and "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" To
that last question, o' musical condom, I'd have to answer no, actually. Silly, yes.
Sexy, no. And just a tad too gobforsaken gobsmacking (who'd have thought that
possible?) for me.
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