Sophie’s Final Gift: A Penthouse for Oprah’s "Best Friend"

WE PRESUME THAT IN HER LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT, OPRAH’S DOG SOPHIE BESTOWED A SMALL FORTUNE TO HER STEPMOM GAYLE KING as only days before the cocker spaniel’s recent death Oprah’s BFF closed on a swanky $7.1 million Manhattan apartment in the name of "Sophie’s Penthouse LLC."

We’re guessing that Sophie thought of the gift as a little something that Gayle could call her own; after all, it must be hard keeping the perpetual smile’s paint fresh when you’re best friends with the world’s most entitled woman. How do you stay on her good side but by pretending all the time? Can you tell your rich BFF that she’s having a bad hair day, her skirt’s too tight, her breath stinks? After all, this is not a relationship based on parity. Sophie probably wanted to buy Gayle a little freedom to call her own, let her drop her game face some times.

Wags reported last week that a deed was filed in New York citing "Sophie’s Penthouse LLC" as the owner of the 57th Street penthouse. The gossip site TMZ, has posted the document in its entirety here, showing that the contract for the three bedroom spread was signed in California last October 3rd and closed on March 10th. TMZ also has the floor plan of the 2,530 square foot, 36th floor unit for those with spatial skills who want a looksie. And Crabby has found the incorporation papers of Sophie’s Penthouse LLC filed in — big surprise — Delaware’s division of corporations. Delaware is every CEO’s favorite state because of the friendly environment it provides corporate entities registered in the state, among them requiring neither owners nor operators to be identified in public records.

Sophie, a black cocker spaniel who died of kidney failure, is one of the only celeb pets to have gotten its own obituary in the news media. This much attention hasn’t been paid to the death of a celeb’s pet since George Clooney’s pig Max died. But we can all feel better that Gayle and Oprah will be a little closer to Sophie in that penthouse in the sky.

If All H.R. Departments Were Like This, I’d Be Employable

COMMUNICATING SUCCESSFULLY SEEMS LIKE AN EASY THING: you open your mouth and out pours the auditory consequence of synapses connecting. But if you think this, you are wrong. Good communication depends on one’s personal definition. Why say, "You make me angry" when "Fuck you!" will do. In the former example, this would be considered "good communication" because of the less provocative way in which the speaker delivers a message. But literary types would prefer the latter usage as it is shorter, more direct and delivers an unambiguous message. As a journalist, I was always taught that pithy was better.

In this vein, the much-to-be-admired blog, The Modern Gal, shares with us a priviledged document from the HR Department of some unnamed company here. The document shows that the company is lobbying for less direct communication in the workplace in an effort to prevent fisticuffs, yet all the while displaying a sense of humor. Um, Miss Modern, can I get the name of that company? I want to submit an application.

Shocking! LeBron James is Large Black Dude; Gisele Bundchen is Whispy White Girl

YOU WOULD THINK VOGUE was advocating kidnapping white girls the way some people are atwitter about its current cover with NBA star LeBron James looking fierce with his arm wrapped around the waist of the arm candy known as Gisele Bundchen. Might we be overthinking this?

Some people say the cover shot by famed photog Annie Liebovitz reminds them of King Kong with Fay Wray clutched in his monstrous arms. And if we were Barack Obama’s grandmother, I’m sure if we were standing on a street corner that we’d be frightened seeing the strapping LeBron lurching toward us. Then again, I’d feel the same way about any good-looking white dude. I’m old enough to know about sociopaths and Ted Bundy.

As for Gisele, well, I’d like to bitch-slap the twig. And not because she’s promoting stereotypes on Vogue’s cover. First there’s that body; second, she has has dreamy Leo DiCaprio whisper secrets into her ears and slip other body parts into her snatch; third, now she’s shacking up with the Superbowl Pinup Tom Brady. Yea, she should definitely be ashamed of herself promoting such potent sexuality.

Some people are wise enough to recognize when a beautiful cover is just a beautiful cover. Here’s a plea from Crabby: Can we stop looking for racist intent under every rock? There’s enough real examples staring us in the face. Just look at drug convictions, prison sentences, and the current presidential campaign.

That’s Incredible! Strange Ties in a Shrinking World

I CAN SEE THE HEADLINES NOW: "BARACK OBAMA DESTINED TO BECOME PRESIDENT," is cousin to six previous U.S. heads of state. Or so say researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, who claim that Obama is distantly related to George W. Bush, his father George Sr., Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison.

Not exactly the cream of the presidential crop, Truman excepted. And too bad for Barack that there’s no Lincoln tie-in. His supporters would be howling at the moon about his manifest destiny. Also, does it hurt his label as the "most liberal" U.S. Senator to learn that Hillary Clinton can claim beatnik writer Jack Kerouac, mistress-in-waiting Camilla Parker-Bowles, and singers Madonna and Alanis Morissette as distant family? Seems like the "left" mantle rightly belongs to Hillary now, possibly bolstering her support among the far-lefties.

The sexiest findings, at least according to media coverage, is that Obama and that hunka hunka Brad Pitt are related, and in another twist, so are his lady love Angelina Jolie and Hillary Clinton. I can see the similarity between Angie and Hillary: both are so "fierce," as Project Runway’s latest winner likes to say.

The world never seems smaller than when I look at the flat Earth on Google’s analytics page, a tool used by many bloggers to see who’s reading. Those famed "six degrees of separation" surely have shrunken to five in these times of lightning strike communications and genetic testing.

I’m giddy, dizzy, imagining the potential familial relationships soon to be revealed. Just think of what we’ll read in the future:

News Flash! The "girl with the magic vagina" distantly related to famed trickster Harry Houdini, eccentric Vegas illusionists Penn and Teller.

Lady killer! George Clooney reveals he’s a cousin nine times removed from England’s King Henry the Eighth, yet still keeps his head about him.

Twins Separated at Birth! Talk-show hosts Oprah Winfrey and Star Jones Reynolds discover they are long-lost sisters, bicker over who’s double helix design is worth more to tabloids.

Can you think of stranger pairings? Send them to me with your name and city and I’ll print them in an upcoming post. Can’t wait to read all about them.

Get Even With Corporate Bullies: Videotape them with Cellphones

T HE ONE REGRET I HAVE ABOUT LEAVING THE EMPLOY OF THE DAILY SOUTHERN NEWSPAPER where I worked as a reporter was I didn’t deliver a pie in the face of a bullying editor who had ruined me socially at the organization. Or, okay, if you want me to take the blame, made me so neurotic that I ruined myself. There was no one person, peer, supervisor who was willing to stick a neck out for me, and I was neither a Southerner nor one of the Ivy Leaguers who had just been brought in by the new bosses from New York. So I did what any person would do without alliances: I withered and then developed the biggest chip on my shoulder that I can still work up a rant about the place. The creep turned me into a pariah that no one risked talking to out of the fear that being a target was contagious. And he made the next big jerk I met at work, a woman named Dana, seem petty and narcissistic by example.

Bullies are in every level of society and the workplace is where the biggest ones get their kicks as adults. And frankly I don’t know what much there is to do about them. But venting helps, and yesterday the New York Times invited readers to leave comments about bullying in the workplace, and today follows that up with an article on the emotional toll that bullying takes on the target. It’s nice to see the topic taken seriously, but that doesn’t mean your company will. There’s lots of support on the web though. One site you can check out is www.mybossstinks.com, where they link to tips on dealing with bad bosses. My suggestion: keep a voice-activated tape recorder around you whenever you’re near the bum who’s bothering you. Or have someone nearby videotape the creep with their cellphone. The only thing that is indisputable is direct evidence.

Oprah Misses Chance to Demonstrate "Healing Hands," Gets Sued Instead

A MIRACLE COULD HAVE BEEN WITNESSED BY HER FLOCK, BUT INSTEAD OPRAH WINFREY is being sued by an Opraphile who was knocked down by stampeding worshippers at a December, 2006 show.

Orit Greenberg of Illinois is seeking $50,00 in damages after she allegedly was pushed down a flight of stairs by zealous fans who were told to sit wherever they wanted in the studio audience. As a result, Greenberg claims she received "severe and permanent" injuries and contends the crowd was not properly controlled by Harpo Studios staff.

One would think that Oprah would have simply walked over, laid her hands on the slumped fan and healed her with her magical touch.

Such a lost opportunity for America’s demigod. Surely the talk show know-it-all will silently cut Greenberg a check for the amount she’s requesting - $50,000 — which is a pittance of Oprah’s worth. Forbes estimates Winfrey brings in $260 million annually, which means that her wealth ticks upward $24,680 every hour she breathes. The production company declined to comment on Greenberg’s allegations.

And more bad news for Harpo but new opportunity for the public to see what goes on behind the Harpo curtain: Darlene Tracy, a Massachusettes mother of four, claims that the Oprah Show stole an idea she pitched to the show’s executive produce, Ellen Rakieten, entitled The Philanthropist.

Tracy claims the show contacted her for more information but then brushed her off saying they would use their own ideas. Fast-forward three years later and Winfrey is now airing a twisted version of altruism on a sponsor-ladened surreality TV show called The Big Give. .“I am the architect of that show and its framework has been stolen,” Tracy told the Boston Herald. Can’t wait to see how this sideshow ends.

The Sad Truth About Obama: He was Forced to Choose a ‘Side’

HISTORY WILL RECOGNIZE BARACK OBAMA AS, IF NOT AS THE FIRST African-American president, then surely the first politician for whom it was safe to address the perpetual suspicions and resentments between blacks and whites. Despite their loyalties to the black community, Hillary and Bill have nothing on Obama in this topic, for the black man who would be president has the advantage of being biracial.

Obama’s upbringing is both his lore and allure: he was born to a white woman and a black African, abandoned at two by his Harvard-bound father, raised by his mother and grandparents in Hawaii, and later moved to Jakarta, where he lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. That spice of his life, combined with the bland rectitude of having graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, make him what some have called a "Rorschach Test" for Democratic voters. They can project whatever they want on this candidate. And in his beautifully written and masterfully delivered speech on race this week, Obama proved that he sees from both sides of the divide. We witnessed his expression of an imperfect love of a minister who delivers racial rants, and of a white grandmother who fears groups of black men. And while some have rightly pointed out that Obama could not choose his grandmother, Obama’s admissions gives us all permission to express our own deep-seated anxieties, resentments and puzzlement over our misgivings about "race." And though the media could have begun this debate, and the healing decades ago,(it was too busy cowering in fear of "black anger,") this is safe territory for Obama, because he is both white and black.

Frankly, I think it’s naive for white Americans to think that blacks should by now be liberated from seething anger over racism. Though it’s been nearly 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, it’s been mere decades since blacks where threatened for daring to go to school, drink from public water fountains, ride in the front of a bus. Martin Luther King’s "dream deeply rooted in the American dream" has come a long way since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But that vision has not yet materialized for every person of color, and today it’s slipping away from millions of middle class blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians.

Yet self-loathing has also scorched black communities, leaving many children fatherless, indifferent to education, and too-willing to surrender to hopelessness. And too many demagogues are only too eager to blame historic racism on African Americans’ current woes without holding up the mirror. It is for these reasons that whites smolder silently.

Obama knows both these scenarios. Perhaps it’s because he did not choose his grandmother, could not lose her, needed her, that Obama learned that the flaws in our loved ones do not really matter. Because he ultimately did choose the Rev. Jeremiah Wright during his "odyssey" to find his racial identity. "On the streets of the South Side, where the Black Panther movement, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson flowered, Obama was mocked as a dispossessed newcomer who failed to grasp the historical urgency of the black struggle. "The white man in blackface," a political rival once called him," writes the Boston Globe‘s Scott Helman.

Would Obama have had a political future if he had not planted grass roots in the black community? I suspect not. He could have walked out of Rev. Wright’s racist sermons, he could have chosen a different path, a different church. He, more than most, knew a fuller truth. But in America, biracials are forced to choose sides. Their world can be a lonely place if they fail to do so. And that truth is no different for one so blessed and talented as Barack Obama.

The Double Standards of Race-baiting

THE MEDIA KEEPS DENYING THAT IT HAS used different yardsticks when judging the candidacies of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. Just yesterday I saw MSNBC’s Courtney Hazlett on Joe Scarborough’s morning program discussing Saturday Night Live’s recent skits of a slavish press fawning over Senator Obama. Hazlett reported that Michael Lorne denies SNL is endorsing Clinton as president, but expressed her own view that the skits prove otherwise. Yet Lorne rejected the criticism in a New York Times interview. "That obviously is not the case,” he told Bill Carter. "We don’t lay down for anybody.” He said most of the show’s writers are Obama supporters, but that the show’s skits had touched on a truth that the media was denying.

Crabby concurs. Just take the example of the recent firestorm provoked when Geraldine Ferraro was quoted in a newspaper saying, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.” By which she meant that Obama would have been eliminated from the presidential primary because of his mealy-mouthed voting record in the Illinois legislature, his mischaracterizations about his stance against the Iraq War, and his alliances with shady characters and bad influences were he not such a handsome, charming, and Ivy-educated black man.

But words to such effect are not allowed in our racially-sensitized national dialogue. There have been shout-outs by numerous news organizations for Ferraro to apologize for her "racist remark," a request she has so far adamantly refused. But so far there has been little outcry from the mainstream media about Obama’s two decade affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, a minister whose words harbor more overt racism than those uttered by Ferraro. Even the New York Times cloaks itself from this breaking controversy but nevertheless old affiliation with an opening sentence fingering other media’s coverage of the story. Check this morning’s Google news, and you’ll find more than 4,000 stories indexed on the Ferraro brouhaha, but at last count only 60 on the Obama-Wright alliance. Does this not just prove Ferraro’s point? Do those numbers in themselves validate the media’s bias?

Much ado was made when Bill Clinton called Obama’s anti-war stance a "fairy tale," and for having the audacity to say South Carolina’s primary win for Obama was a no-brainer given the state’s heavy African American vote. But the outrage was muffled when Jesse Jackson Jr. mocked Hillary Clinton for crying over her hair but not for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The imbalance proves once again the media’s timidity in dealing with racial issues. But until it is able to tackle the uncomfortable truths about the differing standards of race from all sides of the debate, racial resentments will continue to simmer just beneath the surface, to occasionally boil over into riots, protests or the "Bradley Effect."

Eliot Spitzer, Fallen Hero of the People

THE DOWNFALL OF New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer leaves me saddened, and I’m a long way away from the Empire State. He was supposed to be the upholder of truth, justice and the American way, just like Superman and all the other G-Men and women. And not because I think prostitution is worthy of the resources of federal investigators. I don’t. Aren’t there bigger crimes with bigger fish to catch?

But that is not to say that Spitzer hasn’t let the little people down.

He was supposed to be above all the rest. He was the capeless crusader, a Manhattan district attorney who launched "a successful investigation that brought down the Gambino family’s control over Manhattan’s garment and trucking industry." In 1998, he became the state’s attorney general, tackling, and here I copy verbatim from Wikipedia, "corporate white collar crime, securities fraud, internet fraud and environmental protection. He most notably pursued cases against companies involved in computer chip price fixing, investment bank stock price inflation, and the 2003 mutual fund scandal. He also sued Richard Grasso, the then-chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who he claimed had violated his position after receiving an upwards of $140 million as a deferred compensation pay package."

He was, in essence, a real hero of the people. In the Bush era, who else was looking after the interests of ordinary citizens and not the powerbrokers? From afar, it seemed Spitzer was the one high-profile government official sending notice that the law applied no matter how much your bank account was worth. And because he seemed to really mean it, he made me want to follow the law more closely. And because he wore his mantle of righteousness, and he had a wife and three daughters, he had a duty to try to fulfill it, even if it meant foregoing dalliances with lost girls who sold themselves to the highest bidders.

"I cannot allow for my private failings to disrupt the peoples’ work," Spitzer said at a news conference in New York City on Wednesday. "Over the course of my public life, I have insisted - I believe correctly - that people take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself. For this reason, I am resigning from the office of governor."

You have disappointed us, Governor. The little people needed you.

What? No Dripping Cum? Perez Hilton has Gone To the Dogs

MAKE NO MISTAKE, THIS blogging gig is hard work.

You have to read the news indexing websites like MSNBC, the New York Times, and Google to find juicy tidbits that you want to spend time with.

You’ve got to wade through scores of celebrity blogs to find something, anything, anybody interesting enough to write about. And so much of it is repetitious. Yes, we’re shocked! that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer got caught with his pants down.

Yes, we know that Madonna has been finally inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Gosh, that makes her seem so old! The Madonna we knew seemed to care little for such sentimentalities.) That Janet Jackson’s called out sick on her Saturday Night Live gig because of the flu. That Britney begins her crawl back to stardom with an appearance on the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother."

But did you know that Perez Hilton has a dog? I was shocked to found out that that beastly boy from L.A. actually cared about any living thing. But then Crabby found herself confronting pictures of the cutest little pup on the trashblog written by the The Queen of All Media. (Does Oprah know he’s using her title?) The dog’s name is Teddy, he’s a mini Goldendoodle, and Perez bought him for his mom’s birthday back in October.

Perez introduced him to the world in a slobbery YouTube video back in October, but posted updated pics yesterday on his site because the pooch had just gotten back from the day spa. Because "everyone should go and get gussied up every once in a while,” Perez muses on a video.

Crabby wonders why Teddy’s been spared the embarrassment of having his hair dyed shocking pink, and getting his snaps doctored with either devil horns, angel halo, or cum spilling from his poochy mouth.

Seems Mario has a soft spot after all.