Cast member Rihanna poses at the American premiere of the Universal Pictures film "Battleship" in Los Angeles May 10, 2012DANNY MOLOSHOK/Reuters
MONEY WOES
How did Rihanna nearly go broke? Blame the accountants. According to legal documents filed in connection to the pop star's lawsuit against her former accounting firm Berdon LLP, Rihanna had $11-million (U.S.) in cash at the beginning of 2009. By the end of the year, she was down to $2-million. During the in-between period, Rihanna claims her accountant gave her the green light to buy a house costing approximately $7-million, so she took his advice. Rihanna later sold the house for a $2-million loss. Rihanna also claims that her 2009 Last Girl on Earth tour was losing money hand over fist, but her accountant never told her the truth.
Source: TMZ
DAILY DOUBLE-DOUBLE
Make us proud, Julia Clark. The Saskatoon native, and current student at Harvard's organismic and evolutionary program, is the first Canadian contestant to compete in the annual college tournament on Jeopardy!. Clark did the online Jeopardy! audition test last spring and forget all about it until she got a call in November asking her to be on the show. How did she prep? "I spent a lot of time studying American history because, being Canadian, I didn't have much of a background in that." The best part of the experience for Clark: Meeting Canadian-born Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. "You don't get to talk to him very much," she said, "but he seemed like a really interesting, cool person." Clark's turn at the Jeopardy! board will air Thursday night.
Source: The StarPhoenix
TWITTER OBITS
A wide range of Hollywood celebrities have taken to Twitter to register their condolences on the death of thirties-era child star Shirley Temple, who passed away this week at age 85. Among those tweeting were CNN host Piers Morgan ("What a star, what a life, RIP Shirley Temple"), actress Emily Rossum ("My first acting inspiration. Rest in peace") and comic actor Josh Gad ("One of the last true Hollywood legends"). Actor James Franco weighed in with his tweet, "We love you, Shirley Temple. Love to all the child stars, grown before their time." And it's presumed that Jason Biggs was attempting to be funny when he tweeted, "RIP Shirley Temple. One of my absolute favourite drinks when I was a kid."
Source: Us magazine
NERD NIGHT
When you hire John Oliver to host your awards show, you should probably expect him to come out swinging. The former Daily Show correspondent returned to host the annual Crunchie Awards in San Francisco for the second straight year and nobody can say he held back his disdain for the gathering of tech-industry players. Oliver began his hosting stint by yelling "F–k you!" to an audience member who wolf-whistled during his introduction. And then the Englishman got straight to the point: "It's an honour to be in a room with such high-functioning nerds," said Oliver. "It seems like it's an awards show where the tech industry celebrates and quietly criticizes each other. It's like Nobel prizes given out in an atmosphere of high school bitchiness."
Source: TechCrunch
PURPLE PROSE
Who knew Kristen Stewart was a poet? The Twilight star recently shared one of her personal poems during the course of an interview with Marie Claire magazine. Stewart says she penned the poem, printed in its entirety on the magazine's website, in 2012 (perhaps not coincidentally the same year she broke up with her Twilight boyfriend Robert Pattinson after she had an affair with her Snow White and the Huntsmen director Rupert Sanders). Titled My Heart is a Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole, the poem includes such purple prose as, "And I'm drunk on your morsels/And so I look down the line/Your every twitch hand drum salute/Salutes mine…" By her own admission, Stewart was mortified by the poem. "Oh, my God, I'm so embarrassed," she told a Marie Claire journalist.
Source: Us magazine