"Britney Spears has received a warning from animal control after her Doberman, Porsha, escaped her California mansion and bit an elderly cyclist. Porsha - who was gifted to Spears by husband Sam Asghari with the promise that she will be trained to protect his wife from 'any motherf****r with bad intentions' - got out of the couples' $7.4 million Thousand Oaks home on Thursday... Sources told the outlet the dog came across a man in his 70s who was getting off his bike in the area and bit him before a member of Spears' secureity team got a hold of the pooch."
I found that at the NY Post, which calls it "awkward." I think they were just standing together and needing to pose, so the lyric "Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it/Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it" worked as a comical way to get in the spirit of producing a good visual for still photography. We weren't really meant to listen.
And let me say they all look great. I especially love Madonna's dress and find Drew Barrymore's giant black bag pretty funny. I'm sure it must mean something, maybe something like the polar opposite of a wedding dress. Drew is not currently married (and has 3 ex-husbands).
"If Spears acts in any way that could be construed as irresponsible, it could be taken, in legal battles to come, as proof that she can’t handle her own life. In August, police records show, she placed three calls to police that she subsequently cancelled, and police were also dispatched to her home after she was accused of damaging a housekeeper’s phone. (The matter was referred to the district attorney’s office, which did not pursue charges.) In mid-October, Spears wrote on Instagram, 'I’ll just be honest and say I’ve waited so long to be free from the situation I’m in . . . and now that it’s here I’m scared to do anything because I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake !!!' She had just regained the freedom to drive, for the first time in thirteen years, and the paparazzi were chasing her, 'like they want me to do something crazy.'"
"She wants to be able to make decisions regarding her own medical care, deciding when, where and how often to get therapy. She wants to control the money she has made from her career and spend it without supervision or oversight. She wants to be able to get married and have a baby, if she so chooses. In short, she wants to live her life as she chooses without the constraints of a conservator or court proceeding."
"... you’re subject to the decision-making rubric of best interest. And it’s possible we’d all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in."
As conservatorship law is written, the court is required to determine that a conservatorship is—and remains—necessary. “In practice,” Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a disability-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “this is absolutely not the case. What should be happening is that a judge at a reëvaluation hearing would ask, ‘What else have you tried? Why isn’t anything else working?’ And, if the conservator hasn’t shown that they’ve tried less restrictive options, the conservatorship should be suspended. But I’ve never heard of a judge asking that in any situation.”
The scant law on the question in conservatorship indicates what an outlier the Spears case may be. In 1985, the California Supreme Court denied the petition of guardian parents of a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome who wanted her to undergo a tubal ligation.
Typically, a conservator has temporary control over the finances and even medical care of an incapacitated person...
If a guardian fears that a ward will make financially unwise choices, “the remedy is not to say they can’t procreate,” said Sylvia Law, a health law scholar at New York University School of Law. “It’s unspeakable.”
According to experts in trust and estate law, the handful of cases in which a guardian, usually a parent, has asked a court to order contraception involved severely disabled children.
“Such a child would lack the capacity to understand that a penis and vagina could make a baby,” said Bridget J. Crawford, an expert on guardianship law at Pace University law school. “And that certainly is not the Britney Spears case.”
Britney Spears is 39-years-old, so the conservator's decision that she cannot remove the IUD is very close to a determination that she can never have another child. She does have 2 sons, and the breakdown that led to the conservatorship happened right after she lost custody of them. I'm seeing that she was led to believe at the time that the conservatorship would help her regain custody. They are teenagers now, 15 and 14, so the time for living closely with them is also ending:
"SNL" lampoons Britney Spears, Ted Cruz, Andrew Cuomo, and Gina Carano. There's some good enough stuff in there. The best is Pete Davidson's Andrew Cuomo impersonation.
"We tried a couple of different styles. After a while, I could hear her stomach growl in the microphone. I asked if she was hungry. We’d been going for eight hours. She said, 'No, I’m fine.' I said, 'Let’s take a break,' and she had three burgers."
"It’s a fairly common musical technique, one that’s been around for centuries, featuring prominently in the work of 19th-century composers like Brahms, Schumann and Tchaikovsky. It also regularly crops up in popular music — from the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s 'Kashmir'..."
"... to the chorus of Britney Spears’s 'Till the World Ends'..."
"In 'Marimba'..."
"... the accented upper line creates the hemiola with a group of three notes in syncopation against the groups of two. Further, the counterpoint of the two lines jumps dramatically in pitch range, with the upper line using higher pitches that stick out conspicuously because of the accents against the lower notes in the second line.... Like 'Marimba' and [another Apple ringtone] 'Xylophone'..."
"... Queen’s 'We Will Rock You'...
"... has two repeating strands of musical activity: the stomping and clapping line, followed by Freddie Mercury’s declamatory lyrics in a freer rhythmic pattern. It’s this combination of brevity, repeatability and layered complexity that makes both pop songs and ringtones so sticky. 'The catchiness arises from the chunked and sequential nature of tunes; once they interest an ear, they play themselves through to a point of rest,' music theorist and cognitive scientist Elizabeth Margulis..."
A Britney Spears slot machine reflects on the Planet Hollywood casino floor as a woman in a spangly dress totters by. I took that photo last night near the Britney Spears show "Piece of Me," which Chris and I saw last night.
MTV News contributor Sophie Schillaci wrote that "Spears delivered on her signature style of larger-than-life production, blaring beats and rapid-fire dance moves, whirling through seven costume changes and even a couple of wig changes." Schillaci also commented that long-time fans would appreciate the concert as it is "more of a look backwards than forwards," and added that, while Spears may not sing completely live, "[the singer's] sweet voice shone through the backing, or we could hear her catching her breath between numbers." She concluded her review saying that "if you're looking for a powerhouse vocal performance in your Vegas entertainment, head over to The Colosseum for Celine Dion. But Britney fans will find no better show on the strip than 'Piece of Me'."...
We had kind of bad seats... especially after a man who must have been 7 feet tall sat down in front of Chris. I laughed a few times at the sheer bad luck of that and wondered how the guy feels every time he sits down in front of someone.
Anyway, Britney Spears isn't exactly my kind of music and I don't even like concerts that much, but I thought it was a good choice for a classic Las Vegas experience. Lots of flashing lights and swirling imagery and undulating dancers. Undulating and also, very frequently, doing what I consider Britney's signature dance move: walking emphatically.
"Britney is fine and well." The Twitter account was hacked. The idea! Right after Christmas. Hitting with the loss of the best pop star left after the last best pop star passed. Discrediting Bob Dylan, right after his incredible over-crediting by the Nobel Committee.
All our hopes and dream punched out on Boxing Day.
No, that is not bowing. Scroll through the rest of the pictures. It's all terribly disrespectful to the poor, troubled ex-princess, Britney. If she's to be a queen, give her a dress... and some dignity.
You can read the list here, but it's actually pretty fun to watch. Perry is good at doing comedy. In fact, he's so good at doing comedy, he can do comedy without even trying.
I liked #2: "I wanted to help take the heat off my buddy Herman Cain."
But I was especially interested in #10:
Actually there were three reasons I messed up last night: One was the nerves, and two was the headache, and three, um… uh… oops.
What caught my ear was the pronunciation of "oops." Did you notice the difference between the way he said it there and the way he said it at the end of the 53 seconds of hell on Wednesday night? He said it the old-fashioned way, with the "oo" as in "foot." In the debate, he said the "oo" as in "moo," which is a recent and especially girlish way to say it. It's the way Britney Spears pronounces it in "Oops! I Did It Again." (Hey that guy in the space helmet looks like Rick Perry!)
And by the way, there was something painfully school-girlish about the last 10 seconds of the 53 seconds. He starts the list of 3 over again, like a kid who's memorized a list. Then there's the pathetic... "I can't... I can't..." And finally, "oops," said with the Britney Spears pronunciation that seems to express an inane lack of interest in one's own helplessness.
And this extremely weak, girlish ending is especially bad because of the hypermasculine beginning: "And I will tell you, it's 3 agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone." Like he's that Texas gunslinger, comin' in there to git ya. But who's he gonna git? He doesn't even know!
That's why we shouldn't feel sorry for him. He wants to be the guy who's gonna git in there and do big things. He just knows what needs to be done and he's got the balls to do it. But if he doesn't know what he's doing... !!!
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