Celebrity Crackpot Ideas They (Unfortunately) Made Reality
When someone becomes rich and famous, they're tempted to think they're great at everything. Sometimes that can lead to a musician launching an acting career or a writer starting a business -- but, as often as not, it leads to an insane failure birthed by hubris and lackies being paid too much to say no.
Akon Is Trying To Build A Cryptocurrency Themed City Named After Himself
Blockchain is an incredible invention that allows wealthy people to take their insane plans, add "powered by blockchain," and immediately be taken seriously for no reason. Take Akon, who's developing a cryptocurrency named Akoin that's supposed to revolutionize the entire African economy in some vague way. The hope is that entire national economies will go digital, making all transactions using the currency Akon humbly named after himself, and then somehow civil wars will end.
There are some technical challenges, including sorting out where people are suddenly going to get the smartphones and cheap high-speed internet required for this, as well as the hurdle of African countries inconveniently having their own economic plans. But the "Smack That" singer remains enthusiastic, telling a press conference "I come up with the concepts and let the geeks figure them out," which is code for "I have enough money to attempt to will my delusions into existence." That's the kind of radical problem solving we expect from a man who fixed the conflict diamond problem by denying their existence.
Akon himself doesn't have time for minutiae, since he's already moved on to planning an entire city in Senegal named Akon City to serve as an Akoin showcase. Apparently it will be a "real-life Wakanda," a gleaming city of the future where all transactions will be made via Akoin. It's possible that we saw a different cut of Black Panther, but we don't remember Ne-Yo being introduced as the minister of finance or T'Challa spending the whole movie trying to pay for things in Omari-yen.
Akon claims to have been gifted 2,000 acres of land by the Senegalese government, but so far the only concrete news is that he stole his concept art from a real development who says they're not affiliated with Akon and, even worse, intend to complete their project with actual money. It's also unclear how Akon will pay for an entire city or how it will be "powered" by blockchain, but everyone knows that writing "I Wanna Fuck You" automatically qualified Akon for an economics doctorate, so clearly we're the ignorant ones here.
Morrissey Won An Award For Bad Sex In Fiction, And That Wasn't Even The Worst Part Of It
You probably know Morrissey from his music, but you might also know him as an author, in which case you have our sympathies. In 2015 he wrote List of the Lost, about a '70s track team that gets cursed by a demon, and despite that non-sexy premise he somehow managed to win the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award. Here's why:
"Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza's breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra's howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza's body except for the otherwise central zone."
Yes, that was all just one sentence. Here's another, because we know what you've done.
"In their secrecy, Harri does not like Tracey's knotted banana toes, and Tracey finds the manly central issue too slight to grip, and although such things ought not to count in the adult mind, somehow they do yet they don't yet they do yet they don't."
The "manly central issue too slight to grip" means a small penis, while "knotted banana toes" means Morrisey thinks writing is accomplished by threatening a thesaurus. But all the attention placed on the "deltoid deities" and "phenomenally top-heavy and modernly unfashionable" women making sex at each other distracted from the book's many, many other issues. It doesn't appear to have been edited, even for typos, leaving us absolutely no idea what this next extract means.
"The bullet of Justy as a hell-driver flyer with a disciplined land into Dibbs' dry hand, and the new corner man faced the home straight with power-hitter grunts and Bunkie pluck as the bilge-free body speedballed with stirred stumps to beat the devil with scorch and sizzle and unfortunate dribble and snappy like crazy he somersaulted with pitching motion into a ferocious belly-flop tumble of a sprawled pratfall -- face to the gravel, each limb slithered like snowslide subsidence."
It's like if Finnegans Wake smoked meth. At this point we should note that Morrisey's description of the books opens with "Beware the novelist... intimate and indiscreet...," ripping off every 23-year-old man getting a MFA who thinks drinking too much whiskey is a personality. But now, one more sentence for your reading pleasure.
"In the church of secret service known as the abattoir this is exactly what humans excitedly do to beautiful bodies of animals who were also crafted in care by some divine creationist, yet at the human hand the animals are whacked and hacked into chopped meat whilst gazing up at their protector with disbelief and pleading for a mercy not familiar to the human spirit, ground and round into hash or stew for the Big Mac pleasure of fat-podge children whose candidature for roly-poly vicious porkiness makes their plungingly plump parents laugh loudly, as little junior blubber-guts orders yet another Super-burger with tub-of-guts determination to stuff death into round bellies, and such kids come to resemble their parents as ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag."
Michael Flatley Self-Financed An Action Movie Starring Himself As A James Bond Rip-off
Michael Flatley became wealthy by starring in hit stage shows like Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. He pioneered holding your arms stiff by your sides while flailing your feet around, as though fighting off a lobster swarm with a live macaw down his pants. Which is an entertaining act, but few people saw it and thought "this man must be the next James Bond!" Those who did were immediately chased out of the theater by an usher for drinking an entire Toilet Duck bottle stolen from the janitor's closet during intermission.
But one person in that minority is Michael Flatley himself who, at the age of 60, decided the time was right to reinvent himself as a debonair secret agent. He wrote, directed, produced, and financed a movie called Blackbird, starring himself as Blackbird. It's Flatley's first movie and reportedly features "thrilling stunts" but, sadly, no dance numbers. So we'll have to keep waiting to hear "Oh no! The bomb can only be defused... with tap!"
...On second thought, we'd totally watch that..
The plot is basically just Casablanca if Rick could do krav maga. According to the official synopsis, "Troubled secret agent 'Blackbird' abruptly retires from service and opens a luxurious nightclub in the Caribbean to escape the dark shadows of his past," because there's no better way to escape the dark shadows of your past than spending every night hammering watered-down champagne corks back in with your shoes while screaming at Vybz Kartel's manager on the phone. But Agent Blackbird is dragged out of retirement by the sudden reappearance of an old flame, who appears to be both half his age and someone who wandered in out of a romcom where a squirrel bites Jason Segel on the penis.
Flatley has insisted the movie is "not a vanity project" even though filming locations appear to have been chosen based on their proximity to his various homes. The villain is played by Eric Roberts, Hollywood's most available semi-star, and going by the poster he spends the whole movie shushing people for saying "Agent Blackbird? I... I can't control my erection!" The movie wrapped in 2018 but has yet to be released, even though an Irish entertainment reporter, driven insane by what we've dubbed "dance madness," launched an epic but doomed quest to see an early screening. There's since been no news, but maybe it will show up on Akon's inevitable streaming service.
Blake Lively Started Her Own Lifestyle Website That Was Even Worse Than Goop
Gwyneth Paltrow is raking in millions by selling $350 bottles of psychic vampire repellent to people who think their dollar store vampire swatters will leave them unfulfilled. Blake Lively's Preserve was born in 2014 when she looked at Paltrow's Goop and said "What if I ran that scam, but did a much worse job?"
Preserve was pitched to consumers as everything and nothing. Was it a magical place? Yes. Was it also an amazing place? Yes. Was it a magazine, a store, and a philanthropic endeavour? Yup, yeah, and you know it! Its business model was "Blake Lively wrote a blog post about liking enchiladas and life, so you should drop 110 bucks on a designer apron."
To give you a sense of how little direction Preserve had, they published a piece about the history of barbeque that contained phrases like "Pray consider it, dear reader," "fire-prepared victuals shoved into food-messed face-holes sans cutlery" and "one harkens back to ye days of olde, to the court of Richard the Lionheart, to the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, to Lords and Ladies locked in scenes of chivalry." Then, once Lively's editors killed themselves, Preserve published a photo shoot that paid tribute to the halcyon days of the antebellum South.
Possibly inspired by Lively's plantation wedding to fellow Green Lantern star Ryan Reynolds, Preserve talked about the "innate sense of social poise" and "unparalleled warmth and authenticity" rich southern belles had as they picked out a slave at market. All issues of taste aside, the shoot further muddled whatever vague message Preserve was supposed to have, as cheetah print mini-skirts weren't really a thing back in the 1800s.
Then Preserve shut down in mid-2015, because "Buy a $70 bowl from a Gossip Girl actress" was not a viable long-term business plan.
James Franco Wrote A Short Story About A Girl Recounting The Joy Of Sex With James Franco
James Franco, the human equivalent of the jerk-off motion, wrote a book called Actors Anonymous about stand-ins for James Franco and also James Franco. One actor is generous enough to have sex with his fans, whom he nicknames "Diarrhea" (because of her diarrhea, you see), and her "less attractive friend Cunty." As for James Franco the character, he has sex with a freshman at NYU, and we get to relive this historic moment from her point of view.
"I'm just a stupid little girl who wants to be an actor," she says. "Kurt Cobain is my god. He is the most beautiful man that ever lived. Except maybe James." She continues, using authentic modern language, "I want to be a punk rocker riot grrrl. I want to be able to show my pussy out loud. But I'm shy of my pussy. I'm afraid it smells." She accepts an invitation to Franco's place, admires his art, then refuses oral sex from him and instead offers some of her own. So if Franco did hook up with someone at NYU there's a totally normal explanation for why he didn't go down. By the end of their sexual encounter she feels like she's in Mary Poppins, while readers feel like they've become celibate.
The book is labeled a novel, but it changes format from short stories to a film script extract to a series of monologues. Franco inserts himself as both character and commentator, saying, "I know you think it's innovative to do this split personality thing, but I think it's just you covering because you can't write a straight story. It's like you can't tell a story from beginning to end, so you hide behind all this shit." Now seems like a good time to point out that Actors Anonymous was slammed for being self-indulgent nonsense more interested in dropping names than telling a coherent story.
But that's not fair to its profound moments, like this line we're sure will shake you to your core: "And if everyone just watches videos now, aren't the videos life, and real life the escape?" But while Morrissey tries to reassemble his shattered mind so he can take notes, we'll leave the rest of you with this poem excerpt, which is ostensibly written by the ghost of River Phoenix for James Franco.
"You spend your time all over, James.
You're all over the place, James.
I was a River that flowed straight
And pure, you're like a king
That orders one thing,
And then orders the opposite thing."
Domenico De Luca has been writing for thirty years, with screenplays, short stories and songs making up the vast majority of his output. He is a film buff with his very own blog called So Many Films, So Little Time.
