John Mayer’s new girlfriend, Scheana Marie (which is apparently not her porn name?):
Marie is also an aspiring actress – she guest stars as Maria, the pizza delivery girl of the Jonas Brothers’ dreams on their upcoming TV show JONAS, which debuts on the Disney Channel on May 2. (Marie’s episode airs May 16).
The former model, who has appeared in ads for Pioneer, Doritos, Nissan and Toyota, graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from Azusa Pacific University.
The New York Observer, Feb. 24:
And at noon each day, hundreds of thousands of women (and men) here log on to members-only Gilt Groupe, a designer sample-sale Web site at gilt.com, and begin clicking madly in hopes of snagging items like a $108 silk jacquard ruched dress ($385 retail) by Adam Lippes, or a $2,398 strapless black silk cascade gown ($7,950 at retail) by Oscar de la Renta. They type credit card digits rapid-fire lest the coveted item drop out of their shopping basket, not unlike signing on for tickets to an Arcade Fire concert or reservations at Momofuku Ko.
“We have women who are not gun-shy about buying designer gowns that retail for $5,000 because they feel like they’re getting a great deal buying it for $1,000,” said Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of the site. She said the sales regularly sell out in hours. The site’s fourth-quarter sales in 2008 were double its third-quarter sales.
Gilt Groupe reports that it has just signed its one-millionth member, creating fierce competition to land that pair of size-38 Christian Louboutin patent leather heels. The clientele has become diverse, ranging from socialites looking for a wear-one-time-only gala dress, to office-assistant underlings looking to jolt their wardrobe with a trophy item, to grandmothers in Florida cat fighting it out over Tory Burch sandals.
The upside: It’s all terribly democratic. Anyone with a fast Internet connection can snare a trendy Doo.Ri and Thakoon (a Michelle Obama favorite!) dress for $300 or $400.
The bad news: Gilt Groupe gets expensive and overwhelming very quickly. Some hardcore members say that they have become calamitously hooked on buying the still-not-cheap bargains, even in the trough of a recession. And these women are not of the limitless-funds, ladies-who-lunch variety, either.
Okay. We get it. Gilt Groupe is really popular with the ladies. Now can we not read anything more about it, please?
This is a) a real website and b) my Tuesday spin instructor.
He looks awesome and Teutonic. Which Tuesday class do you go to? I will come next week!
1. “fyi, just thought you should know — according to a girl i was talking to tonight the current williamsburg consensus is that the hipster grifter is an urban legend invented to sell copies of The Observer.”
2. “hey, has there been any information about the hipster grifter being either ‘made up’ or having an internet presence that is controlled by someone else?
i think someone else is pretending to be her or something.”
Meta-interconnected-something-ness:
Mr. Kaplan will leave a New York media world that is fundamentally different than the one he entered in 1994. Just last week, the Observer broke a story about a Brooklyn con woman, the so-called “hipster-grifter,” in a news article that provided just the kind of New York intrigue and context that had been a hallmark of the newspaper. But Gawker, the Manhattan gossip blog, immediately took custody of the story, annotating it with attitude and reader-submitted sightings of the protagonist that all but obscured where the story came from in the first place.
Awesome day in SF. Morning run in the Presidio, lunch in the Mission, catching up with an old friend (from kindergarten!) in Dolores Park, catching up with another old friend (from freshman year in college) in Hayes Valley. Tonight: sushi in Sausalito.
From Jenna’s NYT story about blog books: “But the latest frenzy is over books that take the lazy, Tom Sawyer approach to authorship. The creators come up with a goofy or witty idea, put it up on…
This tastes like Haterade. Poor NYT writer can’t get an “actual” book published. The Tom Sawyer approach to book publishing sounds a hell of a lot better than the Grady Tripp one.
So Postcards From Yo Momma and Love, Mom are both mentioned in the story, which is great, though we do seem like sort of the odd (wo)man out here—we’re the only one that’s not an image-based book. The other thing that I was sort of sad didn’t make it in is how excited so many of the moms were to be “published.” At the book party, which Jenna came to, they were all running around signing each other’s books on the page where their email was. One woman took a 17-hour train from Wisconsin to be there. It was really, really nice.
But I suspect this was more a case of an editor wanting the story to sound a certain way, because on Thursday night Jenna emailed me and asked if we could put some of the moms from the book in touch with her for the story. I said sure and emailed the kids whose moms were in the book, asking them to contact Jenna directly. She told us around 20 of them contacted her, but none of them made it into the piece. So I am going to give Jenna the benefit of the doubt and say that the haterade is coming from her editor here.
Kari Farrell apparently emailed someone at 3 this morning saying “yes, I made mistakes,” but “what the article didn’t mention is that I haven’t done anything of that nature for years.” Er, okay then. There’s more, too! [NYO]
I mean, crazy, right? When a friend who works at Vice sent me the blog post they originally did about hiring Kari Ferrell, I was like, “Cool! Maybe I could just talk to you guys and get some more info about her?” I was all set to write it up quick-like for the NYO’s website. But then the Vice people were like, you know, after we put up that post, we were contacted by some people who knew her. And I was like, Oh really? So I contacted them. That’s when I really fell down the rabbit hole.
Now people are coming out of the woodwork—including Richard and Max and Amandalyn and Jodi and Alice, and one of her former roommates, who emailed me; and one of my co-worker’s friends, to whom she passed the same “I want to give you a handjob in my mouth” note at Enid’s as she did to the guy in my story (who got it at Union Pool); and I’m sure there’s others—to say that they encountered her and she pulled one or more of the shenanigans I outline in the story.
I wonder what’s going to happen to her. Someone, no doubt, is going to turn her in, and she’ll probably go back to jail, at least for a little bit. But I wonder if her pathology—and it is a pathology—is something that she can ever get over. As much as I like to believe in our capacity for redemption, forgiveness, change, and all that good stuff, I find it really hard to believe that she ever will be able to. And that is pretty sad.
Eric and I recently discovered a shared fascination with the slew of impossibly named NPR hosts we listen to every day: Renee Montagne, Steve Inskeep, Corey Flintoff, Korva Coleman, Kai Ryssdal, Dina Temple-Raston.
In fact, we’ve often wondered what it would be like to be one of them. A Nina Totenberg or a Renita Jablonski. A David Kestenbaum or a Lakshmi Singh. Even (on our most ambitious days) a Cherry Glaser or a Sylvia Poggioli.
So finally, after years of Fresh Air sign-off ambitions, we came up with a system for creating our own NPR Names. Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.
So I’m Liarna Kassel. And Eric is Jeric Bath. I even have a new nickname for my little brother in Dylsan Rosarita.
The local affiliates also have some great names. Soterios Johnson on WNYC and Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY (I thought her name was Mosskowain for the longest time) are two of my favorites. My only problem with Liana’s method is I don’t have a middle name!
Hey there, folks. Now, if you have any idea at all of what a jalopy is, then you know they usually do tend to get where they’re going — but it might not always be the smoothest ride along the way! For one thing, there might be a little bit of back-firing out the tailpipe. Ka-pow! And, well, I do believe it’s going to be the same way with the blog posts on this space that fall under the name “Grampa’s Jalopy.” Think of it, well, as a blog within a blog!
Hee. You should all follow Hello Gangster.
Interesting post on the Economix Blog about how New York’s diverse economy, made up of many small, independent businesses, has proven more durable than the economies of cities like Pittsburgh, which was reliant on one huge industry (steel).
How Competition Saved New York - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
