• Forbes compiled a list of high-earning celebrities under 30, and Beyoncé is at number one: She brought home an estimated $87 million over the last year, which buys a lot of leotards. [Mirror]

• Lindsay Lohan turned down a role in The Hangover, because she said the screenplay "had no potential." Or maybe she didn't want to play a hooker with a heart of gold in a sorta sexist movie? [Page Six]
• A Facebook movie? Starring Shia LaBeouf as Mark Zuckerberg? Ok. [Gatecrasher]
• Did the Black Eyed Peas bite a track from musician Adam Freeland? [The Daily Swarm]
• Sharon Stone's rep says Sharon Stone did not have "air rage" and was not detained by police at the airport, but she was yelled at by a flight attendant. [Independent]
• Sarah Jessica Parker's new show, which will be like Project Runway, but for artists, has begun casting. According to this piece: 'Part of me was worried it would look too mercenary for certain artists,' she says. 'They might find it objectionable to use TV to talk about what they do.' The show might, she says, end up being 'more about people who feel comfortable with something risky,' by which she means the medium of TV itself. And yet, of course, the artwork created on the show can't be too risky, as it needs to be presentable to a prime-time audience." [mediabistro.com]
• Daniel Radcliffe injured! While filming Half-Blood Prince. He's fine. In fact, he says: "It was great actually, it was brilliant. "I was doing this scene where I fight a giant snake and, being the hi-tech, multi-million production that we are, the snake was being played by our stunt co-ordinator holding a long pole with a boxing glove tied to the end with gaffer tape. On the last take before lunch he really planted the front foot. I was fending it off with a chair and was caught unawares. The chair went flying into my top lip. To be honest, it was brilliant because I saw the playback later and I go down like a bloody boxer." [Telegraph via Esquire]
• Daniel Radcliffe: "I've been out with a couple of women who have been older than me. I think it's the maturity thing more than anything else, but that was when I was younger – girls my age are now mature, so it's great. I've widened the field!" [People]
• Guess what millions of users were doing on the web yesterday? Watching Michael Jackson's memorial, which drew huge traffic. (Although not as much as the Presidential inauguration in January.)[MediwWeek]
• Since the memorial is costing L.A. between $1.5 million and $4 million, the city has set up a website where people can make donations to help pay the bill for police and other public servants. [USA Today]
• "Jackson Memorial Made Fans Into Family: At memorial, the Jackson family invited a stadium of people into their lives." Also: What do the yellow ties and flowers mean? [MSNBC Scoop]
• Dionne Warwick on the Michael Jackson memorial: "He would've loved it. He would've loved it." [CNN]
• Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee promised a House resolution that would forever honor Michael Jackson, but such a resolution will likely face opposition in the House. [AP]
• CNN is now reporting "details" about Michael Jackson's body from a "source" — and the information — he was covered in needle marks; he was bald — sound just like the stuff The Sun printed, which turned out to be untrue. [CNN]
• The Austrian ambassador to the UK is urging people to protest Brüno, since it mocks his country, Nazis and... Josef Fritzl. [The Sun]
• Has the ending of Brüno been cut and changed? [Sydney Morning Herald]
• The Latoya Jackson scene — in which Sacha Baron Cohen's character tries to get Michael Jackson's phone number — has definitely been cut from Brüno. [Mirror]
• The last season of Lost: Producer Damon Lindelof says, "anything goes." [EW]
• Spotted: Mary J. Blige doing the Moonwalk. Wish there was video. [Page Six]
  
• If your dream is to see Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt dressed up as Sid and Nancy — where Joey is Nancy — your dream has come true. [ONTD, Cinemash]
• Roman Polanski's lawyers are still appealing for his decades-old case to be thrown out. [Mirror]
• Hamptons gossip: People drank champagne, Jon Bon Jovi sang, Nick Stahl fell asleep in the pantry! [NY Observer]
• Jodie Foster hearts surfing. [Page Six]
• Um, the Saturday Night Live skit "MacGruber" is going to be a movie. With Ryan Phillippe and Val Kilmer in negotiations to star alongside Will Forte and Kristen Wiig. Will the whole film be shot in a control room? [The Hollywood Reporter, Variety]
• 30 Rock episodes on Comedy Central? [Variety]
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang banned from parade! [Daily Mail]
• Whatshisname wants to move to Australia after his divorce from Whatshername. [The Sun]
• Blind item! "Which musically inclined young celeb has been dubbed - behind his back, of course - 'Lip Gloss' because he always puts it on before hitting a red carpet?" [Gatecrasher]
• "You don't have to pay for it, and it's unconditional. It's hard when you get cut off the road in traffic, but it's what I try to practice." — Taraji P. Henson, who is pro-love. [Gatecrasher]
• "Not smoking is a neverending struggle. You put a cigarette to your mouth, you light it, and you know that you're hurting yourself. I did it at least 10 times a day and my throat hurt, my voice was gone, but I still was attracted to it. It's the same thing as dating someone who's not great for you, or staying up all night before you have something really important to do the next day. It's something that we all do, and I'm not exactly clear as to why we do it." — Maggie Gyllenhaal. [Mirror]
• "The death scene, to me, was quite a difficult scene to film just because I have never in my own life, up until quite recently, never been bereaved. You can never imagine what that's like so you sort of feel like a bit of a phony when you're acting it out, but hopefully I did OK in the end." — Daniel Radcliffe. [Mirror]
• "I am not trying to get back with the Countess in any way, as your spies suggested. We will remain friends and take care of our children." — Count Alex de Lesseps. [Page Six]
• "Weight doesnt matter. At the end of the day everybody has a different standard for what turns them on. There are probably tons of men out there that find thick librarians smokin hottt! LOL. The way i dress represents who i am and i think everyone should just dress in whatever makes them feel good. And just for good measure, Wilkinson added, "And while im totally flattered u like the way i look and dress...i just hope u dont make other women feel like they have to wear a 'cloak' if they dont look like a Playmate!" — Kendra Wilkinson, in response to blog What Would Tyler Durden Do, which used a picture of her to write: "If a girl is built like Kendra, she should dress exactly like Kendra. Every day, all the time...If the girl isn't built like Kendra, um…I don't know. I guess maybe an invisibility cloak or something. What's the point to even being a girl if you're not gonna look like Kendra?" [Celebuzz]

Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me

You'd think, based on the title of the anthology Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, that the men who've contributed essays to it have learned something from women who've dumped them. Well, some of them have! Actually, as I flip through the book again now, I can only find one essay that has a thoughtful take-away that might help someone who finds him or herself in a similar situation. It's by Ok Go singer Damian Kulash, Jr. and it's called "A Dog Is No Reason To Stay Together," but an apter title might be, "Don't fool yourself into thinking you can make a long-distance relationship work, especially if you are in a band that has just recently become successful." Damian examines his relationship with former live-in love Amanda with sober maturity. "It was love - love like you see in movies. Except in movies, relationships don't change, or grow, or slowly fall apart. They either last forever or end mercifully fast with a thrown plate and a jump cut." That sentence is exactly as good as this anthology gets.

Things with Amanda didn't last forever, but Damian's bio notes that he's now married with two dogs. Actually, almost all of the men in this anthology are married, and Damian is one of the few who don't make a big deal about it in their stories. You know that thing Neal Pollack (oh, he's in here!) does where he's like "I'm married, did I mention that I'm married, I can't be that bad of a guy because someone married me, okay?" That's a recurring theme here.

Most of these guys are comedians or comedy writers or memoirists of the "I'm a lovable loser, haha" variety - Andy Richter, Nick Hornby, A.J. Jacobs, Will Forte, and a slew of former Onion and SNL writers are represented (Chuck Klosterman, where are you?) They often begin their essays, especially when writing about high-school or college-era rejections, by marveling that any woman has ever found them attractive. "God bless arty girls and booze!" Andy Richter writes of the factors that finally enabled his college-fatty self to get laid. "During the course of the evening - aided no doubt by generous portions of cheap beer - I tricked her into liking me," is how Will Forte describes meeting his first serious girlfriend. Whenever men write about getting laid despite being outwardly undesirable, I immediately get suspicious. It's so The Game, you know? It just seems like a weird kind of inverse bragging, especially when they talk about how attractive the girls they somehow managed to bone were, especially when said girls' attractiveness is the only thing about said girls that seems to merit mentioning. Okay, boys, we get it. Even before you were semifamous for being smart and funny, you could still get some. Probably you were smart and funny even then! Um, good job!

The only thing less appealing than false modesty is outright bragging, and there's some of that here too. In 'Things More Majestic And Terrible Than You Could Ever Imagine,' Onion writer Todd Hanson catalogues a litany of women who've dumped him that reads more like a sexual highlights reel. On a list entitled 'Things positive," he writes, "Sex with two heavily tattooed punk-rock drummer chicks whose breasts bounce hypnotically as they hammer away onstage is pretty much as amazing as you'd imagined. I cannot emphasize this point enough." Wow, Todd. Two.

But bragging is still more appealing than vengeful muckraking, and there are a couple of essays in this anthology that have to be filed under that heading. These are essays that seem designed with a single reader in mind - the girl who will glimpse this book on the 'new nonfiction' or maybe even the 'Valentine's Day' table, see her exboyfriend's name on the cover, and open it up to the essay about what a terrible person she is. Damian Kulash's admission that he misses his ex-dog far more than he misses his ex-girlfriend pales in comparison to Andy Selsberg's essay 'A Grudge Can Be Art." Andy details his affair with a nineteen year old aspiring actress eleven years his junior. To be fair, he doesn't seem to be taking any pains to portray himself as anything like a decent or mature person - he acknowledges that continuing to hate a woman with whom he spent less than forty-eight hours ("and that includes being asleep together") for fucking his roommates is pretty ridiculous.

But his parting shot is still kind of stunning in its naked vindictiveness: "I do know where I'll see her eventually: on a reality show. She is genetically and socially engineered to tear through one of those setups like an erotic tornado." There's no way the intervening years could've changed this girl, of course. After all, they haven't changed Andy! Some boys will never learn.

*Full disclosure: the "guy" is the fiance of my best friend and former Jezebel contributor "Heather" and he is not a jerk at all; in fact he is much better and nicer than I ever imagined he would be when he brutally ass-raped the first piece of mine he edited back in the day (;-) Ben!) so that fits right in with my thesis. Also, sorry Emily, for writing this. It needed to be done. That was some fucked Up ish. And readers, sorry for all the "meta." It's Friday. That is my only excuse.