Kindness Cyborg Ryan Gosling Handed Out Girl Scout Cookies to Delighted Strangers

Do you ever get the sense that Ryan Gosling‘s publicist is laying it on a little thick? He saves women from speeding cars, breaks up fights, arm wrestles sadness, and distributes boxes of assorted puppies to needy single people. Or so the rumors go. He also, as he explained to a smitten Jimmy Kimmel, bought a random Girl Scout’s entire cookie inventory and, rather than hoard them like a greedy cookie squirrel, distributed them to random strangers, probably while singing all of Mamma Mia!

About “five or six years ago,” GoslingBot3000 got it in his circuits to do a good deed for some strangers. GoslingBot’s kindness algorithms determined that the thing that every human (except those with a gluten allergy or something) loves most of all in this dreary world is Girl Scout Cookies (specifically Samoas and frozen Thin Mints). Explaining that he once fantasized that some kind gentleman would come along and buy all the cellophane that his father enlisted him to sell, Gosling attempted to fill a void in his childhood by becoming that kind gentlemen:

So, I was walking out of Ralph’s one day and I saw these kids trying to sell their cookies, and I was like, ‘I’ll take ’em all.’ So I bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes.

And just like that, mushy-hearted humans everywhere have bought their tickets to see Ryan Gosling pretend to shoot people in Gangster Squad this weekend. [E!]

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What happens when you decide to cast Lindsay Lohan in your grimy, NC-17, self-aware, shoestring-budgeted B-movie? You get a really compelling piece of longform journalism in the New York Times chronicling the dysfunction on your film set, the many neuroses of your washed-up director, and a litany of reasons why Lindz really ought to make Parent Trap Two: Growing Up Totally Sucks. For those of you who ignored your newsfeeds today, take a gander at this excerpt, in which Times scribe Stephen Rodrick captures the exact moment when director Paul Schrader‘s porcelain heart shatters into a million jagged pieces:

At their second meeting, Lohan complained to Schrader about a biopic she was shooting for Lifetime, in which she played Elizabeth Taylor, one of her role models. She proclaimed the director a jerk, her co-star a nightmare and the crew unfriendly. On it went. Schrader listened for a while. He looked stricken. He softly tapped his balding head on the table. Lohan asked him what was the matter.

“That’s going to be me in two months. You’re going to turn on me.”

The actress touched his arm softly. “C’mon, Paul. That won’t happen.”

He chose to believe her. That summer, he developed a pet line to steel the less brave.

“We don’t have to save her,” Schrader said. “We just have to get her through three weeks in July.”

Keep both eyes peeled for The Canyons, which should be coming to the half-empty five for $20 bin at an abandoned Blockbuster near you sometime next fall. [NY Times]

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The grapevine whispers gently in our ears that Mohse Benabou, a former Israeli soldier-turned-Justin-Bieber-bodyguard (you know, that old yarn), is suing the Biebs for assault and battery, claiming that the slight-of-build pop singer punched him in the chest several times and yelled at him. Benabou is seeking unspecified damages for assault, as well as $420,000 — wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more! — in unpaid overtime. The Biebs camp denies all this, and TMZ learned that Benabou has fibbed in the past: he once lied about working for Justin Timberlake, but, then again, who wouldn’t list JT as a job reference and just hope for the best? He seems nice. [TMZ]

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Family members of Jenni Rivera, the Mexican-American singer who died earlier in December when her plane crashed shortly after taking off from an airport in Monterrey, Mexico, have recently filed a lawsuit against the plane’s owners, accusing them of negligence. The family’s suit claims that the plane’s 78-year-old pilot was not licensed to fly “passengers for hire,” nor did he have an instrument flight rule license, which is extremely important when flying at altitudes of 35,000 feet. [TMZ]

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Despite her best efforts to “blossom into a social networking butterfly,” Megan Fox still abhors social media, which is why she announced on Facebook that she would be deactivating her Twitter account after just a week. How are your New Year’s resolutions going, by the way? Better than Meg-Meg’s? Have you already abandoned your project to cross-stitch that scene from The Aeneid when Laocoön and his sons get swallowed up by the sea serpents? You can only prick your fingers so many times before you realize that a good resolution might have been to start setting more reasonable goals. [Us]

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Destiny’s Child, as in the singing trio of Michelle Williams, Kelly Rowland, and some mom named Beyoncé and not the child who will one day lead humanity to its victory over its robotic overlords, has announced the release of its first recording in eight years. “Nuclear” will drop on Jan. 29 as the sole new track on a compilation of the group’s “most sensual romantic recordings,” all guaranteed to either help you and your sexual partner achieve mutual orgasm, or trick your neighbor into believing that you and your sexual partner are achieving mutual orgams under a tropical shower of lavendar perfume. [LA Times]

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• Giuliana and Bill Rancic put sunglasses on their four-month-old son, and the results were, predictably, adorable. [E!]
• What? Kathryn Bigelow didn’t get a “Best Director” Oscar nomination for Zero Dark Thirty? But all the film critics have said that that movie is, like, ermahgerd, the best movie this year. I guess it’s time for her to direct a Point Break sequel that opens with Bodhi paddling back to shore, only it’s not Bodhi — it’s Jaws!!! [AP via HuffPo]
• Pola Kinski, the daughter of extremely creepy actor Klaus Kinski, told the German magazine Stern that her father began sexually abusing her when she was about five- or six-years-old. [News Au]
• Has Belgium’s Queen Fabiola been hiding her money from tax collectors in one of her palace’s many waffle mattresses? Some highly suspicious people think yes. [AP]
• No, really — Paris Hilton is thrilled that Kim Kardashian is carrying around Kanye West‘s annoying baby. [E!]
• Here’s a photo of what looks like Prince William booing some poor Cirque du Soleil performers because those Frog bastards think they’re just sooo fancy. [E!]
• Katt Williams, who’s wanted to dabble in sounding like a reasonable human for some time now, has said something that football commentators should really say every single time the Washington Redskins run a play: the name “Redskins” is really fucking racist. [TMZ]
• Sol Yurick, the dude who read Xenophon’s Anabasis and was like, “Omg — I could set this story in New York and it would be fucking awesome,” will not be coming out to play ever again. According to his daughter, the author of The Warriors died of complications from lung cancer at the age of 87. [AP]