The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Watch the Flight of the Conchords Season Two premiere right here and right now! Plus, topless women shill washing machines while American Gladiators rub you down.
Tonya Harding, you'll recall, was the figure skater at the center of the Lifetime movie known as the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. That's where her ex-husband contrived to have a hitman kneecap Harding's rival, Nancy Kerrigan, whose cry as she fell to the ground — "Why me?" — rang in America 's ears like the first shot at Antietam. Harding, the first American woman to land a triple axel, later pleaded guilty to hindering the investigation of the Kerrigan attack, and thereafter embarked on a long second act of dubious celebrity: a sex tape, sundry and besotted run-ins with the law, a boxing career, and, most recently, a tell-all book, The Tonya Tapes. In it she claims, among a great many things, that she was physically abused by her mother and gang-raped by her ex-husband and two other men. If there was any doubt that Harding had entered American lore, a "spiritual detective" named Robert Urbanek got himself a web site and made the case that it was Tonya Harding who shot JFK. Oh, and Lincoln, too, but that was in another life.
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24. World's First Test-Tube Baby
"Superbabe," sang the cover of the now defunct London Evening News in 1978, shortly after Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, was born. At five pounds, twelve ounces, Brown became the world's most famous person in diapers, spawning some three-million subsequent in-vitro fertilizations. Brown's parents, for their part, brought home more than baby, giving the London Daily Mail exclusive rights to their story for $600,000 — about $2 million by today's standards. Three decades hence, Brown, er, delivers packages for a living and lives with her husband and toddler son, who was conceived naturally, in Bristol, England. On her thirtieth birthday, thirty I.V.F. families — one for each year of her life — convened to celebrate her entry into the world.
23. Toby Radloff
The ur-nerd first appeared to the world in Harvey Pekar's dour comic-book serial American Splendor (and later in the 2003 movie of the same name) — a pen-and-ink Poindexter who somehow waddled into a cult following. You might remember him from a series of MTV segments in the 1980s, or the films Killer Nerd and Bride of Killer Nerd, or, if you watched much Cleveland-area public-access in the 1980s, The Eddie Marshall Show. A former file clerk at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, he now works there as a courier. Radloff also appears in videos on lurid.com and declares on his Myspace page that he is "currently both busy and under exclusive contract" and will entertain only "serious (i.e.: Hollywood or big-budget indie) business inquiries."Studying law, perhaps?
22. Donna Rice
In 1987, Rice, a marketing rep for a pharmaceutical company and a No Excuses jeans model, who supposedly counted among her suitors both Prince Albert of Monaco and Don Henley, was thrust into a national sex farce that ended with the shaming of one of the great might-have-beens in American political history, Gary Hart. Hart was a former Democratic senator from Colorado and the party's presumptive presidential nominee when he met Rice at a South Florida yacht club. The two took a boat ride to Bimini, aboard the Monkey Business (of all the boats in all the towns. . .), and soon enough, word reached the blue-balled scolds in the press, who took it as their mission to seek out and destroy any stray vestiges of the '60s. There were stakeouts and shouty press conferences, and the scandal metastasized despite repeated denials by both sides that the relationship was sexual. Hart wound up suspending his campaign; Rice was fired from her job at the pharmaceutical company. (She also turned down an offer to pose for Playboy.) Over the years, her story — on the rare occasions she'd tell it — never changed. In 1994, she married a man named Jack Hughes, and from 1994 to 1999 she worked as communications director and vice president of Enough is Enough, an anti-pornography non-profit. In 1998, Rice-Hughes wrote a book called Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace. As one wag put it, lawmakers were now courting her for support, not romance.
21. "Refrigerator" Perry
The Fridge was the appliance-sized, Super-Bowl-shuffling defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears whose championship ring was so large, you could allegedly slide a half-dollar coin through it. If Walter Payton was the legs of the 1985 Chicago Bears, and Jim McMahon the mouth, Perry — then one of the most beloved rookies in NFL history — was the team's waistline, double-chin, and clotted artery all at once. He left football in 1996 and returned to his native Aiken, S.C., where Sports Illustrated found him in 2000, fishing for crappie and working construction jobs for a subcontractor. He claimed to be in better shape. "You put up six scaffolds, then lay brick all day in 100-degree heat," he told SI. "We'll see what kind of shape you're in." He weighed 355 pounds.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
