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.
Is there such a thing as too much motherly love? Uh, yes. Consider the case of Baby M: After Beth Whitehead lent her womb to a trusting New Jersey couple for nine months, she refused to relinquish the baby, threatened suicide and fled the state with her husband and other children. Creepy! A protracted court battle ensued, eventually ending in victory for Whitehead, who was granted broad visitation rights as Baby M's legal mother. (Had this happened ten years later, it would have unfolded on the high court known as The Jerry Springer Show.) It seems, though, that Baby M, whose real name is Melissa Stern, never felt especially attached to her smothering, suicidal mom. So it was that on her eighteenth birthday she set about severing their legal ties and tried to get adopted by her real mom. In 2005, the New Jersey Monthly reported that Melissa was a religion major and a sorority girl at George Washington University. She found it somewhat bizarre, she told the magazine, when her story came up in a bioethics course.
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19. Charles Keating
This fall, Keating, the banker who spent the latter half of the 1980s in the newly deregulated savings-and-loan romper room and the first half of the 1990s in federal hoosegow, appeared once more to the country as the great asterisk floating above John McCain's political career. (McCain was one of five senators — all of them recipients of Keating's largess — who bullied regulators into backing off an investigation of Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, with disastrous consequences.) But what was Keating himself up to? "He's developing real estate again in Phoenix," wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2006. "Quietly. Successfully." Uh-oh. And the guy who embodied pretty much every misbegotten instinct of the latter half of the twentieth century — anti-gay, anti-porn (he founded Citizens for Decency through Law), anti-Ramada Inn (for the spanktravision), pro-greed — remains unrepetant, maintaining he was scapegoated for the failures of government oversight. "I became a poster boy for the S&L holocaust," Keating told the Enquirer. Of his time in prison — which amounted to fewer than five years — he said: "Actually, I am more proud of that than anything else in my life. It was tough. They were tough guys in there. They would take food and money away from old guys like me, but I got along fine. I had no problems."
Spuds, a white English bull terrier, was not only the "Ultimate Party Animal," as those late-'80s Bud Light commercials put it, but also one of the world's greatest gender-bending entertainers this side of Charles Pierce. Yes, Spuds Mackenzie was in fact a bitch. Born Honey Tree Evil Eye, she found a mystifying popularity as Bud's icon of … something or other, but was later criticized by groups like MADD for promoting youth drinking. Bud Light reps went to great lengths to hide Spuds' gender, according to People, going so far as to shield the dog from cameras with their coats when she needed to pee. She appeared alongside Martin Mull in the 1987 film Rented Lips and retired in 1989, wiling away her emeritus years in the North Riverside, Ill., home of her owners, Stan and Jackie Oles. She died in 1993 of kidney failure. She was ten.
16. Cal Worthington
Cal Worthington was Everytown's used car salesman, a whooping yokel in a Stetson, who became a legend for mounting commercials as shoddy as the heaps he sold. "If you want a car or truck, go see Cal. If you want to save a buck, go see Cal. . ." The jingle, set to "If You're Happy and You Know It," was a staple of late-night television, and the ads often featured Cal himself in assorted daredevil scenarios (swimming with Shamu, balancing on the wing of an airplane, standing on his head, etc.) or with his "dog" Spot, which was never a real dog, but some bizarre animal like an elephant or tiger or lizard. The ads worked; at one point, Worthington owned more than two dozen dealerships, eight ranches and a TV studio. But his steel empire suffered blows in the '70s and '80s, after he was slapped with false-advertising lawsuits. Now in his late eighties, Worthington, who has six children by three wives, owns just four dealerships and spends his days jetting about in his private plane. "I never much liked the car business," he told the New York Times last year. And yet, the ads live on — his son, apparently, has taken on the family business.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
