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.
The Jamaican bobsled team debuted at the 1988 Winter Olympics — a walking Successories poster that Disney inevitably turned into a crappy movie starring John Candy. By the time Cool Runnings came out in 1993, though, the runnings had become decidedly hotter for at least one member of the team. "Yesterday I was on TV in front of the entire world," Devon Harris, a captain in the Jamaica Defense force, told Sports Illustrated, recalling one day in 1992 when he found himself in the middle of a gang shootout in an empty lot in Kingston. "Now I could get shot in front of the garbage. I guess the honeymoon is over." Harris now lives in New York and works as a motivational speaker, "worship facilitator," personal financial analyst and children's-book author (he wrote an account of his experience at the '88 Olympics called Yes, I Can!). As for his teammates, Michael White is a traveling manager for Target in New York, and the Stokes brothers, Chris and Dudley, run the national bobsled federation in Jamaica. "We're not a sideshow," Chris told SI. "We're in it to win. A lot of people thought we'd have a good time, forget about this nonsense and go home. We looked at it as a chance to run on a solid sporting tradition, rather than just on hype."
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9. Elian Gonzalez
In 1999, a six-year-old Cuban refugee named Elian drifted across the Florida Strait and into an international custody battle. Now fourteen years old, Elian remains a useful mascot in his native country, where he returned to his father in mid-2000 after a U.S. court ruled him too young to seek asylum. In his hometown of Cardenas, a museum devoted an entire room to his saga, and his father, Juan Miguel became a minor celebrity and was elected to Cuban's National Assembly in 2003. This June, Elian was reportedly one of 18,000 people inducted into the Young Communist Union. Juventud Rebelde, a Communist youth newspaper, quoted him as saying he will never let down ex-President Fidel Castro and his brother Raul.
8. "Where's The Beef?" Lady
Clara Peller was the grouchy octagenarian who, in an '80s Wendy's commercial, demanded to know: "Where's the beef?" "Where's the beef ?" "Hey! Where's the beef?" Seriously, though, where is the beef? Not in the hands of Walter Mondale, who squandered his bid for the 1984 Democratic presidential ticket, despite milking the catchphrase within an inch of its life against opponent Gary Hart, who was milking something else (see No. 22). And not with Peller, who said in a spaghetti-sauce commercial that she had found the beef, after all, only to get booted from her $500,000-plus Wendy's gig. No, the location of the beef remains elusive, reduced to one-liners on The Simpsons and The Office, and yes, hooksexup.com lists. "I made some money, which is nice for an older person, but Wendy's made millions because of me," Peller, the career beautician and manicurist, complained bitterly to Time magazine in 1985. Is that the beef? Peller died in 1987. She was eighty-six.
7. Joey Buttafuoco
He was Humbert Humbert with a socket wrench, and his name was made for late-night television comedy. Buttafuoco. Say it soft and it's almost like praying. Since his affair with Amy Fisher in 1992, he has squeezed every last drop out of his dubious celebrity: Celebrity Boxing, the Lingerie Bowl, cameos in Finding Forrester and Operation Rep: The Movie, and even (surprise) a sex tape. Rumors were floated in 2007 that he had reunited with Amy Fisher, and his second wife, Evanka, filed for divorce, only to reconcile a short while later. (He and wife Mary Jo divorced in 2003.) There was also the usual run of legal woes — in addition to the statutory rape conviction (for which he served six months), he got busted for solicitation, auto-insurance fraud, and illegal possession of ammunition. In July 2007, he signed up to host a live talk-radio show called Let's Talk Recovery.
6. Amy Fisher
The story goes that, during the construction of a bike trail on McKee Peak in Abbotsford, British Columbia, workers would occasionally pause and yell, "Buttafuoco!" So the trail was named — and another further down the mountain — "Amy Fisher." As Wikipedia notes, "Both trails are still in existence and are regularly ridden." Fisher, the fire of Joey Buttafuoco's loins, served seven years in prison and upon release in 1999 alleged that she had been raped by a correctional officer. She eventually dropped her case, and in 2003, ever one to associate with the scum of society, she joined the media, writing a column for the Long Island Press for which she won an award from the Long Island chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2004, Fisher, an advocate for prisoners' rights, published a memoir, If I Knew Then. From there, however, her life quickly rounded on itself, and she once again became a national curio. In 2006, Fisher reunited with Mary Jo Buttafuoco for a televised segment; she later reunited with Joey Buttafuoco for the 2006 Lingerie Bowl coin toss. In 2007, she was supposedly spotted on a date with Joey, though it was likely a publicity stunt for a reality series that thankfully never materialized. In October of last year, the New York Post reported that Fisher's husband, Lou Bellera, had sold a sex tape to Red Light District Video, the MGM of videotaped celebrity coitus. The tape hit the internet in November 2007, and from it the world learned that Fisher was still very much in existence and being regularly ridden.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
