Ashton Kutcher is the pretty much undisputed leading twit on Twitter. As of this moment, he has 2,839,413 followers, outflanking people like Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, Shaquille O’Neal, Britney Spears, and Oprah Winfrey, and even CNN and Twitter itself. He has held the number one spot for quite some time. So, when Ashton Kutcher tweets that his wife Demi Moore has gotten a mohawk, people listen.

I know an awful lot of extremely physically beautiful people, yet, even among celebrities, Ashton Kutcher is so freakishly good-looking that I remember him being in the movie Reindeer Games, even though I don’t think his character had a name. And I think his part was so small it consisted pretty much of stumbling into a bathroom or something at the wrong time. So I stop and think about it and realize that I can’t come up with any other movie Ashton Kutcher has ever been in. I know he was on a TV series called That 70’s Show which ran for a long time, but I don’t even know what network it ran on. So I go and check IMDB and I have actually never seen Ashton Kutcher acting in anything other than Reindeer Games. Yet he is clearly up there at the top of Mount Celebrity. I’ve apparently never really seen him act, yet I know that he dropped out of a biochemical engineering college program to become a male model.

Ashton Kutcher has managed to parlay a certain kind of famous access into something far larger than most. He is a perfect spokesman for digital cameras and micro-blogging services because he has managed to commodify certain parts of his existence in such a flawless and innovative way that, in 2009, the rest of society is panting to catch up.

The Punk’d reality show Ashton Kutcher co-created with producer partner Jason Goldberg at Katalyst Films took the Candid Camera genre to a whole new level. By playing pranks on recognizable people, Punk’d made the viewer feel much more invested in the show; it made the show feel ironically more real and most of the punked celebs more humanized. Maybe this makes some sort of statement about the alienation of modern man and how so many people feel more connected to famous faces on television and online than their, err, IRL peeps. Punk’d was spoofed on The Simpsons as the show Chop Shop with the pranked person crying out anguished “Why would you do that?” in response to their car being chopped for the purpose of filming their reaction for reality television.

Why would Ashton Kutcher do that? To get paid? To become a powerful producer? To be feared? To amuse himself? To get MTV to foot the bill for expensive pranks he wanted to play? To be able to have people to play pranks for him? To come across as more of a man’s man and less of just a pretty boy? To become that special sort of celebrity of the new millennium where he is nominally a famous actor, but the real description is much more complex . . .

So anyway, it appears that Demi Moore would look really hot with a mohawk. But the widely-covered haircut is just a photochop (Chop Shop!) Ashton Kutcher posted to his Twitter via TwitPic. Most of the news covering Ashton Kutcher punking the news media with what is not the most convincing photo manipulation say that Ashton Kutcher actually photoshopped the image. Never mind that minutes after posting the chop with the tweet ” wifey just got a new hair cut what do you guys think? I love it”, he tweeted, “@mrskutcher I”m just playing baby but I think you’d look great with that cut”. Which apparently was enough to convince a large proportion of the news media that Demi Moore actually had gotten a mohawk hairstyle. Because the Punk’d guy would never play the prankster in such matters. And apparently some pundits have poor reading comprehension. Which is ironic, given how many serious think pieces I have seen about Twitter decreasing people’s aptitude to comprehend complex thoughts. How much more complex than j/k are they themselves capable of? And what makes them think Ashton Kutcher did that photoshop job? Surely someone, who can pay other people to do pranks for him, has people for that.

When I started writing this article, a short time ago, the Demi Moore mohawk TwitPic had 179,571 views and now it has 181,371.

Yesterday, gossip site The Dirty reported that they have exclusive nude photos of Miss California Carrie Prejean. Now the winner of Donald Trump’s 2009 Miss USA pageant on NBC is Miss North Carolina Kristen Dalton, but Miss California Carrie Prejean is likely to be the name you’ve been hearing about.

I don’t know if there is a Good Judgment category in pageants, but, if there were one, Carrie Prejean would get awfully low marks. One of the Miss USA judges this year is famous (and openly gay) gossip blogger Perez Hilton. So Perez Hilton asks Miss California Carrie Prejean what, in light of Calfornia’s Prop 8 debacle vs. other states legalizing it, she thinks about gay marriage. Let me just repeat here that Perez Hilton was one of the judges. So, in a show of what people who live in glass houses should not say, Miss California Carrie Prejean said, “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite. And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

CNN reported “Prejean announced last week that she would star in a new $1.5 million ad campaign supporting what she called “opposite marriage” (marriage between a man and a woman) funded by the National Organization for Marriage.” And of course the naughty pictures surfaced. What was that about casting the first stone and being without sin and all that jazz?

Graphic designer Chad Serrano, who is in my pal Sabrina’s Fabulous Book Club for Fabulous People, says he would totally support the National Organization for Marriage type folks if they opposed divorce as heartily as they oppose gay marriage. If no National Organization for Marriage or pro-Prop 8 person ever got divorced, then it would be reasonable for them to excuse homophobia and being bigoted morons as being pro-marriage. Good point.

Then again, NOM is a group who chose as their spokesperson . . . a judgmental naked pageant chick who claims to be in favor of “opposite marriage”. I just wish the people from Opposite Land (really Vista, California), where she apparently from, is from would stop voting in California elections. Oh yeah, and Miss California Carrie Prejean does have a completely valid excuse for having posed for naked pictures and never mentioning it. She was like totally tricked. Uh huh.

Perez Hilton reports in Party Like a Vampire that convention booths are insufficient to entertain Twilight fans, so the series will be getting a large convention in Dallas dedicated to Twilight. The event is, perhaps not surprisingly, called TwiCon. It features a variety of comedy troupes who create respectfully humorous Twilight spoofs and a line-up of bands, most of which are inspired by the movie, but one of which, 100 Monkeys, is notable because it includes Jackson Rathbone who plays vampire Jasper Hale in the movie and its forthcoming sequel The Twilight Saga: New Moon later this year.

Popular Twilight fanfic site Twilighted is doing a fan fiction contest as part of TwiCon with a theme of romance 100 years in the vampire future. Would it be wrong if I mentioned that the only other individual fandoms which tend to receive dedicated conventions are Star Trek and Star Wars. And Star Trek really jumpstarted the erotic slashfic type of fanfic. I’m not sure whether it is technically accurate to refer to sexy fan fiction as a genre with a series of sub-niches, but it feels kinda accurate. Maybe if Star Trek is getting a sexy modern makeover, someone needs to write some threeway erotica fanfic involving Bella and Edward and Spock. Or not.