Is it likely that a bleach blonde with fake tits who worked for Playboy appeared in a Playboy pictorial? Is it likely that a millionaire reality show contestant would murder his bleach blonde girlfriend and think he was going to get away with it by chopping off all her fingers and pulling out all her teeth but not removing her serial numbered breast implants? Is it likely that, if someone were so horribly cruelly disfigured, either just prior to being murdered or post-mortem to incompetently prevent identification, that TMZ would buy a death photo from someone in the coroner’s office and post it on the internet? Well, the only part of the the Jasmine-Fiore-murder-followed-by-death-photo story being reported which is not true is that the victim posed for Playboy. Full disclosure: Jasmine Fiore may have had a bit part in the horror movie The Abandoned which was an advertiser on this site and others I work on, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t bias me on this. I’m pretty sure I would find this story simultaneously ghoulishly hilarious and horrifically tragic regardless.

One Ryan Alexander Jenkins was indeed thwarted when one Jasmine Fiore was identified by the serial number on her breast implants. Apparently Ryan Alexander Jenkins recently finished taping on VH1’s I Love Money 3. I don’t really know what that show is about and I can’t imagine the prize dollars are anything significant to anyone already a millionaire, but I can’t quite bring myself to look it up either. Gawker’s Jezebel reports that, since Ryan Alexander Jenkins became a person of interest in the murder of Jasmine Fiore, VH1 has pulled all mention of the Megan Wants a Millionaire show he was a finalist on. Jezebel further reports that the murder suspect may have actually won the grand prize on I Love Money 3. Jezebel goes on to commend VH1 for their sensitivity in removing the MWAM content from the VH1 web site (juicy bits helpfully archived by Jezebel.)

I have also never seen Megan Wants a Millionaire, which was apparently canceled fairly early in its run. A while back I covered the Charm School reunion show where Sharon Osbourne and this Megan Hauserman ditzy blonde self-professed gold-digger got into a cat fight, although I admit I’ve never seen Charm School and only watched the cat fight vid on the VH1 web site when it became a hot topic.

At that time, Megan’s claim to fame was that Poison frontman/insecure meanie/embarrassment-to-aging-rockers-everywhere Bret Michaels rejected her on Rock of Love. Is being rejected by a guy who was okay-looking in 1986 really a resume item? Apparently so, as Megan Hauserman was given her own show Megan Wants a Millionaire. The Superficial reports, “You know what the most fucked up part of this story is? There’s a reality show where millionaires compete for the love of a self-proclaimed gold-digger with fake breasts. That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.”

It seems that, immediately after being rejected by Megan Hauserman on camera for VH1 in March, Ryan Alexander Jenkins went to Vegas and married his girlfriend of some time Jasmine Fiore. Wouldn’t you be pissed if your significant other went on television to humiliate themselves pursuing someone who is not you? Certainly would not spell wedding bells to me. According to Jasmine Fiore’s understandably bereaved and distraught mother Lisa Lepore, Jasmine Fiore had the marriage annulled in May, but law enforcement can find no record of this. One Robert Hasman got a series of text messages from his ex-girlfriend Jasmine Fiore over the two days before her death. Then he got just one cryptic message, well after her estimated time of death, which just read “suck it“. In other post-mortem commentary news, What Would Tyler Durden Do reports, “Jasmines roommate says their relationship was “on the rocks”. She also said that Jenkins told her he was “done with the relationship” and that “he couldn’t take it anymore”. This was one day after Jasmine was found in a dumpster . . . She’s not very attractive, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill her. Legally, I mean.”

Ryan Alexander Jenkins is Canadian and is believed to have fled to Canada, although his father, a wealthy architect, developed a resort on an island in Honduras and owns at least one plane. The Huffington Post reports that Canada has agreed to extradite Ryan Alexander Jenkins if he is apprehended in Canada because the State of California has promised not to pursue the death penalty in this potentially capital crime.

Judging from video of Ryan Alexander Jenkins singing “I love my wife” to Jasmine Fiore in Vegas which he posted to his MySpace page (and TMZ helpfully archived), Jasmine Fiore was brunette at the time of her death. So bleached blonde and naked for Playboy = false. All the ridiculous stuff (including VH1 choosing not to profit from tragedy) = totally true.

What the Duck is the best comic strip anyone has ever done about photography. Now Blue Blood readers, unless they are viewing the site with some sort of high tech braille conversion computer, are familiar with my more professional lit studio and location photography of rock stars, freaks, and naked people.

I also sometimes like to do, uhm, personal work, where I take my snapshot camera out on the town with me (and sometimes rock stars, freaks, and naked people.) In order to achieve my distinctive brand of party time nightlife photography, I do not look through the viewfinder and I keep the display turned off. I do my best work of this type when alcohol is involved.

I’m not much of a drinker, but I can tear it up from time to time on special occasions. Prior to the age of digital photography, I thought I had never blacked out from drinking. I mean, there was never a dead hooker in my bed in the morning and, in the absence of dead hookers, it is difficult to remember not remembering. Since the advent of digital photography, I’ve been made aware that sometimes less booze equals more memories. For example, I was giving my buddy Gonzo grief for not having introduced me to famous, err, computer wiz Kevin Mitnick when we were all partying in Vegas. Unfortunately, Gonzo was able to produce digital photographic evidence of us hanging out.

At any rate, I was first exposed to What the Duck when my brother emailed me the accompanying webcomic because it made him think of me and specifically my painting the town red snapshots. My brother is a professional photographer and he came across the strip because another professional photographer told him about it. When comic strip creator Aaron Johnson is asked whether he is a photographer, he replies, “I’m 40% photographer, 60% Photoshopper.”

Not to in any way belittle the importance of post-production in modern photography, but Aaron Johnson is 100% hilarious and insightful cartoonist. If you’ve ever picked up a camera for art or business or know too many people who have, the humor in What the Duck is very very spot on and funny.

Have a good weekend and make some good memories everyone. Don’t forget your camera.

BlueBlood.com will be finishing up 2008 with a celebratory balloons set of the lovely Voltaire, lensed by yours truly and Forrest Black. Nothing says “party” like balloons on a hot naked tattooed girl. Well, maybe other things say “party” like that, but balloons on a hot naked tattooed girl are still very festive. Blue Blood’s New Years gift to all of you is the opportunity to try a BlueBlood VIP membership for only $1 and, when you sign up, you will be given the option to add a membership to Erotic BPM as well, also for only a dollar.

My best NYE ever did involve a trip to Las Vegas where they blew up a building to celebrate the start of a fresh year. New Years Eve Vegas-style featured fireworks and dynamite and police and drunk people in the street and everything. Perhaps some contemplation was involved as well, but it’s hard to top that, even during subsequent Las Vegas NYEs. Although admittedly I frequently stay in on New Years or spend it with just a few close friends and family members. Ringing in the New Year and celebrating my birthday are primarily my bi-yearly personal performance evaluations. Basically, I like to use those dates as opportunities to reflect on how I am doing at achieving what I’d like to and I usually set goals on the New Year.

This New Years, I recommend avoiding a hangover and curling up with access to both all the BlueBlood VIP sites and ErotiBPM for $1 each. You can always have a champagne brunch tomorrow with what you saved. Just sign up on the BlueBlood.com sale page and check the box for EroticBPM when you enter your info. Never done an intro price this low before and probably never will again. Year long half price memberships are available too, so please resolve to check it all out in 2009.

So apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, best-selling author Tucker Max challenged Nick Denton’s huge blogging empire’s flagship Gawker to a $10,000 bet over the likely domestic gross of his upcoming movie and Gawker declared Jihad on Tucker Max over everything. Not in that order.

Full disclosure: I have drunk beer with Tucker Max and I’ve shaken hands with one of the Rudius Media bloggers. I have partied in Vegas with large portions of the Gawker staff, enjoyed Gawker’s hospitality in Austin, and shaken hands with Nick Denton. I think it is fair to say that I don’t have a horse in this race because I genuinely like and enjoy the work of people in both camps.

Now, Fleshbot is the main Gawker blog I read with any regularity, although, given that I quoted ValleyWag earlier today, obviously it is not the only one I read. So I don’t know how I missed the Gawker flagship’s 20 entries this month about how much they loathe Tucker Max. I worried that I might be being too rough on Joshua Todd and Buckcherry earlier this week, but, damn, compared to Gawker, I am sweetness and light and the personification of all that is gentle.

I wrote a thing a while back where I praised Tucker Max’s writing and general brilliance, but I mentioned that he was coy in his stories about use of cocaine. Tucker Max is very sensitive to people having misimpressions of him and he explained to me that it was important to him that he was about hanging out with beer and hot chicks and not about hookers and blow and that he felt beer and hot chicks were more fun. I’ve never been big on choosing just one scene, if more than one has something to offer, and there was probably more blow than beer in the room we were standing in, so I told him I’d have to contemplate that. I then printed a retraction of my implication that he might do drugs. And Tucker was still stressed out that I might not have been clear enough.

At the time, I thought he was being more sensitive than he needed to be, but, having read through some of the Gawker articles where everything the guy does is put under such a microscope, it makes more sense to me now. Wikipedia, which almost never takes any responsibility for how badly someone is being falsely maligned or lauded, actually locked the Tucker Max entry about a week ago. If Wikipedia actually makes any effort to control the rampant wikiality of an entry, then you know it is serious. Either that or Tucker Max has superpowers. In addition to pointing out that editing Tucker Max’s Wikipedia entry must be a full time job, on their site, Gawker assassinated everything about Tucker Max from his writing to disgruntled former employees to what swag he gave away at his movie’s wrap party to how cutesy he is with his dog to entries friends of his have written about him during arguments and since removed from the web.

As a big fan of Tucker Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I don’t get what it is about him that drives some people into a complete frenzy of hate and disgust. Folks who are allergic to him generally complain about frat boy something or other and refer to his work as fratire, but Tucker Max says he has never belonged to a fraternity and I believe him.

I’m not excited about I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell being made into a movie. I recently watched the Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors flick on TiVo and it was painful, even mostly fast forwarding. The problem with bringing memoir to the big screen is that the aspect of high quality memoir which is most interesting is the memoirist’s perspective. I have read almost all of Augusten Burroughs‘ books and enjoyed them, but the Running with Scissors movie was wretchedly unwatchable. And Running with Scissors had Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Evan Rachel Wood in it.

Tucker Max quotes Eminem’s lyrics “I love being hated, it’s great, let’s me know that I made it” when talking about the Gawker month-long hatefest. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a sociopath. The line between self-actualized individual and sociopath is soooooooo thin. But I think being vilified bothers both Tucker Max and Eminem, especially being vilified inaccurately. People always like to laugh about the idea of someone getting upset over something on the internet, but we live in a digital age and everyone needs to get their heads around the fact that what happens on the internet is real life now. You can step away from the keyboard, but something that tens of thousands of people read is still going to have an impact.

Sometimes you just have to live your life on your own terms and deal with the fallout. In this case, Tucker Max says that his film needs to do about $20 million gross to definitely be in the black. He has invited Gawker to wager what they feel will be the movie’s earnings and they win if it comes in beneath their bet and Tucker wins if it does better than they gamble. I’d say that a 20 entry media blitz on Gawker might be worth a few grand, but Hamilton Nolan and the rest of the Gawker crew write too well for a hostile deconstruction from them to equal good publicity. I’m very curious to see if Gawker will accept Tucker Max’s wager, all proceeds to be donated to charity of course. After that, I’ll be very interested next spring, when I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is released, to see who wins the bet. I hope I haven’t offended any of the involved parties, but, if I have, I’m okay with dealing with the fallout.

When I was a little kid, my compatriots would frequently use the expression “I don’t care”, but I was always careful to say “I care, but not enough to change my behavior.” Everybody likes a smartass, right?

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.