While condo market stories are about as ubiquitous in the Toronto media as the inefficient glass buildings are in the city core, we’re willing to bet it’s going to be difficult to top the latest condo gossip. Last week the National Post broke the news that none other than Saadi Gaddafi, the son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, owns a $1.6-million penthouse near the corner of Spadina and Lake Shore Boulevard. Read the entire story [National Post] »
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Muammar Gaddafi’s son owns a downtown Toronto condo
Corporate gossip: MLSE chair Larry Tanenbaum unknowingly foiled the Teachers’ plot to unseat him
In striking an agreement with Rogers and Bell to buy the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan’s majority stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Larry Tanenbaum apparently dodged a multi-million-dollar bullet. The Globe and Mail reports the pension plan was prepared to can Tanenbaum as MLSE chairman before he played kingmaker in the joint ownership deal between the twin telecom giants. It’s debatable whether Teachers could’ve actually ousted Tanenbaum, who was never directly threatened. But they had plenty of reasons to begrudge the man who reportedly wields “unusual leverage at MLSE, despite holding only 20 per cent.” Of course, with the Bell/Rogers deal that’s now 25 per cent. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »
Joe Freezy (also known as Joe Fresh) is going to Miami to throw a party
No, Joe Mimran isn’t living out a Will Smith video as part of his bucket list, but he is heading to Miami (where “hot mommies scream ay Papi”) to throw a party at Art Basel. In tandem with The Warhol’s Eric Shiner and Sara Tecchia, Freezy himself will be toasting the arts with a performance from Holly Woodlawn, a nearly 80-year-old drag queen and former Andy Warhol–made superstar. Could this mean that Papa Joe’s empire is expanding even more?
Gawker gotchas: a roundup of Toronto’s most embarrassing moments according to the gossip giant
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Earlier this week, the Globe and Mail’s “Caption Writing Person” set off an online frenzy with a series of epic one-liners mocking Hollywood excess in the age of the Occupy Everywhere movement. But it wasn’t long before people began wondering—for no good reason, really—whether the Globe had been hacked. For its part, Gawker published a post saying the caption writer had gone “rogue” (an adjective we think remains best reserved for failed vice-presidential candidates). Of course, we’re just grateful that this Can Con moment was far less embarrassing than the usual appearances. Nonetheless, some Toronto Gawker headline highlights, after the jump.
TIFF 2011 Roundup: How to be Don Draper (er, Jon Hamm)
Jon Hamm at the George Stroumboulopoulos Hazel Hotel Takevoer party (Image: JJ Thompson)
One of the many A-list celebrities to grace Toronto’s streets last week for TIFF 2011 was none other than Jon Hamm himself—or as he’s perhaps better known, Don Draper, the enigmatic ad executive he plays on the television show Mad Men. Hamm was a class act throughout TIFF: he took in Toronto sights, went to all the right parties and, of course, looked devastatingly handsome while doing it. Based on Hamm’s short but sweet stay in the Big Smoke, we’ve distilled four rules on how to be a gentlemen—Mad Men style—whilst in Toronto, after the jump.
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Chris Nuttall-Smith takes on La Société, Charles Khabouth’s sexy, buzzy French bistro
La Société serves up social cachet wrapped in sex appeal, and some decent French food, too (Image: Eugen Sakhnenko)
Four million dollars buys a lot of restaurant, even on Bloor Street, at the heart of the city’s richest retail mile. Charles Khabouth, the nightclub impresario behind La Société, the new, two-storey, 380-seat, more or less slavish recreation of a belle époque Paris bistro, brought in 29 tile workers, many of them from Montreal, to complete the spectacularly elaborate black, white and gold mosaic floors in the restaurant’s main bar and dining room. He and Alessandro Munge, of the Munge Leung design firm, commissioned a stained-glass ceiling for the bistro’s main space (which they’ve backlit, inexcusably, with sallow fluorescent lights), purchased their zinc bar top from France, outfitted the banquettes in brass and burgundy leather, and panelled the room in enough mahogany to deforest the best-endowed of banana republics. The rent, meantime, likely adds $2 million annually to Khabouth’s overhead. He’ll need to sell a lot of steak frites to cover that, but the man isn’t afraid to go big.
The sports media is totally over-reporting the suggestion that Miami Heat players cried after a loss
One of the greatest scenes in any sports movie ever comes from A League of Their Own: Tom Hanks, playing a drunk, depraved manager of a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), circa 1943—berates one his charges, Evelyn, for making a decisive error during the game. She promptly starts to cry. At that moment, an incredulous Hanks turns on his heel and delivers an absolute gem: “Are you crying? There’s no crying. There’s no crying in baseball!”
Well, apparently there’s no crying in basketball, either. After Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra intimated to the assembled media that some of his players may or may not have shed a few tears in the wake of a one-point loss to the Chicago Bulls on Sunday, the media completely lost its mind. South of the border, radio and television networks gossiped relentlessly, and the speculation machine went into overdrive. Spoelstra didn’t mention who cried, just that some did. And the chattering classes simply couldn’t control themselves. The phrase “crying shame” has never been to put to so much use.
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Ryan Gosling off the market? He was spotted in Cincinnati with “sexiest woman alive”
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Yesterday Lainey Gossip broke the story that Ryan Gosling may be off the market once again. The Blue Valentine star has recently been linked to co-star Michelle Williams and Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, but it seems he’s found a new partner in recently single House and TRON: Legacy star Olivia Wilde. Yes, you read that correctly—London, Ontario’s finest is dating Maxim’s 2009 Sexiest Woman Alive.
Oscar watch: 10 questions about the Academy Awards with Canada’s gossip girl Lainey
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Elaine Lui is Canada’s gossipmonger extraordinaire, with a master’s in Gaga and a black belt in Brangelina. This week, the blogger (find her at laineygossip.com) and eTalk correspondent is in L.A. covering the movie biz’s night of nights. Any news outlet can dish on Oscar outcomes, but only Lainey can tell you if Nicole Kidman has really lightened up on the Botox and whether James Franco and Anne Hathaway are secretly getting it on backstage. (They won’t be—but if they do, Lainey will know). We talked with her about Hollywood’s top dressers, celeb PDA and, of course, all things Oscar.
Best Actress Oscar Curse: a U of T study shows there’s some truth to it, but can it predict this Sunday’s winner?
Our ears perked up last month when we heard about a study out of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management that gave scientific credence to the so-called Best Actress Academy Award Curse. For the uninitiated, the curse refers to how Best Actress Oscar winners seem more likely to split from their spouses than fellow nominees (see: Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Winslet, Hilary Swank and Halle Berry, as well as old Hollywood icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford). At first, we wondered if crunching Hollywood heartbreak numbers is the most effective use of our city’s most beautiful minds (doubtful), but soon we moved onto more useful thoughts, such as: could the Rotman findings be used to help predict this Sunday’s Best Actress Oscar winner?
The Toronto study looks at what happens post-Oscar, but apply a little Freakonomics-style chicken-and-egg skepticism and all of a sudden it’s unclear what came first: the golden statue or the marital strife. Perhaps a troubled personal life is more likely to inspire an Oscar-worthy performance. With this hypothesis in mind, we examine this year’s nominees »
MTV’s Skins gets high school right—except when it doesn’t
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The first instalment of Skins aired last night on MTV Canada, and though it entertained us, it underwhelmed in the OMFG department. Of course, the media and protesting parents groups had us anticipating Sodom and Gomorrah for youths, so anything short of a meth-fuelled orgy would have felt tame. Shot in Toronto and starring a largely Canadian teen cast, the show prides itself on portraying young people as they really are—not squeaky cleaners or spoiled Upper East Siders. But how does the high school experience of Tony and the rest of the Skins gang stack up against what’s really going on in the lives of today’s teens? It’s been a while since our graduation year (hint: it coincided with the launch of Hotmail), so bear with us while we attempt to channel our inner adolescent, and by all means weigh in if you disagree. Below, our take on which aspects of the show ring true, and which feel faker than Ferris Bueller’s snoring machine.
Michael Cera ♥ Who’s the Boss: awkwardlicious star spotted eating fro-yo with Tony Danza
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Yesterday, WENN got its hands on some photos of local boy Michael Cera catching up with a highly unlikely pal (the shots are re-published by Lainey here). Okay, so we can’t say for sure that they’re pals, but we can say that Cera and Tony Danza were spotted going for fro-yo yesterday in L.A. They were accompanied by that weird guy who played the bearded stoner in Knocked Up (a.k.a. Martin Starr). WTF? Or, to put it in Tony-speak: Eh-oh, oh-eh?
Justin Bieber to reprise role on CSI
Justin Bieber shopping (Image: jake.auzzie)
Justin Bieber will be guest starring in another episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation this February 17, just in time for sweeps week. Loyal CSIers and devout Beliebers may recall his much-hyped appearance on the show last September, which lasted a total of 3 minutes and 25 seconds and consisted of lines like: “I was just gonna scare the cops, not blow them up.” Now he’s back, reprising the role of Jason McCann in an episode with the mindblowing meta title, “Targets of Obsession.”
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Selena Gomez gets a little too close to Justin Bieber; Beliebers not amused
(Image: Jake Auzzie)
We all know that pop heartthrob Justin Bieber is the object of affection of innumerable prepubescent girls. So when photos of the Stratford sensation cozying up to Disney actor Selena Gomez surfaced on the Web, it’s none too surprising that more than a few flew into a digital tizzy.
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Spotted! Ryan Gosling getting his Canuck Christmas on in Burlington
Ryan Gosling: Burlington or bust (Image: friskytuna)
Do we really need more reasons to love Ryan Gosling? Yeah, yeah, we know he’s dating a Gossip Girl, but let’s just put that unfortunate match out of our minds for a minute and swoon over the ukulele scene in Blue Valentine. Then there was the recent interview in which, when asked to sing whatever song came into his head, Gosling broke into the My Little Pony theme (Blake Lively probably doesn’t even know what a My Little Pony is). So we hardly need another reason to crush on Canada’s hunk with a heart, but here it is anyway: the Goz spent the holidays not at Chateau Marmont and not on some Lohanian coke bender but back home with his mom in Burlington, Ontario.
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