You may or may not have read reports earlier this year that Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant business was near bankruptcy. Bloomberg has a detailed article not only on the current status of this enterprise, but Ramsay’s other activities as well.

via popcandy

GM has ended its marketing sponsorship deal with Tiger Woods a year early. Ah, spending cuts.

As shocking as this seems, Joe the Plumber has landed himself a book deal. The magnum opus is titled Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream, and will focus on his take on American values.

We7 is the latest ad support music streaming and “buy this song now” site. The usual features of playlists, charts and big name songs in its catalogue are all present. What makes this site/service interesting for me is that Peter Gabriel – Mr. Solsbury Hill himself, is one of those behind the site.

Neil Young, yes the singer/songwriter, through the Huffington Post, has offered his wisdom on how Detroit can be saved one car company at a time.

Glass artist Dale Chihuly provides personal insights into his work.

Yikes, Rod Stewart is launching his own clothing line.

(photo: Virgin Mobile Canada)

Virgin Mobile Canada is quickly capitalizing on Eliot Spitzer’s recent “troubles.” The ads will run next week in a free Toronto newspaper.

C|Net adds:
“At Virgin Mobile,” the ad goes on to say, “you’re more than just a number. When you call us we’ll treat you like a person, not a client. Whether you’re #9 or #900, you’ll get hooked up with somebody who’ll finally treat you just how you want to be treated.”

According to Nathan Rosenberg, chief marketing officer at Virgin Mobile, the ad will run in two Toronto daily newspapers this week as part of the company’s “You call the shots” campaign. “We weren’t planning on an ad featuring Governor Spitzer, but he caught our attention this week,” said Rosenberg.

Remember Coolio? He’s the MC behind mega hits ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’. Then he kind of disappeared. Well, Coolio is kind of back with an web-based cooking show, aptly called Cooking With Coolio.

I have not watched an episode yet and not sure that I will. I don’t have anything against Coolio, but this Slate review is not so encouraging.

Some of you will find the program offensive, pointing to the air of inner-city minstrelsy that attends to the proceedings and the objectified women lingering around them. The production gives you a feel for what it might be like were Flavor Flav to host This Old House. For instance, Coolio taps out his spices from small plastic baggies as if he had bought them not at Whole Foods but in his dealer’s Escalade. Next, a pair of women from Coolio’s stable of “sauce girls” are always at his side, and the sauce girls—possibly taken in from a home for the mute—are not to be confused with actual sauciers. What the sauce girls do, mostly, is stand around in heels, sometimes wearing aprons, sometimes wearing a bit less than aprons. They were permitted to fondle some baguettes in an episode featuring “ghettalian garlic bread.” That’s the one where the star and his sous-chef pretended to abduct a college boy off the street. “We’re gonna find a hungry, broke-ass, malnutritioned, Top Ramen-eatin’ muthafucka, and we’re gonna teach him how to cook a healthy, inexpensive meal,” promised Coolio, intent, as always, on putting the M.F. back into MFK Fisher.

In an effort to reconnect with an older market, Luis Vuitton is using Keith Richards in billboards and magazine ads. Why Keith Richards? People tell Bloomberg that “Keith Richards is timeless and ageless,” said Rita Clifton, who heads the U.K. division of brand consultant Interbrand. “He’s lived his life on the edge, but he’s not a sleaze bag. He’s lean and mean and he’s still current.”

Last week Martha Stewart’s company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. has purchased the rights to Emeril Lagase’s cookbooks, television programs and kitchen products for $50 million in cash and stock. That seems like a hefty sum considering Emeril no longer has a show on the Food Network.

The Globe and Mail reports that recent Vancouver resident Jack Worthington believes he is the illegitimate son of JFK and is asking the Kennedy clan to provide DNA evidence to prove his claim. Follow the link to see a picture of Jack. There is a bit of a resemblance there.

While were on the topic of Woody Allen films, here is one of the most truly memorable scenes (for me at least) in film history – Marshall McLuhan’s appearance in Annie Hall.

Continuing with his work of directing documentaries and films about such musical legends as the Band, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, Marty Scorsese will be making a documentary about the life of Bob Marley. The film is slated to be released February 6, 2010 – what would have been Marley’s 65th birthday.

It appears that Japan’s Crown Princess Massako is being criticized in the media for eating out at some more lavish restaurants while she is on hiatus from her official duties.

Japan’s troubled Crown Princess has been eating like royalty in recent months — and getting pilloried in the tabloid press for violating the image of imperial austerity by living the high life in public.

The sightings, documented in paparazzi-style photos in Japan’s freewheeling news magazines, have compounded the impression the Harvard-educated Crown Princess — who regularly skips official events because of an unspecified nervous disorder — is taking her palace obligations too lightly.

“If she is well enough to regularly go out for fancy dinners, I wonder why she can’t resume her official duties,” said Sachiko Tomobe, a Tokyo florist. “A nice dinner outside the palace is fine if it makes her feel better, but not too often.”

The 44-year-old Crown Princess Masako, a former diplomat who married into the Imperial Family in 1993, has opted out of most Imperial functions for the past four years because of what is widely believed to be depression.

She skipped a rice-cake making ceremony attended by the Emperor and Empress on Dec. 28, but then joined Crown Prince Naruhito and their pet dogs’ veterinarian and his family that evening for a lengthy French dinner.

Crown Princess Masako’s lavish — and publicly funded — meals have attracted attention as the economy is showing signs of faltering, and many Japanese, including Emperor Akihito himself, say they are concerned about the widening gap between rich and poor.

Like me, not everyone was a fan of having Tom Petty perform at halftime at the Superbowl.

That’s right, Tom Petty – the man with a solid UK chart history of one top-30 song from 19 years ago. The man who can look himself in the eye and know that the most extreme reaction he’s ever provoked in anyone at all was that time when Free Fallin’ made a Mojo reader tap his fingers on his corduroy trousers for 12 seconds. The man whose band is called The Heartbreakers even though they don’t so much break hearts as occasionally cause some superficial rusting.

Moreover, it looks like he was lip-synching.

Bloomberg reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is starting to lose favour with the French public in light of his recent public love life. Sarkozy’s approval rate is at an all time low since he took office.

France’s politicians, including former presidents Jacques Chirac and Francois Mitterrand, traditionally have been discreet about such matters. Since Sarkozy and his second wife divorced in October, he has traveled openly with Bruni to exotic locales, even as polls showed rising public concern about the economy and accelerating inflation.

“Nicolas Sarkozy in his Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, vacationing while the French have trouble going on holiday and have cut back on their Christmas spending, doesn’t come across well,” said Laurent Dubois, a political science professor at Sorbonne University in Paris. “It’s taken as arrogance.”

From Paste Magazine:

The New York Observer reported recently that erstwhile heartthrob Val Kilmer is “shopping” for labels to release his album of original recordings. Apparently titled Val Kilmer: Sessions With Mick—as in Val’s pal and partner-in-musical-crime Mick Rossi, not Jones or Jagger or even Fleetwood—the newspaper warns the song cycle “run[s] the gamut from foot-stompin’ rock to moody, guttural ballads,” and even includes a Christmas ditty.

But the Observer isn’t the first to weigh in on this development. Inexplicably, back in October The Solano Tempest posted a review, complete with a (similarly inexplicable) photo of the disc itself. This can only mean that distributing promo CDs exclusively to community colleges is the new pay-what-you-want.

Or maybe it means that even his publicist can’t get behind lyrics like these, via the Observer: “I’ve been growing sideways / I’ve been growing thin / I’ve been a zombie all day / I’ve been preventing sin / Noobadaba dootoo / Noobadaba dootoo.”

See Kilmer’s musical myspace page here.

Bloomberg reports that wealthy Republicans and Wall Street dislike Mike Huckabee more than they do Hilary Clinton.

…he threatens the uneasy if effective coalition Republicans have counted on for three decades: abortion opponents and other social-issue activists supplying foot soldiers, proponents of tax cuts and business-friendly regulatory policies putting up the money and getting the biggest economic benefits.

“Huckabee puts this long-simmering feud between the social-conservative wing and the country-club and business crowd into starker contrast,” said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.

Stop Smiling magazine’s interview with Nigela Lawson is available online.

She describes herself as “clumsy” in the kitchen. Often deprecating, Lawson is quick to point out that — despite the monikers bestowed upon her — she isn’t a trained chef. “I’m a writer — and what I want is for people to get lost in the narrative [of my cooking]. When it comes to food, I’m not just interested in the formula. I like the story behind it. What’s challenging is you’re using words to describe an experience that has nothing to do with words.”

Call it a blessing or a curse. But to her credit, Lawson has done quite a job verbalizing otherwise indescribable sensations. For example, she uses terms like “green and fragrant ointment” to describe cilantro chutney while scoffing at the “flat, sludgy lentils” her mother once favored.

Often accused of being highfalutin, she has been quoted as saying she doesn’t shop at supermarkets (she fears where things come from) and was rumored to have lost a radio gig appealing to everyday folk after saying she had her shopping done for her. To be fair, she never claimed to be lowbrow. For her, it’s “flowing, vicious yolks” on soft-boiled eggs — or bust.

“I’ve never regarded my career as life or death,” Lawson said as our interview concluded. And she has no intention of doing so now. If it’s Julia Child you want, check out the reruns and leave Lawson to concoct (and greedily sample) a meaty ragout.