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> After winning a record eight gold medals in the Beijing Olympics last month, Michael Phelps has turned down the ultimate athletic honor of appearing on the front of the Wheaties cereal box in favor of posing for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Though the half-man, half-fish did grace Wheaties after competing in the 2004 Olympics, this time around General Mills must not have been able to shell out the big bucks that competitor Kellogg's promised. The decision has some nutritionists up in arms arguing that an athlete shouldn't be promoting a cereal that is so blatantly unhealthy, but obviously they're forgetting something incredibly important that Michael hasn't: healthy or not, when it comes to breakfast, nothing tastes better than a big ol' bowl of millions of dollars. Mmmmm, crunchy endorsement checks!
> Bizarre-o horror novelist Chuck Palahnuik is quickly becoming the darling of Hollywood. Most famous for his novel Fight Club, adapted into a hugely successful film starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, the gay author's book Choke hits the theaters later this month. Now Palahnuik reveals in an interview that Lullaby -- about a poem that kills anyone who reads it or even thinks about it -- is being made into a film as well. That's not all: Frances Lawrence, who directed Will Smith in I Am Legend, is signed on to direct the film version of Palahnuik's Survivor, and his novel Rant has also just been optioned. What does all this mean, you're asking? It means your cineplex is about to get a lot more twisted, and if Chuck has anything to say about it, it'll stay that way for the next several years. It also means Chuck's bank account is uncontrollably cha-chinging and all that disposable income ensures the freedom to continue being as bonkers as he wants, which means we get more books which means we get more films. To sum it all up: it's a good thing for everyone involved.
> Alanis Morissette, currently gearing to bring her Flavors of Entanglement tour to the U.S. later this month, told Virgin Radio that when she opened for Vanilla Ice in 1991 she was forbidden from making eye contact with the Ice Ice Baby. "I was instructed not to look him in the eye and that was my first experience of honoring someone’s privacy to the point where you look away when they come near you," the singer said. "I thought, 'Wow, I didn’t think that actually existed!'" Oh, it does. Well, actually, it did. Now we're pretty confident Vanilla Ice would gladly welcome any form of attention from just about anyone.
-- NOAH MICHELSON
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