Short Cuts

Good Trash/Bad Trash: We know how shocked you were over the weekend news that the Liza Minnelli/David Gest marriage is over. Marriage is such a fragile thing in the face of fame, hype, booze, pills, dubious sexuality and minimal intellectual reserves. Cindy Adams, her "best friend" hinted yesterday that a woman Liza met in rehab may have been the catalyst for the breakup. The whole thing was a giant con perpetuated by the "beautiful" people who schlepped to her joke-wedding l8 months ago. The entire lot of them deserve each other.

I Never Saw A Purple Bear, I Never Hope To See One: We meant to get you this picture last week and it's no less startling than it was when it hit the net. This is Pelusa, a 14 year old polar bear in the Mendoza, Argentina zoo. She is normally white but turned purple when vets adminstered a drug to treat a skin infection. She'll go back to being white when she gets better.

Bryant's Bling Thing: Speaking of the odd, oversized and purple things, not a few professional jewelers are sniggering through their loupes at the news that a Santa Monica jeweler took 4 mil off Kobe Bryant for an "8 karat purple diamond" ring to bestow on his humiliated wife. One expert reports that most of these rocks are really just for curiosity and gem display, and that nobody would really believe that they are diamonds anyway. "8 karats would make the thing the size of a Humvee front mounted spotlight and sounds just plain wacky," our bling maven opined. It's hard to sort out just why the Kobe camp would put out a story like this unless they think it makes him look like a loving husband and not stupid. Howie Kurtz backed up and took a hard look at the whole story yesterday.

Staying Alive, Staying Alive: The San Francisco Chronicle reports news that will make sue happy hearts sing. Gary Condit's wife, Carolyn (we remember her when she had no thumbs) walked with several million dollars in her successful secret settlement with the National Enquirer. This should energize their lawyers and scare the living daylights out of the rest of their media targets still in the lawsuit pipeline. This reminds us, what ever happened to Condit's forensic "A" team (Henry Lee, Michael Baden etc.), brought into "solve" the Chandra Levy murder? We never heard another word about their "in-depth study" of her remains.

Why are Idi Amin and Francisco Franco Different? As Chevy Chase once pointed out, Franco is still dead. Despite what every wire service in the world told us last week, Idi Ami isn't. The former Butcher of Uganda was reported dead in Saudi Arabia last week until someone must have reluctantly held a mirror to his nose. He's still in and out of a coma. One wonders who is huddling around his bedside. No link. We just wanted to correct our own report.

-Your Monday Energized LComStaff