Now anyone can be a star. They’re all here, on ViralVideos. From stupid amateur stunts to bloopers of the rich and famous, everything is fair game. What I like about ViralVideos is they have some of television’s more memorable (or most stupid) moments captured so we can play them again and again. I keep hoping that if I watch one particular video enough times, the arrogant hairdresser’s marketing man will get the last word which, if I wrote the script, would be FO.

One of my favorite sites is JibJab which gained notariety for their “This Land” animation. It’s still a link on their home page so, if you haven’t seen it, don’t miss it.

There have to be better ways to leave a lover! When 28-year-old Zackery Bowen jumped to his death in New Orleans this past week, a suicide note lead police to the body parts of his girlfriend, Adrianne Hall. Hall’s charred head was found in a pot in the apartment she shared with Bowen, her torso in the refrigerator, and her arms and legs in the oven. Hall’s family must be devastated.

Joseph Edward Duncan, III, is the 43-year-old man accused of killing three people in order to kidnap two young children for sex. The 8-year-old girl was rescued seven weeks after the murders, her 9-year-old brother was murdered by Duncan. The pedophile coward has plea-bargained his way to three consecutive life sentences for the murders of Shasta’s mother, an older brother, and her mother’s boyfriend. Federal authorities want to go after the death penalty for the kidnappings and subsequent murder but his security encrypted laptop might get the death penalty dropped. It seems Duncan is smarter than the government’s best hackers who, so far, have been unable to unlock an encrypted journal which may be the key to additional abductions and murders.

According to an Associated Press article, too much debt can cost military troops their clearances as well as bar others from overseas duty. Financial problems, contends the Pentagon, can make personnel more vulnerable to the temptations of bribery and treason as well as distract them from their duties. Debt is spiraling out of hand and the fear is that soldiers might be tempted to sell equipment or secrets to the enemy.

In Riviera Beach, Florida, a multibillion-dollar redevelopment project may come to a halt because Florida is one of 30 states that passed laws last year restricting eminent domain seizures. The development company is considering legal action if they can’t go ahead with their $2.4 billion project in the marina district. They’ve already spent more than $50 million acquiring property and over $1 million in planning, engineering, and architectural fees. It’s all those property owners who aren’t willing to move that make this one of the largest eminent domain seizures on record. Governments have used eminent domain to get properties they need to build public facilities. It’s the new wrinkle, allowing corporations to use eminent domain to grab what they can’t buy, that’s not so easy to accept.

Actions speak louder than words, and Paul McCartney isn’t feeding the gossip mills by responding to his soon-to-be-ex’s allegations that were published in London’s Daily Mail last week. The original divorce settlement was pretty sweet for the few years that Sir Paul and Heather Mills McCartney appeared to be happily married. All those millions weren’t enough for Mills who is going after half of everything regardless of when it was acquired or earned by McCartney. That’s the sad part about not having a prenup in place. But then McCartney married for love and divorce has nothing to do with love, it has everything to do with assets.

Growing up in an orphanage or in the home of pop star Madonna and Guy Ritchie, her filmmaker husband? The choice would be clear for most people as it was, until a couple days ago, for the biological father whose 13-month-old son is being adopted by Madonna and Ritchie. The 32-year-old, who can’t read, says he didn’t understand what “adoption” meant when he signed the papers earlier this month. The choice for the little boy is clear: adoption or orphanage since his bio dad is too poor to raise him which is why he was put in the orphanage when he was three-weeks old. Madonna is currently funding six orphanages through her Raising Malawi charity.

“Cheat and you shall pay” might make a good bumper sticker for the super wealthy. Case in point, Roman Abramovich’s affair with young Russian model Daria Zhukova. Wife Irina is in training to set up a chain of boutique hotels in England and Europe with funding from her husband. Regardless of the cost, it should be cheaper than a divorce.

Need another gadget to add to your collection? How about the iSol solar charger for your iPod. It’s one of many solar products offered by Silicon Solar Inc. At the site, do a search for “iPod” or click on the Solar Chargers link at the top of the page. The standard model is $39.95 and, according to product details, can power over 90% of all small electronics.

While you’re at the site, take a look around at all the other solar-powered items offered. One thing about solar power, you don’t have to write a check to the power company every month. And that’s a very good thing. It’s also a very earth friendly thing.

Have you updated to Internet Explorer 7 yet? If you use IE to browse the Web, the new IE7 is supposed to be the most secure browser released by Microsoft since 2001. Click on the link to go to Microsoft’s website to see the changes in this newest upgrade and to download IE7.

Yes, those are the correct number of zeros. Jerry Speyer is a real estate investor who signed a deal on October 17th to buy 110 buildings along New York’s East River for $5.4 BILLION DOLLARS.

Speyer and his partner, the Blackrock investment bank, were the high bidders on two adjoining First Avenue complexes: Stuyvesand Town and Peter Cooper Village which were built in 1947 by Metropolitan Life for returning veterans of WWII. A tenant group was unable to stay in the running with an offer to MetLife of $4.5 billion.

According to news reports, nearly 75% of the 11,232 apartments have regulated rents that are well below current rent levels. It will be interesting to see what plans Speyer and his partners have for the middle-class community.

A newly released French book, Sexus Politicus, reportedly contains stories of sex, seduction, and adultery by decades of French leaders. Press releases give just enough snippets of sexual misconduct to push book sales through the roof. The tell-all book by authors Christophe Deloire and Christophe Dubois joins a long list of books about the sex lives of world leaders.

Author Eleanor Herman has written two such books: Sex with the Queen and Sex with Kings. They join Michael Farquhar’s A Treasury of Royal Scandals, Geoff Tibballs’ Royalty’s Strangest Characters, Karl Shaw’s Royal Babylon, Nigel Cawthorne’s Sex Lives of the Kings & Queens of England, Larry Flynt’s Sex, Lies & Politics, Nigel Cawthorne’s Sex Lives of the Presidents, and Webb Garrison’s Love, Lust, and Longing in the White House.

Cutting edge technology can put our favorite actors and actresses on the big screen without paying them the big bucks. Even more, deceased actors can be resurrected for new roles, and current actors can be inserted into roles they never wanted to play. Gareth Edwards’ Image Metrics has developed performance-driven facial animation that can do all that.

There’s a flaw in the process if studios do try to substitute animations for major actors in movies. Animations don’t make the gossip columns, they don’t cheat on their mates, they don’t have real lives. Would MI3 have grossed so much if Tom Cruise had been an animation? The movie was fairly lame; it was the public TC, whose off-screen life was at the top of the gossip charts, moviegoers were there to see.

A top-grossing actor doesn’t have to be a stellar performer on screen. He or she needs to generate and maintain media interest. There are too many examples to list although “Banjelina” comes immediately to mind. When it comes to selling movie tickets, gossip is good. Controversy is better. Sex hits the top of the charts. Can an animation do that? And, even if it could, would we care?

The November issue of Vanity Fair is notable for several reasons. The number one reason is that it features George Clooney on the cover and in a photo spread inside. No magazine can be all bad when it has George Clooney on the cover.

The issue also has details of designer Janjaap Ruijssenaars’ $1.54 million floating bed. Okay, the cost may or may not be $1.54 million because it has yet to go into production so don’t add it to your decorating budget just yet. Conventional floating beds are suspended by wires or ropes from the ceiling or other contrivances. Ruijssenaars’ bed “floats” because of magnets under the floor and in the bottom of the bed that repel each other. People with piercings or other metal in their bodies are warned to stay out from under the bed.

Another item of interest, in addition to Clooney and the pricey bed, is an as-yet-to-be-built, 3,700-foot-high, “Bionic Tower” which would house 100,000 people. The rocket-shaped structure includes a hospital, malls, 368 elevators, and windows that don’t open. The vertical city was designed by Cervera & Pioz, a Spanish architecture firm, and is being seriously considered by the government of Shanghai as a solution to urban sprawl. If they do build it, can they pretty it up so it’s not so “urban ugly”?

I can’t type this fast enough to keep up with the U.S. Census Bureau’s POPClock Projection of the resident population of the United States. According to the Census site, there’s a net gain of one person every 11 seconds. At least that’s the October 2006 setting. The current calculation projects a birth every 7 seconds, a death every 13 seconds, and an international migrant every 31 seconds.

The nation’s population hit the 300 millionth mark at 7:46 a.m. EDT today. The 200 millionth mark was met with bigger hoopla when it occurred in 1967. The higher incidence of illegal immigrants crossing U.S. borders may mean an illegal was the 300 millionth person in today’s projection. I guess that’s not worth celebrating.