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In This Issue

• Consent is Sexayy
• You Scan My License, Heights, and I'll Trade Your Margaritas for Drugs
• Club EC
• Barack Obama: Exclusive Interview!
• An Open Letter to the Chick Sleeping Next to Me
• A FED Guide to Celebrity Legal Problems
• Columbia's New Admissions Policy: Fuck All Y'all
• Drawn to Columbia. Quartered Too?
• Top 5 Do's For Next 9/11 (Excerpted from Cosmogirl)
• One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
• A Tale of Woe and Infinite Sadness
• The Typical Suburban Housewife
• Bollinger's Free Speech Fetish
• The Muppets Take America
• The Priorities of American Media
• The World Leaders Forum is So Gay
• Coming Soon To a Bookstore Near You!
• THEY WATCH
• Got Meth?
• The Staff of 23.1

It’s tough being a celebrity. No matter how much adoration society lavishes on you, you are still subject to pesky civilian legal codes. Aren’t those laws just meant for poor people? Why even become a celebrity if it doesn’t give you the right to bludgeon your Starbucks barista with your Blackberry for daring to look you in the eye? Until celebrities take over our legislatures [statisticians predict the year 2024] they will just have to figure out how to cope. So I have come up with a handy guide for celebrities to argue their way out of even the thorniest of legal situations.

SEX W/ CHILD or SEX RESULTING IN CHILD:

Celebrities have so much sex that they often forget to ask the important questions before romantically drilling a wide-eyed groupie up against a urinal. “What’s your name?” “Are those braces?” “What are you intending to do with the videotape of this?” Without a good excuse, you could lose a lot of money and time that could be used securing more dispassionate, greedy sex. We suggest:

“I didn’t fuck that girl!”
If you are zealously trying to deny paternity, much like Eddie Murphy’s refusal to acknowledge Mel “Scary Spice” B’s child as his son, then the only thing you can do is claim identity fraud. “Your honor, the girl I fucked 9 months ago was skinny. This bitch has a huge stomach,” and weeks later on, “Also, the bitch I fucked didn’t have no kid, neither.” Even Atticus Finch couldn’t defend against that logic.

“I was just thanking a fan.”
This one is for celebrities caught doing lewd things on videotape with much younger girls, most notably R. Kelly. At the initial arraignment, explain that you were simply giving her an autograph: a mouth autograph, and depending upon the lewdness of your actions, potentially an ear, armpit, and grandmother autograph as well.

“As a celebrity, my genetic makeup is such that I could never produce a viable offspring with a non-celebrity.”
The classic “Chihuahua/Great Dane” defense. With their high cheekbones, beautiful hair, and smooth bodies, celebrities are so superior to us muggles that they should be considered a separate species. It’s like humans (celebrities) to chimpanzees (us). And humans can’t have children with chimpanzees; believe me, I’ve tried.

DWI - DRIVING WHILE INTOXICATED:

Driving under the influence - or as Lindsay Lohan calls it, “driving” - is a serious crime in the world of mere mortals, but if you are a celebrity, it’s not that big of a deal. How else are you expected to get from Hyde to Les Deux? Hire a driver? And ride in a car with a non-celebrity? Why not swallow my food while I’m at it?! Yuck! Unfortunately, the police will need a better excuse than that. We suggest:

“It’s the car!”
Notorious drunks who have starred in movies or television alongside anthropomorphic talking cars should trade on their work. If Lindsay Lohan – star of Herbie: Fully Loaded – gets pulled over, she should convince the officer that it’s the car who is driving erratically, not her. “Officer, I’m not wasted, my car Herbie is!” and then “No, that’s my car’s coke!” Fellow lush David Hasselhoff of Nightrider fame could also blame the car: “Michael [hic], I drive better when I’ve had a few [hic]. I love you, Michael.”

“It’s the highway!”
Highways can be confusing places, with all those signs and mile markers and such. So if you’re like Nicole Ritchie and you get caught driving the wrong way on a highway, plead ignorance: “Officer, how was I supposed to know that the highway is one way without a ‘one-way’ sign?” Nicole is right; that’s entrapment.

“It’s my publicist!”
Paris Hilton blamed her publicist for telling her that she could drive on her suspended license. Smart move; when all else fails, blame your publicist. If your publicist is going to handle all of your bad press anyway, say, when you drunkenly crash your Maserati into an Alex’s Lemonade Stand, they may as well handle the ensuing prison time as well. That’s what they are paid for. That and to hide your desperate stress-eating habit.

MURDER:

While DUI and underaged sex are not specifically prohibited by the Ten Commandments, murder is. Fortunately, the only god celebrities recognize is themselves… or perhaps L. Ron Hubbard. Therefore, as God, celebrities consider themselves the divine creator of their fans. Unfortunately, courts tend not to accept “I made you so I can destroy you” as a valid excuse for killing a fan. We suggest:

“I was just method acting.”
Method acting is a technique in which an actor replicates the real life emotional conditions under which their character operates. So when O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, he should’ve told prosecutors that he was simply preparing for a scene in an upcoming Naked Gun sequel in which his character Nordberg stabs Leslie Nielsen and Anna Nicole Smith to death and then gets away with it because of his high priced defense team. Hilarious!

“I couldn’t have killed her because when she was shot I had gone back into the restaurant to get my gun which I had left on the table.”
This is Baretta star Robert Blake’s real excuse for why he couldn’t have murdered his wife despite the fact that no one saw him reentering the restaurant. I have no joke for this one; the truth is funny enough.

“Would you have preferred that I died?”
When Brandy unintentionally killed Awatef Aboudihaj in a car accident, she should’ve turned the tables and made her survival more important that his death. “I was the star of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. I sang ‘The Boy is Mine.’ If I had died the country would be a cultural wasteland!” She would then follow “What the fuck has Awatef Aboudihaj ever done? Besides wreck the front of my Land Rover!” There are millions of Awatef Aboudihajs, but only one Brandy.

Celebrities work day and night to enrich our lives with their art, music, and sex scandals. As a result, it only makes sense to give them elevated legal status, as a reward for all the good work they do. Take Michael Jackson for example. He did Thriller, the greatest pop album of all time. If Michael Jackson wants to molest a couple of kids who, chances are, were just going to end up suffering due to parental neglect anyway, I say let him do it. The incalculable good Thriller has done outweighs a few acts of unspeakable brutality against children. Plus everyone loves a good story about Lindsay Lohan driving drunk. So to you celebrities I say keep on getting into legal trouble; just use the right excuses to get out of it.

Art by Kimi Traube and Grace Duffy.