MySweetLife.Net

Chicago real estate mogul Steven Good, head of the “largest real estate auction company in the nation,” killed himself with a gun yesterday. He did deals with Trump. His motivation is a mystery:

Kane County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Lt. Pat Gengler said authorities don’t have any “concrete evidence if this had anything to do with his finances.”…

Good, who was also an attorney, wrote a book, “Churches, Jails and Gold Mines: Mega-Deals From a Real Estate Maverick.” According to Amazon.com, Donald Trump wrote the afterword.

The first chapter begins, “Our auction company is to the real estate business what Sotheby’s and Christie’s is the fine art and collectibles business.” The book goes to say that as of its 2003 publication, the firm had sold 40,000 properties totaling $8 billion.

Yes, the commercial real estate market is bad, but who knows. Money is the obvious first place to look when a mogul does something like this during a down economy, but nobody knows. We hope, sincerely, that shame unto death isn’t going to be the next corporate trend in America. Remember: don’t kill yourself. [CNN]

newVideoPlayer(”/Hasidic_Coverup.flv”, 506, 423,”"); Two robbers ripped off Snatch and stole millions in diamonds by disguising themselves as Hasidic Jews. New folk heroes? The next Somali pirates? No, way too derivative, dudes. Recreate Usual Suspects and we’ll talk.

We’re starting a new, daily media column for all the media news items we can’t get to individually. It may also feature pithy remarks and totally exclusive scoops. Read it today, and forevermore:

During the Q&A at America Anonymous author Benoit Denizet-Lewis‘ book party (hosted at a booze-free “sober living loft”) someone asked whether whether being a sex addict made it, er, complicated to report on “Down Low” culture. Benoit’s response, we heard, was uncomfortable.

Young hotshot Patrick Gavin, who runs Fishbowl DC, is going to Politico. He is the DC version of Neel Shah, except Neel lives in NYC and went to nightclubs with cool people so much he landed at P6, and Patrick is in DC so he goes to cocktail parties with political nerds and wears a blazer. And does not sell magic berries. [Politico]

A tipster tells us about a new push for buyouts at the now basically online-only Christian Science Monitor and if the buyouts don’t come, the editor warns in a memo: “The regrettable reality, however, is that there is no way to meet our budget goal other than to reduce the staff. We estimate the reduction to be 15-16 positions (it could be more or fewer, depending on salary levels).” Our tipster adds, “this seems to [management's] attempt to push out the oldest; if it doesn’t work, we (the younger folks) will all likely be sacked, because the monitor never fires anyone who’s been there more than a decade. call it compassion, of a sort.”

The traditional January round of layoffs-and-other-unexpected-occurrences at Conde Nast hasn’t materialized yet. Probably because they just did that two months ago. So it will be at least another month before massive layoffs return. [NYO]

Life & Style’s latest cover is one of those diet stories about how celebrities shed pounds. Their cover girls are Jessica Alba, in a photo by Mario Testino that was airbrushed before it went into a Campari calendar, and Britney Spears, in a photo our tipster tells us was taken in 2003 by Andrew Eccles. So, Photoshop and time travel, those are the ways stars lose weight.

The horrifically troubled New York Times has a new signup procedure for free employee backrubs. Presumably given by laid-off bankers. [Nytpicker]

Nat Hentoff works the phrase “He puts on his skunk suit and heads off to the garden party” into his final column. [VV]

So Roland Burris, the crazy new Illinois Senator-in-waiting, will be seated! According to the Associated Press! But not according to Harry Reid. But… maybe?

Yesterday Burris, who was selected by criminal Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich as a huge fuck-you to everyone on earth, went to Washington to join the Senate, but they didn’t let him in, and he spent the day saying crazy things to the press. They say they can’t seat him because his certificate hasn’t been signed by the Illinois Secretary of State, but that is apparently just a formality.

So the AP just flat-out said Burris gets to be a Senator, but then that was denied, but now Harry Reid and Dick Durbin are apparently just hammering out the details of some sort of compromise deal.

So now we have this old crazy person, for at least two years, at which point he’ll violate his promise to not run for another term, and probably lose.

Will this year’s Senate seriously feature Al Franken, Caroline Kennedy, and Roland Burris? Let us hope Barack Obama gets a lot done in two years ’cause come January 2011 there will be like six Democratic Senators left, and they will all be named Kennedy.

Has anything the celebrity family of Jett Travolta said about the teenager been the unvarnished truth? If so, we missed it. Even the publicity photos of Jett they sent out after his death are Photoshopped.

The constantly changing versions of the events surrounding Jett’s death have gripped the public’s imagination because it is so congruent with the story of his father’s life. John Travolta would have us believe that he is normal; that he is not a member of a crazy cult; and that he is straight. At least two of those things are false.

Let’s count the inconsistencies, which extend back long before Jett’s tragic passing:

• Jett’s parents, John Travolta and Kelly Preston, adherents of Scientology, have long maintained that Jett suffered from Kawasaki disease, an immune disorder which causes inflammation of blood vessels. But Kawasaki disease is not linked to seizures, according to medical experts.
• When they weren’t blaming Kawasaki disease, they publicly maintained Jett’s health was fine, even though many in Hollywood believed Jett suffered from autism. And suddenly, after his death, we learn that Jett wasn’t fine; rather, he was constantly supervised by two nannies and a baby monitor.
• Autism would explain Jett’s disturbingly affectless appearance in public; about a third of people with autism also suffer seizures. Travolta and Preston are followers of Scientology, which believes conditions like autism are all in the victim’s head — that they are “degraded beings” requiring “purification.” Preston has said in the past that Jett underwent a Scientology purification, which reportedly involves high doses of niacin.
• Police in the Bahamas said Jett, who was found unconscious late on New Year’s Day in his parents’ condo and died at a hospital shortly afterward, had struck his head, and reported blood on the scene. The nanny who found him, Jeff Kathrein, a Scientologist wedding photographer hired by Jett’s parents, John Travolta and Kelly Preston, was once spotted in an intimate kiss with Jett’s father. Police said Jett was alone for hours, after last being seen the evening of January 1; a family lawyer maintained that Kathrein, who slept eight feet away from Jett, found him almost right away.
• A funeral director hired by the family said there was no sign of a bruise and that Jett’s body “looked great.” The cause of death on Jett’s death certificate was listed simply as a seizure.
• Two chartered planes and a police hearse, ostensibly carrying Jett’s remains, waited on the tarmac Monday, as Bahamian police blocked access. It was a ruse: Jett’s body was being cremated at the time, and the family planned to fly his ashes back to Florida on Tuesday.

And then there are the photos, which show amateurish signs of digital manipulation to give Jett a jawline as firm as dad’s:

Jett, in reality, had a rounder face. But so what? The need to airbrush away Jett’s chin is the perfect metaphor for the pathetic misdirections and deceptions the Travoltas have engaged in. What they’re covering up is not worth covering up. This is not some grand crusade for the truth — which in the end is the simple and tragic tale of a teen boy dying too young. The lies, big and small, that Travolta tells aren’t for Jett. They’re for him to maintain his fake public image. He asks us, out of politeness or gullibility, to swallow it whole.

Yes, everyone wants to let the family grieve. Let them grieve — but Jett Travolta is the only one who should lie in peace.

Graybearded Santa figure Neale Donald Walsch, a writer on spirituality, copied a tale of Christmas cheer and posted it on BeliefNet.

The tale of a winter pageant where a child displays a letter sign upside-down, turning “Christmas Love” into “Christ Was Love,” was written by Candy Chand and published in Clarity in 1999, Motoko Rich reports. Walsch’s excuse: Someone sent him Chand’s story, unattributed, and he put it in his clippings file. He then retold it so many times he forgot it didn’t actually happen.

Ah yes, the clippings-file excuse — a variant of the one historian Doris Kearns Goodwin trotted out to explain away her plagiarism. And the sloppiness excuse — the one Ruth Shalit used. Walsch, in short, isn’t original even in his outrageous defenses of obvious plagiarism.

Entertainment Weekly lost a quarter of its staff to layoffs last year, but Time Inc. will continue publishing the magazine, even though it maybe considered axing its print edition. Risky.

Sure, the title made $10 million last year, according to Keith Kelly at the Post. And it has new leadership (Kelly reports) in managing editor Jess Cagle, a People and former Time editor who spent 10 years at EW following its launch. (Fortune vet Rick Tetzeli, the former M.E., was kicked upstairs.)

But the magazine’s profits are a fifth of the $50 million they recently were. If 2009 plays out as expected, EW could slide into the red on the cost of printing 1.6 million copies each week.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore is betting an editorial turnaround will prevent that, as will lower costs, thanks to the loss of 30 of 120 editorial staff and plans to share staff with other publications. But Moore should be ready to pull the plug quickly if the magazine starts losing money. EW never quite made its mark, and Time Inc.’s last round of 600-or-so layoffs was actually not that deep given the magazine group’s 10,000 employees.

If the company has to fire more people, it should not be to sentimentally extend a failed experiment.

Barack Obama wants to appoint tee-vee doctor Sanjay Gupta of CNN as our new Surgeon General. What the hell is this, really?

“Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer…

The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting in November with Obama, who said that Gupta could be the highest-profile surgeon general in history and would have an expanded role in providing health policy advice, the sources said.”

More info TK, but obviously Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman is the big loser here. [WP]

MORE ON SANJAY!: First keep in mind that there’s a chance he might not take the gig, because it would be a huge pay cut for him. Now put that out of your mind immediately and gaze upon these fun facts about our probably new Surgeon General!

—Before he was a talking head, he was a real doctor! A neurosurgeon. One time he went to report from Iraq and did emergency surgery to help save a soldier’s life!

—He’s a New York Times bestselling author!

—And he won an Emmy award!

—And “He has recently had articles published in the Journal of Neurosurgery and Neurosurgical Focus on percutaneous pedicle screw placement.”!

—He was one of People’s Sexiest Men Alive in 2003.

And the single most famous moment of his career? Getting into a feud with Michael Moore over the tubby filmmaker’s movie Sicko, which, let’s face it, did have a fair amount of bullshit propaganda in it:

Does any of this qualify him to be Surgeon General of the US? Obama says yes!

First Ladybot Laura Bush sold her memoirs yesterday, and the speculation was that she’d get more than Hillary Clinton’s $8 million advance, because of…inflation? But apparently she got way less.

Keith Kelly reports today that Laura got $1.6 million, which is not only a mere one-fifth of what Hillary got, it’s even less than Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush got. And they were way back in the day, remember!

We attribute this to the fact that everyone knows this book will suck big balls and the only people you can expect to read it all the way through are fundamentalist Christian Republican Texas knitting circle members. Among normal people, now is when they desperately start revealing the dirty laundry of every marginally famous person they know in an attempt to land a few seconds of airtime on ET or something, so Laura, hey, it’s never too late for that. [NYP]

German billionaire Adolf Merckle, one of the 100 richest people in the world, has killed himself by jumping in front of a train—emotionally “broken” over a bad bet on Volkswagen last year.

Merckle’s business interests came out on the wrong side of last year’s short squeeze of Volkswagen. Rival Porsche silently cornered the market on Volkswagen shares, and when they revealed the extent of their stake, the price of Volkswagen stock shot up to levels that made it briefly the world’s most valuable corporation. Many hedge funds who had bet against Volkswagen shares lost huge amounts of money, while Porsche made billions in profit.

Merckle, whose personal wealth was estimated at more than $9 billion. reportedly lost a billion alone on the Volkswagen stock, which shocked his employees. The loss led to margin calls from other creditors and threatened to unravel his entire private business empire. But otherwise he had a rather demure reputation:

Merckle personifies the wealthy but discreet German entrepreneurs who run their businesses in ways that were “worthy of the 19th century,” according to a press report.

Born in eastern Dresden in 1934 and father of four children, Merckle inherited in the late 1960s a small pharmaceutical company from his father that employed 80 people.

Little by little, he built an empire, with sales of around 35 billion euros and more than 100,000 workers.

And now he’s dead.