The Gossip Rag: Celebrity life, photos, gossip, and news

Amy Winehouse (1983-2011) was found dead in her Camden flat at 3:45pm. Arriving medics were unable to save her, and police noted that “on arrival, officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“I look at Heath Ledger and Britney [Spears]. It’s like watching a car crash – this person throwing all these gifts away.” ~ Amy Winehouse

Christopher John Farley, writing for the Wall Street Journal, notes that Amy, having died at age 27, joins a storied club of musicians who never made it past 27: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and famous blues man Robert Johnson.

While the cause of death has not been officially confirmed, Amy Winehouse’s long history of drug and alcohol abuse leaves much of the twitterverse and gossip blogosphere buzzing that it was likely a drug overdose. RIP, Ms. Back To Black.

Here’s a quick movie poster from the upcoming Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson movie, The Adventures of Tintin:

It was silly that Donald Trump insisted that Obama and the White House release his original, long-form birth certificate (also known as a “Certificate of Live Birth”) to settle public doubts about his natural-born American citizenship, but today, Obama has done just that. You can download birth-certificate-long-form.pdf from the White House government site, and inspect it with your own two eyes.

It doesn’t look right to me:

Besides the weird background, all these sections are in a different font / colouring than the rest. Perhaps they’re just poorly scanned, but I would have preferred a high-resolution photograph to this bizzare, low-quality scan. I want a digitally signed photograph of it that looks real–don’t you?

The North Kentucky Voice, in *Correction* Long Form Birth Certificate, Photoshoped? Optimized suggests that these artifacts may be the result of an automatic scan/optimize/layer operation:

Yes, if you take a scanned PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro, on the Document menu there is a tool called Optimize Scanned PDF. It separates the PDF into layers, does some image enhancement, deskewing, etc.

The Smoking Gun raises a few more questions in Will Release Of Obama’s Purported Birth Certificate Give Rise To New “Certer” Movement?, and you can debate to your heart’s content in Reddit’s White House released Obama’s long form birth certificate [PDF] (whitehouse.gov) thread.

An interesting reddit conspiracy theory thread throws around the idea that Sarah Palin is actually not a natural-born American, and thus ineligible to run for President. This would be a great thing for America! The theory is based on the following interesting series of facts:

• The Palin family moved to Alaska when Sarah Palin was 3 months old [link].
• The Palin family liked to cross the border to Canada for healthcare [link].
• Sarah Palin’s husband’s family came from Canada. [link].

I want to see Sarah Palin’s Birth Certificate before I hear another bit about how she is running for any government office! For all the fuss she’s made over Obama, it’s time to reciprocate given her suspicious Canadian background.

For some reason, Katy Perry’s husband Russell Brand posted this hilarious photo of her with no makeup to twitter. Poor girl is probably not particularly happy with Mr. Jokester right now…