I encounter 5 items of celebrity news.

1. The snake that bit one of the dancers in a rehearsal of the Nicki Minaj song "Anaconda" was a "boa constrictor named Rocky who has been in the entertainment business for 15 years." A boa constrictor is not an anaconda, but the snake had no way to know the song was celebrating some other species of snake. Nor do I think the snake could take offense at the lyrics and think something like: That's all I am to you, something that reminds you of a body part of one of your kind, not as a unique individual with many facets to my serpentine being other than serving as a hyperbolic metaphor for the human penis? Do you even know about the snake's penis? Am I simply a big penis to you? Do you even know who I am? I am Rocky, a veteran of 15 years in the entertainment business! I think a boa constrictor bites when it feels threatened, so if the 15-years-in-the-entertainment-business snake bit a dancer, he must have felt really scared. He doesn't know his name is Rocky, a name that connotes a tough guy. He's just a snake. He doesn't know what snakes mean to us, and he's not really in the business, is he? Not from his perspective. He's not getting any coins, as Nicky might put it. He's a confused, frightened creature in an incomprehensible environment, fighting for survival. And that's our favorite phallic symbol.

2. Jennifer Lopez says: "I like being in a relationship. I’m not one to like, whore around, and stuff like that — that’s not my thing." Is she calling other ladies "whores"? Is that allowed these days? She used "whore" as a verb, naming the action, not the person. That might be a love-the-sinner/hate-the-sin kind of attitude, but then she didn't ever say whoring around is bad, only that it's not her "thing." Do your own thing. That's what we said in the 60s, often along with its corollary: Let it all hang out. The Isley Brothers sang: "It's your thing/Do what you wanna do/I can't tell you/Who to sock it to." Some people — like Jennifer Lopez — find that their thing is having sex with their own spouse. No judgment. It's all good. You whores.

3. That bad old billionaire racist Donald Sterling had fallen out of the news, and here's V. Stiviano rescuing him from that fate and averring that the old man is gay and she was his beard. This is not attention whoring — is that word permissible? — because Stiviano is fighting against a lawsuit filed against her by Sterling's wife Shelly, who accuses her of being "a thief and an embezzler," which provides the basis for a counterclaim of defamation.

4. To stop his descent into into a condition I think is called Jack Nicholsonism, Leonardo DiCaprio must lose 10 pounds. "He has given up pasta – and he loves pasta... He also plans on working out more and he is taking his bike wherever he goes." DiCaprio is about to turn 40, and his girlfriend is a 21-year-old model named Toni Garrn, who apparently either wants to make very sure we pronounce the "r" in her name or is a pirate. We're told of Garrrrrn that "Of course she doesn’t care" that Leo is fat. Why would Leo be with anyone who would say she cares that he's fat when he's fat? I love you just the way you are. That's what Billy Joel sang, back in 1979, stealing, he admits, the last line of the 4 Seasons song "Rag Doll," which was inspired by a squeegee-man girl who extracted $20 from Bob Gaudio. Did Joel have any particular person in mind? Yeah. His first wife, and she didn't even like the song. Joel went through 2 more wives, including a 23-year-old that he married when he was 55. Oh, but don't be too mean to Mr. Joel. He has "battled depression for many years," and once tried to kill himself by drinking furniture polish. Furniture polish? "It looked tastier than bleach." But good luck to DiCaprio, whether he chooses to remain boyishly cute or become the jolly roué. Flabby or toned, he'll always be cuter than Billy Joel, and good for him for never divorcing anyone. He has never married.

5. Speaking of fat, Warner Brothers is in trouble for "fat shaming" in its new direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie "Frankencreepy." Some curse causes Daphne Blake to go from size 2 to size 8, but size 8 is depicted more like size 22, and Tom Burns of The Good Men Project writes: "It's sad to think that my daughter can’t even watch a cartoon about a dog solving mysteries without negative body stereotypes being thrown in her face." But apparently, there's an argument that the curse is that each character loses what she (or he) is most afraid to lose, and the only reason Daphe loses her fine figure is that she's too damned in love with it in the first place. This notion of curses tailored to each psyche is familiar. In one of my favorite movies, "The Witches of Eastwick," Satan (the above-mentioned Jack Nicholson) curses the various women with their own fears, and in the case of Cher, the fear is snakes. Watch Cher wake up in a bedful of snakes. Can somebody check the IMDB page on those snakes? I want to know how long they've been in the entertainment business and what are their degrees of separation from Rocky?

"With the BLACK ALBUM, we get to hear the boys write on adult life: marriage, fatherhood..."

"... sobriety, spiritual yearning, the emptiness of material success — 'Starting Over,' 'Maybe I’m Amazed,' 'Beautiful Boy,' 'The No No Song,' 'God' — and still they are keenly aware of this fact: Love does not last."

From the liner notes, by Ethan Hawke for the post-Beatles Beatles album constructed out of the solo effort of the post-boy boys. Scroll way down to see the 50 songs and the order in which they will be played.

Is "The No No Song" about "the emptiness of material success"? Just say "no" to... everything?



Nah, it's a sobriety song. And it was years before the "Just Say No" ad campaign that linked the word "no" to Nancy Reagan.

The phrase "Just Say No" first emerged when Nancy Reagan was visiting Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, California, in 1982 and was asked by a schoolgirl what to do if she was offered drugs. The first lady responded by saying, "Just say no." Just Say No club organizations within schools and school-run anti-drug programs soon became common, in which young people make pacts not to experiment with drugs.

"No" was once a Ringo word, especially when repeated. But maybe you, like me, associate the repeated "no" with The Human Beinz. What were they "no"ing?



That "no" is about rejecting the capacity of others to turn in a superior performance of the shingaling and the boogaloo.

And, no no no, don't accuse me of failing to notice The Isley Brothers. Their original "Nobody But Me" did not include the repeated "no." The absurd non-negative "no"ing was the contribution of The Human Beinz:



"The recording's two 31-fold repetitions of the word 'no; fulfill Casey Kasem's 'Book of Records' category of most repetitive word or phrase in a Hot 100 top 10 hit, besting the 26-fold repetition of 'I know' in Bill Withers' 'Ain't No Sunshine.'"



"Know"/"No"... a telling homophone... as The Beatles knew: