Media-Whore D'Oeuvres

"Named one of the world's most intriguing billionaire heiresses by Forbes magazine, singer and thesp Josie Ho Chiu-yee recently demonstrated her acting chops in Steven Soderbergh's 'Contagion.'  Her father, Stanley Ho Hung-sung, is one of the world's richest men, with a multibillion-dollar fortune from casinos in Macau. (He helped transform the former Portuguese colony into a gaming enclave that now does more business than Las Vegas.) Josie Ho has done more than 30 movies and has four pics opening in the next few months, including Johnnie To's latest, 'Motorway.' Next year, she'll star in Hany Abu Assad's 'The Courier' opposite Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mickey Rourke and Til Schwieger. She has made seven albums, and in July released 'Third Eye' in China, where her band, Josie Ho & the Uni Boys, tours frequently. All of this came despite serious opposition to her going on stage  --  traditional Chinese families frown on performers. 'My family is really strict coming from the finance world, really traditional. It's not like they don't respect art, but old Chinese people look at actors and performers, and think they are from a lower class,' she says" (Variety)

"In November 2002, the Doubletree hotel in Somerset, New Jersey, hosted a daylong gala: lunch, speeches, dinner, more speeches, and finally dancing. There were more than 400 guests, and they were all there to mark the 25th anniversary of the Ilankai Tamil Sangam, ostensibly a cultural and social organization. Many of its members supported the demand by Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority for an independent state, and although the Sangam was not avowedly militant, the flags and videos of the movement’s military wing, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), were on display throughout the hall. The Tamil Tigers, as the group is known, were then in the 19th year of a civil war against the Sri Lankan government. Designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department in 1997, the Tamil Tigers invented the suicide-bombing belt, a technology it exported to Hamas and al-Qaeda. The Tigers were responsible for hundreds of suicide attacks on buses, temples, and shopping malls, and for village massacres in which children were killed in front of their parents. In May 1991, the Tigers assassinated the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Two years later, they assassinated the Sri Lankan president, Ranasinghe Premadasa.One of the distinguishing features of the Tamil Tigers is that the group was mostly financed from abroad by the large Tamil diaspora. Many of its donors were eminently respectable, and worked in America, Canada, Australia, and Europe in professions such as medicine and the law. And so at about seven p.m., it fell to a hospital anesthesiologist to introduce the Doubletree event’s star speaker, Raj Rajaratnam, a corpulent Tamil whose Galleon Group hedge fund had already made him the world’s richest Sri Lankan. His net worth would eventually reach a reported $1.8 billion." (VanityFair)

"Yesterday was also the 35th birthday of my esteemed business partner and friend, Jeff Hirsch a/k/a JH to NYSD readers. He and I have been working together for 13 years. He was a kid when started in the business as my assistant at Avenue in the late 90s. He’s one of those people who is just solid, gets things done, has his feet on the ground and is sensible. Over the years he’s become a shrewd editor as well. He’s also good at handling people. Really good. A diplomat. We started the NYSD together. We didn’t know what we were doing so the first thing we did was build a desk. My desk. Jeff got the wood. The next thing that happened was the kid we’d hired to put us online daily didn’t really know how to do it and suddenly quit in our second week. Jeff, who had been sitting with him as he went through the process, called to tell me the news.  I said to him: 'Now what’re we gonna do?!' (Remember this was the year 2000, ancient times in cyberland). Jeff said: 'Well, there’s a Book for Dummies on How to Go Up On The Internet. I’ll get it and see.' That was on a Friday. On the following Monday morning, We were up." (NYSocialDiary)

"That said, the newest numbers have changed the Top 10 order yet again. (It was another confused weekend like the last one!) This crop of four freshmen failed to make much of an impression with moviegoers because holdovers still ruled the North American box office. But overall the weekend is up +10% from last year: 1 Dolphin Tale (Alcon, Warner Bros) Week 2 [3,515 Theaters] riday $3.4M, Saturday $6.5M, Weekend $14.2M (-26%), Estimated Cume $37.5M Terrific hold as Alcon uncorks another feel good favorite. Dolphin Tale was up 88% from Friday night thanks to the saturday matinee bump. Now it’s placing above both films it trailed last week. But the cume is still lagging. And DreamWorks Animation/Paramount just pushed up the release of Puss ‘N’ Boots to October 28th — which will deprive Dolphin Tale of an extra week of alone time with families. 2. Moneyball (Sony) Week 2 [2,993 Theaters] Friday $3.8M, Saturday $5.5M, Weekend $12.5M (-36%), Estimated Cume $38.4M Excellent hold especially for a 2-quadrant pic. But Moneyball‘s cume needs more beer and peanuts to fatten. 3. Lion King 3D (Disney) Week 3 [2,340 Theaters] Friday $3.3M, Saturday $4.4M, Weekend $11M, Estimated Cume $79.6M Very impressive, still, for this juiced up toon as all releases pass Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo to become the 4th highest-grossing animated film of all time worldwide." (Nikki Finke)