No specter for Spector

With all the news about Spears, Lohan, Hilton, and Simpson, one murder defendant is having trouble breaking through the clutter, despite a regular change in his hairstyle.

The jury deciding rock producer Phil Spector’s fate has not reached a verdict in ten days. But that’s just halfway towards the 20-day record set in the 1993 trial of Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris in Idaho.

Jurors have made great sacrifices on behalf of the American judicial system. The longest civil jury trial in U.S. history ran over three years from February 1984 to October 1987 after plaintiffs claimed poisoning by dioxin in a 1979 chemical spill. The numbers are eye-glazing: the trial included 200 witnesses, 90,000 pages of transcripts, 6,000 exhibits, and 9,000 evidentiary rulings. The jury denied the claims.

But civil judgments can be significant. In 2001 plaintiffs won just over half the civil trial cases, with 4% awarded $1 million or more. Punitive damages, estimated at $1.2 billion, were awarded to 6% of plaintiff trial winners. The median punitive damage award was $50,000. I guess jurors want to feel useful after spending all that time away from work.

But no one seems interested in Spector’s case, hairdos or not. Maybe the inevitable civil trial will generate more publicity for him. In the meantime maybe he should just try wearing ill-fitting gloves.

What would we do without O.J. Simpson?

His approval ratings may be low, but he’s as newsworthy as ever. President Bush? Senator Craig? Nope, we’re talking about OJ.

Google OJ Simpson and you’ll get 11.6 million results. So where does that rank among others with low approval ratings? President Bush gets 45 million; Senator Craig just 1.1 million. Apparently one good way to lower your visibility is to deny that you’re gay.

Britney Spears got 61% more results than the president with 72.3 million. Among other bad girls in the news, Paris Hilton came in 2nd with 40.6 million. Lindsay Lohan couldn’t even break eight figures; she had under 10 million Google results.

Math’s most famous and longstanding mystery – finding a proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem – was finally solved by Professor Andrew Wiles. But he gets only 158,000 Google results. Albert Einstein garnered four million.

Einstein is still way behind OJ but I have faith: given enough of the fourth dimension of time, Einstein will eventually triumph.

Fakers

Sometimes it’s good to be a faker, sometimes it’s not.

James Campbell has shown up in full firefighter’s uniform at the World Trade Center, various train wrecks and wildfires, even at hurricane Katrina. But Mr. Campbell is a faker. Over the weekend Mr. Campbell was arrested for impersonating a fireman.

In Finland, Ochi Yosuke received kudos and a $3,400 first prize for winning the Air Guitar World Championship. Here it pays to be a faker: winning the real thing, for example, the International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship, only netted the winner $3,000.

At the MTV awards Britney Spears was unable to pull off being a faker, flubbing the lip-sync to her new song “Give Me More.”

But when they’re good, fakers make very good money and achieve great fame, especially when they’re actors. Keanu Reeves made over $150 million from The Matrix Reloaded and Bruce Willis $100 million from The Sixth Sense. Talk about gender income disparity: Julia Roberts tops the actress payday with only $25 million for Mona Lisa Smile.

Still, she did a lot better than James Campbell, who now faces felony charges and jail time, and Britney Spears, who faces public humiliation.