Weekend Treats

1.
Nic Cage may be selling all his houses–and losing a few to foreclosure–but he's still got the cheddar to purchase the last home his body will ever have. According to the folks at gossip juggernaut TMZ, that will be a 9-foot tall, smooth sided pyramid located in a New Orlean cemetery.

Doesn't it make sense that Mister Cage, an eccentric man who blew through a vast fortune during one long and unrestrained shopping spree that included buying up 12 or 15 properties around the world, a meteorite, a collection of shrunken heads (allegedly), a dinosaur skull and an aircraft hangar full of vintage cars would choose a final resting place imbued with so much ancient mystery, New Age mysticism, and whackadoodle quackery?

In the early 1970s, a New York City man named Max Toth sold small cardboard pyramids he claimed would dehydrate tropical fish for display purposes and keep a razor blade razor sharp forever. Patrick Flanagan, a Glendale, CA gentleman sold pyramid shaped tents he believed both enhanced his sexual sensitivity and kept food fresh. Your Mama wonders what strange powers Mister Cage attributes to a pyramid.

2.
There have been far, far, far too many reports in the last week about Dancing With the Stars Contestant and mother of 76 children Kate Gosselin shopping around for a new crib in Los Angeles. One of Miz Gosselin's friend's allegedly told the peeps at PopEater that Miz Gosselin and her 29 children are heading for Hollywood to pursue a new life in the klieg lights of reality television quasi-stardom. The goes on to say that the woman who went around for years (years!) with a reverse mullet on her damn head is poking around $2,000,000 properties in gated communities in the Hollywood Hills that have at least 6 bedrooms.

Your Mama could care less about these Gosselin people. We find them and their dramatics a total white trash snooze fest. Don't even get us started on that Ed Hardy wearing dude either. Gawd, if he's not enough of a reason for a person to drink themselves into oblivion, Your Mama does not what is. Anyhoo, our beef with the situation is that there are already plenty of tabloid courting faux-celebrities trotting around Tinseltown so we certainly don't need another one that comes with 98 children, a slew of nannies a body guard and a family van the size of a city bus. Plus, just where are these two-million dollar, 6 bedroom homes located in gated communities in the Hollywood Hills? Anyone?

3.
Amid much publicity and fanfare, Eric Levine–a pioneer in the proliferation of those torture factories known as gyms–heaved his hotel sized home near Phuket (that's in Thailand children) on to the market with an asking price of $850,000,000 Thai bahts. A quick consult with our trusted currency conversion contraption shows that's 26,278,900 U.S. dollars at today's rates.

The very contemporary glass, granite and steel mega-mansion, according to listing information, sits on 4 ocean front acres and measures in at an elephantine 64,560 square feet of interior space. That is not a type children. At nearly 65,000 square feet is it bigger than both Candy Spelling's pile in Los Angeles and the president Barak Obama's house in Washington, D.C. Mister Levine's master suite alone spans an unimaginable 5,380 square feet and has its own damn swimming pool. Guests are treated no less luxuriously. One of the 3 guest rooms encompasses 3,766 square feet and includes it's own Zen garden.

There is, natch, a massive home gymnasium with 80 torture machines. Other features includes a spa with steam and sauna, home theater, 2-lane bowling alley, tennis courts, and a beachfront 2-hole golf course. There are, according to listing information, only 7 poopers. Seven is a lot of terlits in an ordinary mansion, but it doesn't seem like so many in one that's as big as a damn international airport.

Mister Levine calls his estate Beyond. And it is beyond. Beyond something, anyway. Mister Levine owned and sold about a bazillion Golds Gyms and founded California Fitness, part of the 24-Hour Fitness Group.

4.
Nobody does conspicuous consumption better than a Russian billionaire and if you haven't seen the photos of steel, banking and fertilizer tycoon Andrey Melnichencko's $300,000,000+, 394-foot long, Philippe Starck designed boat you should run like the dickens over to the Wall Street Journal who has scads of dee-lishus pictures of the sensationally sleek submarine shaped super-yacht.

We're talking 23,600 square feet of living space, walls covered in silver-leaf, white sting-ray hides and hand-stitched calf's leather, a couple of chairs fashioned from alligator hides and Kudo horns. We're talking bomb proof glass, a rotating bed in the 2,583 square foot master cabin, bathroom knobs that cost $40,000...each, a "nookie" room padded walls and a boob-toob on the ceiling.

We're talking three swimming pools, a helipad, two 36-foot long landing boats for ferrying guests from the boat to the shore, Baccarat-crystal tables, a hallway that stretches 160 feet, and a crew of 35-37 including two full-time ladees who do nothing but launder. The boat costs around $20,000,000 to maintain...per year, and costs half a million clams just to fill it up with gas.

We're talking a seriously high-tech security system with 44 cameras, a dozen exterior camera with motion detection and night vision infrared capability and, allegedly, a secret pod-like escape system.