Your home for progressive gossip

Try as I might, I sometimes just cannot avoid directing you to the New York Press, where editor Harry Siegel has rush-ordered a big-and-tall straitjacket for Armond White for Christmas and reserved 14 inches every week for a new gossip column called Dope Peddler.

I was just going to ignore it until it went away (the whole fucking paper, that is), but Kaiju Shakedown's Grady Hendrix recently offered up a swift kick to the low-life, heroin-scarred testicles that I just could not help but pass along. Basically, Dope Peddler had this "gossip" to pass along about Bollywood actresses:

BOLLYWOOD VALUES
A rich married investment banker, who is from the subcontinent and specializes in Indian equities, reported to Dope Peddler that he's slept with quite a few B- and C- level Bollywood stars who are at least moderately well-known there - and it wasn't his balding looks that did the trick, so to speak. These actresses are women on the level of, say, Catherine Keener. They aren't big stars, but plenty of people have heard of them.

"The sums involved," he says, "are surprisingly small. In some cases, $2,500 will do it. It's interesting because a lot of them play women in the movies who are religious figures, and they're supposed to be sweet, wholesome, virginal. But believe me, the affairs aren't all that hard to arrange if you know who to talk to." The actresses, he explains, have film roles, fans, and fan clubs. But it's just not considered all that strange for such women to supplement their salaries in the manner of 19th-century courtesans.

Earth-shattering shit, right? Well, not quite as great as Hendrix's suggestions for future racist/sexist items for Dope Peddler's stash:

CHINESE VALUES
A rich, married investment banker told me that many Chinese actors require all their scripts to be written in math because that's something all Chinese people understand...

JAPANESE VALUES
A billionaire, divorced commodities trader told me that pop stars in Japan kill themselves if they can't hit the high notes in their live performances...

SINGAPORE VALUES
A zillionaire, polyamorous panda trainer told me that everyone in Singapore plays violin by the age of five and that children who don't are fed to feral cats...

Come, come, Grady. Scripts "written in math" are Armond's purview. I know the paper only has like four writers, but let's try to avoid confusion where we can.