Tinseltown Ticker Tape

The holiday season is upon us, when Christians pretend that if they invoke the name of their messiah enough, He will forgive them for their co-opted pagan solstice rituals and mindless commercial excess. It is a magical time, when families and friends gather in the spirit of love and generosity and other bullshit that nobody really believes in.

Last month, we had the annual celebration of Samhain (or "Halloween," as the kids are calling it these days), which is a magical time in a more literal sense, when it is believed that the barrier between the physical world and the spirit world is at its weakest, making it the ideal time to commune with the dead or summon spirits to our world. It is especially magical at Heidi Klum's Halloween Party, where any woman can be Wonder Woman, even one who has never once caused me to wonder, such as model/"actress" Rhona Mitra:


I can forgive the stockings, because as a Zatanna fan and a former Eddie for Edison, New Jersey's cast of The Rocky Horror Show, I have a soft spot in my heart for fishnets and top hats, but come on...


A Wonder Woman with straps?! I think we can do better than that.

On the other hand, kudos to Heidi Klum herself for her traditionally religious costume of the serpent coiled around the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.


I like the Biblically accurate touch of her visible (and delectable) legs, because, as you religious hobbyists may know, snakes had legs in the Garden of Eden and lost them as punishment for their involvement in the scandal that antediluvian journalists would have mistakenly felt very clever for calling "Applegate."

As for our dear Diana, I think the best Wonder Woman of the season was Brazilian knockout Gisele Bündchen. She is oddly appropriate, too, due to how much she resembles the Amazons of myth, despite coming from half a world southwest of their homeland in the Russian steppes.


I think that now, when Hollywood is abuzz with the recent Britney-Spears'-hideous-vagina-gate, it's important to remember one of the moral lesson we learned from comic books: Wearing underwear is still quite sexy.


Then again, I also think that pubic hair is a tasteful and attractive garnish for a female reproductive organ, but that hardly has anything to do with Wonder Woman.