Brittany Murphy was mostly known as an actress, but it was also kind of common knowledge that she had a pretty decent singing voice, as well. (Remember when she sang the Mentos commercial like we’ve never heard it in Clueless?) It turns out that Brittany was originally trained as a singer and then took to acting. That how she started booking jobs and her original dream had to take a backseat, but it didn’t totally get lost.

Now that she’s passed, this song in the video above has been attracting a lot of attention from the blogosphere. Who knew that back in 2004 Brittany Murphy was recording tracks with the Trance Music King himself, Paul Oakenfold? This song, “Faster Kill Pussycat” was originally recorded while Brittany was under the impression that her name wouldn’t be on the track. She just wanted to keep singing for fun. As she explained to People Magazine in 2006, “I’ve been singing my whole life and [recording] a lot of anonymous vocals. And this was another anonymous vocal, 20 minutes behind the booth in the recording studio two years ago. Then Paul had asked me if I’d put my name on it. The song is so incredible, I said ‘Yes,’ and we made a video.” Unfortunately, it’s a video that not many had seen until after they heard the news of her death this week.

If this is something that Brittany said she did frequently, then there must be more unheard tracks out there… I wonder if we’re going to get to hear those any time soon.

image courtesy of TMZ.com

And we’re back the morning after Christmas break with news of a photo that could have changed history! Bang! That’s how we do it around here! You think we’re going to ease in to the wide world of celebrity news on a Monday morning? Hells no, girlfriends! We’re getting right back in to this!

Check out the photo above. That’d be an image of a man who a bunch of people are pretty sure is John F. Kennedy hanging out with tons of naked chicks on a boat. Trust me when I tell you that this man would not have been president had this photo (which was originally taken in the 1950s) ever been released. The story behind the boat is that, back when JFK was “just a Senator”, he and his brother Ted Kennedy took a trip on a yacht around the Mediterranean and while they were on that yacht, it took on the appearance of one of those party buses you can rent. What’s the big deal? When this photo was supposedly taken, JFK’s wife, Jackie was back in Boston miscarrying their stillborn child. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth, right? As in, if this photo surfaced while someone was trying to become president, you probably wouldn’t vote for them, right? I told ya this was a history changer!

Of course there remains a small chance that this image is not JFK, but so far scans of the image compared to other photos of the late president seem to say it’s him. Same with two Kennedy biographers who were hired by TMZ. Either way, between JFK’s notorious stud reputation and our recent news about Tiger, is anyone really surprised?

Hi guys. Happy Monday!

Not today, not tomorrow, and not next week, but eventually we are going to be hiring around here. No, nobody’s getting fired, but we’re continuing to expand and we’ll be looking for great writers. And I know that this blog attracts a lot of freelance writers and/or people who would really like to be freelance writers.

After hiring, firing and working with freelance writers on a blog for some time now, I have come to the conclusion that I am no longer going to give any serious consideration to freelance applicants who don’t have their own personal regularly maintained blog or a long-established history as a primary writer on a blog. Nick Denton over at the Gawker empire laid down this rule years and years ago, and I continued to ignore his lead, and that was dumb of me. Because, you know, that music review that you wrote for your college’s newspaper three years ago? It doesn’t give me any insight into how you can write, without an editor, on a regular basis. It gives me no concept of how well you’ll be able to hold an audience day after day, when you have twenty minutes to write that piece and not three weeks, and when no one’s going to be there to fact-check. That newsprint piece comes with no warning on how many weeks it’s going to take me to teach you how to properly resize and upload a photograph or embed a video snippet. The seven pages of your short story are equally useless in this regard. So I’m putting my foot down on this issue, and I have a feeling other managing editors on blogs and websites will be doing the same.

So here’s the career advice: If you’re one of those journalism or writer-y types who wants to, you know, get paid to write in the foreseeable future, start a blog. Write in it more than once a month. Writing once a day, at least, would be ideal. Write about whatever you want, but try to use the tone and, to some extent, the subject matter that you’d like to be writing about professionally. If you can also do things like properly embed videos and photos of the correct size, create galleries, etc, that’s a GIANT, ENORMOUS plus to an editor like me.

If you’d like additional little gems of knowledge as to what you might want to touch upon here and there in your nascent blog if you maybe, in the future, want to write for one of my websites specifically, jump inside.

I’m disallowing comments on this particular post, because this isn’t open season on the existing writers, all of whom are still working here because they know how to do all the shit I just mentioned. If you have questions about the meat of the post, you can email me directly at evilbeet@gmail.com.

xoxo
Beet

(more…)

Jude and Sienna Splashing Around on Vacay [popbytes]

A Very Slipknot Christmas [cityrag]

Nick Cannon Plays Workhorse for Mariah [Celebslam]

Hollywood is having the best week ever. [Pajiba]

Alessandra Ambrosia is here to heat up Christmas. [IDLYITW]

Ivana Trump gets kicked off an airplane for acting like a psychopath. [Celebitchy]

The day after Christmas, a raven-haired Nicole Richie did some shopping with baby-daddy Joel Madden. It feels like these two will NEVER break up, and it’s getting to be a little frustrating. I know, I know. It has to happen sometime. I just need to be patient. Sometimes I wonder why they haven’t up and gotten hitched yet. Is there a combined 150-pound weight minimum for married couples in this country that I don’t know about? I mean, we do tend to be haphazard with our legislation in that area.

What are we thinking about Nicole’s new ‘do?

Designer Marc Jacobs and his boyfriend (rumored husband) Lorenzo Martone soak up the sun, and a little bit of each other, on St. Barth’s Christmas Eve.

Okay, who’s got the hotter St. Barth’s boyfriend: Marc Jacobs or Avril Lavigne?