So what if Mary Kate Olsen and Heath Ledger were hooking up? I don’t really care and neither should you. The point is that Heath’s masseuse found him “cold to touch” and called Mary Kate 2 times before the police, knowing that she was at least a trusted friend who had the ability to send help. She knew the situation was delicate. She was probably thinking about the massive amount of cameras, the morbid public eye, and the apathy of police work when she dialed Mary Kate to frantically ask what to do. Yeah, it looks a little shady, but when you read his last interview in the New York Times, you’ll see there’s no foul play. Just a tragic accident with sleeping pills; a male Marilyn Monroe. May he rest in peace and his life be celebrated.

As often happens when he throws himself into a part, the actor is not sleeping much.

“Last week, I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

One night, he said, he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.

Even as he spoke, Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside for another cigarette.

Polite and charming, he nonetheless gave off the sense that the last thing he wanted to do was delve deep into himself for public consumption.

Mind you, I’m getting my info from Access Hollywood, the true bastion of journalistic integrity and newsworthiness, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt.

In a stunning revelation, Mary-Kate Olsen, the fur enthusiast and supposed actress had been TOTALLY HOOKING UP OMG!!1!! with Heath for months prior to his death, and was notified BEFORE the police that he was not breathing. DUN DUN DUUUUUN.

In other news, being a former child star is still beat. But portraying gay cowboys and overdosing is still totally awesome.

Proving there’s no such thing as bad press and that face and neck tattoos make for a killer mug shot, rapper Lil’ Wayne (born Dwayne Michael Carter) was arrested by border patrol at a US Border checkpoint on Interstate 8 in Dateland, AZ, on Tuesday night around 11:30 PM. Drug-sniffing dogs alerted officers that something might be afoot and Wayne’s bus, which was transporting 11 other people, was pulled aside for a consensual search.

Officers found:

Carter faces local possession charges (the feds passed on this one), and two other passengers are looking at narcotics charges. Wayne was released on bail, but has a court date set for Friday morning. In other news, his new album, The Carter III is due out in February.

What a surprise. The highly-evolved (insert sarcasm here) folks at Westboro Baptist Church wish Heath Ledger a wonderful eternity IN HELL!

Sometimes I think we’re already there…

[photo courtesy of Reuters]

Star of 24, Kiefer Sutherland has been released from prison today after serving 48 days on a drunk driving conviction.

The 41-year-old actor left the Glendale City Jail shortly after midnight and was a model inmate, Glendale Police Officer John Balian said.

“He never gave us any problems, never complained about anything,” Balian said, adding that Sutherland spent most of his time on laundry duty.

Looks like Jack Bauer is getting soft in his old age. Sutherland was arrested for drunk driving this past September for drunk driving while already on probation for a 2004 drunk driving conviction. In addition to his time served in jail, Sutherland will also have to serve “five years probation, complete an 18-month alcohol education program and attend six months of weekly therapy sessions.” However, at least TV’s most decorated and badass real-time counter terrorist agent won’t have to watch the premier of the new season of his hit show from behind bars. The seventh season of 24 is set to premier this month.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that drug companies purposely exaggerated the effectiveness of the 12 most prescribed antidepressants by publishing only positive drug trials, and shelving negative ones:

The researchers in examined the American Food and Drug Admistration (FDA) register and requested data from all 74 trials of the most commonly used antidepressant drugs. They then compared the results from all the trials, to just the trials that had been published in the medical literature. The findings are quite shocking:

• A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published.
• Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies).
• According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive.

In other words, when all the studies are examined, there’s only about 50-50 chance that a scientific study of an antidepressant drug will find it more effective than placebo in treating depression.

Shocking, I know, that any company would purposely mislead doctors into prescribing more of their medicine, when they knew it worked at best, JUST AS MUCH AS NOTHING AT ALL. But hey, $21,000,000,000 a year in antidepressant sales will make a lot of people do a lot of shady shit. The Wall Street Journal has this fun little graph showing exactly who these people are, and exactly how shady their conduct is:

Print this out and leave a couple copies in your doctor’s waiting room, or better yet, hand it to him/her directly. Doctors are unfortunately, just as stupid as everyone else when it comes to drugs, only in a smarter way. At least they get paid for it.