The NY Daily News is reporting that Yankee star Alex Rodriguez and his wife, Cynthia (pictured above), have split after about three months of marital “problems.” It seems that A-Rod isn’t the only one whoring around here lately — according to Us Weekly, Alex Rodriguez’s wife has been nailing singer Lenny Kravitz. The magazine says

Kravitz and Rodriguez’s wife Cynthia have been “spending cozy time” in Paris for at least the past four days. Cynthia and Alex Rodriguez – who wed in 2002 and have two young daughters – attended NBC’s New Year’s Eve 2008 party where Kravitz performed.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave! And no, I’m not talking about Britney Spears’ hair extensions. It’s a metaphor for complexities that sprout from a single lie. I tried to find a better metaphor about a labyrinth made of out orifices and wieners, but it turns out there aren’t any out there. That’s why I made one up. “The shenanigans of those who ho, make a relationship Sloppy Joe.” See, because it’s messy? Yeah? Well, okay then. Fuck you.

Now that Madonna’s seven-year marriage to Guy Ritchie is virtually over, the Material Girl Senior Citizen has been playing late-night “bury the bat” with baseball player Alex Rodriguez. According to Us Weekly

$28-million-a-year Rodriguez, 32, has made numerous solo nighttime visits to Madonna, 49, [sneaking] out “as late as midnight.”

Rodriguez attended Madonna’s April 30 NYC concert; the singer sat in his seats at a Yankees game on June 22 (it was the first time she ever was photographed at a Yankees game). Her son Rocco, 7, also sported Yankees gear on June 25 while playing in Central Park.

If it weren’t for baseball, A-Rod would be serving as a drug mule for a Colombian cartel or playing pimp to a bunch of underage prostitutes back in the Dominican Republic. Now he’s banging one of the richest women in the world and making millions of dollars for hitting a fucking ball with a stick, while me and my college education teeter right above poverty level. Somewhere, the U.S. Department of Education is pulling down my pants and taunting me, I just know it.

The Madonna/Guy Ritchie divorce is definitely on, with Madonna reportedy upgrading to the same powerhouse attorney who represented Paul McCartney is his divorce from Heather Mills. The Times of London reports

Madonna is… seeking legal advice on a divorce from her husband of seven years. [Attorney] Fiona Shackleton has been lined up by the 49-year-old pop star. [Husband Guy] Ritchie is thought to have had dealings with a lesser-known Mayfair law firm.

Although rumors of a split have been swirling for almost a year now, what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Besides her being an insufferable egotistical bitch, I mean? Perhaps it was Guy giving the finger to her precious Kabbalah. The Sun says

“Guy has turned his back on Kabbalah once and for all. He also became suspicious of all the Kabbalah crowd living off her money. He told her he doesn’t want anything else to do with it. It didn’t go down well.”

I guess dressing up in costumes for something that doesn’t involve sexual role play and downing $120,000 worth of blessed water a year gets old for a guy after a while. Not to mention that when they were first married, Madonna was technically still a woman. I’m pretty sure he could actually press fraud charges if he wanted to.

Hard Candy press stills:

Get ready to learn more about Madonna than you ever wanted to know in a tell-all book written by her estranged brother. Page Six says

A source said, “[The book] extremely graphic and devastating. He was there through the crazy years and has many stories to tell… he’s seen it all.”

Christopher Ciccone, a gay decorator/chef, was ditched by his sister after she hooked up with her now husband Guy Ritchie, who [actor Rupret] Everett said was “uncomfortable around queens.”

Unless we’re talking about something like her love of post-Victorian architecture and personal choice in dish soap, I don’t think there’s much about Madonna we don’t already know. It’s pretty darn hard to top pictures of someone (NSFW) squatting over a mirror and admiring their own leather donut. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s scientifically impossible without the aid of a speculum and one of those giant projection screens.

Madonna at the amFAR soiree in Cannes last month:

Despite denying marital trouble for months now, Madonna has reportedly hired celebrity divorce lawyer Nicholas Mostyn. According to Digital Spy

The singer is starting divorce proceedings against her husband Guy Ritchie. The singer apparently met the legal representative at his London office ten days ago.

It was unclear whether Madonna was meeting with Mostyn to begin legal paper work or if she was just there to challenge him to a good old-fashioned arm-wrestling contest. You don’t get those kind of veins without mastering the top roll and hook techniques, baby!

Nipping out in Cannes last month:

Madonna continued convincing the young people how cool she is by using the word “fuck” during a live television performance in England over the weekend. “Fuck,” if you haven’t heard, is a word all the kids these days are saying because it shocks and offends the old folks and the squares. The Sun reports

The singer used the f-word twice during the Radio 1 Big Weekend gig live on BBC3, BBC HD and Radio 1. Holding an S&M-style cane, she [said]: “You guys are going to have to start [fucking] it up out there [because] I need to feel some love. I’m going to do an old song. But not too old. [Fuck] the present. Let’s live in the past.”

Radio 1 apologised on Saturday, saying: “An incredible performance… that said, a quick apology for those people who might have felt the content offensive.” The BBC later confirmed they did receive complaints.

So, did the young folks buy it? Not so much. The Daily Mail said

In a savage review The Times wrote she was “sterile” and “soulless” resembling “an embarrassing auntie desperately trying to be hip”.

Going to a Madonna concert now would be like being invited to dine at the Hall of Justice. Sounds good in theory. Only when you actually get to the Hall of Justice, you discover you’re stuck at a table in the corner with Hawkwoman and the Blue Beetle instead of anybody cool. And the whole time Hawkwoman is arguing that she can so digest fur and bones and the Blue Beetle keeps blathering about the importance vitamins and yelling “Bwah-ha-ha!” every five minutes. You’re be better off just staying home.

Madonna continued her promotional tour for her new album “Hard Candy” by regurgitating last week’s performance in Paris yesterday. But wait… what’s this? It appears that she’s kissing another woman! Egad! And all the while holding bottle of champagne, from which she will no doubt drink directly! Such scandal! Such debauchery! Always pushing the envelope, that Madonna! Next, she will do something even more shocking, like make light of the crucifixion or publish a (NSFW) book of nude and sexually ambiguous black and white photos! 2003 also promises to be a year of aeronautical disasters and Eastern Asia SARS outbreaks! Stay tuned!

You can tell how hip and down with the young people Madonna is by the way she drank champagne directly from the bottle during a promotional performance in New York City last night. The Daily Mail says

She performed six songs for around 2,000 people at the Roseland Ballroom, at one point stopping to guzzle champagne from the bottle. Madonna spent almost every second of her No. 1 track Four Minutes grinding against Justin Timberlake, despite being well and truly old enough to be his mother.

Then she screamed something like “I take the drugs and do lots of sex and watch the internet all day and night!” Get it? You know, like an old person trying to sound cool? I guess it sorta came out more like a lame Borat impersonation. Almost as lame as I just made this post. Almost.

Madonna opens up about her early battles against societally-imposed standards of beauty in this month’s “green issue” of Vanity Fair. And for the record, we’re talking about this chick right here. This chick and her Ani DiFranco-esque fight against bleaching, waxing, shaving and rouging. Us Weekly quotes her as saying

“I was one of those people that people were mean to. I didn’t shave my legs. I had hair growing under my arms. I refused to wear makeup, or fit the ideal of what a conventionally pretty girl would look like.’”

To her credit, she doesn’t look like a conventionally pretty girl in the above picture. She looks like a young Larry Bird or an albatross that’s just had all its feathers ripped out in some kind of bizarre glue gun accident. I don’t know whether to start shouting career stats at it or toss it some krill and squid and hope it doesn’t bite me.

Justin Timberlake mentioned having to drop trou for Her Madge-esty when he inducted Madonna into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last night. The Sun quotes him as saying

“We had a recording session in London and I wasn’t feeling well. She reached into her handbag, pulled a ziplock bag of B12 syringes and says: ‘Drop ‘em.’ I don’t know what you say to that, so I dropped my pants. She gave me the shot in my ass. That is what Madonna will always be to us. The shot in the ass when we really need it.”

Curiously, Madonna is the first Rock and Roll Hall of Famer not to perform at their own induction in history. But Madonna swears it’s less of a display of pompous ingratitude and more of an issue of her increasingly frequent panic attacks. In an interview with Dazed & Confused Magazine, she says

“I have panic attacks where I feel like everyone is breathing my air and I cannot live up to everybody’s expectations and I might just die on stage. I normally try to turn my back to the audience, take a deep breath and remind myself that it’s all temporary. It’s hard to describe.”

Then she said, “I get this numbness and tingling down my arm and a sort of heavy sensation on my chest — you know, like someone’s sitting on it — accompanied by shortness of breath and light-headedness… now wait just a bloomin’ minute — who changed the channel? Everybody knows I watch ‘Wheel’ after ‘Perry Mason!’ Goddammit! And there’s corn in this! You know I can’t digest corn!” before the nurse came in to empty her bedpan and give her her calcium supplement and blood thinner again.

Madonna veining it up at the Waldorf-Astoria:

Maddona spends a whopping $10,000 a month on specially blessed Kabbalah water. Ten thousand dollars. That’s a lot of goddamn water. For $120,000 a year, I can only assume she also douches and power washes her decks with it, too. According to Female First

The ‘Like A Virgin’ singer reportedly makes sure she always has a regular supply of the $5-a-bottle beverage on hand. A source close to the singer [said]: “Madonna drinks a lot of water - that’s one of her fitness secrets. And Kabbalah water is the only stuff she will touch. She has it regularly shipped to wherever in the world she is staying at the time.”

What makes this water so special, you ask? Is it diamond filtered? Collected as dew drops off the petals of the lotus flower? Cut with Human Growth Hormone? Nope — even better:

A description of the blessed water on kabbalahwater.com reads: “The Kabbalistic blessings and meditations are used to create Kabbalah Water. [These blessings] bring about elegant and balanced crystalline structures in water, while negative consciousness has an opposite effect. This is hugely important. In a very literal way, Kabbalah Water is life’s original blueprint information brought into the modern world.”

Some leaders from the Kabbalah Centre are said to have claimed the water has the power to cure diseases including cancer and AIDS.

So some old guy prays over it and then charges you five bucks for it? Come on. It’s still fucking water. I could take a dump in a plastic bag and find a priest to bless it, but at then end of the day, I’d still only have a dump in a plastic bag. The main difference is I would only charge you three bucks for it instead of five.

Nobody stuffs a holiday stocking quite like Madonna. And I don’t mean that in the way you’re probably thinking, either. I mean she might as well pull open your stocking and take a big dump in it. The Daily Mail says

As Guy Ritchie recently revealed, the family “canceled Christmas” two years ago - which means that no gifts will be exchanged by the adults. Her children will get just three presents each - a modest tally given that their mother’s fortune stands at around £240 million.

Guy [said]: “As long as the kids get three presents at Christmas, everyone’s happy.” The highlight of the day will be a low-fat macrobiotic feast. There will be a small amount of unsalted meat for the children and for Guy, but no cheese, no cream, no salt, no preservatives and no sugar.

You know — Christmas! That reminds me a lot of the Yuletide favorite “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Only instead of visions of sugarplums dancing in the their heads, it’s visions of sea vegetable jelly and fermented bean paste, and instead of a jolly old elf you get an pretentious old bitch with a fake British accent and arms like a Pennsylvania road atlas.