Not too long ago, Britain’s New Scientist magazine ran a piece about a San Francisco-based company called the DNA Copyright Institute. The organization is apparently offering to copyright celebrities’ DNA so their fans won’t clone them. This raises some fascinating questions. First, who has his own home-cloning kit? Is there a new late-night infomercial out that I’ve missed? Second, what exactly would one do with a cloned celebrity? When you clone somebody, it starts out as a zygote, right? So you’ll have to wait, like, 20 or 30 years for it to mature into your favorite celebrity.

Is it really somebody’s dream to raise Tom Cruise or J.Lo? I mean, I’d love to get my hands on a Stephanie Seymour clone, but am I really going to feel the same way after I’ve put her through school?

I think the scam artists at the DNA Copyright Institute are counting on the celebrities’ limitless egos—their unquestioning willingness to have their pricelessness secured for a small fee. In that, the Institute couldn’t be more correct, because the deliriously famous truly are priceless.

Former U.S. News & World Report reporter Barbara Victor will let us know just how priceless one Madonna Louise Ciccone is when the journalist’s unauthorized biography, Goddess, comes out next month. I suppose an unauthorized biography of any kind should be taken with a grain of salt, because most of the interview subjects are usually about as close as a fifth cousin twice removed. But Victor attacked the story like a true reporter, interviewing, among others, Madonna’s maternal grandmother, her father, her siblings, and her ex-lovers.

But what more could there be to know about the Queen of Shock, right? We know about the late mother, the spurned Catholicism, Sean, Warren, Sandra. Well, how about, according to the press leaks, the 11 abortions? That’s right, 11. Not an abortion, not two or three, we’re talking double digits, baby. Eleven.

Look, I’m as pro choice as an Indigo Girl at a PFLAG meeting on Earth Day, but my word in heaven! What makes this revelation so unnerving is that we’re talking about a very wealthy woman who treated the procedure as though it were a tummy tuck or a face-lift. This is someone for whom birth control isn’t exactly hard to come by; apparently, she uses Swiss cheese for a diaphragm.

This isn’t from an isolated period in Madonna’s life, either. Victor’s book claims number 11 came shortly before the current Mr. Ciccone and was the result of a liaison with a British fellow. (My money’s on Peter O’Toole, that wily old bastard.) Goddess even goes so far as to suggest that Maddie got herself knocked up on purpose to trap Guy Ritchie into marriage. Whew, what a sweetheart. Can we say lawsuit?

Unretiring

Hey, what do Madonna and Garth Brooks have in common? Well absolutely nothing, except for the fact that they’ve both sold a gazillion records. Despite all her hype, I’ll acknowledge that Madonna has an uncanny knack for sublime pop songs, and there’s nothing about dance pop you can really desecrate. Garth, on the other hand, recently continued his mission to defame anything remotely resembling actual country music, holding a press conference at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum to announce the release of his new album, Scarecrow.

This irritates me for a couple of reasons, the obvious one being that Garth Brooks no longer makes country music. This man is one of the key reasons why mainstream country has ended up in a shallow gutter. Beginning with his album No Fences, he advanced the idea that country need not sound anything remotely like country; as long as the artist is wearing a cowboy hat, he might as well be playing a pop song. And when I say a pop song, I don’t mean a pop-flavored country confection along the lines of Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight.” I mean a goofball Diane Warren ballad.

But everyone’s heard these complaints before, and that’s not really what sticks in my craw. It’s that Garth has betrayed me; he has lied to me and hurt me deeply—the way only a lover or a friend can. Last year, he held a huge, ostentatious press conference, which I quickly forgave him for, once I learned it was to announce his retirement. At this press conference, he promised me that he’d never record again. But now here he is back again, threatening to further sully our airwaves.

What a phony. If Garth has to come back, I wish he’d make another rock record under his “alternate identity,” Chris Gaines. When I saw him on Saturday Night Live several years ago, “rapping” and wearing a wig and a fake goatee, I went into shock and hysterics. It was the strongest reaction I’d ever had to his work.

Disturbingly funny

When the Tenacious D record arrived at our offices a couple of weeks ago, I thought I was holding in my hands the best comedy record of 2001. Much to my surprise, though, as soon as I heard Billy Bob Thornton’s Private Radio, the D got the rug pulled out from under them.

Billy Bob’s had an interesting career arc. In five years, he’s gone from folksy character actor to full-on Hollywood eccentric. His marriage to Angelina Jolie has turned into a big-time celebrity spectacle, with public grubbing and with the two stars carrying around vials of each other’s blood. With Private Radio, though, his behavior has slipped into the sublimely ridiculous.

It’s not just that the music is bad (which it is) or that Billy Bob can’t sing (which he can’t). It’s that the lyrics are howlingly awful; they convey the sort of depth you’d expect from a college freshman who smokes clove cigarettes and wears black all the time. Consider the following line: “I don’t think he’s ever seen a man wearin’ pink panties and under the influence of Merle Haggard.” Or, “This cigarette burns like the pain in my soul.” Or, even better, “It’s like an ice-cold blanket on the bed of my soul.”

I can’t believe this guy managed to write Sling Blade. The comedy will get even better soon, when the video for “Angelina” comes out; Thornton made it with home videos. Maybe we’ll find out what he means when he sings, “You were masked and tied and cut and weary, but I said that’s OK, you can be my girl.” It may be MTV’s first S&M video.

What’s wrong with him?

I’ll leave you with a glimmer of hope for celebritykind. I wrote a piece not long ago about how ludicrously high actors’ salaries are, considering how many other people are involved in making a movie. Well, turns out Keanu Reeves, he of many a dim joke, knows what I’m talking about. A Wall Street Journal article recently detailed how, in several films, ol’ Ted Logan gave up as much as $2 million of his salary so that it could be added to the salaries of the crew.

Even more impressive is that he’s given up his back-end deal on the Matrix sequels and asked that it be given to the special-effects crew members, who, quite correctly, are the ones really responsible for the film’s success. Holy lack of ego, Batman! Did we just find a Hollywood star displaying humility and consideration for others? Dogstar may be no Wyld Stallyns, but I say we should clone that guy’s DNA while we can.

Quotidian challenge

“I used to bulls-eye whomp rats in my T-16 back home. They’re not much bigger than two meters.”

Be the first to e-mail the origin of this useless bit of trivia to poplife the shame of your name printed as the winner and some free useless crap from the Nashville Scene!

Previous week’s answer: “Tropicana’s where I lost my heart.” —“Girls, Girls, Girls” by Mötley Crüe.

Winner: Mickey Ethridge.