Katy Perry as the lights go out

What's happening here?



Yes, what this is the reaction of Katy Perry's manager to his charge being asked a difficult question in an interview. Panicking that Perry might not be able to handle the hard-hitting enquiry, the manager had pulled the plug on the interview.

Literally, he pulled the plug. Perhaps he didn't realise that it's meant to be a figurative phrase; perhaps it's lucky he went with "pull the plug" and not "knock the thing on the head" or "pull her out."

The challenging enquiry was "do you admire any Australian artists?", although to be fair - and by "to be fair" I mean "making him look even more like a chump" - he hadn't heard the question properly, and thought that Perry was being asked about the pointless dispute she'd been dragged in to where she tried to sue Australian Katie Perry for being in the fashion business.

That was a ridiculous idea in the first place - trying to use legal action to block someone who had been using her own name for years, in a business that isn't actually Katy Perry's focus. It's almost as if Perry is being managed by an intemperate buffoon or something.

Still, everything got smoothed out:

Hafner added: "[Katy] was just delightful and very keen to make amends. She calmed him down and, after several apologies, the interview resumed."

Wow, her manager is really lucky that his star is so good at calming situations down and keeping everyone on side when he's behaving like a prima dona. She's surely worth the 10% of his income she must charge him.

[Thanks to James P for the story]

Katy Perry will kill all the homophones

Katie Perry has been working for a couple of years as a high-end designer in Australia, and was about to open her first store. She decided to protect her trademark.

Trouble is, she got hit by a cease-and-desist from Katy Perry and EMI, afraid that the singer's fans are so stupid they might confuse an Australian clothes shop with an American pop singer and start dry-humping the hat display stand or something.

EMI try to make this "you can't use your own name to sell your stuff" intervention sound reasonable:

EMI said in a statement Thursday that a "routine notice letter was sent to Ms. Howell, as is customary in trademark practice, alerting her of Ms. Perry's intended application" for trademark protection down under.

You'd have thought that, with all the money EMI spend on lawyers, someone would know the difference between 'alerting' someone to something and sending a cease-and-desist. Otherwise, sheepish EMI staff must have awkward moments - "well, yes, Mother, you did ask me to alert Father that the coal cellar door was open - and, believe me, I was on my way to meet with a couple of guys from the legal department to draft a document forbidding him from falling down the hole and breaking his leg when... well, when he fell down the hole and broke his leg."