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As the days after the death of Anna Nicole Smith linger on, things become eerily similar to 5 months ago when her 20-year-old son, Daniel, passed on. Just like him, Anna Nicole’s autopsy findings have come back inconclusive. Several more weeks will be needed to determine the exact nature of her death.

Also like Daniel, there was an initial investigation to see if foul play was at hand, however, those results came back negative.

Chief Medical Examiner Joshua Perper did find small amounts of blood in Smith’s stomach along with “subtle findings” in the heart and gastrointestinal tract that he will look in to — who knows what that means exactly but we will soon find out.

Also under way is the lawsuit over Smith’s baby girl. With the true father still unknown, photographer Larry Birkhead continues to push forward in unsealing the mysterious envelope because in his heart, the baby belongs to him and Birkhead wants custody.

However, just when you think the story can’t get any more dramatic, along comes Zsa Zsa Gabor — sort of. Popping out of the woodwork is Gabor’s ex hub-a-dub-dub, Prince Frederick von Anhalt (59), who told the Associated Press that he had a decade long affair with Smith and that he is another pop possibility.

However, something about this guy just doesn’t feel right. In case you are wondering, yes, the baby’s daddy will get handed a big piece of Smith’s financial pie, which makes you wonder if this Prince is really a frog. According to von Anhalt, he plans on filing a suit if custody is handed to Birkhead or Howard K. Stern.

Just as chaos surrounded Smith’s life, it surrounds her death. People just don’t seem to get it. All of the feuding is probably what did Smith in. Isn’t it about time that everyone learn from her death and let Anna Nicole rest in peace? If not for her memory than for the sake of her innocent little girl.

In short, can’t we all just get along?

Despite Birkhead’s ongoing lawsuit, he posted a tribute to Smith on his Website Friday, calling her “my sweet potato.”

“We loved, we laughed, we shared a connection that couldn’t be broken, regardless of the challenges,” added Birkhead. I loved her in life and I will love her long after.”

Moving on…

It’s Grammy night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles and the 80’s rock group The Police opened up the televised ceremony as the crowd went wild.

With eight noms, Mary J. Blige scored three awards so far and remains a contender for record and song of the year.

As she graciously walked on stage, Blige humbly thanked everyone and said she was appreciative of the positive attention she now received.

“I want to use this success to build bridges, not to burn them,” stated Blige.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers took home three Grammys, as well.

Honored for reworking the Motown song, “For Once In My Life,” was Stevie Wonder who first wrote the song at the age of seventeen.

The Dixie Chicks won the group-country performance Grammy for “Not Ready to Make Nice,” a response to the negative vibes floating their way over singer Natalie Maines’ criticism of President Bush.

Timberlake scored two Grammys thus far… One in the dance recording category for “Sexy Back” and another in the rap category for “My Love.”

Stay tuned for the remaining big wins tomorrow….

Happy Sunday Eve!

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MEXIA, Texas - The convoys of TV trucks, bristling with antennae, started rolling into this small town as soon as the news broke last week. Reporters were desperately seeking someone, anyone, with the slightest connection to Anna Nicole Smith.

The 39-year-old starlet, who collapsed and died suddenly, always claimed that the rural East Texas community, 90 miles southeast of Dallas, had played an essential role in the story of her life.

She fled Mexia in her late teens for a new life as a big-city bad girl. In Houston, she became a topless dancer, a Playboy centerfold, designer jeans model and bride of an oil billionaire more than 60 years her senior.

But many of the 6,700 residents of Mexia (pronounced Muh-HEY-uh) appear to be just as desperate to put a distance between their city and the celebrity.

They want no part of this passion play.

Mexia, like many small towns, would like to attract more attention - but not this kind. Residents would like to see more businesses moving in. Young people would like more things to do. Everybody would like to feel that life isn’t passing him or her by.

That ambivalence with the spotlight was most evident in Steve Hughes, owner of Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken. Ground Zero for the media, the fast-food restaurant is where Smith - then known as Vickie Lynn Hogan - worked in the mid-1980s and met her first husband.

It’s unclear how long Smith lived in Mexia. She was born in Houston on Nov. 28, 1967. Hughes and other residents say she came to Mexia during her high school years after her parents divorced. She lived with a maternal aunt for only a few years.

Smith’s mother, Virgie Arthur, had asked her daughter why she overstated her small-town roots in Mexia.

“She said, `Mom, nobody wants to read books or see people on TV concerning, you know, middle-class girl found a rich millionaire and married him. There’s not a story in that,’” Arthur recalled on Good Morning America. “She said, `The story is I come from rags to riches, and so that’s what I’m going to tell.’”

A tall, skinny teenager, Smith was nice and unassuming, Hughes said. Nothing, including her brunette hair and average bust-size, revealed a glimpse of the ersatz Marilyn Monroe she became.

“She was just another teenager working in a fast-food restaurant,” Hughes said. “Only a handful of people in this town really knew her.”

Hughes, a trim and youthful 44, bought the restaurant from his father, an Air Force veteran, in 1986.

Already a popular restaurant, Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken became even more so late last week. Media vans and trucks jammed the perimeter of the property, the main business route through town. By Friday morning, Hughes was on guard to keep the media cameras at bay, permitting only a Fox TV crew in the door.

But his face and voice betrayed his tension when he was asked yet again what Smith’s life was like when she worked at Jim’s.

“Take a look around,” he said. “She was a teenager like everyone else in here.”

Then he added: “She had nothing and nobody really. She didn’t have any roots here.”

The phrase - “She had no roots here” - was often repeated around Mexia.

Some exasperated residents said the media were looking in the wrong direction. There were lots of other famous people from Mexia. Former NFL coach Ray Rhodes starred at football and helped integrate Mexia High School in the late 1960s.

And then there was Cindy Walker, the prolific songwriter and charter inductee to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. She wrote hits sung by Bob Wills, Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison, among others.

For most of her life, Walker lived half the year in Mexia and the other half in Nashville. After she died in Mexia in March 2006, Willie Nelson released a tribute album of her songs: You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker.

The man to see about Cindy Walker, an old friend of hers, was another famous Mexian: Dicky Flatt.

Flatt was something of a media creation himself, becoming a household name in Texas in the early 1980s.

In nearly all of his political stump speeches, then-Texas Sen. Phil Gramm said he decided on every government-funding proposal by applying his “Dicky Flatt Test,” looking at whether the government program was worth taking money out of the pocket of his old friend, the epitome of the average, hard-working businessman.

Flatt’s parents moved here in the late 1930s and opened a printing business.

With the discovery of the East Texas oil fields, Mexia had boomed in the early part of the 20th century. Oil derricks blossomed all over town like mushrooms after a rainstorm. But by the late 1930s, the oil gushers had slowed to a trickle. The Depression had hit Mexia hard.

The Flatt family persevered, and Flatt, 64, now runs the printing company along with his two adult sons. It includes a bustling stationery shop on McKinney Avenue, an oasis of activity in the old, mostly empty downtown.

Tall and lanky, with boundless good humor, Flatt resembles a bespectacled scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. His office is cluttered with paperwork, bric-a-brac, framed photos of relatives and a few others of him posing with Sen. Gramm.

Giving a reporter and photographer a tour, Flatt passed through downtown with its boarded-up storefronts. He hoped one day to see it reinvented and luring back the shoppers who left a few years ago for the big-box retailers, like Wal-Mart, up on U.S. Highway 84.

He drove through older neighborhoods, with two-story, Victorian wood frame homes dating back to the oil boom era, when the town was triple its current size. Some houses looked well maintained, while others appeared abandoned long ago.

Flatt pointed to a vacant lot where he went to the old Ross Elementary School and then to a well-kept cottage home, where a woman once tutored him in algebra. He noted the old high school, now an administration building. He proudly announced that the new athletic field was one of the few in the region to have a roof over the stands.

On Brooks Street, he stopped at a two-story, white frame home. Thick bushes and crepe myrtles blocked the view. Cindy Walker, the songwriter, was a recluse in her later years, he said.

She liked her privacy, spending most of her time in her second-floor studio. On a quiet day, if you were passing by, you could hear her playing guitar or piano and singing.

Like Anna Nicole Smith, Walker also left Mexia as a teenager, heading one summer to Los Angeles with her parents. There she started pursuing her songwriting career, boldly seeking out stars, insisting that they sing her songs.

But unlike Smith, Walker remained connected to her small town roots through such songs as “Dusty Skies,” “Cherokee Maiden,” “In the Misty Moonlight,” and perhaps her most famous song, “You Don’t Know Me.”

“Stardom didn’t go to her head,” Flatt said.

But some young people think folks in Mexia are living in the past.

Krystle Wilson, 21, never heard of Cindy Walker. Anna Nicole Smith was her hero. She followed Smith’s career closely and watched her reality TV show.

“Young girl goes off to the big city - that’s every girl’s dream,” said Wilson, a mother of two preschoolers. “I kind of looked up to her. She wanted to get out of here, and a lot of young people would like to get out of here.”

On her way to apply for a job at Cefco, a convenience store next to Jim’s Krispy Fried Chicken, she said Mexia doesn’t offer much for young people.

“No movie theaters. No excitement. The same routine every day.”

Down the road at the Drilling Rig restaurant, Danny Fortson, 51, understands. He practically lived on the road for 25 years as a country and blues musician. But it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be, he said.

“People look for fame and fortune and think it’s going to be a good life, and it turns out to be their demise,” he said.

Fortson is married to Shelli Milam, 33, who owns the Drilling Rig with her brother. For most of Friday, she was doing the mundane but necessary business of welcoming customers, working the cash register and making peach cobbler.

She and many others in Mexia High School’s Class of 1993 left town. “There wasn’t much to do around here,” she said. She went to Dallas, stayed about two years and then came back to be close to her family.

From a parent’s point of view, Mexia is a good place to raise children, she said.

“Everybody knows your business,” she said. “You don’t like that when you’re growing up, but it’s good when you’re a parent.”

One customer, Kelly O’Hare, 43, who renovates houses, said that, as a youth, he liked cruising “the drag” in his 1965 Mustang, from the Dairy Queen to the old traffic circle.

He has three daughters, ages 18, 16 and 11. But he can’t find many lessons for them in Anna Nicole Smith’s death - or the perils of leaving for the big city.

“You can’t prepare them,” he said.

He’d just as soon see them stick around. Good or bad, Mexia is not much different from any other small town, he said.

“It’s Anywhere U.S.A.”

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NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Officials from the weight-loss supplement company whose ads featured the late Anna Nicole Smith said Saturday future ads will focus on ordinary people.

In a statement issued Saturday night, TrimSpa Chief Executive Officer Alex Goen said that while Smith’s dramatic weight loss from the product had “helped to catapult the brand,” he said its success “is not simply the result of Anna Nicole Smith.”

Smith died suddenly on Thursday at 39. No cause of death has been determined.

The company will now rely on its less-famous customers as spokespeople, people who TrimSpa President Tony Azzizzo described in the statement as “your neighbors, friends, family members.”

Azzizzo said the brand “now has thousands of successful weight loss spokespersons, albeit less heralded. Their weight loss experience is no less celebrated for them as Anna’s was to the world.”

TrimSpa has taken heat for some of their ads in the past. Earlier this month, Smith and TrimSpa were named in a class-action lawsuit alleging their marketing of a weight-loss pill is false or misleading. The Federal Trade Commission also recently announced the company would pay $1.5 million to settle allegations that the company’s weight-loss claims were unsubstantiated.

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After the news of Anna Nicole Smith’s death broke Thursday, people weren’t asking only about how she died.

They also were asking how much she’s worth — and not just based on wills and legal claims.

They were looking to sell anything and everything Anna Nicole, from Playboy centerfolds to autographed panties to bobblehead dolls from her stint as an E! network reality television star.

Slews of online eBay listings followed. And so did the sales.

A top seller, the domain name

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Anna Nicole Smith, the Vivacious blonde bombshell whose life played out as a twisted tabloid tale - Playboy centerfold, jeans model, bride of an octogenarian oil tycoon, reality-show subject, and tragic mother - died Thursday after collapsing at a hotel in Florida. Anna Nicole was staying at the Hard Rock Café, when she was found unconscious and was rushed to hospital only to be pronounced dead. The cause of death is unknown at this stage, and will be determined by an autopsy on Friday, Broward County medical examiner Dr Joshua Perper said it could take three to five weeks to finish toxicological and other tests. He said he could not rule out drugs or natural causes but she was not shot, stabbed or beaten.

It is presumed Anna Nicole was on a number of prescribed medications that when mixed together could become lethal. Her death comes only 5 months after the suspicious death of her 20-year-old son Daniel, and the birth of her daughter Dannielynn. Just days before her death details surfaced of a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Anna herself, and the product she endorsed known as “Trimspa”.

An emergency court proceeding was to be heard on Friday to determine the biological father of 5 month old Dannielynn. A California judge refused to order an emergency DNA test on Smith’s remains but ordered her body preserved until a February 20 hearing in the paternity case surrounding her baby. Smith’s DNA would not typically be required to prove paternity, but Birkhead’s attorney, Debra Opri, said she sought the test to make sure the infant being tested was Smith’s.

At a news conference outside the medical examiner’s office in Dania Beach, Florida, Seminole Police Chief Charlie Tiger said prescription drugs were found in Smith’s hotel room but there were no illegal narcotics, as had been reported by various media. “At this point, no evidence has been revealed to suggest that a crime occurred. We found no illegal drugs, only prescription medicines.” He did not name the medicines. Perper said there was no immediate indication that Smith had taken any large amount of prescription medication because there were no pills in her stomach. But he said he would have to wait for toxicology test results to determine if drugs were involved in her death.

Smith, who was born Vickie Lynn Hogan, was dogged by talk of addiction to drugs, including prescription painkillers, that was fuelled by her slurred words and unusual behaviour at awards shows and other public events.

Anna Nicole Smith, has already received much scrutiny, unfortunately it seems people have capitalized on her death as has happened with many stars. Some things are better left unsaid. Anna Nicole deserves respect and should be left to rest with dignity. I feel for the people left behind, her husband, her beautiful daughter and I feel for Anna. I pray that she may rest in peace and be in a better place. We’ll Miss You Anna.

Submitted by Lukey Mercieca
GenerationQ writer

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Marilyn Monroe, everyone kept saying. But Marilyn Monroe was a real actress. And Marilyn Monroe lived at a time when women had few choices other that to use their sexuality as their most important source of power. Marilyn Monroe was an icon when being beautiful was the only way for women to get close to powerful men. Marilyn Monroe was a role model when there were no powerful women to look up to.

Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t a throwback. She was a failure. If she were a flat-chested brunette, she might be alive today. She wasn’t made by her looks, but done in by them.

So why do we all try so hard to look like her?

I live in a town in which there are little Anna’s everywhere you look. Girls having plastic surgery before they’re old enough to drink. Breasts hanging out of halter tops, wheeling backpacks behind them on the way to school. Go to the mall and try to buy something for a teenage girl to wear and you think the stores are outfitting whores for the brothel.

That’s the “junior” department. Junior to what? The boys dress like slobs and the girls dress like sluts.

Go to the fashionable restaurants here and you see the middle-aged (and older) men and their teenage girlfriends, fresh off the bus, wearing shoes too big for them, barely able to walk in the heels.

What are these children doing out so late? If the genders were reversed, the women would be laughingstocks, ridiculed, beneath contempt. Instead, the old men sit with the young girls at the best tables, the objects of envy instead of condemnation.

Don’t these men have daughters? Is this what they would want for them? Where does it end?

We know the answer to that. There is never a happy ending. It ends in misery, and tragedy. It ends with the son of the teenage mother dead from drugs, and the big-breasted beauty choking on her own vomit. It ends with the men in her life fighting over the money, and a baby growing up without a mother.

The dumb blonde dies badly. What else is new.

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LOS ANGELES —  On Thursday, the world stopped for the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Harvard is electing its first woman president, and the country may be ready to do the same, but the woman of the hour was the one who, as the producer of her most recent film put it, “had the market cornered on the dumb blonde act.”

Why is there still such a vibrant market for “the dumb blonde act?”

“People will see that maybe I have a little talent and will take me serious as an actress,” she said, in explaining her decision to star on “The Anna Nicole Show” which began its two year life on E! Entertainment in 2002.

What people saw, and heard, was that she had difficulty getting out a sentence straight. But Anna Nicole wasn’t somebody to listen to, but to look at. Or leer at. In justifying the endless coverage, the news people kept referring to her climb from the bottom to the top, from teenage mother and waitress to television personality and multi-millionairess.

If Anna Nicole Smith represents the top, we need to teach our daughters to aim elsewhere. If her life was a fairy tale come true, then it tells you what’s wrong with fairy tales. They lie, and mislead. She made it to the top, if you call it that, by taking off hers. She never owned her own success. She was defined by who she married and the size of her breasts. She made many lawyers rich, by fighting for the rights of the golddigger, but she never really won the fight. She gained weight and lost weight, and turned it into her most famous role. She was defined by who she used, and who used her.

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Director David Giancarlo has pulled the screenings of the film out of respect for Smith, Teen Hollywood reported Sunday.The movie, which was scheduled for official release in April, was set to be shown to journalists, but Giancarlo has axed the screening and several others planned for next week.

“Illegal Aliens,” which also stars wrestler Joanie Laurer, had to shut down last September as well when Anna Nicole’s son, Daniel, overdosed in the Bahamas.

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New information surfaced on Anna Nicole Smith’s final hours. In Florida to buy a boat, Smith and boyfriend Howard K. Stern were staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

Staffers at the hotel are now opening up to fill in some missing details about what Anna was doing before her untimely death.

Details coming from the bouncers, waiters and others at the hotel depict Smith as a hard partying, falling-down drunk (see amateur picture - free unverified source) who could barely walk herself back to her drug-filled hotel room.

In fact, just hours before she was found dead, Smith was doing shots at the Hard Rock’s Center Bar in the middle of the casino. According to the bartender, she was slurring her speech and seemed “plastered”.

Her room resembled a pharmacy, with prescription meds such as Xanax, Provigil, Vicadin and Methodone.

The coroner continues his investigation into her death, but with details like these, we can assume that drugs and alcohol probably played a role in her unfortunate demise.

Meanwhile Footage of the final moments of Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith’s life sold for more than $500,000 Thursday after a media bidding war, according to Splash News & Picture Agency, the paparazzi outlet that sold the rights to the tape.

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