How Katie was cast to play Tom Cruise's wife

NY Post ^ | July 1, 2012 | ANDREW MORTON

[opentalk]

On Friday, TomKat jumped the couch. Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise after 5 1/2 years of marriage. Best-selling biographer Andrew Morton, author of "Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography" (St. Martins Press), explains why it was a true Hollywood romance --because from the beginning, Holmes was playing a part.

When Tom Cruise turned 42, his best friend, controversial Scientology leader David Miscavige, threw a lavish birthday party, costing an estimated $300,000, on board the church’s cruise ship. He flew in singers, dancers and even Tom’s favorite sushi chefs for the bash, where the actor was serenaded with the medley of songs from his box-office hits.

“It’s the best birthday ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, and I mean ever,” he said, with typical understatement.

Tuesday, Tom’s 50th birthday, will lack some “evers.” He will be in his trailer in the wilds of Iceland, where he is filming the aptly named “Oblivion.” Instead of the expected cards and presents from Katie Holmes, she sent him a confetti of legal papers and correspondence marking the end of their five-year marriage.

...“Katie doesn’t want Suri getting deeper into the cult,” sources tell me. Suri is now at an age where she will face frequent formal interrogation about her behavior, what Scientologists call “sec checking.” In the fight for the heart and mind of Suri, her future religion —Katie was raised a Catholic —will be critical.

[x]

Even their prenup had, according to Scientology insiders, a series of mileposts where Katie would receive bonuses for how long she stayed with the actor. She received $3 million for every year of service, sources said — with a big bonus if she gave him children.

So she had a lot of practice when she took on the Jackie Kennedy role ...

[House Atreides]

All right, now I get the gay allusion. I must be extremely non self-aware to have not seen my obvious gayness. Not only do I have an iMac but I also have an iPad3 (which I’m sometimes tempted to caress). And of course my current smart phone of choice is an iPhone4. My god, I’ve become SO gay.

And to think that I was formerly a Blackberry addict and a proud owner of multiple PCs—starting with a 286 PC I bought by mail order in the 80’s from a company called PCs Limited. As I recall, I paid over $2500 for that primitive thing and was so proud of that green-screened behemoth sitting on our dining room table. I’d have been much better off taking that $2500 and investing it in that company’s IPO at $8.50 a share. You probably know that PCs Limited later changed its name to Dell and the cost of those IPO shares ended up being equal to $.09 per share after a series of stock splits.

And, by the way, I’m not coming out of the closet until after Rush does.

[Revolting cat!]

Wow, Blackberry is, the way I’ve read it, super macho, conservative Republican, 1%! From that to MacBook? Trouble.

[Lx]

I was thinking of the little Intel primitive 4-bit micro, a forerunner of the 8008.

I looked it up and you're correct but I seem to recall Grove saying it was originally designed as a buffer but if you look at the pin-out, it looks like a micriprocessor:

Looks like the same multiplexed bus as the 8080.

I don't remember what the PDP1170 ran.

Interestingly enough, it was at the local state university, Sac State that created the first true microcomputer (according to wiki) in 1972 based on the 8008.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

I like the myth that Macs don’t crash EVER. BS. My company had Macs in 2003 that ran OS9 and it was the biggest nightmare ever. Crashed worse than Windows 95. You’d be right in the middle of typing a Word document and everything would just freeze. When you got back up, everything you did was gone. It was such a disaster that my company spent millions junking the Macs and moving over to PC. It was horrible. The big boss was a real Mac guy until that happened. He junked the Mac at his house, too!