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I have to be honest -- I don't pay a ton of attention to Kirstie Alley. I liked her on "Cheers."

Yesterday, she was on Oprah hawking her new weight-loss line, Organic Liaison, and reality show, "Kirstie Alley's Big Life" -- which will, according to A&E's site, "be chronicling Kirstie's comedic and unique take on her battle with weight loss." Hey, nothing I like better than a comedic battle with weight loss.

But a few weeks ago I read an article that said Kirstie took one of her Twitter followers to task (on her Twitter page) for poking fun at her. He was being snarky about Scientology, and her response went something like this:

@jefframone WOW, you are one BITTER ...go away..play with people like yourself..cynics and well [EDITED]...

And then I learned that she publicly attacked Joy Behar for her treatment of the Tiger Woods debacle. Also via Twitter:

CHEATING is between a husband and a wife. Not TMZ and Joy Bewhore God, I want to bash her ... with her microphone.

So I (of course) went to see Kirstie Alley's Twitter feed, which reads a little bit like a 14-year-old girl posing as Kirstie Alley.


She uses words like KIRSTIELICIOUS (her caps, not mine). I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- after all, most celebrity feeds follow the I'm-Playing-It-Safe-and-Yay-Me rule book. There's something to be said for not giving a damn what people think. But Kirstie Alley broke a cardinal celebrity decree: For heaven's sake, don't answer the insults. You've got 619,000 followers. Maybe you could ignore one or two?

Other celebs who should lose their Twitter card (in no particular order):

Tila Tequila
Maybe reality star Tila Tequila will give up on Twitter on her own. After all, she's apparently retiring from Hollywood to have a baby. The baby that she was planning to have with the now-deceased Casey Johnson, but now she's marrying the baby's daddy instead. Or maybe she had a miscarriage. Or a fake miscarriage. Or maybe she's adopting a baby from Russia. In the end, I'm just not sure her brand of crazy needs an audience.

PS-How many times did I burp in my phone message?? Call at 860-256-8452 or click http://bit.ly/9FGaN4 to listen to it

Ok baby getting REALLY PISSED!!!! BABY HATES TWITTER!!! Mommy Tila going to eat 50,000 cows now & off to sleep! See u tomorrow! nite! xox

Jessica Alba
It's not that Jessica Alba is a bad Twitterer, it's just that she doesn't Twitter. She retweets. Out of her last 100 tweets, three-quarters are retweets (with an occasional three-word add-on), and half of the rest are replies. Does she have any original thoughts? Probably, but she's not sharing them with the Twittersphere. Where's the payoff for her 176,000 followers?

RT @SELFmagazine: The February issue of Self is live now on Self.com! Enter to win @JessicaAlba's cover look! http://tinyurl.com/yc7gou4

RT @cash_warren: This week felt like it lasted a year. #TGIF >agreed!

Amanda Bynes
Apparently Amanda Bynes' 266,000 followers are hanging around breathlessly waiting for her to ... tweet another literary quote. #boring.

"Love will always dissolve emotional pain" - Louise Hay

"Instead of worrying about bad things that might happen, envision the best future, plan it, & make it so." - Ralph Marston

Ashanti
Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just that I grew up when people used to use entire words to express thoughts, but Ashanti's tweets read like a sixth-grader texting her friends. It's annoying. And nearly indecipherable.

I gotta jus say how classic it wz last night!!Doin vocals w DR DRE seein his genius 1st hand owww!!!&of course me & Game put it dwn!yesss!!

Awwwwwww sh*t its a problem!!!!! Me DR. DRE & GAME in the lab ohhhhhhh booooooy this is a SMMMMIZAAASHHH!!!!! http://tweetphoto.com/9709437

Yoko Ono
Yeah, Yoko, I know you were married to John Lennon and Barenaked Ladies sang a song about you, but that's no excuse for the new-aginess happening on your Twitter feed.

Listen to your breathing. Listen to your child breathing. Listen to your friend breathing. Keep listening.

Imagine water coming down a dry riverbed.

Whisper your desire to the wind. Ask the wind to take it to the end of the world.

Spencer Pratt
Spencer Pratt and Yoko are apparently on the same meditative high. Whenever someone's tweets contains words like "enlightenment," "bountiful," and "brothers and sisters" (in the non-family sense), I have to call a time-out.

Yesterday was great but I'm making today so much better! We are in control! Manifest positive today leave the negative in the dark! SHINE!

When you love and pray for your enemies that's when your finding Satori or enlightenment ! Praying postive things for enemies I need work!

Jane Fonda
I have nothing against Jane Fonda, but 90 percent of her tweets are simply links to blog posts on her Web page. Really. Wouldn't you think that the 62,000 people following her Twitter feed could save themselves a step and, you know, subscribe to her blog?

New blog post: BILLY BLANKS http://janefonda.com/billy-blanks/

New blog post: JEFF BRIDGES AND CARRIE FISHER http://janefonda.com/jeff-bridges-and-carrie-fisher/

New blog post: EXCITED http://janefonda.com/excited/

Kim Kardashian
A girl's gotta make a living, I guess. But it's a little hard to stomach that Kim Kardashian gets paid $10,000 to tweet about products. I guess when you have 3 million followers, you can charge that kind of cash. But geez. Don't you kind of want your celebrity tweets to be, I don't know, advertisement-free? I'm not naïve -- I know that plenty of celebs get paid for endorsements. But most of them keep their Twitter cash payments under wraps, and I salute them for it.

About 2 hit the gym right now in my sassy VATA gym gear! U have 2 check out their workout gear www.muscleflexVATA.com LOVE IT!

Have u guys seen QuickTrim at CVS? Its now available at all of their pharmacies!

Britney Spears
This is more of an honorable mention, because Britney's not much of a presence on her Twitter page. This is the feed of Britney's PR machine. Spears herself pops up every so often with a "How's everyone's 2010 going so far?" but for the most part, she's out dodging the paps. What I find intriguing is that 4.4 MILLION followers stick around for tweets like these:

There's a new BS Alert! See who's full of it at http://britneyspears.com/rumors

9 hours left to vote for Britney in the People's Choice Awards! Make them count! http://bit.ly/britfavepop & http://bit.ly/britfavefemale

While we're at it, who else should be ignoring the cosmic urge to Tweet?

More About Twitter on Lemondrop:
+ The Four Cardinal Sins of Twitter -- Didn't Your Mama Teach You To Think Before you Tweet?
+ Flittering: Speed Dating in 140 Characters or Less.
+ Tweet What You Eat -- Twitter's Shame-Based Dieting
+ Would you use Twitter to find a date?
+ Tweeting Too Hard -- Putting All The Self-Important Tweeters In Their Place


Kate Ashford is a freelance journalist who writes about personal finance and health (and other things). Without online shopping, she wouldn't own anything. Her work has appeared in Money, Health, and Glamour. For more, check out HerTwoCents.com



Feb 25th 2010 By Lemondrop Staff

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Crying Wife Syndrome -- What Movies Make You Bawl?

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The Crying Wife is a hilarious site created by a guy named Parker to document the fact that his wife, Hollie, will cry at almost any movie. We know what you're thinking -- a lot of people cry at movies.

But the film doesn't even have to be sad for Hollie to break down in tears -- the site has featured her blubbering at the ridiculous apocalyptic action movie "2010," the Will Ferrell comedy "Elf" and, yes, "Back to the Future Part III." It sounds mean-spirited, but she's actually on board -- as Parker mentions in the site FAQ, in addition to being able to cry at the drop of a hat, she can also laugh at herself.

We asked both husband and wife to step away from the Kleenex and answer a few questions for us -- then we all confessed which movies make us cry.

Lemondrop: Was there some kind of formative childhood trauma that makes your wife cry? Some kind of "Turner and Hooch" moment, maybe?
Parker: Most people ask that, and I understand why. Seeing someone cry the way she does would suggest that she's being hit by some repressed trauma from her childhood. Though that would be interesting, it's simply not the case. Hollie is nothing more than an extreme empathetic movie watcher. Her experiences with movies are on a whole other level than most people. She becomes attached to the characters and intertwined in the story. She forms this emotional connection with characters like Darth Vader and Marty McFly that I can't even comprehend.

Do other things make her cry hysterically? Weddings? Animal births? Majestic sunsets?
I'll be careful to answer this one because I don't want people to get the wrong idea. The answer is both yes and no. I'll start with the "no" first. No, Hollie doesn't cry hysterically after things like sunsets or a speck of dirt on a plate that looks like a heart. Again, her tears are from empathy.

For the "yes" part of the answer, yes, things other than movies will make Hollie cry. She cries when she watches a marriage proposal on YouTube because she is so happy for the newly engaged couple. She cried while watching Pam and Jim's wedding on "The Office." However, she doesn't cry if she's at the actual wedding. Just like when she's in the movie theaters, there's too many people around, so she's too distracted to cry.

Is there a movie where your wife surprised you by not crying?
Nope! If she doesn't cry after a movie (which happens), it makes sense. For example, we just watched "Where the Wild Things Are." A lot of people suggested it on our site, so we figured we'd give it a try. Neither of us have seen it before, and I was told that it was a tearjerker. I hate to say it, but we both thought the movie was horrible.

What's the saddest movie she's ever seen?
"Marley & Me" for sure. In fact, if you look at all of our videos so far, "Marley & Me" is actually the only sad movie that we watched. All the other videos caused her to cry tears of happiness for the characters. (I'm, of course, leaving out "Dawn of the Dead" and "2012" because those are completely different reactions.) I, for one, can't even remember if Marley was a boy or a girl, which shows how much I don't get into movies like she does. One thing I'd like to point out is that people seem to be missing the point of these videos.

Hmmm! We were still mystified at "2012," but Parker summed it all up for us: "Crying after movies is nothing to be amazed at. We get hundreds of emails a day from people who say that they're movie criers too ... Personally, I'd rather see a girl cry over Spock than over Jack from 'Titanic.' That's what makes it funny. It just seems like a lot of people are missing the point."

Well, we thought that was sweet. So we asked Lemondrop staff and contributors which movies made them cry.

Erin Scottberg, community editor: "Until recently, the only time I cried in a movie is when an animal gets hurt. The ending of 'Homeward Bound' gets me every time -- even though I know Shadow comes home, the waterworks just start flowing and can't be shut off."

Julieanne Smolinski, story editor: "I have the opposite problem. After literally being born with blocked tear ducts (SYMBOLIC), I just can't really cry all that much. Like, I'm sure if you hit me in the crotch with a board or told me that Jon Hamm had lost his genitals in a mill accident, I'd mist over, but in general, movies don't really get to me."

CJ Arabia, columnist: "'The Color Purple' always tears the ass out of me, as does any movie involving a hurt or dying animal."

Nicole Sia, contributor: "So this is straight-up cinema snob of me, but the end of the Swedish film 'Let the Right One In' gets me. Best vampire love story every told. SHUT UP, 'TWILIGHT.' Oh, and the fact that they're remaking an English version starring the little sister from '(500) Days of Summer'? Yeah, that makes me cry a little bit too."

[Redacted] Guy, columnist: "I don't know how old I was when I saw it, but when Artax died in that quicksand during 'The Neverending Story,' I felt confusion and terror. The coolest horse ever horribly suffocating in a sucking mouth of mud and sand? I was hysterical."

Teresa Wu, contributor: "'Armageddon.' I would never leave Bruce Willis to die. "

Emily Gordon, contributor: "I cannot take the final half-hour of Peter Jackson's 'King Kong.' Once Kong comes to New York, it's nothing but heartbreak and misery and anger and ice skating, and I just bawl like a baby. Somehow it combines breakups, being wrongfully persecuted and animal torture, and I cry at any of those three things."

Meredith Rodkey, contributor: "There's a very, very subtle moment in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' that makes me cry if I so much as think about it -- it's when Jim Carrey first goes to the office to have his memories erased. There's another man in the waiting room who's holding a dog's collar. I completely empathize with the idea of being so brokenhearted over a pet's death that you'd want to have the memories erased -- it kills me. KILLS me. And now I'm sitting here at my desk crying because I let myself think about it."

Carrie Sloan, editor in chief: "If a pixelated animal is sad, hurt or in danger, I'm a total wreck. You name it -- 'Bambi,' 'Finding Nemo,' 'Up' -- I always cry harder than all the sticky 5-year-olds next to me. Especially in that scene in 'Up,' when the rainbow bird, Kevin, who turns out to be a girl, hurts its leg and hobbles back to its babies."

Paula Kashtan, contributor: "'Can't Hardly Wait.' It's so quietly tragic."


More Good Stuff on the Web:

Wife Pranks Her Husband -- Does She Go Too Far? (Gorillamask) site NSFW

Funny Pictures of Adorable Kids in Awkward Situations (My First Fail)


Rainbow wedding will warm your heart, hurt your eyes (Wedinator)
How to avoid getting your heart broken (Lemondrop)