O-Bits: Return of the O-Bits Edition

If you needed one more thing to like about Liz Smith, the gossip doyenne who died last November, there’s this: Donald Trump hated her. At  memorial held in New York today, Lesley Stahl recalled that Smith was so forgiving, no one held a grudge against her—except Donald Trump. Trump, she told the appropriately dishy, bold-face name-filled crowd, wanted to buy the Daily News, just so he could fire her, adding ” is there anyone he doesn’t want to fire?”

When I was a kid, I thought the movies based on Frederick Forsyth’s “The Day of The Jackal” and “The Odessa File” were pretty cool thrillers. If they didn’t hit in same way as the paranoiac beauties of  “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View,”  they were good enough for a night out. He never impressed me as a writer, even less after I started reading Grahame Greene and John LaCarré. This was brought to mind reading his column from the Express,  where he comes off as one of those officious Englishmen, the kind once played by Terry-Thomas, as he rails against anything that would have made Queen Victoria blush. His problem today: eco-cremation, or cryomation. He wonders why we  just can’t deal with the dead as nature intended: leave the bodies out so the buzzards can have their way with them.  I hope someone will remind him of this when he starts planning his own funeral…

We wrote about twins Alexandria and Anastasia Duval last November; Alexandria was accused of killing her twin sister by driving her car off a steep mountain road in Maui, a crash she survived. The state claimed that they had a heated argument before getting into the car, with Anastasia looking afraid. The verdict came down, and she was found not guilty. Don’t know about you, but I’d still never get into a car with her…

Steven Mirkin

Steven Mirkin’s diverse career has taken him from politics to pop culture to high art, offering him a front row seat to some of the most fascinating events and personalities of our time: writing speeches, fundraising appeals and campaign materials for Ed Koch, John Heinz and independent presidential candidate John B. Anderson; chronicling the punk/new wave scenes in New York and London; interviewing musicians such as Elton John, John Lydon and Buck Owens; profiling modern masters Julian Schnabel, Paul Schrader and Jonathan Safran Foer; and writing for TV shows including 21, The Chamber, Let's Make A Deal, and Rock Star: INXS.

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