…these are the days of Madonna’s life.

As the Material Girl’s latest Malawian adoption soap opera continues to unfold, Madonna visited Chkhota Village in Malawi on Sunday, where she has bought land to build part of the girls’ school she’s planning. According to our photo desk, in this shot she’s being shown a map of said land she has purchased.

1) Nobody uses the term “haters” anymore; 2003 ended.  2) Nobody expects Paltrow to pretend she isn’t rich.  It’s the failure to acknowledge that everyone else isn’t — or even that not all rich people care to cleanse their colons semi-annually using fair-trade wheatgrass — that grates.

Ironically, today’s “BE” missive via email was one of the less galling; it talked about how to get the most out of your parenting time, and the twee psychobabble flew thick and fast, but it showed some improvement in the appealing-to-a-broader-audience department.  But…you know.  We already have an Oprah.

We will give Paltrow this: her hair looks amazing in those Elle UK shots.

Listen, we’ve got nothing against Angelina Jolie.  We really don’t.  We think she could stand to eat a cheese steak lately, but we don’t think she’s a bad person or anything; she’s a good actress, she’s pretty, she seems quite intelligent, etc.

But we’re very tired of this…well, “news cycle” isn’t quite the right way to describe it, but the tendency of every story about Jolie, or quoting Jolie, not only to focus on her children and her status as the committed mother of six, but to cast her in this saccharine, sanctified light: St. Angie of Toddler Acres.  The latest set of quotations is particularly syrupy, as Jolie describes herself as “[waking] up every day, just the happiest mommy,” and says she doesn’t want to miss “school lunches and things like that.”

Frazzled mommies wouldn’t mind a shout-out, we’re betting — after the jump.

You know, we have no idea how things actually run in the Jolie-Pitt household, so take this with a boulder of salt if you like, but that sounds to us like someone who has not actually had to make a whole lot of school lunches, or who because she has lots of household help is not required to make them every day, over and over again, for years on end, someone thinking that slapping some baloney and cheese on two pieces of Wonder Wheat is this quaint Norman Rockwell affair, like, it’s a baloney sandwich and a thermos of soup.  Let’s see how much you like doing it at five in the morning before you leave for the first of your two minimum-wage jobs.

Jolie does acknowledge that she’s financially fortunate and has help; we don’t think she’s completely clueless.  But now and then, we feel like the moms of the world would appreciate a slightly more relatable take on parenting — that a quote like “Not only is this a great script, but I won’t have to lay eyes on a single Spaghetti-O for three months and THANK GOD” might make other “mommies” feel like it’s okay not to be in love with their kids every minute.  Because if Jolie is in love with her kids every minute, when like four out of six of them are still in diapers, we…think maybe she’s legitimately mad.

]]> http://www.wenn.com/archives/3074/feed 0 http://www.wenn.com/archives/2648 http://www.wenn.com/archives/2648#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:22:23 +0000 sarah.bunting http://www.wennblog.com/?p=2648 Page Six reports that Uma Thurman made the best of the long flight from New York City to Utah for the Sundance film festival last Thursday — by doing yoga poses on the plane.  A witness reported that Thurman “started doing yoga in the aisles. She used the flight-attendant station as a ballet barre, where she stretched and did pliés for 20 minutes.”

We know experts advise travelers to get up and move around during lengthy flights, but that seems a bit pretentious to us…especially since the witness also noted that, immediately after deplaning, Thurman “ran for an exit and then chain-smoked like crazy.”  We guess the one cancels out the other…