Top 10 Bafflingly Dumb Celebrity Side Projects

Everybody needs a hobby, even famous people.  After all, they can’t just do the one thing that earns them millions upon millions of dollars, day on and day out, without some variety to keep their lives interesting.  Some celebrities have turned their hobbies into legitimately respectable second careers.

Key word: some.  Other times, they take part in something so absurd and pointless that you have to stop and wonder why they even bothered.  Not everybody can do everything, and these people obviously needed a good assistant to remind them of that.

10. Jada Pinkett-Smith Fronts a Nu-Metal Band

Yes, Will Smith’s wife, a pleasant woman if ever there was one, started up a nu-metal band back in 2002 called Wicked Wisdom.  Between this, her husband commanding you to NOD YA HEAD like it’s a real dance move, and their daughter whipping her hair back and forth, we have to wonder if Jazzy Jeff would’ve been the better choice for ultra-famous family man.

Luckily for her, nu-metal is the kind of music that almost anybody can make.  The chords are sludgy and down-tuned to the point where one finger is all you need to play most of them, the solos are virtually non-existent, the rapping is little more than talking, and singing off-key is basically expected.  All of which Mrs. Smith (or Jada Koren, as she called herself on-stage to fool the one or two people who didn’t know who she was) was an expert on.  Prepare yourself for the absolute best Wicked Wisdom had to offer, and then weep for your poor unfortunate eardrums:

9. Shaq Versus

Welcome to the twisted psyche of Shaquille O’Neal, where everybody loves him so much, they are willing to watch him do ANYTHING.  It’s not enough to watch him play basketball, or badly act, or badly rap; no, we want to see him do every job on the planet.  Or at least the glorious ones.  Nobody wants to see Shaq clean up raw sewage or re-pave a sidewalk, least of all Shaq.

And so he created Shaq Vs, where he competes with various celebrities to see if he can do their job better than they.  He has cooked with Rachel Ray, sung with Justin Bieber, performed magic with Penn and Teller, and told jokes with Jimmy Kimmel.  And he has failed every time.  Seriously, the only time he won was when he golfed with Charles Barkley and bested the Nathan’s Hot Dog Champion in a competitive eating contest.  And even then, he won by one stroke and one hot dog.  So Shaq can kinda play golf and kinda eat a lot, and that’s it.  No wonder he retired.

8. Hulk Hogan Opens Up An Italian Restaurant

Train, say your prayers, and eat your…spaghetti?  Yes, in the mid-90s, Hulk Hogan decided bad wrestling and bad movies weren’t enough for his legacy.  No, he had to include bad Italian food too!

And so he started PastaMania, a fast-food pasta joint in the Mall Of America.  Olive Garden it was not, as most of the dishes were little more than Chef Boyardee products, only insanely overpriced and featuring appetizing names like Hulk-U’s and Hulkaroos.  Within a year, the restaurant was gone, meaning diners who were in the mood for Beefaroni and Spaghetti-O’s had to go back to the store, buy it in the can, and then scoop it out all by themselves, instead of having a failed prep cook making minimum-wage do it for them.  It was good while it lasted.

In retrospect, Hogan’s biggest mistake was not trademarking the name.  A Singapore chain of restaurants, also called PastaMania, opened up in 1998 and is doing well to this very day.  All without giving Hulk Hogan one single dime.  Oh, the humanity.

7. Madonna’s Writes Children’s Books

Now, to be fair, Madonna has actually made money off these books, and people seem to like them; her first, The English Roses, is the fastest-selling children’s book of all time.  But then again, people like a lot of crap Madonna puts out, simply because she’s Madonna.  Remember, her butchering of American Pie was a major hit.

The fact that anybody allowed her to continue writing children’s stories after Rose is proof rich people can get away with just about anything.  The plot concerns a lonely schoolgirl whom all the other girls are jealous of, because they think she has a perfect life and is filthy rich.  She isn’t, but she somehow manages to convince everybody she is, even though she totally isn’t and doesn’t want people to think she is.  Yet she dresses and apparently acts the part, so the misconception is her fault.

And it’s not like she ever goes out of her way to prove herself; it takes a damn fairy godmother to set the other girls straight.  And so the Madonna Moral of the day: pretty girls are people too, and shame on you for needing magic to realize that.

6. Michael Jordan Sells Cologne

If there’s one thing Jordan was good at, besides basketball, it was slapping his name onto every product imaginable.  Batteries, underwear, hot dogs: you name it, His Airness endorsed it.  But sometimes, existing products weren’t good enough to capture his essence, so he had to create his own.  Behold the Michael Jordan cologne, the only Jordan-related decision worse than his minor-league baseball career!

We all want to smell good.  And those of us who grew up following Jordan’s Hall Of Fame career wanted to Be Like Mike.  But those two did not mesh together.  Why?  Because sweaty people generally do not smell good.  Jordan was very sweaty, but he could get away with it, being an ultra-famous athlete and all; for the rest of us, smelling like him did not land very many job offers or dates.

Amazingly, you can still buy Jordan cologne if you absolutely have to; just don’t expect to be taken seriously.  You’d be better off buying Donald Trump’s cologne.  At least he works in a clean, fresh air-conditioned office.

5. Gwyneth Paltrow starts GOOP.com

Gwyneth Paltrow leads an “amazing, super, fortunate life” and wants to teach you how she does it!  That’s the basis of GOOP.com, a lifestyle site launched by Ms. Paltrow back in 2008.  She dishes out unsolicited advice on all facets of a perfect life, such as fitness, fine dining, home organization, making unwatchable movies, and finding the very best pieces of fruit to name your children after.

Many people have labeled the site as “elitist,” because who asked the girl in the fat suit from Shallow Hal what she thought about anything?  Her response was that people who critique her “don’t get it.”   Well, she sure convinced us!

Now all she has to do is tell us why she chose the name.  GP are her initials, but where did the two O’s come from?  And why is her beautiful lifestyle site named after the slimy green crap kids used to make Creepy Crawlers?

4. Bruce Willis’ Sings (And Sells) The Blues

When you think of having the blues, what comes to mind?  Money woes?  Your spouse leaving you?  Your dog running away?  Your latest box-office blockbuster only making 75 million at the box office?

Bruce Willis feels your pain, at least on the last part.  That’s why, in the late 80’s, he released a blues album, The Return Of Bruno.  Bruno was a character he played in a bad movie you have never seen, who sang covers that inspired you to listen to the original a hundred times over, simply to dull the pain.

Two years later, he released a second album so bad Wikipedia doesn’t even bother to link to it, followed by a Classics Collection twelve years later.  Not bad for a guy with a couple hits he didn’t write.  The only thing with more padding than a Bruce Willis Classics Collection is the rubber room they presumably stuck him in after he recorded this dreck.

3. Paris Hilton Hair Extensions

Because when we want to find the perfect bit of fake hair, we trust somebody who just turned 30 and has all her hair.

That didn’t stop Ms. Hilton from releasing her own line of hair extensions a few years ago, which were apparently so bad she didn’t ever use them.  She was sued by the company manufacturing said fake hair because she didn’t wear them on TV like she was supposed to.  Instead, she used other companies’ fake hair and, as we all know, if you wear the wrong kind of artificial clip-on hair, you’re just going to look silly

To be fair, she probably did not do this maliciously and knowingly.  More likely, she was just being her typical moronic self and couldn’t tell one bit of fake hair from the other.  Though she was curious why some if the packages had her picture on the package.  She should probably ask her attorney about that.

2. Garth Brooks Becomes Chris Gaines

Previously in this article, Bruce Willis filmed a movie and then covered a bunch of songs in the style of his character.  Well, Garth Brooks decided to up the ante about a decade later by changing his look, changing his name, writing a bunch of songs under that new name and releasing a “Greatest Hits” by that new name, all to hype a movie THAT NEVER GOT MADE.

Garth went all out when creating Chris Gaines, forging an elaborate back story complete with past albums and former bands, all in anticipation of Gaines’ big comeback tour that would be the focus of the autobiographical movie The Lamb.  Of course, the movie was cancelled in production, which is what happens when everybody who hears about the idea and then sees Garth dressed as Gaines starts laughing their asses off and never, ever stops.  A select few are still laughing to this day.

Oh and the music?  It’s exactly what Garth Brooks playing mid-tempo 1990’s Adult-Alternative rock should sound like, meaning not interesting or inspired in the least.  So maybe he didn’t go all out after all.  Shockingly, Gaines hasn’t released an album since; sadly, Brooks has released many.

1. 50-Cent Creates THE Perfect Condom

No, it’s not a condom that costs fifty cents and is probably made out of wet toilet paper.  No, this is the ultimate condom, envisioned and overseen by the greatest rapper ever named after chump change, 50-Cent.

Called Magic Stick, these were supposed to be everything a guy could want in a condom.  Two problems: first, most guys would say the perfect condom is one that isn’t there.  No man gets excited about wearing a condom, even if there is a top hat on the box.  Second, they failed.  According to the man himself, “I wanted things in it that wouldn’t work,” so the entire line was cancelled.  Nobody knows what exactly he wanted in there: a flowery scent?  A built-in penis enlarger?  A tiny mp3 player that plays “Candy Shop” every time you get down to business?  So many unanswered, stupid questions.

It’s probably best these condoms didn’t work out though; the guy designing them has been shot at least nine times.  What does he know about dodging bullets?

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