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By SHARON FINK, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 10, 2002


GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER?: The idea is hysterically mind-boggling: Ozzy Osbourne is having dinner at the White House.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER?: The idea is hysterically mind-boggling: Ozzy Osbourne is having dinner at the White House.

Okay, so it's not as good as it sounds. The heavy metal god turned TV star and his manager-wife turned TV star, Sharon, have accepted an invitation to next month's White House Correspondents Association dinner, an annual let's-make-nice gathering of journalists and White House people.

But the situation is titillating enough to hope MTV gets it on tape for a special edition of The Osbournes: The president always attends the dinner (is the former Texas governor aware that Ozzy once urinated on the Alamo?). The Osbournes' invitation came from the conservative-leaning Fox News Channel (Bill O'Reilly is more ornery than usual because he wanted Enya), and Ozzy and Sharon will be the special guests of Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, MTV.com says (Greta can recommend a plastic surgeon in case Ozzy wants to start peeling off his tatoos.).

Ozzy himself is mind-boggled at the prospect of meeting President Bush.

"I thought I'd be on a wanted poster on the wall," he tells London's Express, "not invited to his place to tea."

SOME PEOPLE CLAIM THAT THERE'S A FORMAT TO BLAME: For the week ending March 31, Jimmy Buffett's new single, Savannah Fare You Well, received 32 plays on radio, according to stations monitored by Broadcast Data Systems. Buffett's 25-year-old Margaritaville got 391.

Still, Buffett's new album, Far Side of the World, debuted on the Billboard chart at No. 5, his best showing in six years, the magazine says.

SOME FASHION STATEMENTS ARE BETTER LEFT UNSAID: Australian Style has a spread this month devoted to the country's controversial Afghan asylum seekers. Not that asylum seekers were used as models. Models were used as models, and they're wearing designer clothes that are supposed to look like they belong to asylum seekers.

(One is wearing a sleeveless, square-necked purple dress that looks like it's made out of a thick flour sack. Something that looks like a cord is used for sleeves and the belt. The hemline is uneven. And the dress has a large patch of a boat on it.)

Also, the models' lips are made up to look like they've been sewn shut.

"We had something to say, that we don't agree with the way these people are being treated," editor Jacqueline Khiu tells the Sydney Morning Herald. "We wanted to symbolically represent that through a fashion shoot."

© Copyright, St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.