Bloody hell, Tom Cruise is pretty much everywhere lately. Besides expressing the desire “to dance and have big hands,” and, after having Ben Stiller characterize him as “a crazy screensaver,” the Cruise has become the unwitting victim of a sex-change operation.

Of course, that last detail is a highly embellished allusion to Cruise losing the Edwin A. Salt role, and now Columbia Pictures has given the Salt character a sex change and duly handed the role to Angelin
a Jolie. That’s gotta sting just a bit, but Jolie is far more bankable than
the Poison Dwarf lately:

After Universal beefed up Jolie’s role in “Wanted” and then marketed the action film squarely on Jolie’s shoulders and watched it gross $132 million domestically, Jolie reestablished in the wake of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that she is the rare female who is viable in an action genre that has been almost the exclusive domain of men.

Some industry watchers are hinting towards a moment on the horizon when Cruise will fade into obscurity:

Should we look at Tom Cruise’s career as being on a downward spiral when scripts are being rewritten to turn a character he was attached to play for a long time are turned into females and on the same day it is announced he will be a school cafeteria chef?

…Cruise is now loosely attached to a film called Food Fight for Working Title. The picture is described as a warmhearted comedy about a snooty New York chef who is forced to cook meals at a school cafeteria, with Cruise playing the role of the chef.

Oh, a kitchen diva role sounds perfect, and with the whole “big hands” thing, maybe Cruise can even play Rachel Ray in her yet-to-be-announced but inevitable biopic.

Meanwhile, Scientology’s “Marketing Guru,” Jeff Hawkins, has left the cult after 41 years of membership slavery in the Sea Org. While that’s light years from the billion-year contract that Hawkins signed, he certainly paid his dues by engineering the mainstream infiltration of Dianetics, which landed on the best-seller lists after Hawkins’ ads hit airwaves. Hawkins duty, according to Hubbard, was to create Dianetics ads that would “splash the volcano” at the general public and, as a result, hypnotize the public to join Scientology:

In 1971 he was invited aboard L. Ron Hubbard’s ship, Apollo, where he met the Scientology leader and was given the mission of marketing and disseminating the church to the masses, Hawkins says.

Hawkins says Hubbard told him that Earth is a prison planet, and we’re all trapped here. What’s more, the citizens of the galaxy have also been put here and hypnotized by an intergalactic dictator named “Xenu,” and that we are all simply dramatizing the incidents we perceive to be reality. “When you’re in, when you believe in it, you think ‘Oh, he’s this amazing genius who’s unlocked these secrets,’ and it makes a kind of odd sense,” Hawkins admits. “But the minute you break that kind of conditioning, and you really look at it, you go, ‘That’s absolutely batshit crazy.’”

After Hawkins’ ads raked in over $200 million for the cult, he was essentially demoted by David Miscavige, who allegedly punched and scratched Hawkins in front of an audience. Now that Hawkins has escaped the cult, he’s practically penniless:

Hawkins is currently 62, soft spoken, and has no retirement savings, having worked 100-hour weeks for the past 35 years for what he estimates was a salary averaging $2,000 a year.

Nice work, Scientology. Also, smooth move with that whole English work visa scandal, which will surely result in more cult investigations. Oh, but hey, go watch the Cruise as a balding fatass with big hands in Tropic of Thunder, which hits theaters Friday!