Rags to Pixels
Two years ago, Niyad Niyamizov was a shepherd and father of four in a remote mountain village in Turkmenistan. He'd never seen or touched a computer. Today, his animated feature, Desert Lullaby, is all the rage on the art-house circuit. What happened?

In Manhattan's Alphabet City, we caught up with Niyamizov sitting cross-legged on the carpet of film critic David Woodlawn. " Niyad doesn't speak English," Woodlawn explains. " For that matter, he's barely literate. We're witnessing a genuine cinematic miracle here." As Niyamizov tells it, speaking through a translator, an operative from the Soros Foundation happened by his village and accidentally left his laptop behind. At the time Niyamizov was known only for his keen eye and his skill with a rifle; he had no formal training in cinema, cartooning or 3-D digital animation.

"I thought David had lost his mind when he said this was the best animation he'd seen in years," confesses Variety critic Will Aleshire. "Desert Lullaby seemed very pretty to me, but it was extremely confusing and chaotic. At first, the shock of the new was just too much. But now that I've seen it 16 times, I concur with David."

The trip to Manhattan was Niyamizov's first outside Turkmenistan. Unimpressed, he plans to return to his tiny village as soon as possible.

You've Got Male
Last month, teen idol >Celia< set off an international cyberfrenzy when she announced her decision to choose a husband from her online fan base. As good as her word, on December 28 the Latina pop sensation married a Las Vegas bartender named Roberto Bogdanovitch.

"During my target-market week, I got more than 37 million e-mails," >Celia< said at her post-wedding press conference on the synthetic Caribbean island of St. Eustace. "Out of a fan demographic that large, I just knew there had to be a special someone — sensitive, loving and sincere. Well, I datamined all the files and I found him. Roberto is my true soul mate. He'll never be famous, but he's a genuine poet, a musician of talent and a soul who's known real suffering, I'll love him forever." >Celia< suppressed a sniffle. "He's the one man on Earth who truly wants and loves the real me. Come see him for yourself on my next tour!"

Ex-Files
When digital archivist Casper Grohl was hired to strip and junk the old college computer of Elizabeth "Zipper" Stafford, late wife of President Raul Stafford, the last thing he expected to get out of it was a runaway hit video. But Grohl's painstaking researches into Stafford's old hard drive have unearthed four years of extremely candid e-mail and a stunning trove of previously unknown footage from Zipper's live webcam. A clip from the collection became an instant Internet classic, and a commercial version, featuring a soundtrack by flavor-of-the-moment rockers Bride of Mondale, is this month's hottest download.

"Once I cleared the static out of those old jpegs and converted them into modern formats, I knew I had a national treasure on my hands," says the ebullient Grohl, who chalks up the video's success to the former First Lady's funky appeal. "The American people always loved Zipper because she reminded them of their sweet, nutty old hippie aunt," says Grohl. "It was fun to have a cool old chick in the White House — someone from the other side of the Culture War. But Americans never knew Zipper in her salad days, when she was a serious freak. Now that they do, they love her all the more."

"Once I cleared the static out of those old jpegs and converted them into modern formats, I knew I had a national treasure on my hands."