Permit La Russophobe to go off on a brief tangent, won't you gentle reader?

The New Yorker reports that Time magazine recently hosted a party to honor Wikipedia's founder at "a gala dinner for him and ninety-nine other of the world’s 'most influential' people, the Time 100, as they were called."

The magazine reports:

An encounter between Arianna Huffington and Daddy Yankee illustrated the principle that celebrities facing a dearth of conversational options invoke the names of other celebrities with approximately the same frequency with which regular people use the word “um.”

“Anderson Cooper loved you,” Huffington was saying to Daddy Yankee, as John Leguizamo approached.

“Are you from New York?” Leguizamo asked.

“No, I grew up in Puerto Rico,” Daddy Yankee said. “On my next album, with Interscope, I’m working with Dr. Dre, and Will from The Black Eyed Peas.”

“Damn, Daddy! You gonna blow up.”

Across the room was Mukhtaran Bibi, a woman from Pakistan whom Time had deemed a “Hero & Pioneer”: she went to court to protest after being gang-raped as punishment for her brother’s crime of walking with a girl from a different tribe. Bibi was less than starstruck by the scene. “I know no one and know of no one,” she said, through a translator, and raised a hand to her mouth to cover a yawn.