Tattle: Stern signs on for 5 more Sirius years

SIRIUS FINALLY got serious.

Howard Stern, who's perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the continued existence of satellite radio, said on his morning show yesterday that he had signed a five-year deal that will keep him with Sirius XM.

By that time Stern will be almost ready to start collecting Social Security - not that he's going to need it. His last five-year deal with Sirius was worth $100 million a year. This deal's dollars were undisclosed.

Stern's announcement drove Sirius XM stock up about 20 percent in early-morning trading. It finished the day up a little less than 6 percent.

Not so indecent after all

It's official, the Doors' Jim Morrison was pardoned yesterday in Florida for a 1969 indecent-exposure conviction.

But Patricia Kennealy Morrison, who says she was married to the late frontman, told the Associated Press that she's not pleased with the pardon. She says that Morrison didn't expose himself on stage and that the conviction should be expunged or the verdict overturned as fraud.

"I have a real problem with the semantics of a pardon. The pardon says that all his suffering and all that he went through during the trial, everything both of us went through, was negated," she said.

"He felt and he expressed to me on numerous occasions that he had been made a scapegoat of the counterculture movement," Kennealy Morrison said. "He was out there doing what he did, making himself a really easy target because he felt very strongly about it. Unfortunately they decided to go after him for it. It was a complete cheap, cynical, political ploy. That's the way I feel about the pardon."

Morrison was appealing the conviction when he was found dead in a Paris apartment bathtub in 1971.

Kennealy Morrison exchanged vows with Morrison in a Celtic pagan ceremony overseen by a licensed minister, she said, although she never filed the paperwork to put it in the books. Morrison left his entire estate to Pamela Courson, a longtime girlfriend who was with him when he died. Courson died in 1974.

Tattle art

A Dali watercolor of a reclining nude that hung in Hugh Hefner's bedroom was among 125 artworks Playboy magazine offered at Christie's Wednesday.

It was one of 11 works chosen for "The Playmate as Fine Art" pictorial for the magazine's January 1967 Playmate-review issue, which asked artists to create Playmate-inspired art. The nude sold for $266,500 - above its presale estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 - to an anonymous buyer.

The sale represented only a fraction of Playboy's historic art.

* The Center of Olfactory Ar,t

dedicated to scent as an art form, was launched at NYC's Museum of Arts and Design yesterday.

The center will present its first exhibition, "The Art of Scent, 1889-2011," next November.

Elementary-school children are already excited about the masterpiece, "He Who Smelled it, Dealt it."

There is no truth to the rumor that the Please Touch Museum is going to create the Please Pull My Finger Museum.

Songwriter's son questioned

Nicholas Brooks, the 24-year-old son of Academy Award-winning songwriter Joseph Brooks, was being questioned by police yesterday after his girlfriend was found dead in an overflowing bathtub in his swank Manhattan hotel room, a law- enforcement official said.

The partially clothed 33-year-old woman was found in a Soho House room after police received a 9-1-1 call from the hotel about 3 a.m.

Water was discovered leaking from a ceiling, and hotel staff went to the floor above to investigate. They found the woman, dressed in a sweater and underwear, submerged in the tub.

There were prescription drugs found at the scene, and the woman had some small marks on her neck, the official said.

Joseph Brooks, 72, meanwhile, is fighting charges that he raped 11 women he lured to his apartment with the promise of a starring role in a movie.

Tattbits

* According to Entertainment

Weekly, "Christina Aguilera says the revealing pictures of her that recently appeared on the Internet were stolen and distributed by a computer hacker."

Damn you, Julian Assange.

* Wesley Snipes yesterday

began serving a three-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution McKean, in Lewis Run, Pa., for failure to file income-tax returns. Snipes, 48, had been ordered to surrender by noon.

The minimum-security prison camp houses 300 nonviolent inmates and doesn't even have fences around its perimeter.

Should Snipes tweak a muscle on the prison's indoor basketball court, the co-pay at the prison infirmary is $2.

Prosecutors claimed that Snipes had failed to file any tax returns for at least a decade, and owed $2.7 million in taxes on $13.8 million in income from 1999 to 2001 alone.

* Brenda Starr,

the redheaded reporter who was created by Dale Messick and whose first appearance came in a Chicago Tribune comic-book insert in June 1940, is putting the notebook away for good.

Alas, her employer is not buying her an iPad.

Writer Mary Schmich and artist June Brigman say they've decided to end their work on the seven-day-a-week strip, with the final episode to be published Jan. 2.

* "The Smurfs' Village,"

a free downloadable game for the iPhone and other Apple gadgets has become the highest-grossing application in the iTunes store because children who play it and buy "Smurfberries," unknowingly ring up charges on their parents' credit cards. Finally, a viable target audience to charge online for newspapers - unwitting toddlers.

Staff writer Ellen Gray and wire services contributed to this report.

E-mail gensleh@phillynews.com