REAL-ESTATE NOTE.

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Author: Borowitz, Andy

Julia Roberts . . . has bought 32 acres of Taos, N.M., real estate from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, People magazine reports.

Sold: To actress Lindsay Lohan, a seventy-five-thousand-square-foot reinforced bunker previously owned by Vice-President Dick Cheney, for $18.6 million; originally acquired in 2001 for free.

For Lindsay Lohan, house-hunting had been an exercise in frustration. The “Mean Girls” star almost made an offer on outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Federal-style estate in Arlington, Virginia, but was reportedly “creeped out” when a second walk-through revealed twenty-four-hour surveillance cameras in every room. “It wasn’t for me, but I told Paris Hilton to check it out,” she says.

Next stop was the Silver Spring, Maryland, ranch house of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, but this time Ms. Lohan didn’t even bite. “Every room in the place was sealed tight with duct tape and plastic sheeting,” she remembers. “I was, like, whoa, my posse will not want to party here.”

Scanning the real-estate pages of the Washington Post, a listing for Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales’s Georgetown ski-chalet-style home caught her eye. “It said the house was ‘as quaint as old Geneva,’” she recalls. “I went on a ski trip to Gstaad last year and it totally ruled!” But the home’s antiquated plumbing was too daunting, even for the plucky “Freaky Friday” star: “Quaint? More like so last year!”

Giving up on Washington, Ms. Lohan decided to try Manhattanâ€"specifically, the Battery Park pied-Ă -terre of former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who raved that the place had “a great floor plan” and “no nosy neighbors.” The Teen People cover girl was hooked, but time was of the essence: “My broker said that if I liked it I better act fast, because Brad Pitt needed a place right away and was ready to make an offer.” The deal made it all the way to contract before Ms. Lohan received some crushing news: Mr. Kerik did not even own the apartment, and thus was in no position to sell it. “That’s what I hate about house-hunting,” she says. “People are always hiding junk from you.”

The very next day, however, she found the perfect place to hide from the flashbulbs of the paparazzi: Dick Cheney’s secure command center, buried five thousand feet below the earth’s surface. While the Vice-President’s fortress of solitude wasn’t the first underground lair Ms. Lohan had looked at, “the other place my broker showed me was more like a spider hole.” Decorated in a style that the seller calls “early NORAD,” the starlet’s new crib boasts five-foot-thick concrete walls and a state-of-the-art communication system that will allow her to speak directly to her agent, manager, and publicist through bulges in the backs of their jackets. But, most important, Ms. Lohan’s new address has what every real-estate broker knows are the six magic words: “undisclosed location, undisclosed location, undisclosed location.”

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)

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By Andy Borowitz