Because I Can (& b/c Ex-Laker Girls Still Rule!)
How many 5-year old children can you take in a fight?
submitted by The Duke
This short survey will tell you approximately how many five year old children you could fight at once. Results are based on physical prowess, training, swarm-combatting experience, and the flexibility of your moral compass. Here are the ground rules:
- You are in an enclosed area roughly the size of a basketball court
- There are no weapons or foreign objects
- Everyone is wearing a cup (so no kicks to the groin)
- The children are merciless and will show no fear
- If a child is knocked unconscious, he is “out.” The same goes for you.
CLICK HERE TO BEGIN
This was created by Matthew Inman. Thanks to this forum post for the inspiration.
ABBA Drummer Dead – Napolean Hat Found Nearby
Ex-ABBA drummer found dead at home
A former drummer for the Swedish pop band ABBA has been found dead in the garden of his house on the island of Majorca.
Ola Brunkert, 62, is believed to have been the only session musician to have appeared on all the group’s recordings.
A police spokeswoman said an autopsy was being carried out but investigations indicated the death was an accident and no foul play is suspected.
She said a neighbour found Mr Brunkert’s body on Sunday in the garden of his house in the town of Arta.
Police believe he fell and cut his neck indoors. He then apparently tried to leave the house to seek help but collapsed in the garden.
If He’d Just Cover His Breasts I Bet He’d Get That Scholarship
from Breitbart.tv
Mystery Bestsellers for February
snipped from IMBA, noted by Shelf-Awareness
The INDEPENDENT MYSTERY BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATION (IMBA)
Connecting Criminally Inclined Readers with Arresting Mysteries
The following were the bestselling titles at member bookstores of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association during February:
Multiple Dilys nominee Jacqueline Winspear’s historic mystery leads February’s hardcovers, while a timely espionage novel tops the paperback list.
Hardcovers:
1) AN INCOMPLETE REVENGE by Jacqueline Winspear
2) L.A. OUTLAWS by T. Jefferson Parker
3) ATOMIC LOBSTER by Tim Dorsey
4) AUNT DIMITY, VAMPIRE HUNTER by Nancy Atherton
5) THE ANATOMY OF DECEPTION by Lawrence Goldstone
6) THE BLACK DOVE by Steve Hockensmith
7) A PALE HORSE by Charles Todd
8) HELL’S BAY by James Hall
9) PREPARED FOR RAGE by Dana Stabenow
10) THE CRAZY SCHOOL by Cornelia Read
Paperbacks:
1) THE FAITHFUL SPY by Alex Berenson
2) MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust
3) THISTLE & TWIGG by Mary Saums
4) MAGIC CITY by James Hall
5) PUSS ‘N CAHOOTS by Rita Mae Brown
6) A FATAL GRACE by Louise Penny
7) THE WATCHMAN by Robert Crais
8) CHRISTINE FALLS by Benjamin Black
9) WHAT ARE YOU WEARING TO DIE? by Patricia Sprinkle
10) STORM RUNNERS by T. Jefferson Parker
Send Your Poetry to The Guardian
from Guardian UK
Sean O’Brien’s workshop
Sean O’Brien
Monday March 10, 2008
guardian.co.uk
A central figure in the world of contemporary poetry, Sean O’Brien is famous for balancing the demands of tradition and poetic structure with a flair for contemporary themes and local colour. He has won most of the major poetry prizes for his five collections, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the EM Forster Award and the Cholmondeley Award. He is also active as a literary critic and is Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield University.
Sean’s suggestions for adding drama to poetry
A fundamental skill is the ability to dramatize a poem, to give it the sense of three-dimensional life, rather than simply let it comment on its subject. Few of us are sufficiently remarkable to have interesting general opinions about life, but if we renew proverbial truths in fresh contexts we may be on to something.
Factors to consider in order to achieve this include:
1. The use of narrative rather than commentary.
2. The use of image rather than commentary.
3. The method described by the playwright David Mamet in his famous dictum “Arrive late and leave early.”
4. A sense of audience, which may for example require you to consider the function of the “lead” pronoun of the poem, e.g. “I”, “you”, “we”, “they”.
5. The presence of more than one speaking voice; or the sense that the speaker of the poem is addressing a particular person – which puts the reader in that intimate role. Alternatively, the reader may be an eavesdropper on the events of the poem.
6. The sense of the poem as an event that offers the reader an experience. In this context give careful thought to sentence construction. Formal? Conversational? Mixed?
Examples Robert Browning: My Last Duchess, TS Eliot: Portrait of a Lady, WH Auden: The Fall of Rome, Sylvia Plath: Sheep in Fog, Paul Muldoon: Cuba, Jo Shapcott: Motherland, David Harsent: Marriage xviii: A still life is how I see it – a cool approach.
Activity Write a short dramatic poem (30 lines maximum). Here are some possible openings which may be helpful.
1. When you come around here Waving flowers and a writ You’ll find me standing on the stairs.
3. “It will never be said in my country I have killed a naked man.” – “Matty Groves”, traditional
4. Give me a pear from the blue bowl, Jane. Give me five a day, for old time’s sake. Peel me a grape, disembowel a fig. Let fruit be waiting when I wake.
5. You were saying, dear uncle, When the doorbell rang?
Email your entries, with “Poetry workshop” in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk, by March 31.
The Case Against Breeding (In Bronze)
The Hollywood Numbers Game
Fascinating montage of Hollywood clips featuring the numbers 1 to 100. It took this guy 101 days to complete, and he got zero help from his girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend). Very cool tho.
Marlowe’s Favorite Christmas Gift
Why The Subway Was Invented
Reggae Sauce man faces heat in court
By Diana Pilkington @ Guardian UK
The singing star who created Reggae Reggae Sauce was caught in a pickle last week when he appeared in court accused of breaching environment laws.
Levi Roots, whose spicy recipe wowed judges on TV’s Dragon’s Den, is also the owner and manager of the Papine Jerk Centre in Lavender Road, Battersea.
In a bid to prevent flytipping, the law requires businesses to keep records showing how they dispose of trade waste.
But when a litter inspector visited the restaurant last July, there were no records to show that its waste had been lawfully collected.
Further attempts to see the records failed, and Mr Roots was summonsed to appear at South Western Magistrates’ Court.
On March 6, he pleaded guilty to being unable to produce any waste records between July 2006 and July 2007.He was fined £350 and ordered to pay the council’s prosecution costs of £153.Wandsworth Council’s environment spokesman Councillor Malcolm Grimston said: “Businesses need to wake up to the fact that they have a legal responsibility when it comes to dealing with their waste and our flytip investigators are there to make sure they fulfil these. Businesses that don’t could suffer the same fate as Mr Roots and end up in court.”
click below to hear Levi’s Reggae Reggae Sauce song
Spicoli Goes Brokeback with Disco Queen
clipped from E! Online
Sean Penn’s Man-on-Man Disco Kiss
Categories: movies, gay, music
Sean Penn does more than pay lip service to his role as Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant’s movie about the slain gay rights activist.
Just ask Mark Martinez, the performance artist who plays the late cross-dressing disco singer Sylvester in the movie. He got to lock lips with the Oscar winner.
Martinez’s one-day shoot centered around a birthday party for Milk, in which Sylvester performs his 1978 hit, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Martinez did the scene dressed in a purple, blue and silver kimono with a matching turban and black bell-bottoms.
Now back to that kiss.
“All of a sudden, Sean’s pointing at me, and he’s talking to the assistant director,” Martinez says. “The AD comes up to me and says, ‘Just to let you know, you are now going to break up Sean and [costar] James Franco’s conversation. You’re going to grab Sean, and Sean’s going to be really excited, and he’s going to kiss you.’”
And that he did. “I’m performing, and he comes onto the dance floor,” Martinez explains. “He grabs me, and he just slaps the biggest kiss on me…It felt like the kiss was forever. I’m like, Is he going to stop? I had to close my eyes. I couldn’t believe it.”
Martinez, whose professional name is Flava, tried to convince Van Sant to do another take. “I’m thinking, We gotta do this thing again. We just didn’t get it right,” Martinez says. “But Gus was like, ‘It’s perfect, perfect, perfect.’ I said, ‘No! It’s not perfect!’ Sean was laughing at me.”
Milk (above) was the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor assassinated by fellow city supervisor Dan White in 1978. Van Sant’s Milk will be released in November or December.
Pole Dancers in Santiago Solve US Dollar Crisis
By James Attwood @ Bloomberg.com
March 14 (Bloomberg) — Bikini-clad pole dancers, mini- skirted hostesses and a deal on foreign exchange await customers at Passapoga, a Santiago nightclub, who pay with U.S. dollars.
At banks and foreign-exchange bureaus, $1 fetches less than 430 pesos. Passapoga pays 600 pesos.
“This campaign has had considerable success,” said Jaime Retamal, 55, the club’s manager. “Customers come from all over, but a lot from the U.S.”
The dollar has lost a quarter of its value against the peso in the past three years, increasing U.S. travelers’ expense for hotels, taxis and restaurants in Chile. Passapoga is discounting the exchange rate to discourage Americans from cutting back on nightclub visits.
Drinks and exotic dances cost customers the same price in dollars as in 2004, when the growth of manufacturing in China and other developing countries caused demand for copper, Chile’s biggest export, to surge.
Boosted by exports of the metal, which reached a record $8,820 a metric ton on March 6, Chile’s trade surplus widened to $24.5 billion in 2007 from $9.6 billion in 2004. Along with interest rates at a six-year high, that increased demand for pesos.
So far this year, the currency has risen 15 percent against the dollar, the biggest gain among emerging-market currencies. On March 11, it reached 427.40, the highest since November 1997. It closed at 432.85 yesterday.
$23 Drinks
Passapoga’s special exchange rate means a 14,000-peso drink with one of the club’s 50 hostesses costs $23, instead of $32 at the market rate.
Patricia Kart, a Passapoga hostess for 2 1/2 years, said workers agreed to the plan even though it reduces their commissions. The promotion is bringing in more customers, she said.
“We have to take what the house gives us, and our job is to do what it takes to make the clients happy,” Kart, 28, said in a telephone interview from the club. “They are very content.”
When Squatting Might Help
Boyfriend: Woman lived in bathroomEDT By ROXANA HEGEMANThe Associated PressWICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A 35-year-old woman who sat on her boyfriend’s toilet for so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time he called police had a phobia about leaving the bathroom, the boyfriend said.
“She is an adult; she made her own decision,” said her boyfriend, Kory McFarren. “I should have gotten help for her sooner; I admit that. But after a while, you kind of get used to it.”The case drew nationwide attention after Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat in the two years she apparently was in the bathroom.”We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.”Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to mid-thigh. She was “somewhat disoriented,” and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.”She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Whipple said. “It is hard to imagine. … I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”She initially refused emergency medical services, but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.”She said that she didn’t need any help, that she was OK and did not want to leave,” he said.
When Poverty Might Help
Drive-by Shooting Incidents Down in Oakland, L.A.
from The LaLa Times
High Gas Prices Slow Number of Drive-By Shootings
OAKLAND — The return of high gas prices is affecting business throughout California, including gangs, a new study shows. With gas now at $3 per gallon and many gang bangers driving gas guzzling SUV’s, drive-by shootings have hit an all-time low. One Oakland gang member, Flaco, complained that his gang has been reduced to “bike-bys” and “walk-bys.” “Getaways are hell! And I look like some kinda ‘pinche’ paperboy! Who’s gonna be afraid of some dude on a Schwinn with a stupid basket?!” Harvey Shapiro, accountant for Flaco’s gang, told them that they’ll either need to switch to hybrids or give up on drive-bys until gas prices come down. Meanwhile, in the Echo Park neighborhood in Southern California, the gang ‘Big Top Locos’ had a bake sale to help raise gas money but were only able to make fifty dollars. Various gang members have been using the downtime to catch up with their families, workout, and go to church, but they all say they’re looking forward to the time when gas prices drop. Wacko, an East L.A. Crip, promises he’ll be back out once he can afford it, “Sh*t man, all I’s know is bangin’ and my mom is makin’ me whack!!”
Penguin Enhanced e-Book Classics
by Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly
Penguin is committed to trying different things in the digital space and things that work will be continued and those that don’t will be stopped, company chairman John Makinson 
told journalists at a luncheon in New York Wednesday. In that spirit, Penguin USA will launch a line of enhanced e-book classics this May, beginning with Pride and Prejudice. The new e-books, which will be compatible with all e-book devices, will feature an array of features, including a filmography, period book reviews, recipes and black-and-white illustrations. Price will be the same as the print edition, $8. Nine other Penguin classics will be released in the enhanced format in the fall. Makinson said the classics are a “great place to start” to test the possibilities of the electronic format.
Penguin has also announced that its U.K. subsidiary, which has been testing PDF downloads of first chapters for some of its books, will start to offer first chapters of all new fiction titles beginning March 17 at penguin.co.uk. Penguin Tasters will work on iPhone, Palms or Blackberrys and can also be read on computer screens or printed out. Plans are in the works to make Tasters available in the U.S.
At the lunch, Makinson said sales of e-books in the first two months of 2008 are running ahead of the comparable . The Kindle generated a spike in interest, but Genevieve Shore, global digital director for Penguin Group, said sales have come across all devices, with the most sales coming from the Sony Reader. While the number of dedicated e-book readers has proliferated in recent months, Shore said she believes the long-term trend is toward one device that will eventually allow consumers to do a range of things from reading content to making phone calls.
Nine more Penguin E- Book Classics are scheduled for release this autumn:
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
- The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
He’s Michael Bay/He’s got the power!
Michael Bay Must Be Stopped!
This is a nightmare of satanic proportion – there are some movies, nay masterpieces that must never be remade. Bay is a fine director no doubt, however, Roman Polanksi is an auteur. “This is no dream, this is really happening.” – Editor
snipped from MediaBistro.com
Michael Bay To Remake Rosemary’s Baby
Rosemary’s Baby was that most rare of beasts: A horror film set on the Upper West Side. It’s also a time capsule of New York maternal anxiety c. 1968 filtered through the minds of Ira Levin and Roman Polanski. You know, a classic.
A classic which may very likely be remade by Michael Bay (Transformers, Armageddon, Bad Boys).
Paramount, the owner of the Rosemary’s property, is close to completing talks with Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company to approve a remake. Platinum Dunes, which is helmed by Bay alongside Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, has been on a horror movie remake kick as of late. The other films they’ve landed the rights to include:
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
- The Birds (2009)
- Friday the 13th (2009)
Platinum Dunes were also behind the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Amityville Horror and Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes; it’s odd company for what’s widely considered to be one of the best psychological horror films of all time.The current word is that Fuller is currently soliciting pitches from various horror-oriented Hollywood screenwriters.
Iowa Man Celebrates 100th Birthday With Wings and Women at Hooters
from the Des Moines Register via FoxNews
If turning 100 doesn’t win you the right to celebrate with busty waitresses in tight clothes, Iowa resident John Persinger can’t imagine what does.
The centenarian rang in his entry into the triple digits at Hooters on Wednesday, according to a report by The Des Moines Register. His late wife Vi wouldn’t have objected, since she was a regular with him at Hooters, the infamous chain known for the cleavage it serves up with beer and buffalo wings.
The Register notes that Persinger is one of only a few thousand American men that are 100 or older.
“I don’t know how I did it,” Persinger told the newspaper. “Good living, I guess. A lot of good food. Steaks, fried potatoes.”
The 120-pound World War II veteran and retired diesel mechanic lives alone in a one-bedroom house, according to the Register. His children and grandchildren look in on him often and help him with chores — but mostly he does his own cooking and housework.
New Titles Out Next Week
snipped from Shelf-Awareness newsletter
Selected new titles out next Tuesday, March 18:
Seen It All and Done the Rest: A Novel by Pearl Cleage (One World/Ballantine, $25) follows an actress as she copes with reaching middle age.
Charley’s Web: A Novel by Joy Fielding (Atria, $24.95) chronicles a newspaper columnist’s interviews with a convicted child killer.
The Dark Tide by Andrew Gross (Morrow, $25.95, 9780061143427/0061143421) examines the aftermath of an explosion in Grand Central Terminal that kills a hedge fund trader.
Black Widow by Randy Wayne White (Putnam, $24.95) is the 15th thriller featuring marine biologist/government agent Doc Ford.
Dead Heat by Joel C. Rosenberg (Tyndale House, $24.99) follows the Secret Service’s attempts to stop a presidential candidate’s assassination.
Hooker Prize Winners @ AbesBooks
from AbesBooks.com
Our Recommended Books – The Hooker Prize
- The Happy Hooker
Xaviera Hollander
- Callgirl
Jeannette Angell
- Mayflower Madam
Sydney Biddle Barrows
- Love for Sale
Nils Johan Ringdal
- Brothel
Alexa Albert
Kate Christensen Wins 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Kate Christensen, The Great Man
Kate Christensen’s novel The Great Man (Doubleday) has been selected as the winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The announcement was made March 12 by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Patricia Griffith and Robert Stone, Co-Chairmen.
The judges—Molly Giles, Victor LaValle, and Richard Bausch—considered close to 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2007 calendar year. Submissions came from over 70 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. There is no fee for a publisher to submit a book.
Download the press release [Word Doc]
2008 FINALISTS
- Annie Dillard, The Maytrees
- David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk
- T.M. McNally, The Gateway: Stories
- Ron Rash, Chemistry and Other Stories
Motivational Poster of the Day
Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book
GREENWOOD, IN—Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book.
Yes, the whole thing.
“It was great,” said the peculiar Indiana native, who, despite owning a television set and having an active social life, read every single page of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. “Especially the way things came together for Scout in the end. Very good.”
Meyer, who never once jumped ahead to see what would happen and avoided skimming large passages of text in search of pictures, first began his oddball feat a week ago. Three days later, the eccentric Midwesterner was still at it, completing chapter after chapter, seemingly of his own free will.
“The whole thing was really engrossing,” said Meyer, referring not to a movie, video game, or competitive sports match, but rather a full-length, 288-page novel filled entirely with words. “There were days when I had a hard time putting it down.”
Even more bizarre, Meyer is believed to have done most of his reading during his spare time—time when the outwardly healthy and stable resident could have literally been doing anything else, be it aimlessly surfing the Internet, taking a nap, or simply just staring at his bedroom wall.
“It’d be nice to read it again at some point,” Meyer continued, as if that were a perfectly natural thing to say.
While it’s difficult to imagine what compelled Meyer to read more than just the back cover of To Kill a Mockingbird, friends and family members claim the strange behavior goes all the way back to his childhood.
“I remember when Phil was a little kid, instead of picking up a book, getting bored, and then throwing it at his sister, he’d actually sit down and read the whole thing,” said mother Susan Meyer, who declared she has long given up trying to explain her son’s unusual hobby. “At the time, we thought it was just a phase he was going through. I guess we were wrong.”
Camille Paglia Is The Best Essayist in America
clipped from Ms. Paglia’s latest column at Salon.com
(and her latest book BREAK BLOW BURN is amazing)
Sex, of course, remains a hotly contested issue within feminism itself. I have defended pornography and supported the decriminalization of prostitution, positions that I still maintain. (I hope that the valiant women staffers of the Emperors’ Club, Eliot Spitzer’s hypnotic Xanadu, don’t suffer in any way.) However, I am very concerned by a degeneration of erotic images in American media. It isn’t their mammoth proliferation that disturbs me (as it does many other feminists); it’s their antiseptic quality in this era of Botox and plasticized Barbie boobs. American sex is all flash and no sizzle.
One could see it in the banal pack of glamazon young actresses on the red carpet at the Oscars — with their parched, stylist-honed outfits, their bony Pilates arms, their immobilized faces and simpering smirks, and their vapid, perky voices. All of them were upstaged in an instant by Marion Cotillard, the best actress winner whose French sensuality and sparkling vitality simply leapt off the TV screen. In France, there’s still a mystique about female sexuality, a quiet magnetism that has been completely lost in the U.S., where at least our major movie stars once had it.
But even the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which used to be a luscious winter extravaganza of sinuous tigresses or golden California gals lolling in sultry, exotic locales, has now become utterly boring and flat. The artistry, charm and provocation are gone; all that’s left is empty, mechanical attitudinizing. Yet another cultural landmark down the tubes. If you want to see what a collapse has occurred in America’s imagery of sex, check out this 1961 Life magazine cover starring my pagan goddess of that era, Elizabeth Taylor. She is regally presiding with her gleaming Oscar for “Butterfield 8,” where she played a glossy Manhattan call girl. Now that’s a woman!
By the time we got to college in the 1960s, my baby-boom generation had access to a huge range of exciting female personae — from the splendiferous Diana Rigg doing karate chops in leather jumpsuits in “The Avengers” to the mercurial Edie Sedgwick setting off her elfin youthquake as an Andy Warhol superstar. Speaking of Edie, I found this “diaporama” tribute to her on YouTube, set to a song composed and sung by Étienne Daho. That led in turn to another video, where Daho does a deliciously relaxed duet on French TV with Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of the legendary Serge Gainsbourg and that British crumpet, Jane Birkin).
Here’s natural, invigorating French womanliness on display again in the supply expressive Gainsbourg. And despite the intermittent corniness of French pop, what an affectingly simple and evocative performance — a mature man and a sophisticated young woman exchanging meaningful glances and exploring a palette of authentic emotions. With the death of the vaudeville-derived variety format, we never get that on American TV anymore, except from aging country singers, who have become increasingly pat and formulaic in their stagecraft over the past 20 years.
Pulverizing Bloggers
snagged from Folio
Glamour Fires Male Blogger After Readers ‘Pulverize’ Him
Reaction forces serial-dater’s removal.
03/11/2008
Glamour has fired its controversial “Man Needs a Date” blogger after the site was inundated with comments from outraged readers.
In a note posted on Glamour.com, the magazine explained its rationale for removing the blogger, Mike Cherico, from the site: “Our ultimate goal here is to open a productive conversation about men, sex, love and dating; clearly, that can’t happen when the majority of readers would like to pulverize the blogger.”
The latest swath of vitriol for the Los Angeles-based Cherico—a high school English teacher who had blogged as a sort of “serial-dater” for Glamour since 2007—seemed to stem from a post he wrote about a date, in which he says he left a woman who appeared to have a cold sore. The woman launched a blog to counter Cherico’s version of the date, which was then linked to his post in the comments section.
Her 3,000-plus word post was eventually taken down, but not before the floodgates opened.
“It will be a truly disappointing decision if Mike still remains as a blogger,” one of the 200-plus commenters wrote. “I truly and sincerely expected higher standards from this magazine.”
“I realize that this punk is driving HUGE site hits, which equates to $$$, but at some point Conde Naste [sic] has to operate with integrity,” wrote another. “At least I hope so.”
Another summed up the call for Cherico’s removal this way: “How can a magazine that promotes self-confidence and health in women keep this toxic person employed?”
The dust-up generated reaction overseas, where a British blogger wondered if Cherico is the “most hated blogger in the U.S.A.”
For its part, Glamour says it will replace Cherico with a new blogger “soon.”
Taking art to the streets of L.A. County
New program allots 1% of new buildings’ costs to paintings, sculptures. In South L.A., employees and clients take notice.
The new Los Angeles County Administration Building rises four stories above Vermont Avenue, between 83rd and 84th streets, its clean lines and green-glass front striking a contrast with the auto body shops and parking lots nearby.
But something else also sets the county social services hub apart from the squat concrete structures around it: tile murals inside and outside the building, glazed with digitally manipulated photographs of oak trees to soften the bustle of South Los Angeles.
Completed this December, the building is the first developed under the Civic Art Program, which allots 1% of new county buildings’ construction and design costs for art.
Betty Frazer, waiting in line for homeless assistance in advance of her pending eviction, said the wall-sized mural in the lobby, which depicts a fence threading across rolling hills and alongside majestic oaks, gave her a “sense of beauty.”
“It makes it look peaceful,” said Frazer, 44, of South Los Angeles, “even though it may not be. You come here and it’s a headache.”
Now We Know What She Was Growing On That Farm in Kansas (and it wasn’t just her coconuts!)
from Newsday.com
Mary Ann of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ caught with marijuana
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
6:30 PM EDT, March 11, 2008
DRIGGS, Idaho
Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island,” is serving six months’ unsupervised probation after allegedly being caught with marijuana in her car.
She was sentenced Feb. 29 to five days in jail, fined $410.50 and placed on probation after pleading guilty to one count of reckless driving.
Under a plea agreement, three misdemeanor counts — driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a controlled substance — were dropped.
On Oct. 18, Teton County sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Gutierrez arrested Wells as she was driving home from a surprise birthday party that was held for her. According to the sheriff’s office report, Gutierrez pulled Wells over after noticing her swerve and repeatedly speed up and slow down. When Gutierrez asked about a marijuana smell, Wells said she’d just given a ride to three hitchhikers and had dropped them off when they began smoking something. Gutierrez found half-smoked joints and two small cases used to store marijuana.
The 69-year-old Wells, founder of the Idaho Film and Television Institute and organizer of the region’s annual family movie festival called the Spud Fest, then failed a sobriety test.
Wells’ lawyer, Ron Swafford, said that a friend of Wells’ testified that he’d left a small amount of marijuana in the vehicle after using it that day, and that Wells was unaware of it. Swafford also said several witnesses were prepared to testify that Wells had very little to drink at the party and was not intoxicated when she left. He said she was swerving on the road because she was trying to find the heater controls in her new car.
Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc.
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