They love life, don't you know

A doctor who provided abortion services in Kansas was shot and killed today.

How many doctors have to get killed, how many Planned Parenthood clinics have to get firebombed before these "pro-life" cretins are labeled as the domestic terrorists that they are?

And start the backlash in 3...2...1

Ok, we have already seen that Kate (of Jon & Kate Plus 8) is a domineering biotch, and actually has "people" who help her be rude to fans.

Today we learn about the astounding dollars they are pocketing.

Jon & Kate get $75,000 per episode for their show (the network just picked up 40 more episodes), $25,000 for personal appearances, and $8 million from a new book deal.

And, oh yeah, Kate's own sister charges that the family is exploiting the kids. Well, yeah.

US Weekly helpfully compiled a list of some of the freebies the family has also received:

- Free beds
- Front-loader washing machines
- New furniture
- Free solar panels for "Going Green" episode
- Clothes from Gymboree and Gap
- Mady & Cara birthday at American Girl Place (2 dolls and birthday package for 2 adults & 2 kids): $710
- Trip to Florida Key's for Jon's 30th birthday
-Tickets to Dutch Wonderland amusement park: $309.50
-1/2 an organic cow from Natural Acres Farm: $1,395.00
-Tickets to Philadelphia Zoo: $104.00
-Tickets to Walt Disney World: $654.00 per day
- Utah house rental (estimate: $5,000), ski lift tickets $72 for six days), ski school lessons ($140 per child)
- Upright piano, which they got rid of when they moved into their new $1.1 million home : $5,550-$6,350
- Violin: $100-$300
- Old house re-carperted
-Crayola Factory Tour: $90.00
-Teeth Whitening (for Jon & Kate): $1,310 (average price for 2 adults)
-Hair plugs (Jon): $5,200 (average cost)
-Sesame Street Place tickets: $509.50
-Day with Thomas the Tank Engine: $180.00
-Beach trip to North Carolina, house rental, Jeep tour
-Sight & Sound Christian theatre tickets: $236.00
-SkyBox at Phillies game
-LegoLand tickets: $550.00
-San Diego Zoo tickets: $278.00
-Grand Wailea Resort (Hawaii) for 2008 vow renewal: Suites range from $725-$1,080 per night.
-2 purebred German Shepherd puppies: $1,000-$3,000 per dog
- Please Touch Museum tickets: $150.00
- Giants grocery store: $5,000 in gift cards and a year's supply of diapers

How did I miss Porn Day?

YouTube is deleting thousands of sexually explicit videos after it was hit by an organised attack yesterday in a prank known as "Porn Day".

The video-sharing website, owned by Google, has removed most of the porn clips but some content could be available for days as YouTube deletes the offending material. The pranksters hid the porn amid innocent footage of celebrities such as Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers.
- The Guardian

Damn - usually, all I find are videos of kittens and people singing Sinatra badly.

Baked & good

The Onion gets closer and closer to reality every day

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

What the hell was ABC thinking?

Can we fire ABC's programming department now? I seriously have to imagine the network is kicking itself at this point.

I just watched the season premiere of The Bachelorette, ok, a few days late but just as cheesy.

Oy gevalt.

First of all, at the best of times, this show starts out with 3 strikes against it - in fact, 25 strikes again it.

This is the version, of course, where the guys are going after the girl. At least with The Bachelor there are 25 usually smoking hot, often slutty (no less) girls, cat-fighting and scheming and double-crossing to get the guy. Good stuff.

In this version, it's 25 blah guys, many with the gelled, spikey hair (um, memo: the 3rd season of Saved By The Bell is no longer recording) and a bizarre obsession with their bods. Ugh.

But it could be salvageable if the girl was interesting and hot.

Unfortunately, ABC decided to capitalize on the fact that "America was shocked" (as the smarmy host says) last season, when Jillian was cruelly tossed aside by the Bachelor for a (let's face it) hotter girl - so they made her The Bachelorette this time.

Ok, first, she's Canadian. Hey, they are the nicest people in the world, you would pick Canada to apartment-sit for you if you had to pick a country to apartment-sit. But they are BLAND and boring. And this girl is.

And, not to be shallow - she's not particularly good looking. She's got a bit of a schnozz (which I actually sort of like) but no boobs whatsoever, which I don't like.

The initial meet and greet she had with the guys was just painful. No personality whatsoever. Let me tell you, a hot little blonde in a micro-mini would have made all the difference.

Come on, ABC! Don't you know what America wants?

Seriously, it's no wonder network television is dying with programming decisions like this.

The show has been one of my guilty pleasures, so I'll give it a few episodes to see if it picks up a little, but if it doesn't, let me tell you, I'm just waiting for Big Brother to come along and kill some brain cells.

Don't tell anyone in Connecticut....

...but I'm trying wine-in-a-box. Black Box, to be precise.

And it's pretty good.

An amusing little Central Coast Shiraz (they also had Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio and a Cab). The box is 3 liters, the equivalent of four 750 ml bottles - for 22 bucks! Ka-ching.

WTF is Tiffanny these days?

At one time, this girl was the heroine of every mall rat in Long Island and NJ. (Not CT, though, she was considered déclassé there, thank you.)

That looks like a girl mullet, doesn't it?

It was another time

Farrah Fawcett in her prime, Lincoln-Mercury and 60-second commercials for big-ass cars. This was when America ruled the world.

The world has gone mad

Kate Gosselin Scares Fans at Michigan Meet-and-Greet

In her first public appearance since acknowledging she and husband Jon Gosselin might split, Kate Gosselin briefly addressed their martial problems.

(snip)

Fans had mixed reactions after seeing Kate.

At one point, a girl put her arm around Kate for a photo, but Kate's bodyguard waved her off. "Don't touch her," he told the girl. Shannon Knapp, 34, Swartz Creek, Mich., told Usmagazine.com that she brought three gift bags with birthday gifts for Kate's sextuplets. "Kate looked so intimidating - I didn’t even want to bring the gifts to her!" Knapp told Us. "I felt like I might get my hand slapped."
- US

She has a bodyguard? She has fans?

The horror that is the office fridge

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- An office worker cleaning a fridge full of rotten food created a smell so noxious that it sent seven co-workers to the hospital and made many others ill. Firefighters had to evacuate the AT&T building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday, after the flagrant fumes prompted someone to call 911. A hazmat team was called in.

What they found was an unplugged refrigerator that had been crammed with moldy food.

Authorities said an enterprising office worker had decided to clean it out, placing the food in a conference room while using two cleaning chemicals to scrub down the mess. The mixture of old lunches and disinfectant caused 28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea.

Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment - she can't smell because of allergies.

It's not always the price

Because of the whole "weekend in the 'burbs" thing, I missed my usual Sunday guilty pleasure of The Apprentice, but I finally got to watch it tonight.

There was one particular shot where The Donald is giving out the assignments to the "celebrities" and is flanked by his yummy daughter, Ivanka, and his son, Donald, Jr.

Junior is wearing what is probably a $3,000 suit, but, I'm sorry, he looked like a schlump. (I think much of it might be the horrible pastel ties he insists on wearing.)

Me, I wear a blazer with a pair of jeans or khakis, and it's not even close. Ok, it's a $400 blazer, but you know what, it's still how you wear it.

Also annoying is how they keep calling Donald, Sr. "Mr. Trump." Ugh. Stop it. I was on his yacht several years ago for some party (he's since had to sell the boat - his "empire" is really just smoke and mirrors these days, just saying) - anyhoo, trust me, no one in real life is calling him "Mr. Trump" except for schtick.

Another little Trump note; I once had to bring The Donald's (now) wife, Melania, to a few media appearances when she was a guest "correspondent" for a show I was then working on. She is seriously a doll. Not only gorgeous, but a lot of fun and incredibly nice to hang with. So, for that, I will give him "Mr. Trump."

More nonsense from the right-wingers

The right-wing loons are having conniptions because Pres. Obama decided not follow Boy George's tradition of recognizing "National Prayer Day" - whatever the fuck that is.

And of course, the usual right-wing lies are spewing from the Fox News/hate radio crowd, claiming he tried to cancel it, or even won't allow others to celebrate it.

In fact, Obama is doing what the overwhelming majority of presidents have done, including the sainted (in the right-wingers' eyes) Ronald Reagan - ignore the damn thing.

"I could not do otherwise without transcending the limits prescribed by the Constitution for the President and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion nowadays enjoys in this county in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government."
- Andrew Jackson, statement refusing to proclaim a national day of fasting and prayer.

Do these dimbulbs ever tire of being wrong?

More importantly, why do these religious nuts feel a need to shove their religion in my face? How did religion become such a public thing?

Perhapse we should even go to the source itself:

"And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret."
- Matthew 6:5-6

Much more fun that that annoying Verizon guy

I'm loving these T-Mobile ads from the UK. Apparently they have done a series of them featuring dancing, which I guess is why the folks who were in that first ad I put up a few days ago thought they were going to be dancing, and not part of a giant Beatles sing along.

They used hidden cameras at the train station (in a behind-the-scenes video at the bottom of this post, one of the editors says, "If the general public spots a TV camera, game's over.")

That's true. People get just absolutely goofy when they see a TV camera.



And I don't know who Kelly Brook is in the more traditional ad, but me likee.



Here's a short behind-the-scenes of the train station shoot if you are interested in that sort of stuff. I always find those things interesting. And apparently they turn these ads around incredibly fast - they were aired the day after shooting them. That's some fast editing.

They're still talking about this?

The Supreme Court told a lower court yesterday to reconsider its ruling that threw out a $550,000 fine against CBS for the split-second television broadcast of singer Janet Jackson's breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

Can a few more of these clowns retire and let Obama appoint some more justices, maybe ones who don't believe the world is coming to an end because a nipple was on TV for a tenth of a second? It's been five freaken years!

This is why the religious nuts will never win

This is sort of like that great piece in the Antwerp train station, and it's why the right-wing religious kooks, the Muslim nuts or the Christian nuts, ain't going to win. People in the West just like to have fun.

A T-Mobile ad shot live in Trafalgar Square in London three days ago; the 13,000 folks in it thought they were just going to be doing some dancing thing and ended up being asked to sing along in a Beatles kareoke.

(Pink is in there somewhere, so not quite an unaware participant, and I'm sure there's even some other plants, but the idea holds.)

Leave the gun, take the cannolis

"The Godfather" trilogy in HD and surround sound is amazing. It was on HDNet Movies this weekend. Al Pacino looks like he's 12-years-old in part 1. I'm not sure if this or "Panic in Needle Park" was his first movie, but what a way to start a film career.

Of course, he eventually ended up in "88 Minutes," one of the most ridiculous movies ever, so, go figure.

Then again, Robert DiNiro wound up in "Meet the Fockers" - ehh, what are you going to do.

Airhead, silicone boobs

The boob got a boob job.

"Sour grapes, I lost my heart"

You really can't note Neil Young without thinking about Joni Mitchell.

Thanks, Sumner Redstone

I once did a post saying, Thanks, Bill Paley, the genius behind CBS (the network and the record label) for the TV shows and the albums he once made possible.

Today I say, Thanks, Sumner Redstone, who is basically Paley's successor in the media world.

Coincidentally, he just happens to be the guy behind the current CBS, but he expanded that media empire and is also the guy behind Viacom, probably best known as the MTV Networks - MTV, VH1, Nick, Comedy Central, CMT, BET, LOGO, and probably some others I don't know.

Thursday night, I stumbled onto a Neil Young concert on Palladia, which is one of his channels. It's a hi-def channel featuring concerts from all the MTV music nets - sometimes you get rock, sometimes country, sometimes rap, etc.

Wow, this was a great show.

Several years ago, in my music biz days, I worked in Times Square and was running across Broadway to my Chase Manhattan ATM and all of a sudden I see Sumner, who at that point was probably 79, coming toward me crossing the street from the Viacom building, and surrounded by a bunch of (I hate to say this, but it's true) toadies - well, at least they just looked like yes men, in their little grey suits.

I was just pleasantly surprised to see him walking around (remember, this guy is a multi billionaire who controls some of the most powerful media companies in the world) and I was taken aback and blurted out, "Hey, it's Sumner Redstone, whats up?" - Ok, lame, but what the hell was I going to say, I was in the middle of Times Square - and he said, "Hey, how ya doing!" He was probably surprised he actually got recognized, as I doubt most people would be able to pick him out of a lineup.

Of course, I've never seen or talked to him again, but I loved the fact that this guy, who controls CBS/MTV/Paramount, etc. etc. was just strolling around the streets of NY.

Anyhoo, I don't know if Sumner even freaken knows he owns Palladia, but I just want to say: Kudos Sumner, it's a great Channel.