- Local TV anchors, especially female ones, tend to get
their jobs at least in part because they are, um, good eye candy. Sure, they
can be smart and well-educated and many are, but obese chicks with mullets and
full upper-arm tattoos aren't getting jobs as news anchors or weather girls. Fox
44 meteorologist Chelsea Ingram, who predicts the weather for Burlington, Vermont’s
news leader, is
the walking embodiment of this reality and now she has the sash and crown to
prove it. In what had to be a very prestigious event held at the event Mecca
that is South Burlington High School, 10 contestants from around the state
competed for the crown. You know your state is small when only 10 women are
competing for a beauty pageant title and the pageant is held at a local high
school. For being named Miss Vermont, Ingram receives $9,000 in scholarships,
over $12,000 in prizes and the opportunity to compete for the Miss America
title in Las Vegas. Her story is truly a miraculous rise from obscurity as a
post-graduate student at Lyndon State College to being offered a job before the
end of her first semester and offering inaccurate weather forecasts to a city
that lives in a perpetual state of winter. In her year as Miss Vermont, Ingram
will have to balance her day job with traveling the dozens and dozens of miles
around the state, advocating her platform issue, heart disease. Her pretty face
will talk to various government representatives, business leaders, community
groups and citizens-at-large, urging them to do more on the issue of heart
disease and prevention………
- Facebook changes never go over well with the social
networking site’s millions of users. No matter how small or obscure, once news
of the changes gets out, mass outrage follows. This time, Facebook may actually
deserve the anger being hurled its way like monkey feces being flung by the
inmates at the zoo. After new @facebook.com e-mail addresses assigned to every user led to
contact email addresses being reset for millions of those users, Facebook was
quick to place the blame on a virus. A Facebook official said the social
network did intend to give its exclusive visibility on user profiles, but
blamed the bug for resetting the contacts’ email addresses for users. The
changes led to misdirected e-mails across the Internet and on certain devices,
the bug was syncing the last e-mail linked to the account instead of the
primary address set by a user, Facebook engineering director Andrew Bosworth
confirmed. This led to phones were pulling down @facebook.com addresses,
unknown to their users, leading to messages sent to the wrong, and often
unchecked, inboxes. While many devices did not have the issue, enough users
were affected for the issue to go viral. Facebook insisted it was working on
the issue and expected to have it resolved soon so smartphones will go back to
pulling correct addresses. Until then, users can cope by adjusting their
privacy settings to get their show their primary e-mail address and not their
Facebook one. In an ironic twist, the new Facebook email system was supposed to
give users more control over their messages. Once the system is in place and
the bugs are ironed out, users can specify whether they want to receive messages
from Friends, Friend of Friends, or Everyone and they may actually receive
those messages. Under the new system, if someone sends an e-mail to a @facebook.com
address and it's from an address associated with a Facebook friend or friend of
friend's accounts, it will go into the inbox. All other messages will be sent
to a separate folder, unless the user has specified in his or her privacy
settings that they only want to receive messages from friends or friend of
friends, in which case the message will be rejected. It sounds
confusing, but eventually it may work, even if a lot of people are infuriated
along the way…………
- The wisdom of Kenny Powers lives on. Powers, the fictional
baseball star of
HBO's "Eastbound and Down," is alive and well after being presumed
dead and off to the TV afterlife. Powers, who says bombastic things like, “I'm the man who has the ball. I'm the man who can throw
it faster than f**k. So that is why I am better than everyone in the world.
Kiss my ass and suck my d**k, everyone,” was supposed to be done after three
seasons. The smack-talking, watercraft-loving, heat-throwing all-star
had the apparent final chapter of his story in the show’s spring finale, co-produced
by Will Ferrell and frequent collaborator Adam McKay. The episode appeared to
chronicle the end of the Powers saga as long-suffering assistant Stevie moved
out of Powers’ Myrtle Beach pad, Powers’ sex-and-drug-paraphernalia-laden baby
room was turned back into a dojo and the star of the show was called up to the
majors, smoked a couple of strikes and then walked away and appeared to die in
a fiery DUI car crash. That turned out to be a ruse, as Powers has apparently
taken a page from the playbook of Dr. Gregory House, the star of Fox’s hit
medical series “House,” and faked his own death. House faked his demise by
setting a building on fire and escaping at the last minute, but Powers faked
his passing with different motives. The plan now that HBO has ordered eight
more episodes of the Danny McBride-starring show is for Powers to get back with
his lady love April and realize that being a star athlete isn’t everything.
McBride sounded like a man ready to move on and hang up La Flama Blanca's
cleats. "HBO definitely wants us, and [co-creator] Jody Hill and I love
writing for the show," McBride said. e. "But there is other stuff
we'd like to do. Both of us are ready to make jokes concerning people who don't
have strange haircuts." Whether it was a huge contract offer or merely the
realization that he could no longer be a fictional baseball badass, McBride apparently
has a few fastballs left to throw………..
- Riot Watch! Riot Watch! Life turned violent Monday in western China,
where a violent protest against a planned copper alloy plant certainly kicked
things up a notch. Protestors began gathering outside a local government
building Sunday, one day too late to crash a signing ceremony for the contract to
build the $1.6-billion metal factory but in plenty of time to clash with
police. Thousands of residents skirmished with The Man even as the Shifang
government in Sichuan province warned on its micro-blog Tuesday that anyone who
had “enticed, planned and organized the illegal gathering and protest or
participated in the vandalism ... would be severely published.” That sounds
like an open invitation to any self-respecting dissident and sure enough, the
sh*t his the fan Monday when police fired tear gas and stun grenades into the
crowd, estimated by some to be in the tens of thousands and with many elderly
and children in attendance. Why did police respond so violently? Because they
were under attack from a hodgepodge of flying implements, including bricks,
potted plants and water bottles. The government said 13 protesters were injured
in the melee, but opposition groups placed the number higher and speculated
that there may have been fatalities. Despite the excessive reaction to the
protest, the uprising did achieve its aim as the government announced it would
suspend the project and seek counsel from local residents on how to proceed. In
an odd twist, officials then blamed the Dalai Lama and the banned spiritual
group Falun Gong for instigating the unrest. “Ordinary people basically worried that
the Hongda program would pollute their environment,” Chen Lin, Shifang’s vice
director of propaganda and spokesman, said. “They first started something online, then
they put it into practice. A lot of people were simply watching in the
beginning, but then some extreme people were involved and then created physical
conflicts.” If only there were more of those “extreme people” in the world. Images of authorities beating residents
with batons, police vehicles overturned and protesters carrying signs
circulated online in the hours after the attack, showing the boldness of the
protestors as they sought to block a project they believe will harm the already
heavily-polluted environment in their region……….
- It’s too bad Donovan
McNabb doesn’t own an NFL team or run his own hall of fame because then, he
could be a starting quarterback and a surefire hall of famer in waiting. The
35-year-old former All-Pro, who has fallen off a virtual cliff the past couple
years, first being traded from Philadelphia to Washington before moving on to
Minnesota and losing his starting job to rookie Christian Ponder after six
games last season, said not long ago that he believes he belongs in the Hall of
Fame. "Even these last two years, when people may look at it and say, 'Oh,
he's done, or whatever.' I'm 34, 35 years old, but still, I played at the
pinnacle, I played at the highest level of my career. I played there,"
McNabb said. "And I would vote for myself for the Hall of Fame." Even
though he was released by the Vikings and there hasn’t exactly been a line of
teams wanting to sign him, McNabb has made it know that he has lost weight and
gotten into better shape in recent months, raising the obvious question of why
he didn’t dedicate himself to his conditioning sooner. But late last week, he
predicted there's "an 80 to 90 percent chance" he'll play this
season. "I do want to play," he explained. "The most important
thing is I have about three teams I'm looking at. ... We won't name those three
teams." The key in McNabb’s statement is teams he and his agent are
looking at and not the other way around. He believes a team will call him
during training camp if they have an injury or their young quarterback
struggles, but there are plenty of better options than a 35-year-old guy with
conditioning issues and his best years well behind him………..
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