The week before the finals, it finally seemed destined that Bristol Palin would be off the show, having again placed at the bottom of the judges’ scores. But, it was Brandy and professional dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who had done near-perfect routines, who were voted off. Shocked, the audience began booing. It didn’t matter. Palin was now one of three celebrity finalists.
Paulina Porizkova: Aging
(Huffington Post) Before you know it, you have joined the cult of the Scandinavian Stepfords. The members of this clan, like the once hairy-brunette-Italian Madonna and the once freckled-redhead Aussie Nicole Kidman now resemble no one as much as the blonde American Barbara Walters, who could, in turn, not only be their mother but also [...]
Voters choose candidates for looks more than ideas
(ScienceDaily) Voters’ choices are heavily influenced by superficial, nonverbal cues, such as politicians’ appearance, according to Christopher Olivola from University College London in the UK and Alexander Todorov from Princeton University in the US. According to their findings, voters make judgments about politicians’ competence based on their facial appearance and these appearance-based competence judgments reliably [...]
Bush wipes hand on Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with Haitians
Did that really happen the way it looks as if it happened?
Bush wipes hand on Clinton's shirt after shaking hands with Haitians
Did that really happen the way it looks as if it happened?
An antidote to the deification: Joyce Maynard’s account of her affair at 18 with J. D. Salinger showed a sad, angry, predatory man
In one scene she writes: “He takes hold of my head, then, with surprising firmness, and guides me under the covers. Under the sheets with their smell of laundry detergent, I close my eyes. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Still, I don’t stop. So long as I keep doing this, I know he will love me.”
An antidote to the deification: Joyce Maynard's account of her affair at 18 with J. D. Salinger showed a sad, angry, predatory man
In one scene she writes: “He takes hold of my head, then, with surprising firmness, and guides me under the covers. Under the sheets with their smell of laundry detergent, I close my eyes. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. Still, I don’t stop. So long as I keep doing this, I know he will love me.”
A shaken nation is soothed; ‘Lost’ won’t be pre-empted
By Jeff Thomas (Mercury News) The first episode of the final season of “Lost” will spew forth new layers of confusion and complexity (It was all a dream!) right on time after all, with the White House seeking to calm a jittery nation by announcing that the president will not interrupt the long-awaited episode by [...]
A shaken nation is soothed; 'Lost' won't be pre-empted
By Jeff Thomas (Mercury News) The first episode of the final season of “Lost” will spew forth new layers of confusion and complexity (It was all a dream!) right on time after all, with the White House seeking to calm a jittery nation by announcing that the president will not interrupt the long-awaited episode by [...]
Dave Barry on the money, madness and misery of 2009
By Dave Barry (Washington Post) To be sure, it was a year that saw plenty of bad news. But in almost every instance, there was offsetting good news: Bad news: The economy remained critically weak, with rising unemployment, a severely depressed real-estate market, the near-collapse of the domestic automobile industry and the steep decline of [...]
