Last year's Miss U.S.A. Tara Conner celebrated her 22nd birthday Dec. 13 – and is also marking her first year of sobriety, she announced on Friday's Today show. And by this time next year she intends to have another accomplishment under her belt: a book about her experiences and life's lessons, she said on the morning show.Conner, from Russell Springs, Ky., spent 31 days at the Caron Foundation rehab facility in Wernersville, Pa., beginning in December 2006, following allegations of wild partying and wide speculation that she would be stripped of her title. Donald Trump, co-owner of the Miss Universe organization, instead offered her a "second chance" – provided she would clean up her act. (continued in People )
Get out your barf bags, because Tara Conner has announced she'll be writing a memoir about her time I rehab. She spent 31 days at the Caron Foundation rehab facility in Pennsylvania beginning in December 2006, following allegations of wild partying and wide speculation that she would be stripped of her title. What a Debbie Downer. She was much more fun to talk about when she was all coked up and getting down at clubs in New York. (continued in www.hollyscoop.com )
Friday, December 28, 2007
Alek Wek Supermodel
A model of modesty Alek Wek grew up in a Sudanese town wearing second-hand clothes and drinking rainwater -- and she was one of the better off. Those early memories help to keep her feet on the ground now that she has found fame and fortune as a supermodel, says Ciara Dwyer.
Alek Wek glides into the Merrion Hotel looking every inch the supermodel that she is. A giraffe of a woman, her legs are so long that they look like stilts. Her black skin shines with the essence of health. Everyone is spellbound; yet the Sudan-born model is oblivious to the effect her beauty has on people.
Supermodels are a rare breed, but Alek Wek is a different breed again. Imagine a model without vanity and devoid of a monstrous ego. Sounds impossible. But so too does the story of her life.
Alek was born in Sudan in 1977, the seventh of nine children. She grew up in a town called Wau (pronounced "wow"), where, according to her autobiography, Alek, she lived a happy, middle-class life.
"We didn't live in a shack like the people on the outskirts of Wau," she says. "It was a house with a veranda and two bedrooms. The boys slept in one room and the girls in the other. I was a city girl."
Each morning, her father went to work at the Board of Education in his suit and tie, and with a briefcase in hand. The children would go to school and Alek's mother would walk to the local market to shop for vegetables.
But the concept of status is relative. Middle class in Wau is not the same as it is in any Western city.
"The middle class in the town was made up of doctors, teachers and government workers who lived in houses made of stone and zinc. There were plenty of people poorer than us, who lived in neighbourhoods where the houses had thatched roofs and the adults worked in the fields or did other hard labour ... I always felt very comfortable with what we had, although most people in Europe or America would have called us poor, since we didn't have electricity, or an indoor toilet."
They had no running water; instead they had to walk to the nearest Unicef pump. They bought second-hand clothes from markets -- the same clothes that people in wealthy countries dump into collection boxes. And yet it was a contented life, where her father would listen to the BBC World Service on his wind-up radio and her mother gave each of the children a job to do.
"We had enough to eat, a solid house and simple clothes. For that we felt fortunate."
(continued in The Independent )
Alek Wek glides into the Merrion Hotel looking every inch the supermodel that she is. A giraffe of a woman, her legs are so long that they look like stilts. Her black skin shines with the essence of health. Everyone is spellbound; yet the Sudan-born model is oblivious to the effect her beauty has on people.
Supermodels are a rare breed, but Alek Wek is a different breed again. Imagine a model without vanity and devoid of a monstrous ego. Sounds impossible. But so too does the story of her life.
Alek was born in Sudan in 1977, the seventh of nine children. She grew up in a town called Wau (pronounced "wow"), where, according to her autobiography, Alek, she lived a happy, middle-class life.
"We didn't live in a shack like the people on the outskirts of Wau," she says. "It was a house with a veranda and two bedrooms. The boys slept in one room and the girls in the other. I was a city girl."
Each morning, her father went to work at the Board of Education in his suit and tie, and with a briefcase in hand. The children would go to school and Alek's mother would walk to the local market to shop for vegetables.
But the concept of status is relative. Middle class in Wau is not the same as it is in any Western city.
"The middle class in the town was made up of doctors, teachers and government workers who lived in houses made of stone and zinc. There were plenty of people poorer than us, who lived in neighbourhoods where the houses had thatched roofs and the adults worked in the fields or did other hard labour ... I always felt very comfortable with what we had, although most people in Europe or America would have called us poor, since we didn't have electricity, or an indoor toilet."
They had no running water; instead they had to walk to the nearest Unicef pump. They bought second-hand clothes from markets -- the same clothes that people in wealthy countries dump into collection boxes. And yet it was a contented life, where her father would listen to the BBC World Service on his wind-up radio and her mother gave each of the children a job to do.
"We had enough to eat, a solid house and simple clothes. For that we felt fortunate."
(continued in The Independent )
Zombie Panic Movie Review
The Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer's review of 'I Am Legend', the Movie.
What would you do if you were the last human survivor of an unstoppable man-made virus in New York City? Star in your own one-person Broadway show? Smoke in restaurants? Walk blindfolded through Central Park at midnight?
If you're Will Smith's Robert Neville, a miraculously immune military virologist who was researching a cure when panic broke out, the choices are grimmer. He speeds down Fifth Avenue in his Ford Mustang while taking aim at wild deer with his high-powered rifle. He saunters into video stores and has pretend conversations with the nonexistent help. Most important, he tries to find a cure for the virus.
The movie "I Am Legend" is based on the famous Richard Matheson novel that has twice before been adapted for the screen: the 1964 Vincent Price film "The Last Man on Earth," and 1971's "The Omega Man," with Charlton Heston. Matheson's core idea is so powerful that it consistently canceled out the clunkiness of those adaptations. The new one is no exception. You may want to laugh at it, but the laughter catches in your throat because the film's centerpiece – a humanless New York City – is so magisterially eerie. (to be continued in The Christian Science Monitor )
MOVIE REVIEW from the San Jose Mercury News
'I Am Legend': Plagued by its monster roots
By Bruce Newman
But after its promising setup, the movie "I Am Legend" misses opportunity after opportunity to be more than a monster movie. With the very real threat of a global pandemic so recently in the air, the movie has no apparent interest in either infection or panic. Or, for that matter, in the idea of closing borders to ward off undesirables; the movie uses this only as an opening for a computer-generated shot of the Brooklyn Bridge being blown apart to keep the "infecteds" in. "Legend" is full of incident, but nothing much ever really happens.
Smith tries to dig deeper than he's gone before to locate the psychological complexity of being so totally alone. But he's a naturally gregarious personality, so every time he enters a room, you can see him looking for a way to improvise a party. This meets with mixed results. You never sense the soul-crushing loneliness in him that the performance calls for, but he's so good at humanizing his relationship with Neville's dog that his fear of the dog becoming infected is palpable.
The plague's infected survivors -- both animal and human -- come out only at night, and are referred to at one point as "dark seekers." But, again, the movie has no interest in how this army of darkness was formed, only in subjecting Smith's character to the customary array of zombie shock effects.
Even the picture's most undeniably powerful visual -- an uninhabited Manhattan at midday -- finally gets so overused that you may find yourself wondering, as I did, how the production really got all that traffic to stop. (continued in the San Jose Mercury News )
Peter Rainer's review of 'I Am Legend', the Movie.
What would you do if you were the last human survivor of an unstoppable man-made virus in New York City? Star in your own one-person Broadway show? Smoke in restaurants? Walk blindfolded through Central Park at midnight?
If you're Will Smith's Robert Neville, a miraculously immune military virologist who was researching a cure when panic broke out, the choices are grimmer. He speeds down Fifth Avenue in his Ford Mustang while taking aim at wild deer with his high-powered rifle. He saunters into video stores and has pretend conversations with the nonexistent help. Most important, he tries to find a cure for the virus.
The movie "I Am Legend" is based on the famous Richard Matheson novel that has twice before been adapted for the screen: the 1964 Vincent Price film "The Last Man on Earth," and 1971's "The Omega Man," with Charlton Heston. Matheson's core idea is so powerful that it consistently canceled out the clunkiness of those adaptations. The new one is no exception. You may want to laugh at it, but the laughter catches in your throat because the film's centerpiece – a humanless New York City – is so magisterially eerie. (to be continued in The Christian Science Monitor )
MOVIE REVIEW from the San Jose Mercury News
'I Am Legend': Plagued by its monster roots
By Bruce Newman
But after its promising setup, the movie "I Am Legend" misses opportunity after opportunity to be more than a monster movie. With the very real threat of a global pandemic so recently in the air, the movie has no apparent interest in either infection or panic. Or, for that matter, in the idea of closing borders to ward off undesirables; the movie uses this only as an opening for a computer-generated shot of the Brooklyn Bridge being blown apart to keep the "infecteds" in. "Legend" is full of incident, but nothing much ever really happens.
Smith tries to dig deeper than he's gone before to locate the psychological complexity of being so totally alone. But he's a naturally gregarious personality, so every time he enters a room, you can see him looking for a way to improvise a party. This meets with mixed results. You never sense the soul-crushing loneliness in him that the performance calls for, but he's so good at humanizing his relationship with Neville's dog that his fear of the dog becoming infected is palpable.
The plague's infected survivors -- both animal and human -- come out only at night, and are referred to at one point as "dark seekers." But, again, the movie has no interest in how this army of darkness was formed, only in subjecting Smith's character to the customary array of zombie shock effects.
Even the picture's most undeniably powerful visual -- an uninhabited Manhattan at midday -- finally gets so overused that you may find yourself wondering, as I did, how the production really got all that traffic to stop. (continued in the San Jose Mercury News )
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Buffett to buy 60% of Marmon goes for $4.5 billion
The Pritzker family is Chicago's wealthiest, and Warren Buffett is the country's most famous investor. They knew each other but had never done a deal until Christmas Day, when the Pritzkers announced they would sell 60 percent of their industrial conglomerate, Marmon Holdings Inc., to Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. for $4.5 billion.
Berkshire has agreed to buy the rest of Marmon, which consists of more than 125 manufacturing and service companies, over the next five to six years. That structure will allow the Pritzkers to distribute cash now to members of the family, which is dividing a fortune worth an estimated $15 billion.
The Pritzkers, whose other largest holding is the Hyatt hotel chain, control a privately held business empire that dates back a century to a family of Chicago lawyers and was substantially enlarged by Jay Pritzker and his brother Robert. In a complex drama that led family members at one point to sue each other, the Pritzkers have an agreement to split up their fortune by 2011.
Tom Pritzker, Marmon's chairman and Jay's son, said the last six years or so have been spent building up Marmon but that it took only about two weeks to do a deal with Berkshire. Buffett, whose business moves are watched as closely as anyone's, also marveled at how quickly things moved."Our transaction was done just the way Jay would have liked it to be done -- no consultants or studies," Buffett said in a statement.
Tom Pritzker said the family's investment adviser, Goldman Sachs, called Buffett to see if he was interested and on the weekend of Dec. 15 delivered a phone-book-size deal description to Buffett, who was at the airport in San Francisco ready to fly home on his jet to Omaha.
When he landed, Pritzker said, Buffett announced he was ready to move forward.Pritzker said that arranging the sale over a period of time, in which the value of the remaining 40 percent would be based on Marmon's future earnings, represented "an elegant solution to seemingly conflicting goals."
Family members get money now, but the Pritzkers also get the potential benefit of remaining investors in a company they think can grow."We're able to use Warren's capital to give more freedom to those family members who want more freedom," Pritzker said in an interview Tuesday.
At the same time, "I do think Marmon has a great future, and so I want to ride that economic future."Pritzker added that if he had decided to sell all of Marmon on the open market to the highest bidder and not done a deal with Buffett, "several things happen: You don't get that future, and you don't know who you are going to end up with, and that can create what I call an 'event risk.'"Marmon, owned by trusts for the benefit of members of the Pritzker family, was an ailing manufacturing operation in Ohio when it was acquired by Jay and Robert Pritzker in 1953.
It has collective revenue of about $7 billion and includes business interests ranging from construction and railroad and intermodal tank cars to specialty pipes, metal fasteners, crane leasing, store fixtures and food-preparation equipment. It employs about 21,000.
The deal with Berkshire will close in the first quarter of 2008; prior to closing, Marmon will make "a substantial distribution of cash and certain assets to the selling shareholders."
In the statement announcing the deal, Buffett said he was looking forward to working with Pritzker, Marmon CEO Frank Ptak and John Nichols, the former CEO who is now a consultant to Marmon. Pritzker said Marmon has more than tripled its operating income and improved operating margins from 4.9 percent to 12.4 percent in the past five years.
Source The Chicago Tribune
Jeanne Carmen Dies of Lymphoma
IRVINE, Calif. (AP) — Jeanne Carmen, the "little country girl" who became a 1950s pinup and actress and hobnobbed with Frank Sinatra and other stars, has died. She was 77.
Carmen died of lymphoma Thursday at her Orange County home, said her son, Brandon James.
Born on Aug. 4, 1930, in Paragould, Ark., Carmen picked cotton with her family before running away at 13.
"I was just a little country girl that wanted to be a movie star," she told the Orange County Register in 1996.
Carmen was still a teenager when she came to New York and, despite having no show business experience, immediately became a dancer in a Broadway show called "Burlesque," with comic Burt Lahr.
She later went into modeling, gaining a measure of success with a series of cheesecake shots in men's magazines. One gig turned into a new career as a trick golfer. On tour with golfer Jack Redmond, she would perform stunts such as hitting a ball out of a man's mouth.
Carmen claimed that she later hustled golfers with Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli.
She came to Hollywood while still in her 20s, where she appeared in low-budget movies with such titles as "Guns Don't Argue" and "The Monster of Piedras Blancas."
Carmen also claimed to have had affairs with Sinatra and other celebrities.
She moved to Orange County in 1978.
In addition to her son, Carmen is survived by daughters Melinda Belli and Kellee Jade Campo, and three grandchildren.
Source : Associated Press Loose fat for Idiots
Carmen died of lymphoma Thursday at her Orange County home, said her son, Brandon James.
Born on Aug. 4, 1930, in Paragould, Ark., Carmen picked cotton with her family before running away at 13.
"I was just a little country girl that wanted to be a movie star," she told the Orange County Register in 1996.
Carmen was still a teenager when she came to New York and, despite having no show business experience, immediately became a dancer in a Broadway show called "Burlesque," with comic Burt Lahr.
She later went into modeling, gaining a measure of success with a series of cheesecake shots in men's magazines. One gig turned into a new career as a trick golfer. On tour with golfer Jack Redmond, she would perform stunts such as hitting a ball out of a man's mouth.
Carmen claimed that she later hustled golfers with Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli.
She came to Hollywood while still in her 20s, where she appeared in low-budget movies with such titles as "Guns Don't Argue" and "The Monster of Piedras Blancas."
Carmen also claimed to have had affairs with Sinatra and other celebrities.
She moved to Orange County in 1978.
In addition to her son, Carmen is survived by daughters Melinda Belli and Kellee Jade Campo, and three grandchildren.
Source : Associated Press Loose fat for Idiots
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