Comedy fundraiser for VT

Steve Hofstetter of collegehumor.com has performed at Virginia Tech over the years, he and some comedian friends are organizing a 5/2 benefit for the families of the victims.

More on info on the benefit here: http://helpthehokies.com/

GET INVOLVED!

-INVITE. Tell your friends to join this facebook group. To help, Steve will donate one cent for everyone that joins.

-DONATE. You don't have to donate as much as Steve, but give a penny for everyone on your friends list. Every bit helps.

-SHOW UP. Road trip it to Strasburg and show that you care in person.

For more ways to help, visit http://helpthehokies.com/

Recent Katrina News

“Yet, 19 months after the levees broke and destroyed parts of the city, people are still struggling to get back to a ‘normal' life.”

Most restaurants close at 10 p.m., she wrote. Nonfunctioning traffic lights sit curled up on street corners, twisted and uprooted from their cement bases. Many streets lack street signs. Schools, health care providers, restaurants and groceries are absent in many parts of the city.

“I found myself wondering,” Sadasivam wrote, “ ‘How can this be?' and ‘How can this be happening in America?' ” - The storm has not ended: UCD law students spend spring break helping victims of Hurricane Katrina

DONATE!

Many of his clients, said Mr. Bricker, were residents of New Orleans' public housing projects, evacuated from low-rise brick apartment buildings now shut down by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which plans to raze the units and replace them with mixed-income homes.

"With minor repairs," said Mr. Bricker of the barricaded projects, "poor people could move back in there tomorrow."

During a luncheon prior to the panel discussion, Kenneth Feinberg, the Washington, D.C., attorney appointed special master of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, asked a simple question: Why has such a fund not been established by the federal government in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? - Columbia Law Panel Probes Slow Response to Katrina

More News, Good and Bad
U2's instruments auctioned off to help Katrina victims
FEMA wants Katrina aid back
Google updates Katrina imagery, denies it’s evil

Pity the soul that makes cash off of Katrina!

Tori Amos is Crazy and I Love Her

Tori Amos - American Doll Posse Dutch Interview

BIG WHEEL VIDEO AND INTRO TO THE GIRLS!


My favorite songs right now from American Doll Posse are...Smokey Joe, Mr. Bad Man, and Girl Disappearing. If you know what you're doing you should be able to find the complete album on the nets. And then be sure to buy it in person the first week, ears with feet help with sales!

Anatomy of a HOAX: Harry Potter 7 LEAKED

I am a huge Harry Potter fan. First read the first 2 books in 1999 and was forever hooked. In the past 8 years I've waited in line for the books at midnight like everyone else. Last year I was fedup with the lines and was happy to find a .pdf of the Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince online a week before it's release. I bought the book about a month later, as any real Potter fan would. I wondered how long the book would take to leak to the internet this time around. So I've been searching every month for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows/Deathly Hollows. This week on a fav torrent site I found a 659 page book that looked like the right thing.

The words seem to go the way they should and on page 8 we find Dudley Dursley is a wizard! Which made much sense and got me hooked. 24 hours later I was satisfied with the ending to the series. So happy I made it into a cell phone ebook and sent it to 2 friends. So happy I posted about my glee on livejournal...a friend's response, "uh, wasn't that found to be fake?"

WHAT, WHAT WHA? No Way! It's perfect this version! Harry Potter and Ginny make out all the time. Harry and Ron get wasted on Firewhiskey a bunch! The story is told from the pov of all the main characters for once! Harry is the 7th Horocrux and lives in the end! Everyone gets their own scar! All the things a harry potter fan would desire...and it's fanfic? Well, I guess that makes sense.

In fact, this new Harry Potter? A piece of fanfic by melindaleo called The Seventh Horocrux.

The Admin Team of PhoenixSong.net have recently learned that there is a "leaked" file of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows floating around the internet, specifically in bit torrent form. While people obviously have different opinions on "spoilers" in general, this one is especially troublesome because it is actually a plagiarized version of our own Melindaleo's fan fic, "The Seventh Horcrux", available legitimately here at PhoenixSong: http://www.phoenixsong.net/fanfiction/story/3517/ Please be aware that Melindaleo was in no way involved in re-titling her fan fic as the seventh book or in trying to pass it off as a leaked copy of the seventh book. Someone else did this without her knowledge or permission, and she has been quite upset and worried, especially about the fact that people may be being duped by this situation. - Phoenixsong.net

Yes, it's a 659 page piece of fanfic. And quite possibly, it may turn out to be better than JKR's book 7. Seriously.

Something real of interest to close us out....the new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film trailer. For real.

Amy Lee of Evanescence plays my favorite video game!

"I either read or play stupid Japanese video games. My biggest obsession is Katamari -- you have this ball and you start rolling up stuff -- it sticks to you if it's smaller than you. So you start rolling up tacks and carmels and sticks of gum. The bigger you get you start rolling up people, and they're screaming, and cars and buildings, until you roll up the whole world. It's fun for me, because I'm a total control freak, so it's like I'm cleaning up. I'm making this big massive city of buildings and noise and cars [into] a clean, green pasture. It makes me feel better. It's one of those weird OCD things."
- VH1

Review and explanation of the game from dignews.com

Word of mouth on this one is pretty strong, so maybe you've already heard the premise. For those that haven't, the idea is, the colossal King of the Cosmos (a complete and total loon) went a little… nuts last night (more so than usual). The American version omits the original Japanese explanation: he was plastered. Anyways, he screwed up the galaxy something fierce, destroying all the stars in the sky. Being the lovably lazy and irresponsible guy he is, he decides that you, the teensie-tiny Prince of the Cosmos, must fix it. This is done by… rolling up random junk in a ball. Don't worry, the story isn't supposed to make sense. You start off small, the size of a paper clip, rolling a ball called a katamari, essentially using only the analog sticks to maneuver.

Katamari King and Queen costumes from craftzine.com


Great page exploring the ways Katamari can be used to change how we interact with media on the nets

As the user rolled around the town, the text chunks would appear in the right menu. Clever programmers could produce some sort of active linking system that would build links between the chunks that relate or hook up especially well, so that as the page went along links appeared between chunks. The reader could stop rolling at any time and scroll the right window up and down to read what he/she has collected. There could also be an 'export' function that allows the reader to save a clear .html version of the katamari they rolled. - Katamari Interface

Birthing Babies: Ricki Lake's New Docu

Huffington Post has a new interview with Ricki Lake on her new documentary:

Why did you want to produce this film?
I wanted to make this movie after my two very different birth experiences with my children. I felt like I had an opportunity to explore and question birthing practices in this country and perhaps be an advocate for mothers' rights and better maternity care.

How intimate does the film get?
I am naked at 195 pounds giving birth in my own bathtub. It can't get any more intimate than that!

What do you hope people take away from the film?
A lot! I hope this film educates people and empowers them to really know their choices in childbirth. We do not want to make any woman feel bad about the outcome of her birth, or the choices she made (or will make).

Tasteful Nude Photos of Kristin Chenoweth and Vanessa Williams

I pray that photoshop wasn't used TOO much, but that would fall on deaf ears in this day and age. Still they look good and I hope they represent an honest look at aging from Allure...but prolly not.

Click for bigger versions :)

Natalie Portman promoting Goya's Ghost and talking intelligently as usual

Exploring the girl/woman/woman/girl complex this former sultry child star still struggles with.

Beautiful Girls is an extraordinarily tender film about inappropriate and safely unstated love. It's so sad that a movie like that can screw you up, I say. "Absolutely ..." she says. Silence. "Well at least you were older by then - almost legal," I say, trying to fill in the void. "I was 13 in that film, pretty far from legal! But it definitely made me shy away from that kind of role. And there's a surprising preponderance of that kind of role for young girls. Sort of being fantasy objects for men, and especially this idealised purity combined with the fertility of youth, and all this in one." Blimey, you really have thought this through haven't you. "I guess ... so I definitely shied away from it."

As she became older, did it annoy her that she had been cast in such roles? "I don't know about annoy, but it was definitely interesting to think about - why men write the female characters they do. Just like the way they write the male character. How much is wish-fulfilment fantasy, and why. Yep, interesting." - Guardian UK

Very cool that she knows what she's talking about, makes sense since she lived the lie of that fantasy.

Simon Pegg of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead talks Star Wars

"I stopped collecting Star Wars toys until the amazing Master Replicas lightsabers appeared," Pegg adds. "I bought one at a collector's convention and couldn't quite believe how cool it was. I kept thinking if these had been around in the '70s, it would have been almost too exciting to bear -- the sound, the sequential ignition, the authentic detail. When I was seven, I had a plastic tube taped to a torch [flashlight] and I was happy. I'm 37 now and I have six Master Replicas lightsabers. My wife has caught me swinging them without a hint of irony, at least twice." - Read More of this excellent interview

Oliver Stone Anti-War Commercial Coming Soon

The Oscar-winning director and Vietnam veteran will direct a 30-second spot that will air in about three weeks on national TV. It will feature a U.S. veteran of the Iraq war or the family of a veteran discussing the war's impact.

"They're giving it from their personal experience, either being on the ground or being at home waiting for their mother, father, husband to come home," MoveOn.org spokesman Alex Howe said Friday.

Stone, 60, is donating his services, Howe said. - Yahoo

Since he's the best living war filmmaker this should be quite QUITE cool! Heaven and Earth is my favorite "war is not as beautiful as life" movies. The tag line? Lasting victories are won in the heart

Second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Film

Alcon and Warner Bros. have hired director Sanaa Hamri to helm a sequel to 2005's The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, reports Variety. The original core ensemble -- America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel and Blake Lively -- are all in talks to reprise.

The plan is to begin production June 3, starting in Greece, then moving to New York and Connecticut. The challenge on the sequel has been squaring the availability of the actresses because of TV series commitments, but the hope is that all the actresses return.

Written by "Pants" co-writer Elizabeth Chandler, the sequel uses as its foundation "Forever in Blue," the fourth installment of the "Pants" novel series by Ann Brashares. Bits of the second and third books will also be used. - Coming Soon

Elizabeth Sequel Trailer!

Early teaser trailer for the upcoming movie The Golden Age, with Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush, among others. It's the second movie in what the director plans to be a trilogy. The first installment was 1998's Elizabeth. - http://cateblanchett.net/

Grindhouse suffers?

How can it be? Let's hope for future box office results as word of mouth spreads...suppose I should go see it then huh? ;-)

Heading into the weekend, the media focused its attention on Dimension Films' "Grindhouse," in which Rodriguez and Tarantino join forces to replicate a low-rent double-feature from the '70s. But the homage-within-an-homage -- Rodriguez contributed the zombie flick "Planet Terror" while Tarantino whipped up a tale of liberated chicks who cross paths with a murderous stunt driver in "Death Proof" -- failed to deliver on expectations for the Weinstein Co., opening at No. 4.

While its audience, heavily weighted in favor of over-25 males, awarded the exercise a favorable B-plus rating in exit polling, the movie's total box office amounted to a disappointing $11.60 million. - Source

OMG! Bratz Movie!

What's the plot on that?

Giovanni Ribisi = Einstein

Giovanni Ribisi = Einstein

A non stop rain of ideas, millions of pieces
organized into a tangibly stronger online brand

"I don't know if I should say, but I will, finally, talk about it," Ribisi said. "Einstein. I'm going to be doing Albert Einstein, with Liliana Cavani, who did the Charlotte Rampling film from the 70s, called The Night Porter. It's great and the script is really great, and I'm really excited about it." Ribisi said the film will begin shooting "in July, I think, and there's another movie called The Stanford Prison Experiment after that." The Einstein biopic will be shot in Italy and in Barcelona and "at Princeton, of course," Ribisi said.

"It's a movie that focuses on his relationship with his first wife, Mileva Maric, and I guess it's from the inception of that relationship to the end of his life," Ribisi said, adding that the role of Mileva had not been cast yet. "It's still sort of at the incipient stage," he noted. When a reporter asked, jokingly, if Ribisi's Einstein would be played as "twisted," Ribisi joked back "Yeah, he's gonna be a weirdo, dude. Einstein The Weirdo. I suggested that, and they were like, 'no, just Einstein.'" - Source

The Night Porter is one of the sickest sweetest films ever made, anybody who thinks they love film should check it out. It's just beyond...