Drinking whiskey clear!
Oooops! Forgot to put this in the previous post:
– British band Spandau Ballet are set to become the first band in space! According to reports, the newly-reformed band “have signed on to play a weightless, out-of-this-world rendition of one of their hits — like ‘I’ll Fly For You,’ ‘Gold’ or “‘True’ — in five minutes on board mogul Richard Branson’s commercial spacecraft, the Enterprise“.
How it came to this, I’ll never know. Read more about it here.
– You know those news stories you sometimes read about a child trapped under a heavy object, and a panicked parent temporarily gaining super human strength in order to rescue the child? Well, it’s apparently happened again, this time in Kansas. Apparently Nick Harris, a completely average 5’8″, 185lb. man, saw a neighbor’s daughter being accidentally backed over by a Mercury sedan. He rushed over and lifted the car off her. He tried lifting several other cars later that same day, but could not replicate the deed.
– In his new film Up In The Air, George Clooney stars as somone who is a member of an airline’s super-secret frequent flier program that offers such perks as private check-in, secret doors that allow him to get “cuts” to the front of the security lines, customer service on a first-name basis who will do anything to get him to his destination, even if that means booking him on another airline or holding connecting flights at the gate, and a “never, ever, ever bumped” policy. Although the film takes a few liberties, such über-elite programs are actually real. This post over at ABC News talks about the real-life perks that some lucky folks get.
– Firefox 3.5 has apparently overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the single most popular browser.
– Click here to read about the couple who paid around $150,000 for a 175 square foot “micro studio” apartment in Manhattan. The apartment is 15 feet long and 10 feet wide, and the bed takes up a whopping third of the living space… but the view is reportedly spectacular!
– Britain’s Prime Minster Gordon Brown once bounced a £3 rent check when he was in college. This news came to light as his former landlord, who found the check while going through some old papers, decided to put it up for sale on eBay. I’ll let you write your own “how can he balance the budget when he can’t even balance his own checkbook” jokes.
– A group of undersea archaeologists have found yet another strange formation on the bottom of the Caribbean sea, and think that the pictures show more proof of the existence of Atlantis. I say “another” because some people have been convinced for years that the so-called Bimini Road is evidence of some great civilization that once flourished in the Caribbean islands. The group hasn’t released the specific location of their “find” yet.
OK, I know I’m a little late with this news, but inclement weather, holiday parties and football have kept me busy for the past few days.
The final version of the Anglican Covenant was released late last week, with controversial section IV restored. You can read the full text of it here, and read BabyBlue’s analysis of it here, complete with a video message from the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Perhaps His Grace has grown a pair after all.
A new version of WordPress was released late last week, and there appears to be a serious conflict between it and the “Twitter Tools” plug-in I use to add new blog post notifications to my Twitter feed.
I have temporarily disabled the Twitter Tools plug-in until either a WordPress 2.9 compatible version is released, or I can find an acceptable substitute.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
I always felt a kind of… bond with Brittany Murphy. Sure, she was really cute and everything. But even though it sounds silly, I always thought it was kind of neat that we were both born the same hospital, albeit six years apart.
Murphy’s rise to fame started with her appearance in Clueless in 1995. I loved her in the criminally underrated 1996 film Freeway was Reese Witherspoon and Keifer Sutherland. Roles in Drop Dead Gorgeous and Girl, Interrupted (both 1999) led to her first major starring role in Don’t Say a Word (2001), a thriller with Michael Douglas. This led to her role in 8 Mile, which made her a bona fide movie star. She appeared in many films since then including Just Married, Uptown Girls, Sin City, The Groomsmen, Love and Other Disasters, Happy Feet, and The Ramen Girl.
Murphy also had aspirations of being a pop singer. In 2006 she released the single “Faster Kill Pussycat” with British DJ Paul Oakenfold. The tune hit #1 on the Billboard dance chart in the US, and #7 on the UK singles charts. She also sang two songs on the Happy Feet soundtrack. For the past couple of years, Murphy’s Wikipedia page mentioned that she was working on an album of her own, although that was edited out of the page in the months before she died.
The one thing I’ll really remember Brittany Murphy for was her longtime role as Luanne Platter on the animated series King of the Hill. Some folks seemed surprised that it was Murphy’s voice on the show. I think it was unmistakably her.
It might seem crass, but I wanted to post a few pictures of her. She really was quite pretty, don’t you think?
One of my all-time favorite hotties, actress Brittany Murphy, has passed away. She was 32. From reports:
Los Angeles police have opened an investigation into circumstances surrounding the death of actress Brittany Murphy.
Police have been dispatched to Cedars-Sinai and to Murphy’s home in the tree-lined hills of West Hollywood. Police sources emphasized that their inquiry was preliminary, adding they could not say whether it would point to any criminal conduct.
Murphy, 32, died early today after going into cardiac arrest, law enforcement sources said. L.A. city firefighters responded to “a medical request” at Murphy’s home in the 1800 block of Rising Glen Road. Murphy was transported to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
Born in Atlanta, Murphy moved to Burbank with her mother at age 13. Her film break came in the movie “Clueless” (1995), in which she starred opposite Alicia Silverstone.
You will be missed, Brittany!
via L.A. police investigate death of Brittany Murphy | Los Angeles Times.
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Sighed, when I cried I know,
It all makes us see how we lie
We sigh, some say
But you know all this
Sighed, when I cried I know,
It all makes us see how
We lie, we sigh
Some say, but you know
– Cocteau Twins
“Sigh’s Smell of Farewell”
I just thought this was cute:
If you know me, you know I’m a huge fan of British TV. I’ve recently stumbled across a show I think my readers might enjoy: Paradox
The gist of the show is this: a satellite (privately owned by a British defense contractor very closely aligned with the Ministry of Defence) suddenly, out of the blue, begins receiving pictures… from the future. The pictures come in batches of eight or perhaps twelve. They’re usually grainy or out of focus, and are of some minute detail, like the partial serial number of a manhole cover, or a small section of a roadway sign. It’s up to a special group of Manchester cops – led by DI Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite, of Hotel Babylon, The Fixer, and “sexy, sexy voice” fame) to figure out the clues and stop a crime – or disaster – from happening.