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Adam Lambert and the Idol staff must have heard us yesterday. Kara DioGuardi did a taped interview for the View that will air today.
During the segment, Barbara Walters asked DioGuardi if she thought his “perceived sexuality” might have influenced the audience to vote for Kris Allen.
To which DioGuardi responded, “Well, first of all, I hope not … because we should be judging on talent and viability in the music industry and they both [Lambert and Allen] had that. I don’t think that Adam [Lambert] was ever in [the closet]. I think he was always openly out.”
Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox were on the outs but it looks like they’re moving forward. Jen was rumored to be upset about earlier this month Courtney hungout with Brad at the Chris Cornell concert.
Last night, Jennifer, Courtney and David Arquette had dinner at Water Grill in downtown LA and afterwards headed to Fleetwood Mac at the Staples Center
On Wednesday the Hills was filming at Pinches Tacos in LA and Brody, His Girlfriend, Lo and who else, Kristin Cavalleri. However, Audrina was not there because she was busy bitching to media outlets complaining that she does not like Kristin, she is pathetic and will do anything around the cameras
So when your Maserati gets towed, what car do you take. Well, if you’re Lindsay Lohan, you take the infamous black Matte Rolls Royce Phantom. The Maserati got towed for being in the red zone on Thursday.
Susan Boyle is cracking under the pressure of her recent fame. She can not take the sheer amount of pressure on her.
Courtney Love fired back at American Express yesterday. Her attorney claims, “AmEx knows the claim has no merit. We have told them this for a long time. AmEx’s law policies allowed fraudulent transactions to be charged to my client’s card.” Just because you’re drunk and high and don’t remember buying something doesn’t mean its fraudulent.
Smoking in youth-rated movies has not declined despite a pledge two years ago by Hollywood studios to encourage producers to show less “gratuitous smoking,” according to an anti-smoking group.
The American Medical Association Alliance, pointing to research that big-screen smoking leads teens to pick up the tobacco habit, called for an R rating for any movie with smoking scenes.
The head of the group that gives U.S. movies their ratings, however, said the smoke has been clearing from youth-rated movies, a result of the film industry’s sensitivity to the issue.
The alliance, the medical association’s advocacy arm, launched a summer campaign this week aimed at publicly shaming studios into making smoke-free films.
“Research has shown that one-third to one-half of all young smokers in the United States can be attributed to smoking these youth see in movies,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, head of the Los Angeles County Public Health Department.
As far as body-shaving advice goes, it may be the best a man can get – and it certainly has a lot of people talking.
A new series of Gillette videos, which are featured on the company’s Web site as well as on YouTube, show a cartoon man demonstrating how to shave different parts of the male anatomy, including the groin.
“Taking care of the hair down there certainly has its benefits,” the narrator explains in the video. “When there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.”
Michael Norton, a Gillette spokesman, said the grooming videos, which also offer tips for shaving the head, chest, back and armpits, were devised after consulting men.
“Guys told us they want to learn how to shave body parts other than the face,” he said. “We think it’s become a much more mainstream aspect of grooming.”
The ladies seem to agree.
“Women appreciate a well-groomed man,” said Amy Bailey, owner of The Beauty Mark, a Beacon Hill cosmetics boutique.
ouch?
On the day Chris Brown took to YouTube to say he’s “not a monster,” a photographer sued the R&B singer, saying Brown’s bodyguards beat him as he tried to take pictures at a gym.
Robert Rosen sued Brown and LA Fitness International, claiming he was assaulted by a bodyguard after snapping pictures in a gym in Universal City. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for multiple claims, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence.
The suit states Rosen snapped photos of Brown and friends on the basketball court at the LA Fitness on May 13, roughly a month after the singer’s arrest for allegedly assaulting then-girlfriend Rihanna. Brown has pleaded not guilty in that case, which is scheduled for a hearing Thursday.
Rosen’s lawsuit states he fell down a flight of stairs after being chased by Brown’s bodyguards, who assaulted him. It does not allege violence by Brown.
Rosen also claims he was blocked from leaving the gym by a gym employee. A phone recording at LA Fitness’ headquarters said the company was closed on Wednesday evening and did not allow a message to be left.
Reporter Bobby Ghosh writes, “The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or ‘walling’ and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.”
Former interrogator/member of the FBI Ali Soufan, who testified to Congress last month, tells TIME: “He was a diabetic … We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him …. So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.” Ghosh points out, “Defenders of the Bush program, most notably Cheney, say the use of waterboarding produced actionable intelligence that helped the U.S. disrupt terrorist plots. But the experiences of officials like Soufan suggest that the utility of torture is limited at best and counterproductive at worst.”
In an yet-to-be released interview with GQ, Levi Johnston, the ex-boyfriend of teen mom Bristol Palin (and father to her son, Tripp) reveals even more details about the dynamics of his relationship with Bristol and her family.
Johnston told GQ that Todd Palin, on multiple occasions, offered to buy his daughter a car if she would break up him.
1. She may have left her common sense and ability to speak without slurring someplace else, but Courtney Love never leaves home without her American Express Card. Although, now, we bet she wished she had! American Express is suing the “musician” for more than $350,000 in unpaid charges and other fees on her AmEx Gold card. As of now, all of her charging privileges have been suspended and AmEx filed the lawsuit stating they are seeking $352,059.67 from Courtney.
2. Adam Lambert is staying in that closet as long as he can, but he’s still preaching about being true to yourself. In an interview yesterday, he said: “It’s a really, really cool thing to be able to show people that you can be yourself, and you should be proud of yourself, and you should own who you are and what you’re about, and never make apologies for it.”
3. Beyonce not selling tickets??? B’s camp has announced that there will be 1,000 tickets priced at $20 a pop for each date on her North American tour! Fans can purchase the cheapie tix via Ticketmaster beginning Friday morning. Is our girl B gifting her fans with affordable tickets because she’s feeling generous or because they weren’t selling otherwise???
4. In a new video of Chris Brown, he addresses haters and all his “TRUE FANS” says he is “not a monster” and is working on a new album as we speak!
5. In July’s issue of Cosmopolitan, Lauren Conrad discusses Heidi, her Z list boyfriend and why she left The Hills.
here is a except :
“What they didn’t get is that I didn’t want to fight with her anymore. It’s hard to look at somebody who used to be your best friend and say, ‘We can’t be friends. Too much has happened.’ I’m trying to move on, but they won’t let me. And when someone keeps pushing you into the same position well…you get upset.”
A new low-cost airline will begin serving mid-sized U.S. cities that it thinks larger carriers have left behind.
Clearwater, Fla.-based JetAmerica said 34 nonstop passenger flights a week will start July 13 at Toledo, Ohio; South Bend, Ind.; Melbourne, Fla.; Newark, N.J.; Minneapolis and Lansing, Mich. Twenty-eight flights start or end at Newark Liberty International Airport. The carrier will add six more flights — from Toledo to Minneapolis — starting Aug. 14.
JetAmerica is targeting small and midsize cities like Lansing, which has seen the number of daily flights at its Capital Region International Airport fall from 35 to 12 the past five years. The decline is part of a national trend that has seen airfares increase at those airports as daily flights have decreased.
Robert Selig, head of the Capital Region Airport Authority, said JetAmerica will give Lansing business travelers direct access to New York City and carry leisure travelers to central Florida.
“We don’t have access to either one right now,” Selig said. “So, this is going to fill a major void in our schedule.”
Filling that void won’t be cheap.
The Lansing, South Bend, Melbourne and Toledo airports are subsidizing JetAmerica with $1.4 million in grants in its first year, along with about $867,000 in waived airport fees and $1.1 million in marketing and advertising assistance.
South Bend, Toledo and Melbourne received their grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Small Community Air Service Development Program, which has awarded $104 million to 223 recipients since 2002 in an effort to restore lost service and bring air fares down.
Newark and Minneapolis, each of which serve more than 20 million passengers a year, are not offering assistance to JetAmerica.
John Weikle, chief executive of JetAmerica, said the subsidies will help insulate the new carrier from spikes in jet fuel prices. Higher fuel prices have contributed to the failures of at least four major airlines since 9/11. Smaller carriers have also been hurt.
Surging fuel prices helped bankrupt ultra-discounter Skybus Inc. last year. Weikle founded that Columbus, Ohio-based airline known for its $10 fares. The bankruptcy cost 450 employees their jobs.
Prices will start at $9 a seat and top out at $199. The $9 price will apply to the first nine to 19 seats on each plane. Passengers will pay $15 to check a bag. Food, drinks and in-flig
Energy Secretary Steven Chu stunned the audience at a London scientific conference Tuesday with a radical but simple proposal to combat global warming: Paint all the roofs of all the buildings in the world white.
If we did so, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist said, and if we also made sure the world’s roads and sidewalks were light-colored, it would have the same effect on global warming as taking all the cars in the world off the world’s roads for 11 years.
The idea is to harness the “albedo effect” — the theory that a reflective planet warms up less as heat from the sun is bounced back into space
Chu, speaking at the St. James’ Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, said the calculations are based on work done at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he used to work and where three researchers concluded last year that changing surface colors in the world’s 100 largest cities would offset 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
But at least one science expert thinks Chu is nuts.
“It’s past simplistic — it’s ridiculous,” says Steven Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com and an avowed climate-change skeptic. “Imagine the glare on roads, in urban areas, imagine the UV radiation bouncing around. Snow blindness would be replaced by road blindness.”
But Dr. Gordon Bonan, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says there’s a kernel of truth in the science behind Chu’s idea.
They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.
Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.
The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.
Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.
California’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s gay-marriage ban Tuesday but said the estimated 18,000 same-sex weddings that took place before the prohibition passed are still valid _ a ruling decried by gay-rights activists as a hollow victory
In a 6-1 decision written by Chief Justice Ron George, the court rejected arguments that the ban approved by the voters last fall was such a fundamental change in the California Constitution that it first needed the Legislature’s approval.
While gay rights advocates accused the court of failing to protect a minority group from the will of the majority, the justices said that the state’s governing framework gives voters almost unfettered ability to change the California Constitution.
The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 last May that it was unconstitutional to deny gay couples the right to wed. For a while, that put California _ the nation’s most populous state _ back in its familiar position in the vanguard of social change; at the time, Massachusetts was the only other state to allow gay marriage.
In California, gay rights activists argued that the ban was improperly put to the voters and amounted to a revision _ which required legislative approval _ not an amendment. But the justices disagreed.
The court said that while the ban denies gay couples use of the term “marriage,” it does not fundamentally disturb their basic right to “establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship with the person of one’s choice and to raise children within the family.” California still allows gay couples to form domestic partnerships.
Prominent lawyers Theodore B. Olson and David Boies filed a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court on behalf of two gay men and two gay women, arguing that Proposition 8 violates the U.S. constitutional guarantee of equal protection and due process.
Olson said he hopes the case, which seeks a preliminary injunction against the measure until the case is resolved, will wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a former U.S. solicitor general who served in high-level Justice Department jobs in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.
AT&T, one of the biggest corporate sponsors of “American Idol,” might have influenced the outcome of this year’s competition by providing phones for free text-messaging services and lessons in casting blocks of votes at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was the winner of the show last week.
Representatives of AT&T, whose mobile phone network is the only one that can be used to cast “American Idol” votes via text message, provided the free text-messaging services at two parties in Arkansas after the final performance episode of “American Idol” last week, according to the company and people at the events.
There appear to have been no similar efforts to provide free texting services to supporters of Adam Lambert, who finished as the runner-up to Mr. Allen.
Since then, angry supporters of Mr. Lambert have flooded online chat boards with messages claiming irregularities in the competition’s voting.
Representatives of AT&T helped fans of Mr. Allen at the two Arkansas events by providing instructions on how to send 10 or more text messages at the press of a single button, known as power texts. Power texts have an exponentially greater effect on voting than do single text messages or calls to the show’s toll-free phone lines. The efforts appear to run afoul of “American Idol” voting rules in two ways. The show broadcasts an on-screen statement at the end of each episode warning that blocks of votes cast using “technical enhancements” that unfairly influence the outcome of voting can be thrown out.
Talkarazi
Ptibull gets physical! At his concert in Aspen a fan throws money in reggaeton stars face and Pitbull punches him back! In the video Pitbull pulls male fan on stage (not sure why) then fan throws money in his face and Pitbull goes crazy… LAID HIM OUT with one punch kicks him in the side then continues with song !!!
The new Princess of Pop, Lady GaGa, graces the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone in nothing more than her fierceness and some bubbles, bitches!
…. she looks super hotttt!! I mean she could of had something done to her hair but its all good 🙂 … check it out
RIHANNA REPORTEDLY THREATENS TO BURN DOWN CHRIS BROWN’S HOUSE … AND TALK ABOUT HOW WEAK HE IS IN THE BEDROOM!! According to Star magazine, Rihanna is convinced that he was the one that leaked those pics of her naked on the web so what is she going to do you ask?
At first, Rihanna 21, was so furious, “she was saying crazy things like, ‘I’m going to burn down his house!’ … She [also] says she’s going to release her own photos of Chris. She has less-than-flattering nude pics of him that she plans on leaking
And more: [Rihanna also] plans to spread nasty rumors about Chris, 20. One example: that he was a novice between the sheets until she taught him everything he knows.
The mag is also suggesting that Rihanna hacked into Chris’ email and sent the following message to all his dancers:
“This notice is to inform all my dancers that you will no longer be needed. I’m sorry this is short notice, but if you haven’t already realized, my career is over… I think I could build a career as an exotic dancer. I’m going broke and I need some income coming in … I just hope you don’t see me on Celebrity Rehab or Intervention”
Mike Tyson’s 4-year-old daughter, Exodus Tyson, was pronounced dead on Tuesday. The child was discovered on Monday at her Phoenix, Arizona, home hanging from a treadmill by its power cable. The horrible incident is being treated as an accident.
Stopping driver’s license fraud is no laughing matter: Four states are ordering people to wipe the grins off their faces in their license photos.
“Neutral facial expressions” are required at departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) in Arkansas, Indiana, Nevada and Virginia. That means you can’t smile, or smile very much. Other states may follow.
The serious poses are urged by DMVs that have installed high-tech software that compares a new license photo with others that have already been shot. When a new photo seems to match an existing one, the software sends alarms that someone may be trying to assume another driver’s identity.
But there’s a wrinkle in the technology: a person’s grin. Face-recognition software can fail to match two photos of the same person if facial expressions differ in each photo, says Carnegie Mellon University robotics professor Takeo Kanade.
Dull expressions “make the comparison process more accurate,” says Karen Chappell, deputy commissioner of the Virginia DMV, whose no-smile policy took effect in March.
Elaine Mullen of Great Falls, Virginia, bristled at the policy while renewing her license until she heard the reasoning. “It’s probably safer from a national security point of view,” she says.
Arkansas, Indiana and Nevada allow slight smiles. “You just can’t grin really large,” Arkansas driver services chief Tonie Shields says.
A total of 31 states do computerized matching of driver’s license photos and three others are considering it, says the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators. Most say their software matches faces regardless of expressions. “People can smile here in Pennsylvania,” state Transportation Department spokesman Craig Yetter says.
More than two million motorists have had an accident or near-miss while driving and listening to sport on the radio, a study has warned.
Football fans can get as emotional as their on-pitch heroes.
The Football Focus report has been published to coincide with the UEFA Champions League final in Rome.
Put together by academics from the University of Leicester, it warns that listening to live football matches on the radio whilst driving can be a dangerous distraction.
And it estimates that two million drivers have fallen foul of the emotions it can produce.
Tests carried out for the study showed casual listeners drove at a consistent pace throughout matches.
However, the driving style of football fans was found to vary considerably – sometimes erratically – as games progressed.
“It acts as a warning to more than a quarter of motorists, who are likely to listen to part or all of the match while driving, that they could be putting themselves and other road users at risk by doing so,” the report says.
Grammy-winning rapper T.I. told fans he would stay optimistic when he heads to prison on a federal weapons conviction. The 28-year-old rapper, whose real name is Clifford J. Harris Jr., performed for a packed audience Sunday night in Atlanta’s Philips Arena less than two days before he is to begin serving the sentence of a year and a day.
He must report by noon Tuesday to the Federal Correction Institution at Forrest City, Ark. He was arrested after prosecutors said he tried to buy unregistered machine guns and silencers from undercover federal agents in 2007.
During the concert, T.I. said he hoped that everyone learned from his mistakes. He brought his five children on stage, often holding one of them while he performed “No Matter What” _ a single off the almost double-platinum album “Paper Trail.”
“What I need y’all to do is pray for me while I’m gone,” he said. “I’ll see y’all in 366 days.”
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