Dancing With the Stars’ Karina Smirnoff Gets a Nose Job
Dancing with the Stars pro Karina Smirnoff admitted that she recently had plastic surgery - more specifically a nose job, according to People. Karina, 29, said that the surgery was…
Western Swing Dance (KAMR Amarillo)
AMARILLO — Grab your boots and swishy skirts. We’re getting into the swing of things in Family First. It’s the annual Western Swing Dance and Jam in Amarillo. The Western Swing Society puts it on every year. They use the money raised for scholarships for kids. GCHS Dance Team plans clinic (Granite City Press-Record) The […]
Bloggers Cover Red Sox World Series Sweep
The Boston Red Sox made it look easy with a sweep of the Colorado Rockies to win the World Series. That seemed impossible going into the series with The Rockies losing just once in 38 days. Once the hottest team in baseball the Rockies came up empty in their final four games. Curt Schilling, the Red Sox’s blogging pitcher, blogged that the 8 day break may have hurt the Rockies. “God has his fingerprints all over this game.” I stole it. Clint Hurdle said that about game 4 and it resonated with me all day long. What Aaron Cook and Jon Lester went through to get to this point, to get the ball, was God’s work. What they did after “Play Ball” was awe inspiring in a million ways. Hate to see the cheap shots taken by fans and writers at what went down over the last 5 days with regards to the series and Colorado’s team. They may not use it as an excuse, I certainly don’t expect to hear it from Helton, Holliday Hurdle or any others, but the 8 days between games, in my opinion, had a negative effect on them. I still believe we are the best team in the world, and 8 days or not we would have won, but I think it did impact them in many different ways. 8 days off and then you step in the box and have to face the best pitcher on the planet? Hats off to the NL Champions for redefining comeback and “against all odds”. What they did to even get to the 2007 World Series needs to be etched in stone. I think it will be lost over the next few months because of the outcome of the Series but it shouldn’t be, they did it with class and style. They played the game right and hard. Seeing true, old school, blue collar guys like Todd Helton finally getting into the World Series after putting up Hall worthy numbers his whole career is a cool thing. Lots of happy posts as you might expect on Red Sox blogs like Over the Monster, Red Sox Podcast, Boston Sports, The Joy of Sox, A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory, Red Sox Monster, Extra Bases, Surviving Grady, The Triumphant Red Sox Blog, Red Sox Chick, Cursed to First, Boston Red Sox Nation, Behind Enemy Lines, Keep Your Sox On, Sox Nest and SawxBlog. The Rockies aren’t the champs but they had a great season and won the pennant. Some Rockies blogs/websites can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. Baseball Musings says it was fun while it lasted: “The team that pulled rabbits out of hats since the middle of September lost the magic in the World Series.” Will the Red Sox get used to winning? Some are suggesting a Red Sox dynasty is emerging but they will need to win at least another World Series or two to be like the Yankees were in the late 90s. Purple Row blogs a list of some of things The Rockies need in order to win next season. A baby giraffe born at Zoo New England in Boston was named Sox. Presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani said earlier that he would be rooting for the Red Fox - a statement that infuriated some Yankee fans. Some coverage of world series stories here and here on Ballbug. The games were Twittered by @redsoxcast. Some Twitter Red Sox victory tweets can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Posted in Sports Blogs Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Bloggers Cover the California Wildfires Part III
Firefighters are now cautiously optimistic that they have the upper hand on the wildfires in Southern California. Qualcomm Stadium is the San Diego Chargers home again - it is no longer a temporary home for evacuees. The L.A. Times has a fire damage database to help people find homes damaged or destroyed in the fires. There were over 2,000 homes destroyed because of the wildfires. SignonSanDiego.com says the death tolls from the wildfires is now 14. Even after these terrible fires Californians will have to keep their guard up because Santa Ana winds don’t peak until December. Here are some more California fire highlights from the blogosphere. FEMA faked a news conference about the wildfires with FEMA employees posing in journalists. They tried to claim it was because no journalists came to the conference but they only gave them 15 minutes warning that the news conference was going to happen. FEMA also gave journalists a phone number so they could call and ask questions but it was a listen-only line. They’ve been slamed for the fake press conference in blogs (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) as well as in the mainstream press. Zzzzzzzz: Vice President Dick Cheney took a snooze during a briefing on the fires. A Close Call. Part of the lawn at this house was burned but the house survived. The Firefighter blog has a post about a DC-10 Supertanker making a drop on the Arrowhead Fire. The post points to a video of the DC-10 Supertanker in action. NFL, Charges donations: “The National Football League is donating $250,000 to the Chargers Fire Relief Fund, and the Spanos family, owners of the San Diego Chargers, is donating $1 million.” Neatorama has a post about how some expensive homes have private firefighter protection. Some rare trees, butterflies and other wildlife may be snuffed out because of the fires. Green Sahm wants California homeowners to think about what they plant: “One of my hopes is that more homeowners will think about what they plant after this. In a place like this, drought resistant plants are a must. If it’s not too easily burned, so much the better. There are plenty of plants that do grow pretty well out here without constant watering. Some are quite pretty.” Twitter can be a useful tool. The Fast Company explains: “If you’ve ever been tempted to call Twitter useless, reconsider; the service is allowing thousands of Southern California residents to stay safe by receiving up-to-the-minute geographical information about the spreading fires.” Michael Roston at the Huffington Post writes that President Bush cut the fire preparedness budgets. “During Bush’s first year in office, the Forest Service’s State Fire Assistance program for wildland fire management was funded at approximately $56 million per year. But the President’s budget proposal for 2008 only requests $35 million from Congress, an 18% cut from what it spent in the current year, already well below the earlier levels.” 3,000 prison inmates helped battle the flames. They were paid $1 an hour. Some stunning photos from a Reuters photo blog in a post called Notes from a Wildfire. AOL Photo Talk also has some frightening images. The number of YouTube videos returned with a California wildfires search is nearly 4,000. This video shows the Santiago Canyon fire. A photograph of the wildfires from the International Space Station. (via The Marble). With fires still burning serious air quality concerns remain. San Diego has an air quality website than can be found here. AIRNow provides national maps. A more personal account of the bad air can be found here in a post by Queen of Spain - via Social Mom who has a post about the response to the fires. Bloggers are still calling Glenn Beck an idiot. A hippopotumus got loose and wound up in swimming pool that belongs to Steve Crosby, the San Diego Chargers special teams coach. Both the hippo and the coach were unharmed. Some resources for those who want to help: Califirehelp.com, CaliforniaWildfires.org and The San Diego Foundation. Hostess with the Mostess has a few more links in this post. Our past coverage can be found here and the California fire resources page is located here. Posted in 2007 California Wildfires Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
Prince Harry and Girlfriend Chelsy Davy Break Up
Prince Harry and his girlfriend, Chelsy Davy, have decided to break up after three years together, according to News of the World. Sources claim that Chelsy grew tired of Prince…
Slow Sales For Gawker Book
Mixed Media, a blog from Portfolio, reports that according to Nielsen BookScan data Gawker’s book The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media has only sold 242 copies since it went on sale earlier this month. Mixed Media says BookScan reports on about 75% of all book sales. Of course, the tracking service only accounts for about 75 percent of book sales, by its own admission, so you can add another 81 units to that total. Still, it’s probably somewhat fewer copies than Simon & Schuster’s Atria division was hoping to sell when it acquired the total in what I’m told was a $250,000 deal. Especially when you consider all the free promotion the book got on Gawker.com, to what was presumably its target audience. Books like Gawker’s book that are of interest only to those in the blogging and media industry probably only sell about 5,000 to 10,000 copies at best. It isn’t the kind of book that could ever sell 100,000 copies. Even so it is clearly underperforming for its niche. Maybe they will see a pickup in sales with this negative press. Posted in Blogging Industry News Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
YouTube’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades
YouTube.com is considering some changes and they have a preview of a redesigned website you can view. The navigation changes seem useful but the site is a little on the bright side. Download Squad is warning its readers to have their sunglasses ready before viewing the redesign. YouTube’s blog post about the preview says there will be a number over large changes over the next three months. In a constant effort to improve the user experience and incorporate your feedback we’ll be making a number of large changes to the site over the next few months. In addition to making improvements upon existing features, we’ll be rolling out some brand new items that are still in the works. We can tell you there is a lot to look forward to, but in the meantime we offer you this sneak preview of the new YouTube video browsing page (our “Videos” tab) and invite you to share your feedback with us. — Categories will now be found under the “Videos” tab. — Dropdown menus make for a smoother transition when clicking through popular pages, ie. “Most Viewed,” “Top Favorites,” “Recently Featured,” etc. — Tabs and video browsing pages have a new overall look and feel. YouTube has also merged the videos and category links but you can still make all the same popularity searches as before. It would be helpful if they would include a few more categories since there are so many videos on YouTube now. Until there are more categories you can always run a search for tags using this search string and changing KEYWORD to the tag you want to use: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=KEYWORD&search=tag Use Halloween as the keyword and you get videos tagged Halloween. They seem very eager for feedback at YouTube and they are requesting feedback on the right hand side of the preview page. Posted in Videos Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com
ProPublica: New Non-Profit Investigative News Organization
ProPublica is a new non-profit news organization focusing on investigative journalism (hat tip Boing Boing). They will employ 24 fulltime reporters and editors. Paul E. Steiger - the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal - will serve as both president and editor-in-chief of ProPublica. ProPublica, when fully staffed in 2008, will include 24 fulltime reporters and editors, the largest staff in American journalism devoted solely to investigative reporting. ProPublica will be supported entirely by philanthropy and will provide the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own Web site and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article. Commenting on the new organization Mr. Steiger said, ?ProPublica will focus exclusively on journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them. We will be non-partisan and non-ideological, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality and fairness.? He continued, ?We will look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power. But we will also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and the media when they appear to be exploiting or oppressing those weaker than they, or when there is evidence that they are abusing the public trust.? You can read the full news release here. ProPublica says they are launching now because they fill investigative journalism is being squeezed out of reporting. ProPublica’s newsroom will be located in Manhattan. Their news team will include a blogger, webmaster and a computer-assisted reporting specialist. Posted in Journalism Permalink | Recent Headlines | Twitter | WWFeeds.com
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