Guv Goes On Diet, Loses 40 Pounds; Cheesesteak Industry Devastated Ed Rendell, the unabashed indulger in all things greasy, has not had so much as a bite of a cheesesteak in two months. He’s given up sweets, too, including his favorite dessert, Starbucks coffee ice cream. Not a spoonful, as hard as that might be to believe. It shows. The once-rotund governor has shed nearly 40 pounds since reaching an all-time high in the spring of 265 pounds. His secret? “I literally eat half of what I used to,” Rendell said yesterday at the governor’s mansion. “I am now a […]
Wall St. Dancing On The Grave Of The Public Option
MARKET WATCH: “The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health-care reform,” Obama said on Saturday in Grand Junction, Colo. “This is just one sliver of it.” Bucking a bearish Monday trend in the broader stock market, shares of health-insurance companies including UnitedHealth Group Inc. (UNH 28.95, +0.47, +1.65%) and Aetna Inc. (AET 29.54, -0.09, -0.31%) rose after the comments by Obama as well as members of his administration over the weekend. Health insurers have fought a public plan. Republicans, long opposed to a public plan, seized on comments made Sunday […]
ELVIS COSTELLO: Indoor Fireworks
Written by Nick Lowe.
BENERGY: A Day In The Life Of Ben Franklin
[Via NICK BILTON] Hat tip to Dave Bragdon. TANGENTIALLY RELATED: The Anoka-Hennepin School District is paying a high school student’s family $25,000 in a settlement after two teachers made his perceived sexual orientation into a class joke. Teachers seem to now set their gaydars based on a student’s choice of research topics. The high school junior wrote a report on Ben Franklin during the 2007-2007 school year. His teacher, Diane Cleveland told the entire class that the student had a “thing for older men.” Cleveland also told the class the boy’s “fence swings both ways,” according to the Star Tribune […]
ROAD TO REDEMPTION: We’ve Only Just Begun
PHAWKER: For obvious reasons, we have been thinking a lot about Michael Vick as of late. We have been thinking about the doggie Auschwitz he ran for six years for fun and for profit and about how it cost him everything: his career, his seven figure net worth, his freedom and, in some corners, his membership in the human race. We have also been thinking that this is what happens when you take a man out of the ‘hood but you don’t take the ‘hood out of the man. And while that may explain Vick’s crimes, it does not excuse […]
TONITE: It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
[Click image to activate Internets] NEW YORK TIMES: Though the third season of “Mad Men” didn’t quite begin with the jumpstart we were hoping for, it did at least offer a comforting “continuity of service,” to borrow a phrase from Don Draper and Salvatore Romano’s meeting with the father-and-son executives of London Fog. This particular episode didn’t shake us to our core, but it did pick up nicely where Season 2 left off. Like a comfortable Thanksgiving dinner, every crazy member of this extended family was reliably acting out his or her established role. MORE NEW YORK TIMES: This week […]
CINEMA: Pretty Pretty Ponyo
PONYO (Dir. by Hayao Miyazaki, 100 min., Japan, 2008) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The tenth feature film from anime master Hayao Miyazaki is no radical departure from what we’ve seen from him before, it’s more feisty heroines, more strange morphing creatures and more warnings of nature out-of-balance. But it is also predictable that the 68-year-old Japanese national treasure evokes feelings of awe that no other animator currently working can. Ponyo contains most of the master’s pet themes, in a gentler package than any of his films since Totoro yet at his advancing age one should savor its ingenuity for […]
RIP: Legendary Memphis Producer Jim Dickinson
MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL: The North Mississippi Allstars have lost their father, Bob Dylan has lost a “brother,” rock and roll has lost one of its great cult heroes and Memphis has lost a musical icon with the death of Jim Dickinson. The 67-year-old Dickinson passed away early Saturday morning in his sleep. The Memphis native and longtime Mississippi resident had been in failing health for the past few months and was recuperating from heart surgery at Methodist Extended Care Hospital. MORE BILL BENTLEY: There aren’t many shamans still in our world. Most have been ground down to dust, and those […]
I, GAMER: Reeding Iz Funn
BY ADAM BONANNI Best I can tell, the only place in the known universe where bronze is worth more than gold is in Bookworm Adventures 2, the latest black hole disguised as a game from developer Popcap designed to suck up all your free time. Imagine scrabble with the twist of roleplaying game conventions: A health bar, potions, and a mess of augmentations and enhancements that you can give your words. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, I would be pretty curious to know what you are thinking right now. Bookworm Adventures 2 is actually much simpler than it sounds, […]
WORTH REPEATING: The Tree Of American Crazy
WASHINGTON POST: So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every […]
CINEMA: Plan 9 From Outer Space
DISTRICT 9 (2009, directed by Neill Blomkamp, 112 minutes, South Africa/New Zealand) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC For a genre that thrives on imagining new worlds, it is disheartening to see how derivative most modern sci-fi films are, happy to cobble together their scenarios from pieces of The Matrix, X-Files, Alien or whatever other proven blockbusters are lying around. After its cryptic ad campaign I was hoping District 9 was going to be an exception, and at least its Johannesburg slum setting is a novel location for the genre. The apartheid metaphor takes District 9 a fair distance before its […]
TONITE: Passion Pit Stop
BY AMY Z. QUINN If we’re talking football — and isn’t everyone in Philadelphia talking football right now — this is the time of year for two-a-days, the brutal cram session practices designed to whip a team into shape as the season’s kickoff looms ever larger on the calendar. And while the members of Passion Pit, the Boston five-piece electro dance-pop outfit, weren’t discussing the NFL’s dramz yesterday while traveling from Canada to Philly for their first shows in town, they were in for a two-a-day here Saturday. Passion Pit, as the already legendary story goes, began as a four-song […]
HOW MANY ROADS MUST ONE MAN WALK BEFORE YOU CALL HIM A MAN: Dylan Hassled By Shore Cops
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood. A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday. “I don’t think she was familiar with his entire body of work,” Woolley said. The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several […]