Monthly Archive: August 2008

Paul Newman, taking his Corvette out for the last time?Newman has not confirmed that he is ill — in June he insisted he was “doing nicely” — but the rumors keep circulating.(Thanks to editor Paul Hehn for the tip.)

Here are two new profiles just requested by our friends at Ask.com: songwriter Kara DioGuardi and teen actress Demi Lovato.

Small-town Wasilla, Alaska has had a lot of press since Sarah Palin became the running mate of John McCain. Palin played high school basketball in Wasilla, was Miss Wasilla of 1984, and was the city’s mayor from 1996-2002.But just how small is Wasilla?

Michael Jackson is 50 years old today.ABC News asks him about his AARP card… then shows how he might have looked now without all that surgery.

Sarah Palin, the first female governor of Alaska, is now the first female Republican candidate for vice president of the United States.John McCain’s aides made the announcement to reporters this morning.

The Democratic Convention is over and it’s official: Barack Obama is the first African-American presidential nominee of a major American political party. Congratulations to him.His website has the transcript and video of his speech from Denver’s Invesco Field.The Rocky Mountain News headline: ‘Obama accepts nomination, rocks Invesco.’

Gawker has the accidental obituary of Apple Computer head Steve Jobs run by the Bloomberg news service yesterday. At least Jobs got that rare opportunity to read his own obit. Many of the details are probably familiar to him already. It is interesting to see how placeholders are used in the pre-obit for the final missing bits of the story. (“He was TK”?)

Sports Illustrated has an underwater photo series that shows how Michael Phelps touched the wall 0.01 second before rival Milorad Cavic in the 100-meter butterfly.Even with the photos, and seeing the finish, Phelps still seems impossibly far from the wall when Cavic is just inches away. Quite a finish.

The Washington Post has two new stories on cartoonist Lynn Johnston. One talks about her krazy plan for starting For Better or For Worse over on September 1st, retelling the strip’s early storylines in “new-runs.” Lynn reports with pleasure that Farley the Dog, long dead, will be once again alive under the new plan. (Though presumably he’ll have to croak again in the future.)

Oh, come on: Cher as Catwoman in the next Batman flick?

“And you know, what struck me when I first met Barack was that even though he had this funny name, even though he’d grown up all the way across the continent in Hawaii, his family was so much like mine.”Michelle Obama addressed the Democratic Convention last nightHere’s the transcript from The Denver Post.

“This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it, I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it. And we can do it again.”Ted Kennedy made a surprise speech to the Democratic Convention last night. CNN has the transcript.

Alas. The Daily Mail reports that Margaret Thatcher has been in mental decline since 2000.The Mail yesterday ran excerpts from a new memoir, A Swim-On Part in the Goldfish Bowl, by Thatcher’s daughter Carol.

The Democratic National Convention starts today in Denver, Colorado. For local coverage, try these special sections from The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News.And here’s the official site.

We saw Woody Allen’s film Vicky Cristina Barcelona this weekend and really dug it. It’s warm, thought-provoking, sensual, and you can’t beat the backdrop.

First we read it in The Sun.Now the Los Angeles Times confirms it: Celebrities like dopey glasses.

Last week, Jar Jar Binks.Now: Happy 74th birthday R2-D2 man!

It seems that Joe Biden can continue his run for senator from Delaware as well as be Barack Obama’s running mate.Biden has been a senator since 1972. He was reelected in 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996, and 2002… bringing him up for his seventh election in 2008. In some states he’d have to drop his Senate bid in order to run for vice president. But not in Delaware.

Delaware’s Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2008.Barack Obama announced Biden as his choice with an overnight text message to supporters and the press.

One more for the weird baby name brigade: Gwen Stefani and Zuma Nesta Rock.Born at Cedars-Sinai!

A North Carolina man has used a pink Barbie rod and reel to catch a record-breaking catfish. David Hayes landed the 21-pound fish on six-pound Barbie test line.

Nick Symmonds is out of the Olympics.

Seems like only a few years ago that Bruce Willis and Demi Moore were married and having kids.Now their daughter Rumer is playing a nerdy college coed in the movie The House Bunny.

A modest coincidence: Joe Biden and Evan Bayh — the leading candidates to be Barack Obama’s running mate — both have sons named after themselves and nicknamed Beau.Beau Biden (Joseph R. Biden III) was born in 1969 and is now attorney general of Delaware.

Runner Nick Symmonds won his quarterfinal heat in the Olympic 800 meters today. He’s through to a semifinal heat on Thursday.Alas, his teammates Andrew Wheating and Christian Smith didn’t make the cut.

Oh, dear. The lastest Bigfoot sighting turns out to be a hoax.

The Associated Press runs down the potential vice-presidential nominees.

Our new profile of Indiana Senator Evan Bayh lists his place of birth as Terre Haute, Indiana.

Actor Ahmed Best was born on this day in 1973.

A point of personal pride here: Nick Symmonds will run the 800 meters in the Olympics this week.

A few late follow-ups on recent news…

Can’t wait to see the new movie Man on Wire. It’s a documentary about Philip Petit, the daredevil who walked a high wire between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.

After 16 years as the beloved quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Brett Favre has been traded to the New York Jets.Try the Milwaukie Journal-Sentinel for the latest notes from the Green Bay side, and Newsday for the New York take.

Actor Morgan Freeman is divorcing his wife just a few days after he suffered a near-fatal car accident, according to the Los Angeles Times.Nice photo selection to go with the story, there, LA Times.

You stud.

People magazine has published the first photos of Knox and Vivienne, the twin newborns of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the stubborn dissident who outlasted the Soviet Union, has died at age 89.His 1962 book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a Soviet prison camp inmate, made him both famous and a favorite target of government authorities. (A mathematician and professor, he had already spent a decade in prison camps and then in exile in Kazakhstan.)