First, Jenny Sanford, who has recently come out with a memoir, did an interview with Barbara Walters in which she admitted her soon-to-be-ex husband, Gov. Mark Sanford, refused to make a vow of fidelity when they got married.

She says she was young and in love. How about stupid? This should be like the opposite of an annulment. She agreed to marry him even though he didn’t vow fidelity, so she shouldn’t have the right to divorce him.

In other news, on this feast of the patron saint of throats, Barry Manilow and Susan Boyle are appearing together, on the top 10 album sales!! Barry’s The Greatest Love Songs of All Time has debuted at #5, while Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed a Dream remains on the charts at #4, after 9 weeks (6 at #1). It was little over 100,000 short of being the top selling album in the US of 2009, and *was* the top selling “physical” album of the year (as opposed to download) in the US, and, most importantly, the top selling album of the year in the world.

In December, TV Guide Channel had the highest rated special in its history with “The Susan Boyle Story.” In the special, Susan sang on stage with her hero, Elaine Paige, OBE, “The First Lady of British Musical Theatre.”

The connection of the two stories is that Paige and Boyle sang Paige’s hit duet “I Know Him So Well” (Originally sung with Barbara Dickson). Ironically, while Susan Boyle is of course known for her more “plain” appearance, she looks very good compared to Paige, very obviously deformed tube8 with face lifts and/or botox.

The song, from the musical Chess (music by ABBA; lyrics by Tim Rice), is sung by the mistress and wife of a chess champion. The mistress figures “he needs a little bit more than me / more security,” while the wife muses, “he needs his fantasy and freedom.”

Both figure they should have gotten to know him better before they “fell,” but “now, at least, I know I know him well. . . .”

So, in honor of Jenny Sanford, here are Susan Boyle and Elaine Paige:

Read more: tv guide
in wikipedia

For some of us the loss of the FX channel means a lot considering a lot of the best TV shows are carried by the network. Shows like Sons Of Anarchy, Nip Tuck, Damages, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and the hit new show The League; which all about guys wheeling and dealing to improve their Fantasy Football teams. For millions of Fantasy football players out there this show is exactly what it’s like to run a team.

While there is still time for Time Warner to continue to bring America one of the top channels, time is running out and it does not look good. With New Years only eight days away a lot of people holiday TV lineups are in jeopardy.

With the loss of FX if you plan on just watching one of the BCS College Football bowl games that won’t happen either. Once you lose FX you also lose Fox, which will be airing The Sugar Bowl between No.3 Cincinnati vs. No.5 Florida, Cotton Bowl No.19 Oklahoma St vs. Mississippi, Tostitos Fiesta Bowl No.4 TCU vs. No.6 Boise St, and the Fed Ex Orange Bowl No.10 Iowa vs. No.9 Georgia Tech.

For Time Warner they couldn’t have picked a worst time to put out their Roll Over Or Get Tough Campaign. The campaign is Time Warner trying to say that networks are causing them to drive prices up on all of their customers. But yet Dish Network will still be bringing their loyal customers those same channels that many Time Warner customers stand to lose at a lower price.

They can try and spin the situation anyway they want with a revenue of $46.98 billion in 2008 maybe they should pay their top CEO’s less in bonuses and focus more on keeping their loyal customers. All they can do is blame themselves as customers start to find dictionary out there are cheaper and better options out there like Dish Network.

Below are the main target areas for the Roll Over Or Get Tough Campaign
Albany NY
Austin TX
Beaumont TX
Binghamton
Buffalo
Charleston SC
Charlotte
Cincinnati
Columbus OH
Corpus Christi
Dallas/Ft. Worth
El Paso
Florence/Myrtle Beach
Green Bay
Greensboro
Honolulu
Kansas City
Los Angeles
Louisville
Milwaukee
New York
Raleigh
San Antonio
San Diego
Syracuse
Toledo
Utica
Waco

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Read more: direct tv
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Pelicans in Flight (1882)

Even before the invention of film, there were many Frenchmen who contributed to inventions that led to it’s birth;

In the early 19th century, Joseph Nicephore Nipce and Louis Daguerre the first to make pictures in a camera through exposure of sensitive chemicals to light.

In 1888, tienne-Jules Marey presented the chronophotographe, which presented 12 images a second, and all images appeared within the same photograph. An important precursor to cinematography.

Three months later Charles-mile Reynaud was granted a patent for his invention, a machine called a Thtre Optique. A primitive projector, it worked as a tool of early animated films. On October 28, 1892 he projected the first animated film, Pauvre Pierrot, at the Muse Grvin in Paris

The birth of cinema is popularly acknowledged as having taken place, December 28th, 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumire presented the first program of projected films. It took place in the basement of the Grand Caf in Paris on the Boulevard des Capucines. The brothers first film was La Sortie des usines Lumires, but the most shocking to early audiences was L’Arrive d’un train en gare, which showed a train entering a station, craigslist where many audience members fled in fear that they‘d be run over by the incoming train. The brothers are also credited with the first comedy, and the first narrative film.

While The Lumires specialized in vrits and reality based films, it was Georges Mlis, a magicien, who really pioneered fiction and effects oriented cinema.* He is most famous for his film Le Voyage dans la lune.

The first big movie studio was also French, founded by the Path brothers in 1901 (a different company was founded in 1894, but their repertoire also included paid shows of phonograph recordings, which were later dropped when they decided to focus on the budding medium. They hired Ferdinand Zecca, who grew a reputation as plagiarist stealing from Mlis, Edison and the British pioneers, as their creative manager. By 1908, Path was by far the largest movie producer, making twice as many films than all of the American companies combined.

In 1908, Film D’art was founded, which was something of a step back for cinema. It was little more than staging and creating a repertoire of famous actors of the time giving silent performances of their greatest roles. They were very theatrical, usually one shot… often Shakespeare.

1908 up to WW1 was a low point in French cinema, as filmmakers and producers were more focused on the commercial potential of the medium rather than the artistic. Two notable exceptions would be actor, Max Linder, who brought subtle and sophisticated slapstick comedy to the screen ( and was apparently a big influence on Charlie Chaplin, among others), and Louis Feuillade who made serial films like Les Vampires and Fantmas .

The outbreak of WW1 had predictably dire effects on the French Film Industry, and it’s during this period that the American industry grew in prominence, crushing the power of Path, among others. Even after the Armistice, the industry suffered, but out of this stagnancy blossomed a movement that would raise film to an art.

It was Ricciotto Canudo who spur the movement when he referred to cinema as the seventh art and in 1920 founded The Club des amis du 7 art. Among the members of* The Club des amis du 7e art, were filmmakers Louis Delluc and Germaine Dulac.

I’ve collected a few shorts by Cohl/Melies and Lumieres, here is a link where you can find them all;

Shorts

(I won’t be watching any pre-1923 films for the purpose of the thread, however, I am pointing out five I would like to see at some point. For every year I will be choosing three films from which I will be choosing one as the “Film of the Year”, to watch and review. I’m pointing out the others for interest, as well as a sort of extended “to see list” for myself. Hopefully it might also inspire a few to look up or see a film you hadn’t heard of already.)

J’accuse! (Abel Gance, 1919)

L’Hirondelle et la msange (Andr Antoine, 1920)

L’Atlantide (Jacques Feyder, 1921)

Les Vampires(Louis Feuillade, 1915)

The shepherdess from Ivry (Maurice Tourneur, 1913 )

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Read more: dans movies
in wikipedia

You know how we love Costco hotdogs and chicken bakes?  Or just food in general, especially if it comes from Costco.  I was talking to Frank the other day and he told me in Taiwan they have bacon hamburgers on the foodcourt menu in Costco, as well as Peking duck pizza!!! He sent me a photo of the pizza

And I found a photo of the bacon hamburger via Rinux

And for the hamburger, you can put all kinds of condiments on it too, just like the hotdogs.

I think we need Peking corned beef duck pizza as well as a bacon hamburger in the Costcos over here!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Jennie

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I love Australia for its Asian eats, awesome seafood, modernised European flavours and killer coffee. But one of the things I don’t love is its chocolate chip cookies. For some reason, everywhere I go, all I get are dry, crumbly disks that fail to meet the comfort cravings of a New York boy who grew up with Toll House cookies (made from the recipe on packets of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips, of course) as the norm. Mom would pull them straight out of the oven, which is always the best way to eat them. And even better were the outings to gourmet cookie stores for warm chocolate chip cookies that were slightly crunchy on the outside, moist inside and, once bitten, unleashed a flow of molten chocolate.

If there’s ever a time built for comfort food, it’s the holidays, so I decided to take a crack at baking real-deal choc chip cookies for my partner Sarah’s family, who we were visiting up at the Newcastle Coast. But I wanted to do one better than my mother’s version (sorry, Mom) and aim to reach the upper echelons of those professional cookie bakeries.

To help me in my quest, I turned to the New York Times, from which I remembered David Leite writing a terrific article about how to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Leite goes back to the original recipe by Ruth Graves Wakefield, who introduced chocolate chip cookies to the world in the 1930s at her Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. Leite also points out a key step in Wakefield’s baking process that has been left out from those Nestle chip packages: refrigeration. It turns out that putting the cookie dough in the fridge for at least 24 hours, and up to three days, allow the eggs to be fully absorbed into the dry ingredients and develops a deeper complexity of flavour. Who knew?

After I read the article in 2008, I hadn’t remembered that the accompanying recipe had come from Jacques Torres, probably since I had no idea what that meant until I visited the chocolatier’s factory in Manhattan’s Tribeca this past summer. Here you’ll find some of the city’s best hot chocolate, terrific artisan bars and bon bons, and, of course, a very good chocolate chip cookie. Even better was the fact that Leite had modified the Jaques Torres recipe to integrate other learnings he had picked up while researching his article. Things were looking good for my cookie quest.

Cooking the recipe from Australia presented some minor challenges, from converting American weights, measurements, sticks of butter and temperature, to sourcing less-ready ingredients like cake flour and semisweet chocolate, but the nitty gritty gets a bit, well, clinical, so I’ve left that to the bottom if you really want to know the ins and outs.

With all of the ingredients and conversions sorted, it was time to get baking. The day before, I had carefully mixed all of the ingredients, using a hand mixer in lieu of a KitchenAid (hint, hint, for anyone who desperately wants to buy me a birthday/Chanukah/holiday present). I did this all at Sarah’s sister’s house, all while here two-year-old twin girls and four-year-old nephew watched in near-shaking anticipation, literally climbing the walls from their stools on the opposite side. Grudgingly, I had to hand over my beaters to placate the hungry little savages, then turned my attention to the emptied bowl, where I scrounged up tastes of the remaining batter. Isn’t this always the best part of making cookies?

The next day, I pre-heated the oven to 185-degrees Celsius, and removed the batter from the fridge. I was much drier than I expected, and it took a bit of finger muscle to extract batter and its cumbersome large chocolate discs, then form it into golf-ball-sized spheres. I spread them out on baking-paper lined pans, put them in the oven, and watched them work their magic… and then realised within minutes that I hadn’t spaced them out nearly far enough apart. About 15 minutes later they came out light golden, gooey, delicious – and slightly oblong. I did eight batches in total, and each time made adjustments to spacing, heating method (turning off the convection fan after the first two batches, as I’d been told that works better for baking) and time. If there’s one thing you have to do with cookies, it’s watch them – or time them perfectly. There’s a very fine line between beautifully golden  and overcooked brown (read: dry) cookies.

The end result? Chocolate chip cookies exactly the way I remembered them, maybe even better (at least the ones I didn’t overcook). And there’s still room for improvement and experimentation. Next time, I want to see what three days in the fridge does to the dough’s flavour, how using cake flour changes the texture, and what semisweet or dark chocolate adds to the taste. For now, though, I’ve got a dozen extra cookies tempting me from their Tupperware container, and I’m doing everything I can to avoid ruining my appetite. Again.

New York Times Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookies

The Nitty Gritty
If you’re interested in the trials and tribulations of baking a US cookie recipe, this part is for you. The first challenge chocolate was the usual conversions, from pounds and ounces into grams – luckily my baking scale could switch between the two, so I didn’t have to make the conversion. Then there was figuring out what three sticks of butter consisted of in grams. A little Google research showed that one US stick of butter is 113 grams. The average Australian block of butter is 250g, so three sticks meant 1.5 blocks, with a little bit off the top (pedantic baking types can go back to the scales to be precise).

The harder part was achieving the mix of bread flour and cake flour. Bread flour, which has more protein in it (11-12 percent, rather than 10 for standard plain flour), was pretty easy to find at Coles. Cake flour, however, was a different story. I searched several specialty shops to no avail. A little more Google research and I learned that cake flour is finely ground and lower in gluten than plain flour, and if it isn’t available, Women’s Weekly suggests the best substitute is to use plain flour, but remove two tablespoons for each cup that you use – which is what I did. In hindsight, I later discovered that Fremantle’s Anchor Foods – whose Lighthouse bread flour I used (found at Coles) – also produces a cake flour.

For the couveture chocolate, I head already bought a 1.5kg bag of Callebaut milk chocolate discs to make homemade rocky road, so I used them. I bought the bag at Chef’s Warehouse in Surry Hills for just $17, an even bigger bargain when I saw a measly 100g of Callebaut chips for sale in Edgecliff Mall for $9. Just think: it would cost $135 to get the equivalent amount. I’m no bargain hunter, but for once I was glad I had shopped wisely. Even so, my preference would have been for semisweet (or bittersweet) chocolate, but finding it in larger discs or chunks is difficult in Australia. If you’ve seen a good semisweet chocolate in Sydney let me know (note: the term simply means a minimum of 35 percent of chocolate liquor, so variations are extensive and as such, taste varies widely). I’ll also have a go at experimenting with dark chocolate next time.

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Not wanting to overreact, when the Pittsburgh Steelers lost straight-up to Cleveland last Thursday our power ranking minds immediately started pondering how much weight the upset should have on overall ratings. The Steelers were No. 9 on last week’s chart but that loss was not the kind of football we’ve come to expect over the past few years from this team.

It must be a similar situation for an online sportsbook when writing a line after such a surprising lack of effort from an inherently good team. Do you make them a big dog the next week or bank on public support for the team that was upset to dust off and come back strong?

If the rankings were based on the past month Big Ben would probably be positioned somewhere down near the Ryan Fitzpatrick’s and Josh Freeman’s of the league. But the BetRepublic.com ratings our based on full season performance so the damage isn’t quite that severe yet but still, Mike Tomlin’s squad needed to be penalized.

Pittsburgh fan – if it’s any consolation, Denver and Dallas have joined Pittsburgh in the group of let-downs but that probably doesn’t help much, does it? No, we didn’t think so.

BetRepublic.com Week 15 NFL Power Rankings

1. New Orleans Saints – Win establishes new franchise record for victories in a season (13) but Saints are becoming bad-beat specialists for Over/Under bettors. Fake field goal on 4th-and-7 from the 15?

2. Indianapolis Colts – Colts defense is quietly becoming difference that could keep this team perfect regardless of who is calling signals under center in fourth quarter.

3. Minnesota Vikings – Jasper Brinkley is linebacker who took place of EJ Henderson as Vikes extend streak of not allowing 100-plus rushers to 35 games.

4. Philadelphia Eagles – This is really shaping up like a Week 17 replay of last season when Eagles crushed Cowboys 44-6. Philly gets back-to-back home chances to make Dallas outcome moot.

5. New England Patriots – Notice how drama in Foxboro is starting to get more attention than the actual football.

6. San Diego Chargers – It was nice of Norv to let anyone in Denver think they ever had a chance of winning this division.

7. Cincinnati Bengals – Run game is there and Chris Henry is gone but Cinci needs to get its deep passing game working or it’s going to be a one-and-done.

8. Arizona Cardinals – Notice how the top eight teams are all made up of division leaders? Arizona still saving its best games for last few weeks.

9. Green Bay Packers – This is youngest overall team in the NFL for third time in last four years. It’s been a contributing factor towards high number of penalties but at this point in the season it is becoming inexcusable.

10. Baltimore Ravens – It may have only been the Lions but there is no questioning what butters the bread for that Ravens offense. Run-game has crept to eighth-best in the league.

11. Pittsburgh Steelers – Early lines indicate that bookmakers still have faith. Maybe the extra days of prep are what Steelers need; after all, their last win was at Denver following bye week.

12. Denver Broncos – Handicapping Broncos is fairly simple: They lose to every team with a shot at making the playoffs and beat up on the bad teams. Hello Oakland!

13. Dallas Cowboys – Romo and Phillips both look ready to move on but you’ve got to love bet nba that big screen TV!

14. Miami Dolphins – First thing you need to know: Fish are 14th against the run giving up 106 yards per game. Second thing: Titan run-game has not been stopped at home since Week 5.

15. Houston Texans – QB Schaub throws for 365 yards doing just enough to keep Texans on pace for shot at .500. Maybe the next step is to not include Gary Kubiak in gameplan.

16. New York Giants – Quite a finale for Eagles’ last ever visit. Hope last one out turned off the lights.

17. Tennessee Titans – Vince Young’s hamstring didn’t look good so Titans already thin playoff hopes may now be clinging to the arm of Kerry Collins.

18. Jacksonville Jaguars – Loss to Miami wasn’t nearly as close as the final score indicates. Jags are the imposter of the AFC playoff picture and won’t be there for long.

19. Atlanta Falcons – Given the injuries Atlanta’s 6-7 record is pretty respectable. Team is 8-5 ATS, too, and could be a good cover team each of next three weeks.

20. Washington Redskins – We don’t want to be an “I told you so,” but did you see our Fantasy Football tip of the week run in Oakland? RB Quinton Ganther is the new Clinton Portis.

21. New York Jets – Rex Ryan defensive system really starting to kick in. Now if the Jets could just face the Bills and Bucs the rest of the way they’d be playoff bound in no time.

22. San Francisco 49ers – One thing about playing for Mike Singletary, you won’t find any quitters on this team.

23. Carolina Panthers – Things are starting to fall into place for Carolina and they should serve as a good warm-up team for the playoffs for their next two or three opponents; possibly even a good dog play.

24. Seattle Seahawks – If there’s any team in need of retooling this off-season, Seattle could be it. And this job will not be for the faint of heart.

25. Chicago Bears – This team is lacking urgency and focus; if players can’t realize they still need to play hard for shot at playoffs they should at least realize their jobs are on the line.

26. Oakland Raiders – Did QB Gradkowski play well enough before season-ending injury to unseat Russell from No. 1 spot for next year? Ball is in your court now JaMarcus.

27. Tampa Bay Buccaneers – Starting with the Bucs, see if you can name the three teams that fired their offensive coordinators just before the season began.

28. Buffalo Bills – That’s two! (And you’re getting warmer)

29. Kansas City Chiefs – For final game of three-week home stand the Chiefs get the Browns
(2-11). KC lost by 29 to Denver (8-5) and just six points to Bills (5-8). Early money says home side wins and by the way, the Chiefs are the third.

30. Cleveland Browns – Beating Steelers gets Mang-idiot a two-spot bounce. Browns are at KC in Week 15, eying out that 29 spot.

31. St. Louis Rams – Rams beat Lions in Week 8 to show they were not the worst and now it looks as if they will burn Detroit again by finishing below them in the standings. Brilliant!

32. Detroit Lions – Enjoyed brief stint out of cellar after beating Cleveland but that loss to Baltimore has likely poured concrete over tomb of another lost season.

Check out BetRepublic.com for NFL picks, more NFL power ratings, power rating plays and live sports betting TV.

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badjojo
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