Posted by Tommy Garrett on Apr 20, 2008 - 10:36:49 AM
Constance Towers played roving – not to mention, ravishing – reporter for yours truly again this past week when I was suddenly called out of town. So I asked Connie to pinch-hit for me at a major event in the glamour capitol of the world: The unveiling of soap luminary Kate Linder’s (Esther Valentine, “The Young And the Restless”) star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 10.
Celebrating her anniversary (26 consecutive years as a cast member of the number one rated show in the Daytime Nielsen Ratings) that very week, Kate is so deserving of this honor. She is also to be applauded for her charity work (feeding the poor and homeless, for example) and serving as celebrity spokesperson for The ALS Association (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). She is to be applauded as well for her entertainment-industry experiences as board member for AFTRA and TV Cares and being elected for a second term as Governor of the Daytime Programming Peer Group for the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Late in the morning of Kate’s big day, Connie Towers and her singing discovery, romantic crooner David Johnson, synchronized watches at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Tinseltown. “I met David outside the hotel entrance, and we walked over to the star site across the street together,” Connie related. “Kate’s star is next to Eric Braeden’s star, which was kind of appropriate. [“Y&R” cast mate Braeden plays Victor Newman on the show.] There was a huge mob waiting, and I was taken into the VIP section. I went in with Mark Teschner, who does the casting for ‘GH.’”
“What an event it was,” Connie raved, recalling the exciting sidewalk festivities. “Kate wore a great Navy pants suit with white cuffs and collar. She looked fabulous. ‘Every inch a star,’ as they say. She paid great tribute to the Bell family for her career and dedicated the star to Bill Bell [the late co-creator/head writer of “Y&R” and “B&B”] and Johnny Grant [the late honorary mayor of Hollywood].”

canyon-news.com

Published on Thursday, Mar 20, 2008
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church 36th Annual Bake Sale — 10 a.m .to 5 p.m. today at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, 129 S. Union St., Akron. All profits from Easter Bake Sale to benefit national and local charities. 330-434-0000.
Famous American Women — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — 7 tonight, at the Daniel’s Community Center, Doylestown. Free. 330-658-4677.
I-X Indoor Amusement Park — Held at the I-X Center, 6200 Riverside Drive, Cleveland. Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m Saturdays and Sundays. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. March Monday-March 28; closed March 31 and April 1; 5-10 p.m. April 2-4; closed April 7-8; 5-10 p.m. April 9-11; $19, $16 for children under 48 inches in height; $9 for seniors. 800-897-3942.
26th Annual Akron Antiquarian Book Fair — 3-8:30 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the John S. Knight Convention Center, 77 E. Mill St., Akron. More than 60 vendors will offer rare and collectible books, maps, prints and posters. Writer Russ Musarra and illustrator Chuck Ayers will talk about local landmarks and sign copies of their latest book, Walks Around Akron, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday. $5. 330-865-5831.
Friday Night Wine Tasting — 7-11 p.m. Friday at Skyview Lodge, 336 Pearl Road, Brunswick. An evening of wine tasting, light tapas, cash bar, and live entertainment. $10. 330-225-8345.
Pysanki: Ukrainian Egg-Decorating workshop — 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday at the Wayne Center for the Arts, 237 S. Walnut St., Wooster. Nancy Skinner will teach. Pysanki is a technique that uses melted beeswax to write designs on an egg that is then dipped in dye. $20. 330-264-2787.
Internet Genealogy workshop — 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Akron-Summit County Main Library, 60 S. High St., Akron. Free. 330-643-9030.

ohio.com

Cooking shares the connective thread of music and travel. Like a good song or a colorful postcard, recipes are shared through friends and generations. Unless you were a fan of rumaki. This sense of community explains why cooking videos have sprung up on YouTube, Chowhound and other Web sites. People are hungry to share their secrets. But can you learn to cook through YouTube? I found it somewhat difficult.
It’s not like those early morning cable TV workouts where you simply roll out a mat in your living room and count along with young women in bikinis doing calisenthics along South Beach.
Cooking through YouTube requires the viewer to step up to the plate and keep his or her eye on the ball.
“Cooking on YouTube is an emerging trend that’s heating up,” said YouTube spokesman Spencer Crooks from YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif. “A vibrant community is sharing recipes and exchanging techniques. Chefs interact with the viewers where people leave comments. There’s a single place to turn for everything from knife techniques to cooking an omelet in a Ziploc bag.”
I made jambalaya for my YouTube experiment. Cajun cooking allows for improvisation, great background music (Clifton Chenier, Lil’ Band of Gold), Mountain Dew chasers and good companionship.
I used my 1984 version of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen cookbook as a safety template. I embellished with my own ideas and stuff I found on YouTube. This was like re-configuring the Louisiana Purchase.
I came across the three-part series “New Year’s Eve Jambalaya Cooking” on YouTube. It was not very inspiring. The kitchen appeared to be a mess and the droll woman in the background sounded like she was stoned, calling the chef “dude” and asking, “What’s going on here now?”
The worst part was that most ingredients were not introduced. The video’s saving grace: posts by viewers suggesting to add chorizo sausages, pork, blackeyed peas, kidney beans, stock, carrots/onions/ chickpeas and so on.

suntimes.com

PCs for Five C’s
Back in the day, we ran a regular feature dubbed Grand Openings in which we toured vendors’ Web sites to see how much PC you could buy on a $1,000 budget. These days, of course, spending a grand gets you a fairly formidable desktop or not-half-bad notebook: With the merest glance at BestBuy.com, we found Core 2 Quad Q6600 desktops with 3GB of RAM and 500GB hard drives from both Dell and Gateway, plus 17-inch HP and 15.4-inch Toshiba laptops with Turion 64 X2 processors and a 14.1-inch, Core 2 Duo-based Dell in our choice of seven colors.
Clearly, our price ceiling had to fall to make the search at all interesting. Last spring we took a crack at comparison shopping with $750 to spend, but it wasn’t as much fun as Grand Openings used to be. We missed the challenge of making decisions, the shopping experience of having a gunman leap out of an alley and shout, “All right, punk — faster CPU or more memory? Answer in five, four, three, two …”
The answer was obvious: $500 is the new $1,000.
Of course a $500 price tag isn’t unprecedented. For a couple of years or more, retail superstores have offered consumers $500 desktops suitable for use as a family’s second or third PC. These days, several vendors stock $199 Linux systems ready to be the family’s fifth or sixth.
But can half a grand buy a PC you’ll feed good about buying? The first item on our checklist and/or wish list was a dual-core processor — and believe us, if you weren’t familiar with the 65-nanometer-process, entry-level Pentium Dual-Core chip that Intel quietly slipped into its lineup below the Core 2 Duo last year, you will be after five minutes shopping for $500 PCs.
We also kept an eye out for PCI Express x16 slots to allow upgrading from low-priced desktops’ integrated graphics, and — hardest to find in this price range — 2GB instead of 1GB of memory, to shift Windows Vista from Park to Drive. Unless otherwise mentioned, every system we eyed came with a DVD±RW burner, with WiFi standard equipment on laptops.

itmanagement.earthweb.com

Sen. Barack Obama meets with the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune on Friday, March 14, 2008. (Chicago Tribune photo by Zbigniew Bzdak)
by James Oliphant
Earlier today, the Clinton campaign demanded that Barack Obama release all the documents pertaining to the purchase of his home in 2005 on a piece of land adjacent to land owned by Tony Rezko.
The Obama campaign’s response: We already have!
Says Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor,
Here’s the link to the documents Vietor is talking about. And on this fine Saturday afternoon (it’s a beautiful day in Washington) if you would like to examine some fence construction documents, via con Dios.
Just to review: Clinton’s campaign has said she will release her tax returns before the Pennsylvania primary. But it hasn’t made a pledge about donors to the Clinton library. The Obama campaign has long made an issue about Bill Clinton’s post-presidency business connections.
You know HRC will just release this yrs returns. Why wait for April 15th? What about the rest going back to Bill’s Presidency? No way we’ll see those. I know HRCers are having fun today at Obama’s expense, but that will go away and HRC will still be the most secretive, power grabber in the mix.
Yes Hillary, let’s talk about Rezko, afterall he raised money for Bill, remember?
Rezko made a $1,250 contribution during the Clinton re-election campaign in 1996 to a Democratic party account that funded activities in Illinois to help win the election for Bill.
Let’s also talk about Norman Hu, shall we Hillary?
For those who have wondered what happened to Clinton fundraiser Norman Hsu, here is your answer. Norman was indicted in New York on 15 counts of duping investors with a nationwide Ponzi scheme.
The Clintons need to be put down like the rabid Rovian dogs that they are. It will never stop until their man McCain is Prez.

weblogs.baltimoresun.com