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Selasa, 02 Februari 2010

Oscar Nominations: Who Got Snubbed!

The Academy Awards nominations were announced Tuesday morning in Beverly Hills.
As predicted, The Blind Side's Sandra Bullock scored a Best Actress nod, as did Best Actor nominee George Clooney for Up in the Air. (SEE A COMPLETE LIST OF OSCAR NOMINEES HERE)
But many stars were surprisingly shut out.
Look back on the hot couples (like Jen Aniston and John Mayer!) who hit the Oscars last year
Though his performance was critically lauded (and he scored a Screen Actors Guild Award nod), Brad Pitt didn't nab a Best Actor nomination for his role as Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Golden Globe nominee (and star of Nine) Daniel Day-Lewis also got shafted.
Red carpet flashback: see how the stars dazzled at the Oscars in 2009
John Krasinski's wife-to-be Emily Blunt was ignored in the Best Actress category for The Young Victoria, even though she earned a Golden Globe nomination. Also shut out: Oscar winners Marion Cotillard, star of Nine, and Julia Roberts, star of Duplicity - both of whom received Golden Globe nominations.
See how the stars partied at last year's Oscar bashes
Clint Eastwood was left out of the best directing category for the drama Invictus. Instead, honors went to James Cameron (Avatar); Katheryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker); Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds); Lee Daniels (Precious) and Jason Reitman (Up in the Air).
This year's Best Picture nominees - 10 films were nominated instead of the usual five - were predictable: Avatar: The Blind Side; District 9; An Education; The Hurt Locker; Inglourious Basterds; Precious; A Serious Man; Up: Up in the Air.
See unforgettable Oscar moments
Some fans expected the comedy blockbuster The Hangover to earn a nod - it was up in the Best Comedy or Musical category in this year's Golden Globes - but it did not. Also ignored: Julie & Julia, Nine and Crazy Heart.

Buckeye chuck

buckeye 
chuckBuckeye Chuck predicts early spring. by MaureenMcCabe on February 2, 2010. Buckeye Chuck predicts an early spring… way to go Chuck! real Living ecard groundhog day. This is a Real Living Ecard. Happy Groundhogs Day! . From late September until early April, Buckeye Chuck spends his time hibernating. On February 2, against his will, Chuck emerges from his sleep to predict the weather. In 1979, the Ohio legislature made Buckeye Chuck Ohio's official . Ohio's official weather prognosticating rodent is Buckeye Chuck of Marion. Festivities include warm drinks and a spam burger.
buckeye 
chuck
Buckeye Chuck predicts early spring. by MaureenMcCabe on February 2, 2010. Buckeye Chuck predicts an early spring… way to go Chuck! real Living ecard groundhog day. This is a Real Living Ecard. Happy Groundhogs Day! . From late September until early April, Buckeye Chuck spends his time hibernating. On February 2, against his will, Chuck emerges from his sleep to predict the weather. In 1979, the Ohio legislature made Buckeye Chuck Ohio's official . Ohio's official weather prognosticating rodent is Buckeye Chuck of Marion. Festivities include warm drinks and a spam burger.
buckeye 
chuck
Buckeye Chuck predicts early spring. by MaureenMcCabe on February 2, 2010. Buckeye Chuck predicts an early spring… way to go Chuck! real Living ecard groundhog day. This is a Real Living Ecard. Happy Groundhogs Day! . From late September until early April, Buckeye Chuck spends his time hibernating. On February 2, against his will, Chuck emerges from his sleep to predict the weather. In 1979, the Ohio legislature made Buckeye Chuck Ohio's official . Ohio's official weather prognosticating rodent is Buckeye Chuck of Marion. Festivities include warm drinks and a spam burger.

RTKL in i-phone bussiness

Architecture in motion

For most businesses, the term “currency” refers to financial resources. But at international architecture firm RTKL, currency is synonymous with the company’s wealth of innovative design ideas. With offices from Baltimore to Shanghai and award-winning projects spanning six continents, unlimited communication is key to keeping the firm’s intellectual capital flowing. That’s where iPhone comes in.
“Our culture is based on visual information,” explains RTKL Vice President Thom McKay. “And iPhone allows us to exchange that information, that visual currency, with a level of immediacy that we didn’t have only a few short years ago.”
iPhone enables RTKL’s architects, designers, engineers, and other staff to share detailed visuals and build on each other’s ideas, even when team members are literally oceans apart.
With iPhone, says McKay, “we’re not just faxing or sending PDFs. We’re actually collaborating across the devices — across cultures, across geographies, across time zones — with great ease and facility. For contacts, calendars, and e-mail, it’s all there. By combining these things into a single handheld device, iPhone has made many people happy.”

Demystifying Deployment

So far, RTKL has deployed iPhone to approximately 450 staff members — about half of the company’s global workforce. Configuring the phone to work with the firm’s existing systems was “a no-brainer,” says Ardie Aliandust, CIO and Vice President of Technology.
“From the IT standpoint, our integration with Exchange was really simple,” he says. “Almost a non-event. We were able to integrate iPhone into our corporate network seamlessly, not only for voice calling and web access, but also to access many of our internal information resources.”
Via a VPN connection to the RTKL intranet, staff can take advantage of corporate resources such as a digital image bank of more than 15,000 images. “Having access to our digital image bank has been extremely helpful, especially because I travel so much,” notes McKay. “I can review campaigns, photographer portfolios, or ad mock-ups while I’m traveling. iPhone has made it extremely easy to do that.”

Building New Ideas

In a business based on visual interchange, it’s essential to find resources that facilitate the flow of ideas and inspirations. One advantage of iPhone, says RTKL Vice President Katie Sprague, is that it gives them a flexible, expandable toolkit for creative collaboration.
“We all knew that the way our business worked would fit seamlessly with how iPhone is organized,” she says. “Each of us brings our own set of apps to meetings. I might want to look at color palettes. I use myPANTONE, so I can pull things up then and there without having to bring all my chips with me.”
With tens of thousands of inspiring apps to choose from, iPhone helps keep the creative conversation going at RTKL. “One of our senior designers downloaded SketchBook Mobile Express and was using it to kick around ideas on a project,” McKay recalls. “It was just wonderful to see him sketching with his fingertip on ideas for this new museum we’ve been working on.”
iPhone apps also simplify international business travel for RTKL staff. “I like to use FlightTrack Pro to see what's up with my flights,” says Sprague. “Am I on time, am I delayed, what's going on with gate changes?”

Bringing Worlds Together

For the creative professionals at RTKL, one of the greatest benefits of iPhone is its ability to transmit and display rich visual information. “Virtually everything we do is based on a picture, an image, a drawing, a sketch, an animation,” says McKay. “iPhone has been perfect for us because it allows us to exchange ideas and share sketches, PDFs, and JPEGs. It’s made communication easier and more immediate.”
But iPhone doesn’t just enhance the firm’s creative capital, Sprague adds: It also brings together a world’s worth of business information, from deadlines in Dubai to contacts in Chicago.
“We’re a global firm, and iPhone is a global device,” she says. “We truly are networked as a result. I'm really excited that the idea of creativity and business can live together. This tool thinks the way we think. It absolutely has changed the way we work.”

super-fun and amazing star sightings (um, hello Jon Gosselin!) abounded. But the best party I hit was to celebrate a hilarious --though slightly irreverent --viral video by the men’s grooming brand Axe, showcasing their man-loofah (a moofah?) called the Detailer and good guy grooming below the belt. Check it out at axecyb.com, and tell me what you think!
The bash was hosted by gorge Khloe Kardashian, who (by the way) looked spectacularly slim. When I asked her if her hubs, Lamar Odom, could learn a thing or two from the video, she told me that he always keeps it clean!
Khloe looked so smoldering with smokey eyes and that sexy Victoria’s Secret model mane!

Senin, 01 Februari 2010

Obama Story Tools

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama has sent Congress a multi-trillion-dollar spending plan seeking to attack double-digit unemployment and boosting this year's federal deficit to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion.
Obama's new budget blueprint preaches the need to make tough choices to restrain run-away deficits. But it also aims to attack 10 percent joblessness, a priority the administration sees as badly needed to lift the country out of a deep recession that has cost 7.2 million jobs over the past two years.
The result is a budget plan that would give the country trillion-dollar-plus deficits for three consecutive years. Obama's new budget projects a spending increase of 5.7 percent for the current budget year and forecasts that spending would rise another 3 percent in 2011 to $3.83 trillion.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs.
The deficit for this year would surge to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion, topping last year's then unprecedented $1.41 trillion gap. The deficit would remain above $1 trillion in 2011 although the president proposed to institute a three-year budget freeze on a variety of programs outside of the military and homeland security as well as increasing taxes on energy producers and families making more than $250,000.
Echoing the pledge in his State of the Union address to make job creation his top priority, Obama put forward a budget that included a $100 billion jobs measure that would provide tax breaks to encourage businesses to boost hiring as well as increased government spending on infrastructure and energy projects. He called for fast congressional action to speed relief to millions left unemployed in the worst recession since the 1930s.
After a protracted battle on health care dominated his first year in office and led to a string of Democratic election defeats, the administration hopes its new budget will convince Americans the president is focused on fixing the economy.
Republicans complained about Obama's proposed tax increases and said the huge projected deficits showed he had failed to get government spending under control. But administration officials argued that Obama inherited a deficit that was already topping $1 trillion when he took office and given the severity of the downturn, the president had to spend billions of dollars stabilizing the financial system and jump-starting growth.
Obama's job proposals would push government spending in 2010 to $3.72 trillion, up 5.7 percent from last year. Obama's blueprint for the 2011 budget year, which begins Oct. 1, would increase spending further to $3.83 trillion, 3 percent higher than projected for this year.
While Obama projects that deficits from 2011 to 2020 will add $8.5 trillion to the national debt, the administration said that figure would have been $1.2 trillion higher were it not for deficit cuts the administration is proposing, including elimination of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for families making more than $250,000 annually, something Republicans have vowed to oppose.
Much of the spending surge over the past two years reflects the cost of the $787 billion economic stimulus measure that Congress passed in February 2009 to deal with the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. The surge in the deficits reflects not only the increased spending but also a big drop in tax revenues, reflecting the 7.2 million people who have lost jobs since the recession began and weaker corporate tax receipts.
"Having steered the economy back from the brink of a depression, the administration is committed to moving the nation from a recession to recovery by sparking job creation to get millions of Americans back to work," the administration said in a statement accompanying its budget.
The administration's $100 billion proposed jobs measure would be lower than a $174 billion bill passed by the House in December but far higher than a measure that the Senate could take up as early as this week.
Obama's new budget attempts to navigate between the opposing goals of pulling the country out of a deep recession and getting control of runaway budget deficits.
"It's a question of timing. We have got to jump-start job creation now and then over time bring the deficits down," White House budget director Peter Orszag said in a CBS "Early Show" interview. "None of this is easy but it is crucially important for the American people."
On the anti-recession front, Obama's new budget proposed extending the popular Making Work Pay middle-class tax breaks of $400 per individual and $800 per couple through 2011. They were due to expire after this year. The budget also proposes making $250 payments to Social Security recipients to bolster their finances in a year when they are not receiving the normal cost-of-living boost to their benefit checks because of low inflation. Obama will also seek a $25 billion increase in payments to help recession-battered states.
In a bow to worries over the soaring deficits, the administration proposed a three-year freeze on spending beginning in 2011 for many domestic government agencies. It would save $250 billion over the next decade by following the spending freeze with caps that would keep increases after 2013 from rising faster than inflation.
Military, veterans, homeland security and big benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare would not feel the pinch. Federal support for elementary and high school education would get a big increase as would the Pell Grant college tuition program which would see an increase of $17 billion to just under $35 billion, helping an additional 1 million students.
The administration said it was proposing the largest funding increase in the history of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a $3 billion increase to $28 billion plus an additional $1 billion if Congress agrees to some major changes in the law.
The administration would also provide an additional $1.35 billion for the president's Race to the Top challenge, a federal grant program in which 40 states are competing for $4 billion in education money included in last year's stimulus bill. Obama hailed the results of this effort in his State of the Union speech.
The New York Times reported Monday the administration was seeking a sweeping overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law that will call for broad changes in how schools are judged to be succeeding or failing.
In Obama's new budget, the Department of Homeland Security would get an additional $734 million to support the deployment of up to 1,000 advanced imaging airport screening machines and new baggage screening equipment to detect explosives. Those increases represented a response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt on an airliner landing in Detroit.
The president's budget seeks a $33 billion increase in a supplemental appropriation this year for the military and $159.3 billion in 2011 to support Obama's boost strategy to deal with the terrorist threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
NASA's mission to return astronauts to the moon would be grounded with the space agency instead getting an additional $5.9 billion over five years to encourage private companies to build, launch and operate their own spacecraft for the benefit of NASA and others. NASA would pay the private companies to carry U.S. astronauts.
Obama's budget repeats his recommendations for an overhaul of America's health care system even though prospects for passage of a final bill have darkened given the loss of a Democratic Senate seat in Massachusetts in a recent special election, depriving Obama's party of the votes needed to break a Republican filibuster.
Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs insisted Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" that the push for health care was "still inside the 5-yard line" but Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said the public was overwhelmingly against the bill and the administration should "put it on the shelf, go back and start over."
In addition to the freeze on discretionary nonsecurity spending, Obama is proposing to boost revenues by allowing the Bush administration tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to expire at the end of this year for families making more than $250,000 annually, which the administration projects would raise $678 billion over the next decade. Tax relief for those less well-off would be extended.
The new Obama budget will also include a proposal to levy a fee on the country's biggest banks to raise an estimated $90 billion to recover losses from the government's $700 billion financial rescue fund. Those losses are expected to come not from the bank bailouts but from the support extended to General Motors and Chrysler and insurance giant American International Group as well as help provided to homeowners struggling to avoid foreclosures.
Also on the deficit front, the president has endorsed a pay-as-you-go proposal that passed the Senate last week. It would require any new tax cuts or entitlement spending increases to be paid for, and he has promised to create a commission to recommend by year's end ways to trim the deficits. Administration officials briefing reporters on Sunday declined to say when the commission would be appointed.

Pink Performs "Glitter in the Air," Rises Above Other Performances

For those who missed the 2010 Grammy Awards, it is fortunate that we live in the age of the computer, video streaming, downloads, and YouTube, because missing Pink's "Glitter In The Air" performance would have been a virtual crime and a cruel

Pink's 2010 Grammy Awards Performance Thing of Naked Beauty (And Why We Thank the Heavens for Video)
Date: January 31, 2010
Los Angeles, CA
United States of America
 shame. Pink's performance, to put it bluntly, was simply beautiful, from the lifting vocals to the downplayed white-cowled singer that emerged from her constraints as if reborn to fly above the audience. It was artistic triumph. It was a graceful weaving of song and staged theatrics. Again, it was beautiful. And although there were no awards given Sunday evening for Best Live Performance at the 2010 Grammy Awards, there is no doubt that Pink walked away the winner of that unofficial competition.

Pink had some stiff competition. Lady Gaga opened the show with her "Fame Monster" set, sang a bit of "Poker Face" in a green heart-shaped unitard and got dumped into a "Rejected" smokestack-like recycler, only to come out dueling with Elton John on head-to-head pianos. They sang "Speechless" and the crowd, obviously enjoying the first-ever collaboration between the two 'glam' rockers, went wild.

Needless to say, topping that bit of theatre and showmanship was not the easiest of feats.

Beyonce, who would go on to win six of the ten Grammy Awards she was nominated for (a record for a female artist), couldn't top it. She marched out with a legion of black-uniformed troopers and sang "If I Were A Boy." And although the performance was exciting and well sung, it lost its edge due to its highs and lows, building too many crescendos.

Taylor Swift, who took home four of the little gramophone trophies (and winner of Album of the Year), didn't even come close to topping Pink's performance. Even after singing two songs -- Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon" and her own -- with the incomparable Stevie Nicks, she did not compare. Truthfully, Taylor Swift's reedy and weak vocals are nowhere in the same league as Lady Gaga's, Beyonce's, or Pink's. So what might have been an exciting duet with one of rock's most legendary female performers turned into a disappointment.

Must See This Amazing Beyonce Grammy Awards Performance 2010!




I have to wonder is the media turning on Beyonce! I keep reading all these reports to battle Beyonce Knowles against Taylor Swift.


LATimes.com reports, “On a night in which BeyoncĂ© set a record for women with six Grammy Awards, the reigning diva of R&B still had to share the spotlight with 20-year-old country-pop princess Taylor Swift, who collected four awards, including album of the year, for "Fearless," the biggest-selling album of 2009.”

Beyonce is no longer a celebrity brand but now a celebrity Icon. Check out this amazing performance. BTW, Beyonce is a cross-over artist no longer just considered R&B.