Media criticizes SNL for Tiger Woods skit, loses all respect

Boy, during this whole Tiger Woods scandal, the news media has really showed their true colors. Forget finding facts, everybody is just naturally assuming there was a domestic incident, despite that not being confirmed by anyone. However, media sources like to just report it like it happened (as if they know).

Not to mention their eagerness to report the numerous ladies that have come forward to say that they have slept with Tiger Woods. This is sound, solid, useful journalism!

And now this media is using their platform to pick on that dastardly Saturday Night Live that basically has done the same thing they've done, except it's funny and entertaining. And by the way, it's a sketch comedy show so basically they're allowed to play around with the rules because nobody treats them as the truth.

In the comedy sketch, Tiger Woods (played by the “S.N.L.” performer Kenan Thompson) gives a series of press conferences attempting to apologize for acts of infidelity. In each appearance, the fictional Woods appears with more bruises and injuries, evidently sustained at the hands of Elin (played in the skit by Ms. Lively).

Around the blogosphere, viewers wondered if “Saturday Night Live” went too far in mining comedy from the subject of domestic abuse — particularly when the show’s musical guest was Rihanna, who in February was assaulted by her then-companion, Chris Brown.

Has SNL gone too far? There was no domestic abuse reported, they're just taking on the humerous angle that Tiger's wife would be rather angry to find that he's been sleeping around. Nothing more, nothing less. It's the media that's jumping off the boat with this whole domestic violience issue. And I'm sure Rihanna didn't actually watch the freakin' skit.

Again, the media has shown they have no shame, morals or even a sense of place when it comes to covering things these days. But.. gasp... at least they're better than that evil SNL.

Comcast will not ruin Hulu

Perhaps you heard yesterday that Comcast bought NBC Universal meaning that it's probably the most powerful entertainment entity in the universe, except for that evil empire known as Disney. One of things that got me thinking was that NBC Universal has a lot of content streamed on Hulu, but that takes away from Comcast's own on demand service (which by the way, is one of the most addicting tv services ever), so would they pull the plug on Hulu?

As expected, Comcast announced its buyout of NBC Universal today, a deal that has left many wondering what will happen to Hulu, the ad-driven TV and movie streaming site. According to Comcast COO Stephen Burke the answer is: not much. Burke referred to Hulu's existing business model as "smart and appropriate" and said there aren't any plans to change the site.

Burke noted that NBC has been "careful not to put too much cable content on the Internet." Comcast CEO Brian Roberts emphasized further that Comcast has no intent to "crush [Hulu] like a bug." It's worth mentioning that NBCU is only one of two other studios (ABC and Fox) with a stake in Hulu, so it can't determine the site's fate outright. Roberts also said that a Hulu subscription model isn't in the cards -- but time will tell.

Thank god, that would have absolutely ruined my day.

Susan Boyle: most popular woman ever

Who saw this coming? Susan Boyle is killing the sales charts after releasing her first album. While I think this is fantastic, I'm wondering what they're going to do about the music video.

Susan Boyle, queen of the pop charts.

The matronly Scottish singer who rose to unlikely fame on British reality TV has a exclamation point to add to her fairytale success story. Her first album has not only debuted in the number one spot on the Billboard charts - it's the biggest selling debut album from any female artist since SoundScan began tracking record sales in 1991.

The 47-year-old church singer, who makes her home in Blackburn, Scotland, released her album "I Dreamed a Dream" on November 23, and it sold 701,000 copies in its first week, Billboard.com reports.

That beats 2009's previous big seller, Eminem, whose "Relapse" moved 608,000 copies in its first week. The last album to better Boyle's sales was AC/DC's "Black Ice" in October 2008, with 784,000 records sold.

Now when does she do a song with Lady Gaga?

The new Scrubs stinks

Perhaps you've heard of this show called "Scrubs" as it's only one roughly five channels in syndication at any given time. Anyways, for the ninth season and the "should-be-expected" exodus of most of the actors wanting to move on with their career has led to ABC bringing in a new cast. Problem is... the reviews aren't that great about the crew.

Will "Scrubs" be more or less consistent when Zach Braff (who'll be in six episodes) and Sarah Chalke (four episodes) take off for good? Who knows. This is nothing if not an experimental treatment.

Some key characters from "Scrubs" are either missing in action (that's the case with Judy Reyes' Carla) or make very brief appearances (Neil Flynn's Janitor makes a cameo but Flynn's on ABC's "The Middle" now). Bob Kelso, however, is still around, which means we'll get to enjoy Ken Jenkins' wicked way with a punchline for at least another half season (at this point, ABC has ordered 13 episodes of "Scrubs: The New School").

Part of me wants the "Scrubs" graft to take, but another part of me wonders if ABC should have simply pulled the plug. The main problem Season 9 of "Scrub" is that Lucy Bennett (Kerry Bishe), the medical student around which the new season revolves, isn't all that funny or winning, and she needs to be one of those things for "Scrubs" to truly work.

The fault really isn't Bishe's, the problem is more that her bland, tentative character just isn't that entertaining,at least in the first two episodes. Lucy certainly doesn't have the doofy, dorky charm that made Braff's J.D. and his voiceovers engaging for so long. Plus J.D. had Turk (Donald Faison) to bounce off, and the J.D.-Turk relationship is still one of the most consistently funny things about "Scrubs" (which begs the question, what happens when Braff exits and the Guy Love between Turk and J.D. no longer anchors the show? Will it be like Bell Biv DeVoe with just Biv?)

No J.D. and Turk? I am totally out. You hear me? Totally out.

This weekend in terrible movies

Thanks to the pathetic single bookworms of the world, Twilight reigns supreme at the box office, taking in 42 million over the weekend. This basically ensures that guys around the country are now going to need a pale complexion and fangs in order to get laid. Crap...
 
The Box-Office Top Five
#1 "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" ($42.5 million)
#2 "The Blind Side" ($40.1 million)
#3 "2012" ($18 million)
#4 "Old Dogs" ($16.8 million)
#5 "A Christmas Carol" ($16 million)

2012 made just $18 million and after having a $200 million budget and pulling in $65 million during their opening weekend. Looks like they're not recouping their costs in that actual disaster.

The pleasant surprise is "The Blind Side", which gave Twilight a run for its money. This football movie shows that maybe some people out there have a brain, or aren't hopelessly single.

They might have to make movie theater seats bigger

No seriously, really, really big. All that popcorn and other wonderful menu items are so packed with calories, you'll have to spend a couple days at the gym just to work it off. Eww.

The real drama in movie theaters these days isn’t happening on screen.

It’s at the concession stand.

When moviegoers plunk down the bucks for snacks at the nation’s theaters they may be putting themselves at greater risk than any character in the flick.

ABCNews.com reports that, according to a new study by the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest, the offerings at concession stands contain an alarming amount of sugar fat, and calories. Even the smallest bag of popcorn has 700 calories and three days' worth of saturated fat.

The CSPI report studied concessions sold at the nation’s top three movie theater chains: Regal Entertainment Group, AMC Theaters and Cinemark.

“A combo at Regal (meaning a medium popcorn and medium soda) has 1,610 calories,” wrote the study’s authors. “That’s like eating six scrambled eggs with chedder cheese, four bacon strips, and four sausage links before the lights come up.”

Sixteen hundred Calories? That makes McDonalds look like weight watcher. Looks like if I'm going on a diet I won't be watching movies anytime soon...

Will Ferrell is an overpaid hack

Has Will Ferrell followed the steps of Adam Sandler as being one the most famous people ever, and then crashing back to earth with an incredible flop? You can't really argue with that considering his latest movies which have received critical pans and bombed at the box office. Now Forbes has named him the most overpaid actor in show business.

Looks like "Land of the Lost" has earned star Will Ferrell the dubious distinction of being the most overpaid actor in show business, according to the list makers at Forbes magazine.

Forbes looked at 100 top actors based on their widely released films over the past five years. It factored in the production costs of those movies against how much boxoffice, DVD and other revenue they generated in order to come up with an operating income for each film, which it then compared with the salaries the stars earned.

In Ferrell's case, the actor's films earned just $3.29 for every dollar he was paid. That's a pretty poor contrast to the $160 that Shia LaBeouf's movies returned to the studios for every buck he earned.

That figure, by the way, put LaBeouf -- who starred in "Transformers" in 2007 and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" in 2008 -- at the top of Forbes list of Best Actors for the Buck. Also included on that list were Robert Downey Jr., Christian Bale and Dennis Quaid.

"Land of the Lost," a boxoffice dud starring Ferrell as an offbeat scientist, racked up about $100 million in production costs, not including marketing, but only returned $65 million at the worldwide boxoffice. His movie "Semi-Pro," which earned $44 million at the worldwide boxoffice, has also dragged down Ferrell's return-on-investment performance lately.

This has always struck me as odd considering that Ferrell himself is still a pretty funny dude, but it just seems like the crap he gets himself into is his downfall. He was also overexposed to the point where you couldn't go to the grocery store without being thrown some sort of Ferrell-ism. That kind of stuff causes your shtick to get old quick, and in the world of comedy, your lifespan in terms of popularity can be pretty dawn short.

But hey, that doesn't mean he's poor or anything...

Why Vampires Suck... annoying movie posters

Just a question... why does every Twilight poster make the actors look like their deathly ill. I know that vampires are supposed to be some sort of nocturnal creatures of the night, but seriously, Edward looks like Sammy Sosa after a bad skin-bleaching accident.

2012 hauls in $65 million

Apparently people are in love with another "end of the world" movie despite terrible reviews and one of the most ridiculous movie trailers everywhere. The American public is totally cool with suspending belief and buying into the joke that a limousine could outrun and 156.0 magnitude earthquake.

World-ending scenarios are certainly cause for concern in reality, but moviegoers couldn't resist dabbling in doomsday this weekend with the release of Sony's "2012." Director Roland Emmerich, already known for disaster epics such as "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," set the box office on fire once again with a $65 million weekend debut domestically and an additional $160 million overseas, resulting in a $225 million worldwide intake.

World-ending scenarios are certainly cause for concern in reality, but moviegoers couldn't resist dabbling in doomsday this weekend with the release of Sony's "2012." Director Roland Emmerich, already known for disaster epics such as "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow," set the box office on fire once again with a $65 million weekend debut domestically and an additional $160 million overseas, resulting in a $225 million worldwide intake. 

So I watched "The Day After Tomorrow" last night and despite it actually being completely ridiculous, it was still pretty entertaining. I'm assuming the same is for "2012" but just with different actors - don't fix it if it's not broken. 

News Corp. looking to block its content from Google News

Just to show you how stupid the news business is, I'd like to present to you the case of Rupert Murdoch, who built himself quite the empire in information. Fox News, a plethora of newspapers (including the Wall Street Journal) and MySpace. In other words, he's probably burning actual stacks of money to keep his mansion warm. Anyways, seeing Google News (which it is not) as a stealer of information, Murdoch is now contemplating blocking his newspapers from Google News and similar features from Bing and Ask.

Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.

"What's the point of having someone ... who likes a headline they see in Google, come to us?" he asked. "The fact is, there's not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying."

At this point, users can see the first paragraph of most articles in the Wall Street Journal, but to read the rest of the story online, they must sign up for a subscription. Murdoch was not sure that that is the approach he'll take with all his publications.

One thing Murdoch is touting is the subscription-based service as opposed to an ad service for the money-making model on his newspapers websites. Problem is, with the subscription-based service, any schmuck can come along with a subscription and then post it for free online and then people will go and read that instead of your actual newspaper site. At least Google drives traffic to your site, as opposed to just copying and ignoring the source altogether.

If Murdoch blocks his newspapers, something tells me Google News will just go to other places.

"Fourth Kind" as painful as an actual alien abduction

After seeing the initial creepy trailer for the fourth kind, I thought "The Fourth Kind" might has some potential as the continuation of the "Blair With"-type movies but with aliens. But apparently it gets run into the ground by showing actual real footage... not sure how they screwed that up.

The new sci-fi abduction thriller The Fourth Kind should really be called 'The Fourth Wall', because right from the start the film consciously makes the choice to break that wall and have the actors talk directly to the audience as themselves. As the camera annoyingly spins around her, star Milla Jovovich walks right up to the lens and tells us that she will be playing a real life person, psychiatrist Abbey Tyler, who you’ll sometimes see on screen in purportedly “real video footage” of the incidents portrayed. Jovovich then warns us that what we’ll see is deeply disturbing, but the ultimate effect of all this explanation isn’t disturbance, it’s just distraction.

Writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries to convince us that the story is true by constantly using a split screen of the “real footage” next to his actors’ word for word reenactments. Unfortunately instead of making the film more chilling and unsettling, that technique just makes the whole thing obvious and theatrical: you’re always aware you’re watching a movie with actors and are never drawn into the mythology of the story.

The movie operates under dual assumption that you’ve either never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind or The X Files, or that you’ll buy into this as an unofficial sequel to both. But the sad fact is that The Fourth Kind plays more like one of those cheesy alien documentaries you see on Discovery Channel, complete with low budget abduction vignettes intercut with the real victims interviews about what you’ve just seen. 

So basically I'm going to see middle-aged housewives complain about alien abductions? Forget about it, I'll just watch "Unsolved Mysteries."

Sports journalists have unoriginal headlines

Seriously? Do I need to explain this one?

Couple steals 1,000 bags from airport

This is a weird story and should be posted somewhere in the dumb criminals section. Get this... over 1,000 stolen suitcases were stolen from the Sky Harbor Airport by this couple to your left. Wow, and what was even more entertaining than the complete lack of security in an area of supposed alertness was how simple and stupid the plan to steal these bags was.

Keith King, 61, and Stacy King, 38, were arrested at their home in Waddell Friday for allegedly stealing the luggage from Sky Harbor Airport, MyFoxPhoenix.com reported. They were charged with burglary and tampering with evidence.

Police say the Kings are suspected in an alleged scam involving at least 1,000 stolen suitcases and maybe even thousands of pieces of luggage.

A Sky Harbor Airport officer grew suspicious when he witnessed Keith King allegedly walking out with a bag a few weeks ago. Investigators say King visited the airport more than 60 times recently without ever boarding a plane, MyFoxPhoenix.com reported.

They apparently would ship it in a horse trailer even though they never had horses at their house. They would also have yard sales on a frequent basis to sell the bags. Hmmmm, any cop worth their bacon would be able to see somebody driving on a regular basis to the airport with a horse trailer (horses don't fly often) and then neighbors saw this suspicious selling activity outside their house. Put two and two together and you have some pretty dumb criminals. Du-oh!

Leno would go back to "Tonight" if asked

Perhaps you've heard about what a dumpster fire this whole "two late night show" schedule thingy that NBC has been doing. Some people don't like Conan (even though I think he's the funniest guy on TV) and Leno is drawing some pretty terrible ratings.

Now Leno has come out and said that he'd do "The Tonight Show" again if asked, although he heaped the praise on Conan. Personally I think that NBC might want to wait this one out and see what happens in the ratings six months down the road.

Oh and Leno talks about Letterman too.

NEW YORK (AP) - Prime-time newcomer Jay Leno says he would have rather stayed put at "The Tonight Show"—and if NBC offered him that job again, he'd take it.

In an interview with Broadcasting & Cable magazine published online Monday, Leno hastily added that such a decision isn't his to make.

Conan O'Brien, his successor as "Tonight" host after 17 years, is "doing fine," Leno said.

"Conan is in the same position I was in when I took over. It takes a while. Some will like it; some will leave forever and not come back."

Leno said he doesn't think the recent controversy surrounding his former late-night rival David Letterman "will have a big effect at all."

Referring to Letterman's acknowledged sexual affairs with female members of his staff, Leno said, "If it were me, it would kill me. I'm the guy who's been married 29 years. But Dave has never pretended to be Mr. Moral America, he's never set himself up that way. He's not a hypocrite."

I can't tell if this is a back-handed comment or not but whatev, he's Jay Leno, he can do what he wants. He's been on Home Improvement.

CNN drops to last in the ratings

News giant CNN is having some issues with competiting networks. In fact, they're losing to them all in the ratings race, including their own sister network HLN. Execs can't be too thrilled about this one.

CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks with the audience that all the networks rely on for their advertising.

The official monthly numbers will be finalized at 4 p.m. Monday and will include results from Friday. CNN executives conceded that will not change the competitive standing for the month. CNN will still be last in prime time.

That means CNN’s programs were behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but even its own sister network HLN (formerly Headline News.) Three of its four shows between 7 and 11 p.m. finished fourth and last among the cable news networks. That was the first time CNN had finished that poorly with its prime-time shows.

Maybe Anderson Cooper could start hosting "Who's the daddy?" episodes like Maury Povich or start yelling a berating guests on his show? Hey, it works for Bill O'Reilly!

You know your church might be in trouble when it's convicted of fraud

Signs your religon might have some issues...

(1) It was founded by a science fiction writer.
(2) It's most famous member is considered crazy and jumps on Oprah's couch.
(3) It's convicted of fraud.

It would be safe to say that Sciencetology has some issues...

PARIS (AP) - A Paris court convicted the Church of Scientology of fraud and fined it more than euro600,000 ($900,000) on Tuesday, but stopped short of banning the group's activities.
The group's French branch said it would appeal the verdict.

The court convicted the Church of Scientology's French office, its library and six of its leaders of organized fraud. Investigators said the group pressured members into paying large sums of money for questionable financial gain and used "commercial harassment" against recruits.

The group was fined euro400,000 ($600,000) and the library euro200,000. Four of the leaders were given suspended sentences of between 10 months and two years. The other two were given fines of euro1,000 and euro2,000.

Prosecutors had urged that the group be disbanded in France and fined euro2 million. A law that was briefly on the books this year prevented the court from going so far as to disband the French branch of Scientology in Tuesday's verdict—though it could have taken the lesser step of shutting down its operations.

On the other hand, you can earn eternal salvation by paying off that fine if you choose to join the church. Woo hoo!

Oops, plane overshoots airport by 150 miles

Well, this is embarrassing for the airline and the pilots...

WASHINGTON — Were the pilots distracted? Catching up on their sleep? Federal investigators struggled to determine what the crew of a Northwest Airlines jetliner were doing at 37,000 feet as they sped 150 miles past their Minneapolis destination and military jets scrambled to chase them. Unfortunately, the cockpit voice recorder may not tell the tale.

A report released late Friday said the pilots passed breathalyzer tests and were apologetic after Wednesday night's amazing odyssey. They said they had been having a heated discussion about airline policy. But aviation safety experts and other pilots were frankly skeptical they could have become so consumed with shop talk that they forgot to land an airplane carrying 140 passengers.

The most likely possibility, they said, is that the pilots simply fell asleep somewhere along their route from San Diego.

"It certainly is a plausible explanation," said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va.

Simply fell asleep? Since when is a pilot falling asleep at the controls just a simple mistake? With 140 people in your care, you'd think the pilots would be a bit more receptive to the outside conditions of their aircraft - namely where the heck they are. I think something else happened that caused them to overshoot their intended airport.

1. They though they were smuggling 140 American immigrants into Canada. It happens, espicially in this economy.

2. The pilots were watching Season 3 of "Friends on DVD."

3. The pilot slammed on the brakes, but it kept on skidding.

This makes me even more apprehensive about flying? I might be better off getting in a hot air balloon.

Smart meters to save the world and piss off customers

Lookey here! The next step of evolution in the way we get out electric bill. It's suppose to improve efficiency and we're actually suppose to be able to see how much we're using in real-time.

However, when they installed all these meters, power bills immediately went up. Ooops.

Fast Company loves smart electric meters. They're the first, essential step in the smart electric grid, which promises to fight global warming, improve efficiency, and bring consumer control into our electricity system.

Pacific Gas & Electric loves SmartMeters too. They've installed 3.7 million, with a goal of 10 million by 2012--the largest program in the nation.

Who doesn't love smart meters? Thousands of PG&E customers in Bakersfield, California. They blame the newly installed meters for doubling and tripling their power bills over the summer, compared to the previous year. The SF Chronicle reported that "Angry homeowners repeatedly booed PG&E representatives during a public hearing on the meters earlier this month."

PG&E says it's a case of mistaken identity. The true culprits were July heat waves and recent rate increases. Every meter they've inspected so far has been working properly. 

Well so much for going green if you lose green in the process. 

Swine flu numbers inflated?

Apparently the reports coming out about the number of causes of swine flu may make things seem worse than they actually are...

With most cases diagnosed solely on symptoms and risk factors, the H1N1 flu epidemic may seem worse than it is. For example, on Sept. 22, this alarming headline came from Georgetown University in Washington D.C.: "H1N1 Flu Infects Over 250 Georgetown Students."

H1N1 flu can be deadly and an outbreak of 250 students would be an especially troubling cluster. However, the number of sick students came not from lab-confirmed tests but from "estimates" made by counting "students who went to the Student Health Center with flu symptoms, students who called the H1N1 hotline or the Health Center's doctor-on-call, and students who went to the hospital's emergency room."

Without lab testing, it's impossible to know how many of the students actually had H1N1 flu. But the statistical trend indicates it was likely much fewer than 250.

Oh no! What does this mean? Well people that think they have swine flu but done have it may elect to skip the vaccine because they think they're fine. However, since they didn't contract H1N1, they're still susceptible to it.

That's not good news by the way. More people could become infected largely due to misinformation. Somebody get me a breathing mask ASAP.

New York Times to cut 100 jobs

Another sign that newspapers are quickly falling off the face of the earth: the New York Times is cutting more newsroom jobs. Apparently the janitor and bagel guy will be left.

The New York Times plans to eliminate 100 newsroom jobs — about 8 percent of the total — by year’s end, offering buyouts to union and non-union employees, and resorting to layoffs if it cannot get enough people to leave voluntarily, the paper announced on Monday.

The program mirrors one carried out in the spring of 2008, when the paper erased 100 positions in its newsroom, though other jobs were created, so the net reduction was smaller. That round of cuts included some layoffs of journalists — about 15 to 20, though The Times would not disclose the actual figure — which was the first time in memory that had happened.

Not a good sign for up-and-coming journalists who see the holy grail of newspapers shed off more jobs as the sagging economy continues to hit bottom lines.

Hospital mistake exposes hundreds of patients to dangerous radiation levels

Ways to get people not to come back to your hospital: expose them to dangerous levels of radiation. Yay American Healthcare!

According to hospital officials, the error responsible for subjecting patients to eight times the recommended dose of radiation occurred in February of last year. The Los Angeles Times reports that, at the time, the hospital

believed using a new protocol for a specialized type of scan used to diagnose strokes would provide them with more useful data. However, this called for the machine to be re-programmed so they could  override the pre-programmed instructions that came with the scanner when it was installed.

As a result of the hospital's fiddling, patients receiving CT brain perfusion scans were subjected to extremely high doses of radiation, which in some cases, resulted in radiation poisoning. The mistake was only noticed when one stroke patient reported that he had begun to lose his hair following a scan. Upon discovering their mistake, the hospital contacted 206 patients who had received overdoses and found that 40 percent of them had experienced either patchy hair loss or reddening of the skin as a result.

I won't fiddle around with the settings on my microwave much less a CT scanner. When effects of a potential screw up could be (and were) felt by hundreds of people, maybe you should look at things a little closer? Just a thought.

So do they get a lifetime free food card to the hospital cafeteria or something?

Chuck Norris: Not the guy you want to owe money

Apparently Mike Huckabee owes Chuck Norris some money. How much? Oh, to the tune of $25,000.

Politico brought Huckabee's newly filed campaign finance report to our attention with an item about how deadbeat news outlets CNN and ABC News owe the campaign $2,906 and $833, respectively, for "Press Travel Reimbursement." We checked, and it does. But the eye-popping figure to us was $23,570 owed by the campaign to Top Kick Productions of Houston, Texas for "travel - charter." Hmmmm—what is Top Kick Productions, and what films has it produced? Why, Lone Wolf McQuade, Deadly Reunion, and Silent Rage! Certainly looks like Chuck Norris' production company. Indeed, Norris listed Top Kick as his employer in a donation to Huckabee's PAC last year.

Well somebody better pay up before they get a roundhouse kick to the head.

NASA invites tweeters to space shuttle launch

This is certainly more exciting than sitting at your computer and tweeting all day.

WASHINGTON — NASA invited fans on Twitter to get front-row seats for next month's launch of the space shuttle Atlantis from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Registration for a NASA "Tweetup" will open on Friday, and the first 100 people to sign up will get to spend two days at the space center, touring the facility, chatting with technicians and astronauts, as well as watching a launch.

The event planned for November 11 and 12 will be the US space agency's fifth Tweetup for users of the wildly popular microblogging service but it will be the first time the gathering includes a shuttle launch.

"The goal of this particular Tweetup is to share the excitement of a shuttle launch with a new audience," said Michael Cabbage, director of the News Services division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

It's only a matter of time before people start Tweeting from space. I also wonder what will happen when aliens run across twitter and realize that all the human race likes to do is talk about themselves.

(Maybe that's why we haven't encountered other life in the galaxy)

Model fired for being too fat?

Ralph Lauren is catching some flack for firing size 4 model Filippa Hamilton, for allegedly being "too fat."

“They said I couldn’t fit in their clothes anymore,” the size 4 stunner told TODAY’s Ann Curry Wednesday in New York. Hamilton said that Lauren wrote a letter to her agent saying, “We’re terminating your services because you don’t fit into the sample clothes that you need to wear.”

Lauren has a different story about her departure, saying that she simply couldn't meet the obligations of her contract. There is no mention of weight in their official statement and they call her a beautiful and healthy woman.

Regardless of whether or not her firing was because of her weight, it sure sparked dialogue on the current state of models and how they're getting smaller.

Kate White, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, joined Hamilton and Curry and agreed with Goldman. White said that the problem is something of a vicious circle.

“It really starts with the sample clothes. They’ve downsized. They’re now like a 2 or a 4. In some degree it relates to the Kate era,” she said, referring to Kate Moss, the super-thin supermodel whose career began in 1988 at the age of 14. “Before then, supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Christie Brinkley — they were really curvy. But they got skinnier and skinnier. The clothes got smaller. So it creates this cycle where you have to fit in the clothes to get the job, and then the models get smaller and that’s who we have to use in the fashion stories.”

White said that despite some recent efforts to show normal women in fashion magazines, women have to force the industry to change.

Now White makes a valid point about women making the industry change. They'll continue for force super-thin models down our throats as long as we gobble it up. As soon as "heavier" models become more popular or sell more, than they'll make that shift.

The solution? Start putting Cosmo in McDonalds.

The Moon is probably very angry right now

Remember when NASA use to do cool things like land on the moon and drive around it on rovers? Now they just like crashing spacecrafts into it. In probably the most hyped space mission in a long time, two NASA spacecrafts was smashed into the moon in order to determine if there was water present. I wonder if this is a warning shot to possible invading alien species.

NASA officials touted loads of data from the probe and telescopes around the world and in orbit. But most of the photos they showed during a Friday morning press conference were from before the crash. The crash photos and videos were few and showed little more than a fuzzy white flash.

Still, NASA scientists were happy.

"This is so cool," said Jennifer Heldmann, coordinator for NASA's observation campaign. "We're thrilled."

Ladies and gentlemen, the space program! It could take two weeks to even determine if the data collected was useful, meanwhile NASA seems just happy they could smack something into the moon.

Ummm....

They're actually making a remake of Red Dawn

After scouring cable channels in my youth, I came across an 80s movie entitled "Red Dawn" and when I read the "Info Box" (thanks DISH Network), I nearly collapsed laughing. They actually made a movie about the Russians invading the United States and our only hope were a rag-tag group of teenagers? It's like Breakfast Club meets Rambo. Yowza.

Well, guess what everyone... they're making another Red Dawn!

The Chinese-infused Red Dawn re-make's been blowing crap up filming this week in Detroit. The city's an awesome place for making a movie. Just ask Michael Bay. He's been blowing crap up filming in Detroit for years.

They're also filming it in Detroit, which seems like the last place the Chinese would invade since, you know, that city should be deserted by Christmas. Economy jokes aside, this movie has replaced the Russians with the Chinese and from what I can tell they all have Humvees.

Oh brother.