Taking Charge

‘Twilight’ release moves to Nov. 21

Thanks to Angel for pointing out that there was a date change for Twilight. I hadn’t seen *this* headline! This makes me so much happier. I will be able to see Twilight sooner than I thought. I want to reread the book before hand though. I also need to read the newest one as soon as I get it. That softens the blow of Harry Potter being moved, sort of. I think, even more strongly now, that the change for the HP release is because of the change for Twilight. Why would WB release the change 2 days after the change of Twilight was announced? There has to be a reason…

Next Harry Potter movie pushed back to July, 2009

Seriously.. wtf? From November to next July? Are they scared of Twilight coming out in December? That’s ridiculous! They are just going to piss off a whole lot of fans, including me. I was planning on seeing it, then Twilight the following month. There is NO reason for them to have done it. Oh wait, they have no big summer movies year, so they think that Harry will be it. Well screw you, Warner Bros. You just made a lot of enemies! I would love to see people protest opening weekend next July, seriously. I know I’d like to. I may wait until it’s near the end of it’s run to see it.

Actor and comedian Bernie Mac dies at age 50

CHICAGO (AP) — Bernie Mac, the Emmy and Golden Globe nominated actor and comedian who worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago’s South Side, died Saturday at age 50.

“Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital,” his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.

She said no other details were available and asked that his family’s privacy be respected.

The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body’s organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.

Recently, Mac’s brand of comedy caught him flack when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.

Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language. The performance earned him a rebuke from Obama’s campaign.

But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.

“Wherever I am, I have to play,” he said in 2002. “I have to put on a good show.”

Mac started his comedy career at age 8, with a standup performance at a church dinner. In 1977, at age 20, he took that act to comedy clubs in Chicago.

His film career started with a small role as a club doorman in the Damon Wayans movie “Mo’ Money” in 1992. Mac went on to star in the “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise with Brad Pitt and George Clooney and his turn with Ashton Kutcher in 2005’s “Guess Who?” — a remake of the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn 1967 classic “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” — topped the box office.

Mac also had starring roles in “Bad Santa,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “Transformers.”

The comedian drew critical and popular acclaim with his Fox television series “The Bernie Mac Show,” which aired more than 100 episodes from 2001 to 2006.

The series about a man’s adventures raising his sister’s three children, won a Peabody Award in 2002. At the time, judges wrote they chose the sitcom for transcending “race and class while lifting viewers with laughter, compassion — and cool.”

The show garnered Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for Mac. He also was nominated for a Grammy award for best comedy album in 2001 along with his “The Original Kings of Comedy” co-stars, Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley and Cedric The Entertainer.

In 2007, Mac told David Letterman on CBS’ “Late Show” that he planned to retire soon.

“I’m going to still do my producing, my films, but I want to enjoy my life a little bit,” Mac told Letterman. “I missed a lot of things, you know. I was a street performer for two years. I went into clubs in 1977.”

Mac was born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough on Oct. 5, 1957, in Chicago. He grew up on the city’s South Side, living with his mother and grandparents. His grandfather was the deacon of a Baptist church.

In his 2004 memoir, “Maybe You Never Cry Again,” Mac wrote about having a poor childhood — eating bologna for dinner — and a strict, no-nonsense upbringing.

Mac’s mother died of cancer when he was 16. In his book, Mac said she was a support for him and told him he would surprise everyone when he grew up.

“Woman believed in me,” he wrote. “She believed in me long before I believed.”

Associated Press writer Carla Johnson also contributed to this report.

I don’t know how many of you use Yahoo! Music to buy mp3’s. I know there is at least one person who does, so I thought I would share the following bit of information. Yahoo Music is closing on September 30, 2008. This means that if you have purchased music through them, you will not be able to play them because of the DRM on it.

They intend to take their DRM servers offline when they take the store down. So if you have music from Yahoo, you need to burn it to CD then rip it back to MP3 format or you’ll lose it forever. Sucks, doesn’t it? DRM sucks, but it’s what it’s come down to thanks to the RIAA.

Looking for an alternative to Yahoo? Don’t go with iTunes. I’m sorry but they’re just as bad. I’d recommend Amazon, honestly. They don’t DRM their music, that I know of. And they can be imported to whatever you need to be used on whatever device you own. So yeah. If you use Yahoo Music, you’ve been warned.

So, since Rob was off all week, we were able to do a few things that we don’t normally get to do. For instance, Friday night we went to Music In The Park for the second time this summer. Usually we only get to go once, if even that. This week was advertised as Square Dancing with Northern Harmony. I wasn’t sure if we would go, but I’m really glad we did.

They started out playing Polka music. Rob looked a bit mortified and I cracked up. I had never heard the band before, but the music didn’t surprise me. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire night and took a bunch of pictures. Rob took a bunch too and some have the back of my head in it. *grumble* One of them shows how light my hair gets in the summer when it’s exposed to the sunlight. I need to expose it to more sunlight. Maybe Tuesday after his dental appointment we can go to the park. He has 2 appointments, one at 9;15, the second is at 3:30. We’ll see what we do.

Anyway, I’m done for this post.

Friday night, Rob and I got to go check out a new band. They are called The Cheyenne Band. They’re really a lot better than I expected, to be honest. They play a lot of older and some newer country and were really good. People were really enjoying themselves.

I got to say hi to a friend I hadn’t seen in quite a while, and had a nice conversation with a couple that lived in the trailer park, two places away from us. I hadn’t really talked to them since we moved, really, so it was nice talking to them at length. Overall, it was a really nice night. We had a nice time. Too bad this is probably the only week we can go. Maybe I’ll scope out other events for this week, depending on what happens tomorrow and we can do that.

For now, I’m done. I have more on my to post about list, those will come tomorrow or sometime this week. Hope everyone had a good weekend and has a good week.

Okay, lets dive into this head first! Tuesday afternoon I called Rob’s eye doctor because I really did not like the look of his eye at all and he only does procedures on Wednesday. His appointment was scheduled for Thursday, though, and I knew he was going to need to have procedure and waiting another week was not a good idea, since it looked horrible and he works with people. Anyway, I call around 12:30 and get a call back around 4:30, explain to the doctor’s assistant what’s going on and why I called. She looked to see if there was an opening and luckily there was. Someone had cancelled out. Whew. So we snatched that appointment and that was that.

Wednesday we get there at 10:30 for his appointment, get taken back almost immediately and all that stuff. We came out at almost noon. Long story short and non-disgusting, he had 4 procedures done, a lot of anesthesia was administered and a lot of nastiness was taken care of. It’s still not back to normal, he’s still got a lot left to deal with. Probably at least one more procedure day to deal with. I really hope that that’s all it will be, cuz this is honestly getting to be tiresome and expensive.

I picked up a OneTouch Ultra Mini glucose monitor the other day, since Mom is supposed to be checking her levels daily and I’m supposed to be checking mine regularly as well. I am very happy to say that my levels are in the low end of the normal range. Mom’s are in the high end of the normal range. Rob’s however, is high. We’ll be watching his closer to see if it was a fluke or not. I’m hoping it was, but if it’s not, he’ll be having himself ratted on when he goes to the doctor next month. In fact, I set up a spreadsheet to chart all three of us and plugged in the numbers from all the tests done so far.

Friday, was uneventful, outside of writing articles for Associated Content and listening to the 24 hours of iPhone. Saturday was.. interesting. It started out well enough with me checking lj and email and stuff. I was working on some research and having an interesting chat about BBS days when everything suddenly disconnected. I figured it was a small outage. It happens from time to time. An hour later, it was still down so I call tech support, figuring if it’s an outage, they’ll know, otherwise we can figure out the problem. It was an outage alright. It ended up being a 32 hour outage. Seems that they had a piece of equipment fry at their main hub that took out DSL and Dial-up for the entire coverage area.

So, what did I do without Internet? I read a book. I finally finished Blood Noir. I had a really hard time getting into this one. I usually dive into Anita books like the world will end if I don’t. I enjoyed it overall, but I really don’t like the books that are character-centric. I like Jason, but I don’t think now was the right time for a book focusing on his issues. Especially since she seems to have made it so that Jason replaces Richard as Anita’s wolf. I love Richard, and Jean-Claude. I prefer the books that they are more heavily involved in. I was also disappointed by how forced the book seemed. Like Laurell was pushing herself to get it done so she could get rid of it. There are a lot of holes and unanswered questions. It just seemed like the last few chapters were forced out to get it done. I went back at one point to see if I’d missed a couple pages because it went from Anita and Jason in the hotel getting hit with a tranquilizer grenade to them being somewhere else and no explanation as to any of it. I mean, yeah they wouldn’t know much of how they got there, but there was no real answers as to who all was involved other than the servant of a Vampire Master. The other thing that bothered me was the prominence of the Ardeur, again, after it hadn’t been so prominent. I hope that this isn’t going to be the way of future books.

So yeah, I enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as other books in the series. Next up, I have Kitchen Witch to read, then it SHOULD be the last Twilight book. So that covers much of my weekend. Tonight was spent catching up on LJ, E-mail and stuff while watching Big Brother 10, Design Star and Food Network Star. Now, however, it is bedtime after I do one quickie task that needs to be done tonight.

Okay, I am not a real big boxing fan, but there is so much hype over an upcoming match that it’s not even funny. Most people already know about the May 5, 2007 match between Floyd Mayweather and Oscar De La Hoya. It was the single most lucrative boxing match in history, bringing in over $120 Million in revenue.

Not just that, the tickets for the first match sold out three hours after they went on sale, shattering the record for ticket revenue set by the Holyfield/Lewis fight in 1999. If that wasn’t enough, there was plenty of controversy surrounding the match, when it came to Mayweather’s estranged father training De La Hoya for the fight. It never really came to be a problem, since Mayweather Sr demanded a large sum of money that De La Hoya was not willing to pay for a trainer.

If that wasn’t enough drama for the fight, the fight itself was worth the watch, even the large buildup put out by HBO prior to the fight that were aired in the weeks prior to the fight. The fight even came down to the final judges scores to determine the winner with two judges having Mayweather the winner and one for De La Hoya.

This is definitely a rematch that is worth keeping an eye on. If you’re going to be in Las Vegas on September 20th, 2008 and you love boxing, look into getting yourself the De La Hoya/Mayweather tickets as soon as you can.

Everything seems to be going HD lately. Or that’s what it feels like. First it was high definition television, now it’s high definition radio that’s the latest trend. All you need is a new stereo for your car. You get all your same great radio stations, plus you get new radio stations without a subscription fee.

What does this have to do with iTunes? With iTunes Tagging you can hit the tag button on your new stereo and it sends the song information to your iPod so that you can keep track of songs that you want for later. I know that I’ve often heard songs on the radio and wished I could remember them later. Well, having an iTunes Tagging enabled radio and an iPod, you’ll never have to fight to find the song again.

This is a fantastic feature for anyone who loves music, but has a bit of a memory sieve when it comes to remembering titles and artists. Isn’t it time you upgraded your car stereo?