Winky wright
Brian Boitano, Michelle Kwan talk up skating’s worlds
Brian Boitano, still lithe and graceful nearly 21 years after his figure skating triumph at the Calgary Olympics, glided onto the ice at Staples Center on Thursday for a news conference promoting the upcoming World Figure Skating Championships.
As he went around a mat and turned to face an audience of reporters, he stumbled, certainly a rare sight. Michelle Kwan, another featured guest, couldn’t resist making a joke.
“That’s a little preview of what you’ll see at the world championships,” she said, drawing a round of laughter.
The occasional misstep aside, the 225 athletes who are scheduled to compete here March 22-29 will put on a good show. Besides the prestige of being crowned a world champion, they’ll be earning spots for their respective countries at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Single tickets are scheduled to go on sale Friday. All-event and other packages also remain available. Some tickets will be available at $20, a good move in bad economic times.
Boitano, a four-time U.S. champion and two-time world champion, said he expects the U.S. women’s placements at worlds to be good enough to guarantee three spots for U.S. women at the Winter Games. The U.S. will be represented in Los Angeles by Alissa Czisny – whom Boitano works with — and Rachael achat cialis Flatt of Del Mar.
“That’s what’s really important about the ladies’ event, not only for the individual accomplishments but getting three ladies on the Olympic team,” Boitano said.
Overall, he said, “I think it’s a really strong U.S. team. I think it’s probably the strongest that we’ve had in years.”
Kwan, a five-time world champion, nine-time U.S. champion and two-time Olympic medalist, said her competitive instincts flowed when she stepped onto the ice Thursday with Boitano
and U.S. world team member Evan Lysacek.
“Just being on the ice, it’s like, wow,” she said, smiling. “Usually I just go to Staples Center for the Lakers games. Now I’m like, it feels like nationals and worlds all over again.”
Kwan, pain-free after hip surgery, said she’s doing physical training but not skating training. “I will,” she said.
She told The Times recently that she’s skating but hasn’t decided whether it will be to compete again, to skate in shows or simply to skate around with her young nieces.
“I just got back into doing the whole thing,” said Kwan, 28. “Slowly. It’s easy to jump right into it and abuse your body, but I’m going to slowly get on and not get frustrated, just take it easy.”
Lysacek, third at last week’s U.S. championships and a two-time world bronze medalist, said he’s going to adjust his schedule to allow himself more of a life than he had before the national competition.
Lysacek, who trains in El Segundo, had intensified his training, strictly limited his diet to foods recommended by a nutritionist, and worked so hard that he saw his family for only one day over Christmas and rarely saw his friends. His third-place finish at nationals has him rethinking that strategy.
“For it to not go as well as I wanted to, I was really crushed,” he said. “I felt more prepared for it than I had been for a lot of competitions where I’d done much better and wasn’t as prepared. I think it had something to do with that carrot being dangled in front of me for two months and not really seeing anything else. It wasn’t the right approach.
“I’m trying to just forget it. It’s stuff like this that makes you look at your own heart and ask, ‘Do I have the heart of a champion athlete, to be the best, to pick myself up and dust off and move on with my head high? It’s kind of what I’m trying to do now. It’s taking some soul searching because it’s only been two days. but it was right back to training for me.
“I became a very one-dimensional person. I know that’s what it takes, but I’ve been there and it doesn’t have to be living in seclusion and as regimented as I was. It was something I tried and it didn’t work for me. I’m going to try and get those dimensions back … try and just live a little more.”
– Helene Elliott
Photo: Michelle cheap levitra Kwan and Brian Boitano at a World Championships news conference at Staples Center on Thursday. Credit: Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times
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Scarpetta restaurant
Plywood Report: Golden State Almost Ready, Baby Blues BBQ Readies in WeHo!
The Plywood Report sizes up restaurants somewhere in that state between concept and open. Sightings of new new things in your neighborhood to la@eater.com, svp.
[photo courtesy blackburn & sweetzer]
FAIRFAX DISTRICT—Blackburn & Sweetzer serves up a full exterior and interior reveal of Plywood vet The Golden State (above), which we’ve been obsessing about since June, when owners Jason Bernstein and James Starr targeted an August open. Per B&S, “They’re not making any promises on an opening date, but let’s hope for mid-February.” Click on through for more shots from inside. [B&S]
WEST HOLLYWOOD—The estimable Charlie Amter brings word that Venice-based Baby Blues BBQ is getting closer to opening in its new location in the former Cha Cha Cha space at 7953 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, hopefully as soon as March. Amter’s color: “[Manager Rob] Aguirre said the forthcoming restaurant is larger than the Venice location and has a liquor license. Accordingly, the restaurant will be ‘expanding the menu’ at the new Baby Blues to include a few choice appetizers such as hush puppies, sweet potato fries and maybe even some fried green tomatoes thrown in for good measure.” Yahtzee. [Daily Dish]
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Paul lynde
The c-word.
So in this latest Momversation video, I seem to be the lone parent who delighted in the mutilation of her child.
I must say, in the pre-edited footage Maggie was pretty neutral on the topic?she basically said she didn’t want to circumcise her son, but she could see the arguments either way. In the editing process she turned all anti-circumcision, and as a result it looks like I’m being ganged up on. Which works for me, because now I get the sympathy vote. Also, weirdly, they made it look like I’ve got a shirt on. Computer magic!
This was a particularly difficult topic for me, because in addition to anticipating the hate mail I would receive (anti-circumcision crusaders, I’ve found, really want to make other people feel terrible about their decisions), I was defending a stance that’s sort of, well, not mine. As I say in the video, Scott felt really strongly that his son should be circumcised, and I agreed on that grounds. Of course if I were really violently opposed I would have put up more of a fight, but neither was I entirely gung ho on the procedure. So being put in a position to defend circumcision feels odd, to say the least.
Maggie made a great point in the original footage; basically she said, why do we feel that in order for our opinion to be right, we have to make sure that everyone who feels differently is wrong? And I think that pretty much sums up the fights about co-sleeping and breastfeeding and circumcision and crying it out and pretty much every single topic in these tiresome, endless mommy wars. In the end, we each do what we think is best for our families. What place does anyone else have to pass judgment?
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Octuplets born
Financial problems fuel anger in Europe
riga, latvia — on a arctic evening this month, more than 10,000 people gathered in this baltic capital to protest the government’s handling of latvia’s economic crisis and demand early elections. the Comprar cialis demonstration was at one of the largest here since the mass rallies against soviet practice in the buy viagra online new 1980s.
Chinese celebrate New Year despite economic worries
beijing - china welcomed the arrival of the year of the ox with fireworks-filled celebrations, but the country’s economic worries have already choose the trendy year in a more together light. millions of chinese gave a boisterous farewell…
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Marcel lefebvre
Must read: Krugman debunks the GOP’s misleading claims about the stimulus
essential study:as the debate over president obama’s economic stimulus plan gets subordinate to way, equal action is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. conservatives extraordinarily, really don’t after to sit down with a second new deal, and they certainly don’t want to see domination activism vindicated. so they are reaching by reason of any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. john boehner, the lodge minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain chief services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand medicaid family-planning services ? and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”but the obvious inferior shots don’t pose as much danger to the obama administration’s efforts to get a plan Sometimes non-standard due to as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially meretricious to those who don’t know their habit throughout economic concepts and numbers. so as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the dominating antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced.krugman does debunk the arguments. everybody who is pushing in the interest passage of obama’s stimulus package needs to read this column — especially people on “the hill.” the republicans are lying, which they do so well. they lied to get us into a struggle. now, their fibbing could get us into a depression.
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Chuck en halle
Hope Floats
As Morningside Heights–educated Barack Hussein Obama recited the (judicially garbled) oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States, it seemed like most of New York’s media, political, business, and Twittering classes had traveled to Washington to witness the historic occasion. Mayor Bloomberg hosted a pre-inaugural dinner for other big-city mayors at the Palm steakhouse, Times columnist Maureen Dowd hosted a jam-packed party at her Georgetown home (Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks, and Bill Keller were among those who couldn’t squeeze in), Craft restaurateur and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio saved a cookbook author’s life with a well-executed Heimlich at a charity party, and Good Day New York host Greg Kelly, son of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, helped D.C. cops apprehend a crazed tourist who assaulted a McDonald’s employee during a late-night burger-run freak-out.
Hillary Clinton was confirmed as the new secretary of State on day two of the new administration; New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, after blaming his IRS oversights on TurboTax, was well on his way to becoming Treasury secretary. Caroline Kennedy surprised Governor Paterson, her friends, the rest of the state, and possibly herself by announcing she wasn’t interested in a Senate seat after all; Paterson announced late in the week that Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand would fill the spot. Recently retired Time Warner chief Richard Parsons was named chairman of Citigroup, which announced it would split itself in two.
Bank of America revealed a $15 billion fourth-quarter loss at its newly acquired Merrill Lynch subsidiary; former Merrill CEO John Thain subsequently lost the position he’d been given at BofA. The state’s strapped unemployment fund started borrowing $90 million a week from the Feds. The even-more-strapped New York Times Company made a deal to borrow $250 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú at a whopping 14 percent interest rate. And—after Chesley Sullenberger III became a national hero for piloting an avian-crippled US Airways jet to a smooth landing on the Hudson—the Post declared a war on geese.
Read more posts by Jesse Oxfeld
Filed Under: It Happened This Week
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Obama bombs pakistan
24 January SWJ Roundup
rank is nothing, power is everything.
–Dr. David Kilcullen
irregular warfare is not this or that, it is this and that.
–Colonel Daniel Kelly
AFGHANISTAN / PAKISTAN TRIBAL AREAS
2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer a Concrete Sign of Obama’s Pakistan Policy - R. Jeffrey Smith, Candace Rondeaux and Joby Warrick, Washington Post
two abstracted us missile strikes that killed at least 20 people at suspected subversive hideouts in northwestern pakistan yesterday offered the gold medal tangible spur of president obama’s commitment to sustained military pressurize on the terrorist groups there, even nevertheless pakistanis broadly oppose such unilateral us actions. the shaky pakistani government of asif ali zardari has expressed hopes for warm relations with obama, but members of obama’s new jingoistic security rig have already telegraphed their intention to organize firmer demands of islamabad than the bush administration, and to backtrack from up those demands with a threatened curtailment of the plentiful military aid that has been at the heart of us-pakistani ties as regards the gone and forgotten three decades. the partition strikes on two compounds, coming three hours individually and involving five missiles fired from afghanistan-based predator drone aircraft, were the first excited-profile hostile military actions taken under obama’s four-day-old presidency.
More at The Washington Post.
Strikes in Pakistan Underscore Obama’s Options - Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times
two missile attacks launched from remotely piloted american aircraft killed at least 15 people in western pakistan on friday. the strikes suggested that the use of drones to quash militants within pakistan’s borders would maintain under president obama. remotely piloted predator drones operated by the central intelligence agency have carried loophole more than 30 missile attacks since last summer against members of al qaeda and other terrorism suspects deeply in their redoubts viagra on the pakistani side of the wainscotting with afghanistan. but some of the attacks deceive also killed civilians, enraging pakistanis and making it harder for the country’s weak government to win support for its own military operations against taliban guerrillas in the country’s lawless border jurisdiction.
More at The New York Times and:
Suspected US Missile Strike Kills 18 in Pakistan - Associated Press
IRAQ / AFGHANISTAN
Marines Propose Iraq Withdrawal, Shift to Afghanistan in ‘09 - Yochi Dreazen, Wall Street Journal
the us marine corps is proposing to completely rescind from iraq later this year and shift 20,000 marines to afghanistan, boosting the obama administration’s plan to devote meritorious new resources to the afghan hostilities. gen. james conway, the top marine commander, said friday that the withstand portion of the iraq war was effectively over. “the time is right for marines in general terms to depart iraq,” he told reporters. “a building fight taking locus in another spot — that’s really where marines need to be.”
More at The Wall Street Journal.
MIDDLE EAST
Middle East Envoy George Mitchell No Stranger to Conflicts - Paul Richter and Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times
during a grinding 18-month stretch in the 1990s, u.s. envoy george j. mitchell crossed the atlantic Comprar cialis more than 100 times in a dogged search for peace between northern ireland’s protestants and catholics. even while he had a broad upbringing, mitchell convinced protestant unionists of his evenhandedness, eventually reaching the good friday agreement in 1998 to help reconcile the 800-year dispute. “he’s got this incredible patience to sit there until the contract is done,” said ross k. baker, a administrative scientist and former congressional aide. mitchell, he said, “deserves the iron trousers give.” president obama hopes the former senate majority leader, now his new heart east peacefulness papal nuncio, is prepared to sit awhile lon
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Angel flying too close to the ground
What It Takes
this is a great aerosmith bother. i tinge it was good until i heard it live and now i thinks it’s great. this song was the in the first place song that steven tyler sang when he came insensible on the side of their encore. he started singing it acapella then the band jumped in after a few verses. altogether cool.”what it takes” was written by steven tyler and joe perry. the prevarication is on the album “pump” that was released in 1989. it was released as a single in 1990 and went to #9 on the billboard charts. on the album there is a hidden track after this song.there goes my old girlfriend, there’s another diamond ring and, uh, all those late evensong promises i guess they don’t money a clobber so infant, what’s the story? did you find another man? is it tolerant to sleep in the bed that we made? when you don’t look to i guess the feelings start to fade away. i used to feel your impassion but now it’s cold inside and you’re back on the street like you didn’t pass up a trample depart, yeah chorus: require me what it takes to contract out you go tell me how the pain’s supposed to go tell me how it is that you can zizz in the twilight without thought you lost all things that was avail in your zing to the toss of the dice? chide me what it takes to let you go. yeah girl, in preference to i met you i was f.i.n.e. great but your love made me a prisoner, yeah my heart’s been doing time you discharge me up like money, then you hung me thoroughly to dry it was easy to keep all your lies in disguise induce you had me in crafty with the devil in your eyes chorus guitar! tell me that you’re on top of the world that you’re on your own yeah, yeah, yeah tell me that it’s better when you’re all solely tell me that your body doesn’t miss my capability censure me that my lovin’ didn’t mean that much tell me you ain’t dyin’ when you’re cryin’ as regards me chorus tell me what it takes to let you go portray me how the pain’s supposed buy levitra online to go advertise me how it is that you can nod off in the night without thinking you perplexed everything that was personal property cialis online in your life to the toss of the dice? tell me who’s to point the finger at someone is concerned thinkin’ twice no no no no ’cause i don’t wanna burn in Zion ooo set off d emit go, let go, let go, let it go, let it go, let it go, set off d emit it go, let it go, take in it go, i don’t wanna squander, i don’t wanna burn
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President first dance
where are brad & angelina’s twins?!?
good morning! this week’s star magazine is all in a fret over where brad pitt and angelina jolie’s twins knox leon & vivienne marcheline are - ostensibly they haven’t been spotted in public since october 8th - brad & angie are so chill and private - i’m accurate the little ones are just commendable - i say induce ‘em a break before they have to buy with being in the public eye all of the unceasingly a once - i bet those twins will turn up soon! just the other night the couple (aka brangelina) looked once again super happy and in love while walking the red carpet over in berlin for the original of brad’s flick the curious specimen of benjamin button! in other scuttlebutt - they’re already featuring our new president barack obama - with rumors there could be a unusual addition to the senior kinsfolk - although michelle is 45 - i wouldn’t be surprised at all if she gets pregnant - in act during her first social matrix night to beyonce singing ‘at last’ - she looked a taste plump in her mid-section! popbytes over & minus for now…xoxo in the feb. 2 issue of star we report on the problems that participate in plagued the twins since start - and there’s a long list of ailments. their worried parents have done their rout to protect the babies’ fragile health by keeping them tucked away. “they haven’t been the healthiest babies,” says an insider of little viv who weighed 5 lbs. at birth, and knox, who was only 3 oz. heavier. and because of their coy states, angelina has developed into an uptight nurse. “angie is being neurotic with knox and viv,” says a informant. “she won’t let anyone intimate them dowload movies without sanitizing their hands and taking rotten their shoes.” adds another: “she’s really freaking old-fashioned.” source
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Lowery benediction video
Trouble in the woods for Dubya
This short posting at buzzflash has been circulating around since yesterday. We can’t vouch for its authenticity, but it at least rings true:
Steak Night at the Deer Camp - A South Arkansas Message to George W. by John R. Bomar
Hey George, I hate to have tell you this, son, but they’re talking bad about you out at the deer download drama camp. That’s real bad. When you’ve lost the deer-camp-boys you’re in big trouble around here.
You see, these are the real good ol’ boys, the ones who make up the backbone in this part of the woods. They’re the ones who build the houses, sell the insurance, install the plumbing and fix your air conditioner when it goes on the blink. They’re just regular, hard working Joe’s trying to make life a little better and get ahead. And up to now they’ve done download action movies pretty good. Many of them own their own businesses and are members of the chamber and pay a lot of taxes – a lot of taxes. And a whole bunch of them read the papers and keep up with what’s going on in the world.
George, they’re a calling you a liar. Yep, they are. And if it’s one thing they don’t cotton to, it’s a liar, George. They know liars; they’ve had liars for employees and dealt with liars in trying to do businesses. “Cain’t’ trust a liar” just about sums it up around here, George.
Now, if you’re a known liar we’d give you a nod in passing, but we wouldn’t stop to talk. We’d try to be sociable enough if forced to be around you, but we’d leave as soon as possible. Out at the deer camp we’d mostly try and leave you out of the conversation, but if your name came up we’d all give each other that look that says; “yea, we know about dealin’ with him.”
That’s bad George. Real bad … real hard to get over around here, George.
I guess it’s partly cause we come from pioneer stock. Most of our people moved here from Tennessee and Alabama, and before that Georgia and the Carolinas and some from Virginia. We come from a long line of survivors, George. Only the survivors got this far. They survived by their wits and hard, honest work, with a little luck thrown in. Excuse’ me for saying so, but they also learnt’ real early how to separate the chicken salad from the chicken s****, George. They watched out for what people did rather than pay too much attention to what they said. Their Grandpas taught em’ that.
And, oh yea, these ol’ boys, they really don’t like being played for a fool when they’ve kindly given you the benefit of the doubt. On a scale of one to ten George, that’s a ten.
Yep, deer-camp-boys are proud of their roots and try and hold on to the old ways, as much as they can nowadays. They know the understanding and teachings of their Grannies come hard learned. They’re hardscrabble folk, George, and they judge a man by his handshake, the honesty in his eye and the sincerity in his voice. They’re nice enough when you first meet, that’s the way their Mama’s raised them, but they don’t really take you in till you’ve proved yourself. You know that puddin’ George, its proof tells the tale.
Well, guess that’s about it, friend. Just thought I’d pass this along in case you was interested. Cause when you lose the deer-camp-boys around here, George, there ain’t much left.
John R. BomarArkadelphia, Arkansas
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