A roof over their heads is just what they needed
WASHINGTON – On a cold January morning in 2001, Mel Martinez, who was then the new secretary of Housing and Urban Development, was headed to his office in his limo when he saw some homeless people...
2008-11-08 00:26:23Limo driver caused death in crash
A limousine driver is found guilty of causing the death of a two-year-old boy in a Kent motorway collision.
2008-10-28 12:42:07Texas bank robbery suspect flees in black limo
Economic times may not be that tough for a suspected bank robber in the Dallas area. Irving...
2008-10-27 01:02:25Texas bank robbery suspect flees in black limo
IRVING, Texas AP -- Economic times may not be that tough for a suspected bank robber in the Dallas area. Irving police said the on-the-lam suspect used a limousine as his getaway vehicle....
2008-10-25 14:48:22Kenya: Limo Breaks Into New Frontier
He named his new-born baby Helsinki after clinching Kenya's only gold medal by winning the 5,000 metres final at the World Athletics...
2008-10-24 04:00:00LiMo chief talks rivals, Nokia, and mobile Linux
Morgan Gillis discusses the LiMo Foundation&aposs first mobile Linux platform release and why it matters that Nokia bought Trolltech.
2008-10-18 12:06:28Duran Duran singer 'hallucinates' in Sri Lanka
ENT10Entertainment/Showbiz/InternationalDuran Duran singer 'hallucinates' in Sri LankaLondon, Oct 14 IANS Singer Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran says he shot for the song "Hungry like a wolf" in Sri Lanka where he was hot, tired and dehydrated and thought he hallucinated the whole experience. Rhodes confesses he remembers very little of the shoot. Contactmusic.com quotes him as saying: "I got there completely fried having not slept for two or three days. I got off the plane at Sri Lanka and thought, 'Okay, where's the guy with the limo' I'm looking around and an Indian guy comes over and says, 'Nick' I said, 'Yeah, where's the car' "It's blistering heat and I'm dressed from head to toe in black leather. I'm looking forward to some air conditioning and then I see it's a flat-bed truck. I asked how long to the hotel, expecting him to say 20 minutes. He said, 'Five hours.' So we drive for five hours over these dust tracks to god knows where in Sri Lanka. "Literally, as I arrive, they're filming and I'm walking down to the beach in a complete daze, and an elephant walked passed me on the street. I thought I was hallucinating."Drummer Roger Taylor added: "He liked wearing make-up, so, for him, going to Sri Lanka and staying in a dodgy old hotel was not something he loved to do."--Indo-Asian News Servicesev/ar/mj248 Words14101234
2008-10-14 03:04:10Madge's down-trodden behaviour inspired me to become famous, says X Factor hopeful
London, Sept 14 ANI: X Factor hopeful Annastasia Baker has revealed that she was inspired to become famous after she was made to feel like down-trodden Cinderella by Queen of Pop Madonna. The 19-year-old single mum has revealed that she was brushed aside by minions of the singing mega-star while she was sweeping the stairs in a top restaurant.And as Madonna and her entourage went out of the doors of posh London eaterie Nobu and climbed into a fleet of limos, the aspiring singer decided she had to escape her life of drudgery. "I was brushing the stairs when Madonna was in with some people. After she had finished, they left and all these managers came down in front of her and told me to get out of the way. I felt so small," News of the World quoted Baker, as saying."It was then that I felt that I was on the wrong end of things. I wanted to be the person sitting in the restaurant eating fine food and sipping champagne and wine and being the star. "I've always known that I've got the talent but it was just a matter of someone recognising that talent and giving me the chance to make it. "One thing is for sure and that is I've had enough of serving food to people like Kyle Minogue and Posh and Becks in Nobu. It is now time for me to be waited on hand and foot," she added. ANI
2008-09-14 09:00:00Funnies: Denver Limo Shortage
A look at the best in late night political comedy.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AbcNews_TopStories/~4/373458475" height="1" />
2008-08-24 09:19:05Blogs to Riches: Perez Hilton Migrates Into Cosmetics, Fashion and Music
<!--pageType= magazinesmallslug= mf_perezsection= techbizsubsection= peopleheadline= Perez Hilton Burned Up the Blogosphere. Now It's Cosmetics, Fashion&mdash;and Music.authorName= David BrownecreditType= photocredit= Jono Rotman--><p><strong>Mario Lavandeira hates to leave the house. He prefers to stay in his gated-community condo, which has all the charm and personality of a just-cleaned motel room, so he can torture the rich and famous from the safety of his computer. He's been up since 4 am, belly-crawling through the blogosphere to uncover juicy celebrity tidbits for his gossip site, <a href="http://www.perezhilton.com">PerezHilton.com. "I work 16, 17, 18 hours a day," he whines as he stuffs his pear-shaped torso into a black and yellow hoodie and matching track pants that make him look like a giant bumblebee. "I'm not exaggerating. That's <em>really how much I work." <p>But chubby Mario from Miami isn't the boss around here. The boss is Perez Hilton, his infamous alter ego. Like a queer-eyed Incredible Hulk, this raging diva persona took over the life of shy, schlubby Mario in 2005. In just three years, Hilton has smashed through the Hollywood elite, muscling his way from bottom-feeding blogger to up-and-coming entertainment-business power player.<p>This particular spring morning hasn't turned up much news&mdash;no bold-named breakups, no leaked sex tapes, no tinted-limo treks to rehab. But Hilton has a hair appointment, and it's time to get going. So he throws a few celebrity crumbs to the 8 million devotees who rely on him for their daily dish. As usual, they're delivered in a writing style so breathless you need an inhaler to follow along. Choice samples from Hilton's oeuvre: <em>OMG! ... Justin Timberlake is box office POISON ... Jesse Jackson is in Deep Shiz ... Amy Winehouse! Her performance was a hot mess!"My site is for people just like me," he says as we bullet through West Hollywood in his Toyota Camry. "Regular folks."<p>Of course, most regular folks aren't greeted by name at the valet parking stand in front of this chic Beverly Hills beauty salon. Inside, a fawning hair stylist squeals, "My family in Arkansas just loves you!" She takes more than two and a half hours to coif his thick black hair into a spiky 'do with a Flock of Seagulls wave falling over one eye. As he admires the effect in the mirror, I'm reminded of a drawing I spotted above his living room sofa: Hilton as a grinning vampire perched atop the Hollywood sign. "I want to be the gay Latino Oprah," he says. "Anything is possible!"<p><em>Perez Hilton as a bona fide celebrity OMG! which aired on VH1 to respectable ratings, followed by a nationally syndicated on-air gossip gig with ABC Radio. In early 2009, Hilton's first book, a satirical tell-all titled <cite>Red Carpet Suicide: A Survival Guide on Keeping Up With the Hiltons, will hit bookstores. Then there's the recently launched Hot Topic clothing and accessories line brace yourself for armies of teenage girls in <em>Team Perez T-shirts and shiny pink Hilton-brand lip gloss.<p>Now the guy who prefers Bette Midler to Arcade Fire and knows all the lyrics to Paula Abdul's "Vibeology" is working with Warner Music to launch his own boutique label, with acts handpicked by the blogger himself. "Record labels release so much crap these days, I think I could do really well," he says as we head back to the condo. "Nothing coming out of <em>my label will be crap. But if it <em>were, it would just be a single. If there's one crap single that has the potential to make a shitload of money, I'd release it."<p>As we pull up to a four-way stop, Hilton gasps. "Look! It's Seth Green!" Sure enough, the red-haired actor from <cite>Austin Powers sits in the next car, staring blankly out the window. "I should say hello to him," Hilton says, then pauses. "He should say hello to <em>me."<p><strong>The blogs-to-riches story of Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. is the stuff of online legend. In 2004, during what he calls "the worst year of my life," he was a fame-obsessed loner who had just been fired from a reporting job at <cite>Star magazine. "It poisoned my soul," he says. Dreaming of becoming an actor, he moved from New York to LA, unemployed and broke. Too cheap to pay for Internet access at home, he set up shop at a local Coffee Bean &amp; Tea Leaf. There, enjoying the free Wi-Fi, he stumbled across a few personal blogs. He thought of writing an online diary of his own but concluded that his life was too boring.<div id="embed"><div id="pic" style="margin-bottom:12px;"><img src="http://www.wired.com/images/article/magazine/1609/mf_perez2_f.jpg" alt=""/><div id="caption">Hilton and his fave act Girlicious at the MuchMusic Awards.<br/><em>Photo: Getty<p>Then he had what his idol, Ms. Winfrey, would call his <em>a-ha moment: He realized that it was easier to be a famous blogger than a famous actor&mdash;all you needed was an oversize persona to stand out from the keystroking horde. In September 2004, he set up a free site using Blogger, chose a bland beige template, and began tapping out his musings. Over the course of a year, they evolved into what is now the hot-pink PerezHilton.com. The site's original name, PageSixSixSix.com, had to be changed after the <cite>New York Post, home to the "Page Six" gossip column, filed a lawsuit.<p>Snarky celebrity-focused news sites were nothing new, but Hilton delivered his as childlike graffiti scrawled over photos. Even in Hollywood, his vicious, eye-clawing approach stood out. Two of the site's more benign entries: "L. Ron wuz here," scribbled over a shot of Tom Cruise, and the word "Fake" branded on the breasts of actress and reality show regular Brigitte Nielsen. He also became known for having the juiciest pictures, most of them pilfered from other sites. The result was a lot of traffic and a few lawsuits from photo agencies. "Perez is the outsider&mdash;the gay, the Latino, the interloper," he says of his persona. "And Hilton is the mainstream&mdash;Hollywood, pop culture. So I'm this outsider commenting on this wacky world of celebrity who managed to become an insider but is still, in many ways, the ultimate outsider."<p>In the hands of Hilton, the outrageous antics of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton the ubiquitous, ridiculous celebutante and inspiration for Hilton's garish nom de guerre are distilled into photo-driven, text-message-length morality plays gleefully deconstructed and critiqued by his legion of <cite>Us Weekly-loving, mostly female fans. He promoted his site by posting a bulletin on Friendster; soon PerezHilton.com was generating 20,000 pageviews a month.<p>The reaction from mainstream media was immediate and scathing: <cite>The Insider, a tabloid TV show, dubbed his site "the most-hated in Hollywood" for its tacky takedowns of untouchable stars. Old media attacked Hilton's integrity is he a journalist or just a pathetic celeb-hound with a blog, and other bloggers derided his oily, relentlessly self-promoting manner. One site referred to him as a "professional canker sore."<p>But the scorn only boosted his traffic. Within a year, monthly pageviews had topped a million. "Without the attention from the mainstream media, I'd probably be seen as just another gossip site," he says. "Anyway, it's not gossip&mdash;it's celebrity news. It's <em>facts." And Hilton seems to relish the notoriety, Googling himself daily to see what people are saying about him. "The fact that they attack me on my own Web site and leave all these negative comments keeps my head in check," he says. "I'm happier this way than if I was universally adored&mdash;like Reese Witherspoon."<p>Critics are one thing, copycats are another. In July, Hilton filed a lawsuit against <a href="http://perezrevenge.com">perezrevenge.com, an uncannily similar celebrity site which also pokes fun at Hilton, claiming, among other things, trademark infringement and cybersquatting. "Don't dish it if you can't take it, my friend," responded the editor on the Web site.<p>Somehow, Hilton has converted notoriety into legitimacy. In 2006, he pitched a reality show based on his day-to-day activities&mdash;blogging and bitching about celebrities&mdash;and VH1 snapped it up. When he announced on his site, incorrectly, that Fidel Castro was dead Hilton's family fled Cuba for Florida in the '60s, the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report picked up the item albeit with skepticism. When Bloomberg invited him to be its guest at this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, he was seated next to Tracey Ullman, who gushed, "I read your site every day!" For his LA-based novel, <cite>Bright Shiny Morning, author James Frey interviewed Hilton and modeled the character of a flamboyant gossip monger on him.<p>Not that Hilton needs the publicity. Ads on his homepage fetch up to $54,000 a day, and his overhead is minimal&mdash;his only employee is his sister Barby, who fields emails and corrects typos. Which means he's pulling down millions a year. The site now averages 198 million pageviews a month, according to the Web ratings service Quantcast. Nielsen Online estimates that while visitors to <a href="http://www.tmz.com">TMZ.com, one of his main competitors, stay only 15 minutes, those on Hilton's site linger for 45 minutes.<p>That kind of stickiness confers influence. When Hilton posted tracks by an unknown singer-songwriter named Eric Hutchinson, thousands of fans rushed to iTunes to download the album. Three months later, Warner Music signed Hutchinson&mdash;and began sniffing around Hilton. "Maybe it speaks to the music industry's desperation," muses an employee of a rival company, "but we want to make the new media our friend." Soon, Hilton and Warner were talking boutique label and a $100,000 advance against an even profit split for his discoveries the deal's not done yet, and Warner has declined to comment. "Because he gets so many hits and he's on TV and the radio, he can be helpful with lesser-known acts," concedes one major-label publicist. "In that respect, he's valued."<p>If the Warner deal falls through, Hilton insists he'll start a label on his own within the year. "I remember running into Perez at a restaurant while we were midway through the TV show," recalls Jeff Olde, a VH1 executive, "and he was meeting with someone about his own record deal. That's when I realized this is one very ambitious guy."<p><strong>At 5 o'clock the following evening, Hilton is changing out of his Peanuts pajamas for another big outing. He's been invited by KIIS FM to appear at the radio station's concert in Irvine, featuring Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. "I can go to an event like this and get more addresses for my address book and bring a lot of opportunities my way," he says as the black town car pulls up to the amphitheater. "But now, the people come up to <em>me. "<p>As Hilton steps out of the car wearing a yellow T-shirt reading "Hot Mess", Perez-mania erupts. A young woman at check-in gushes, "Your site is my favorite!" A concert rep leads him to the red carpet, where an <cite>Access Hollywood reporter sticks a microphone in his face as paparazzi snap his photo. Hilton is then whisked into a VIP goody-bag tent, where he's laden with free jeans, T-shirts, and self-tanning lotion. Back outside, he's approached by TV producers and a radio station executive eager to have him on the air.<p>"For me, it's just work," Hilton says of all the fuss. But occasionally he seems to miss the safety of being Mario, the socially awkward recluse. At one point in the evening he retreats to a mostly empty tent, takes a seat, and calmly eats the low-fat fish-and-rice dinner he has brought in a plastic container.<p>Then it's time for Hilton and a local radio personality to do their bit. Security guards lead them to seats in the middle of the amphitheater. A camera zooms in and transmits their images to large screens above the stage. Perez Hilton is on. "Lindsay Lohan is in the house!" he bellows to the assembled teenyboppers. "And she's <em>drunk!" And then: "I just saw the Danity Kane girls&mdash;I think they're <em>scared of me!"<p>On the way home, Hilton is still on fire. "I'm so fucking jealous of Seacrest!" he shouts, referring to the <cite>American Idol host, who was also at the show. "He helicoptered in and out!" But it's not hard to imagine Hilton taking off in a chopper himself one day, heading skyward as the rest of us scratch our heads, wondering how he ever got up there.<p><em>David Browne <a href="mailto:david@david-browne.com">david@david-browne.com <em>wrote about the death of the music album in issue 15.03.<br style="clear: both;"/> <a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.phphfmm=v2:c8aaac85371c0f42c0675d2c56a82a2e:AY3lJHCuQ0lMhQ6+uFqEjQHIku/yb+Piise+rFBDyaLBYqrOvWhPwpFK4FaJor/SBFIJ3l+FxTApdjPqSSiK2061VHLzHgLFsjDdQvxs5bM='><img border='0' title='Add to Reddit' alt='Add to Reddit' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/reddit.png'/> <a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.phphfmm=v2:737797ab315438989bde4f910d5a9dcc:Dx0EoW/pzauVu5xYCU7/9N24syyX8/l3Mfzj3tkl2suJEl6qGVq/RfcUCXe9s1z1OZ7DIX79dj2v49Ix+ta35FYuo35C7QlyzW6Rz9VeMm8='><img border='0' title='Add to Yahoo My Web' alt='Add to Yahoo My Web' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/yahoo.png'/> <a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.phphfmm=v2:7bcf62e16ce82f9c4116ce51bdb67ef8:OMviAWIpnMWFqlBPjqXDkCvgIHrHkUGbQEs5UknrisQ6ueVpbN9hmKIlNlxNJnVsCslrgPCBzbXoJstRxW4J90Dc2Dnc6aRKNN2t3DSYf50='><img border='0' title='Add to Google' alt='Add to Google' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/google.png'/> <a style='font-size: 10px; color: maroon;' href='http://www.pheedo.com/hostedMorselClick.phphfmm=v2:43c52e8422ffe20c0ca77d30bc6c33b0:wJBmmILqi0JIKLhd6XZlDU+cYC2EmhyCd51ji50YsYz268sn+8QBSal4GMoumB+y1JRy2DD2oCjxGG/mCrBFsN6zvXKQG2MtsZeGNtLl5Mw='><img border='0' title='Survey' alt='Survey' src='http://www.pheedo.com/images/mm/poll_survey.png'/><br style="clear: both;"/> <img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdoi=4ac5061ea492dbc911d5a1c9356d8d1a" height="1" /><img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.phpi=4ac5061ea492dbc911d5a1c9356d8d1a" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" alt=""/><div class="feedflare"><a href="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbiza=1MIM8K"><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbizi=1MIM8K" border="0"> <a href="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbiza=JEEOYk"><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbizi=JEEOYk" border="0"> <a href="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbiza=BHEv4k"><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbizi=BHEv4k" border="0"> <a href="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbiza=nQDPfK"><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~f/wired/techbizi=nQDPfK" border="0"><img src="http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/techbiz/~4/370586631" height="1" />
2008-08-21 16:17:24
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