Lynne Spears Babysitting Kids

Kevin Federline has been beckoned to Fashion Week in New York City by Marc Jacobs and must heed the call. But what about the children? Won’t someone think of the children? Oh, phew, Mama Spears is watching them. Wait, what?! E! News reports:

“A source tells E! News that Lynne Spears is supposed to take a break from trash-talking Sam Lutfi and head over to Federline’s Valley home to babysit today, which we’re guessing is going to stretch through Kevin’s visit to the Big Apple.(K-Fed’s rep has confirmed he is going to the Marc Jacobs show and will be in NYC for one day on business meetings but would not comment on who’s caring for the children.)”

I predict that, by the time Lynne is done watching the boys tomorrow night, Jayden knocked up two girls on the playground and Sean checked in and out of rehab no less than five times. (Whether he’s strung out on smack or Oreos is up for debate.) You see, folks, when Lynne Spears shoddily parents, she shoddily parents to the MAX!

Lipodissolve: Weight loss of the Future

Post-Gazette: LINK
By Cristina Rouvalis, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In surgically enhanced Los Angeles, where size 0 is the new size 4, it’s not surprising that women spend their lunch hours having fat cells zapped.

But even in flab-friendly Pittsburgh, so-called lunchtime lipo is becoming popular.

Which is why Nancy Pariza traveled to Mt. Lebanon to spend $4,000 to shed about 1.5 pounds of fat from her size-4 body, ignoring her friends’ protests that she was crazy.

“Everyone made fun of me. ‘Yeah, you are so fat.’ I didn’t like the junk coming out of the side of my jeans,” she said before going under local anesthesia for SmartLipo surgery at The Skin Center Medical Spa in Mt. Lebanon.

Every week, Dr. Dominic Brandy performs about five to six SmartLipo procedures, comprising about a fourth of his business at the Skin Center. In November, he inserted a tiny cannula with a laser fiber under the skin of Ms. Pariza’s lower back and hip to liquefy the fat cells before vacuuming out 650 milliliters of fatty liquid from her waist and hip.

Like a growing number of patients, the 5-foot-4, 122-pound Ms. Pariza wanted to go the minimally invasive route of surgery under an hour.

“I don’t want to feel anything,” Ms. Pariza, a receptionist who works in Cleveland, said before her surgery. “I had seen traditional lipo done on TV. It looked so brutal. People jabbing the needles in. Oh, man. I had to change the channel.”

Sucking out fat, no matter how it is done, is a growing American preoccupation.

Traditional liposuction remains the most popular cosmetic surgery in the United States, with 403,684 operations performed in 2006, up 128 percent from 1997, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

But the less invasive spin-offs such as SmartLipo (which are not tracked by plastic surgery societies) are gaining in popularity. While this has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, an even quicker procedure that sculpts with chemicals instead of the laser fiber is more controversial…

With games beginning in April, All American Football League holds 1st draft

Canadian Press: LINK

ATLANTA – Bryan Randall and Eric Crouch still long to play professional football.

Though the two quarterbacks might not earn another NFL paycheque, Randall and Crouch are grateful that the All American Football League will debut in April.

Former college standouts Randall and Crouch were the second and third picks in the league’s inaugural draft on Saturday, with Randall going to Tennessee and Crouch going to Texas.

Randall, a former Virginia Tech standout who spent time on the Atlanta Falcons’ squad, went to training camp last year with the Pittsburgh Steelers but didn’t make the team.

“It’s a great opportunity for me, and I can’t wait to get back on the field and compete,” Randall said. “I guess I’ve learned that you never get football out of your blood, or at least I haven’t been able to, over the last few months.”

The league will fill the void created when the NFL shut down NFL Europe earlier this year after 16 seasons. The league was losing a reported US$30 million a season.

With teams in Detroit; Little Rock, Ark; Gainesville, Fla.; Birmingham, Ala.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and a yet-to-be-determined city in Texas, the league hopes to build on fans’ identification with former collegiate stars.

Former Troy offensive lineman Zarah Yisrael was drafted No. 1 overall by Arkansas.

Florida picked Marshall quarterback Eric Kresser fourth overall, and another quarterback, David Koral of UCLA, went to Michigan in the No. 5 spot.

Alabama drafted centre Josh Sewell, formerly of Nebraska, with the sixth and final pick of the first round.

Crouch, who won the 2001 Heisman Trophy at Nebraska, is eager to show American fans that he can still play quarterback. Drafted No. 3 overall by the Texas team, Crouch was an NFL receiver for St. Louis and Green Bay.

Kansas City later designated him to NFL Europe, where he remained a wideout in 2006 for Hamburg. But not long after leaving Germany, Crouch was allowed to play quarterback again when he signed with the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts.

“I love the game of football, but quarterback really is my passion,” Crouch said. “I can’t deny that I’d like to get another chance to play in the NFL, but the fact remains that I’m really excited to play this spring for Texas. I think the atmosphere will be great.”

League CEO Marcus Katz, who made a fortune after co-founding a company that provided student loans, first announced plans last year for a professional league that would lean heavily on the year-round craze of big-time college programs.

So when the All American debuted its colours, logos, helmets and mascots during the draft, it was no surprise that everything was nearly identical to those used by each state’s most popular college program…

Only in Zimbabwe: 10-Million-Dollar Bill

Associated Press: LINK
By ANGUS SHAW

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Zimbabweans will be soon lining their pockets with 10-million-dollar bills.

The central bank annouced Thursday it would increase the denomination of the nation’s highest bank note more than tenfold to keep pace with the world’s highest inflation rate, officially estimated at 25,000 percent annually. Independent financial institutions say real inflation is closer to 150,000 percent.

The new 10-million note is the equivalent of about $4 at the dominant black market exchange rate.

In an effort to end chronic cash shortages and long, chaotic lines at banks and automated teller machines, the bank will issue the new notes on Friday along with 1-million and 5-million dollar bills, said Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono.

The highest existing note, introduced last month, is 750,000 Zimbabwe dollars.

A hamburger at an ordinary cafe costs about 15 million Zimbabwe dollars ($6). But that price has trebled this month amid shortages of bread, meat and most other basic goods.

Acknowledging the inflation crisis, Gono said individuals from Friday would be allowed to withdraw an increased limit of 500 million Zimbabwe dollars ($200) in a single day, up from 50 million.

He said special arrangements were being made to pay soldiers, police and other uniformed services “because it is not desirable to see them queuing for cash.”

With higher denomination bills, Gono said businesses might be tempted to again raise prices of scarce goods.

“If this happens, the whole objective of solving the cash shortages … will be defeated,” he said.

Zimbabwe’s economy began to crumble when President Robert Mugabe’s government stripped white Zimbabweans of their farms to give to blacks in 2000. The economic decline has caused runaway prices, chronic unemployment and acute shortages of basic goods, along with a decline in foreign investment over the past seven years.

U.S. Given Poor Marks on the Environment

New York Times: LINK
By FELICITY BARRINGER

Clarification: Group of 8 is France, England, USA, Italy, Russia, Canada, Germany and Japan. China is ominously missing.

WASHINGTON — A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8 industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list.

European nations dominate the top places in the ranking, which evaluates sanitation, greenhouse gas emissions, agricultural policies, air pollution and 20 other measures to formulate an overall score, with 100 the best possible.

The top 10 countries, with scores of 87 or better, were led by Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The others at the top were Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, the leader in the 2006 version of the analysis, which is conducted by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities.

“We are putting more weight on climate change,” said Daniel Esty, the report’s lead author, who is the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “Switzerland is the most greenhouse gas efficient economy in the developed world,” he said, in part because of its use of hydroelectric power and its transportation system, which relies more on trains than individual cars or trucks.

The United States, with a score of 81.0, he noted, “is slipping down,” both because of low scores on three different analyses of greenhouse gas emissions and a pervasive problem with smog. The country’s performance on a new indicator that measures regional smog, he said, “is at the bottom of the world right now.”

He added, “The U.S. continues to have a bottom-tier performance in greenhouse gas emissions.”

The list, which is to be released Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the fourth, and most refined, of a series of rankings first issued in 2002. Because of methodological changes, the list this year is not directly comparable to the last one, issued in 2006, in which the United States was ranked 28th…

To Cut Costs, NBC Universal Ends Pilots

New York Times: LINK
By ERIC PFANNER

Basically, because of the recession of tv, cut funding. like a good company, cutting funding helps in the short term. way to go, NBC (and other companies following NBC’s footsteps)! Now we’ll see more of the same (as if we don’t already).

Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said Tuesday the broadcaster was moving to save as much as $50 million a year by reducing its reliance on expensive pilots of new series on the NBC television channel.

The decision to eliminate most pilots was made as the company looked for ways to cut costs in response to the Hollywood writers’ strike and the slowdown in the economy, Mr. Zucker said. “It’s clear we are in a recession in the United States, and we’re going to have to manage our business accordingly,” he said.

Networks like NBC have long relied on big-budget pilot episodes of television series in an effort to attract advertiser support for the rest of the season. But Mr. Zucker said the pilots, the first episode of a show and whose production cost has shot up to $7 million for an hour from about $3 million three years ago, were a poor indicator of the future success of a series and many never move beyond the pilot stage.

“So you’re spending money on programs you’re not going to get,” Mr. Zucker said.

He said NBC might still commission “one or two” pilots a season, but would not do so as a matter of course.

Other networks are making similar calculations. A senior executive at one of NBC’s competitors said Tuesday that “we will definitely do fewer pilots than we have before.” This executive, who asked not to be identified because the network has yet to make its plans public, added that it had cut the number of scripts ordered for next season in half…

Check this out.

Here’s a like to my Beta design for my e-zine (which I want to publish, but that won’t happen). it’s in beta, but I think it could work. I wish I could formulate a staff though. I might want to check out how that PSU girls magazine actually got enough funds to go professional. Please tell me what you think, gimme your worst. critique, criticize, help a brother out!
(email me at akozdra@gmail.com or add a comment please please pretty please)

LINK