The relationship ended in 2009 after Brown physically assaulted Rihanna -- but as the media knows, it never really ended. Rihanna forgave the abusive Brown earlier this year, saying: "I felt like the only person they hate right now is him. It was a weird confusing space to be in, because as angry, hurt and betrayed as I was, I just felt like he made that mistake because he needed help. And who’s going to help him? Nobody’s going to say he needs help, everyone’s going to say he’s a monster without looking at the source. I was more concerned about him."

Continue Reading...

Jim McGrath, Bush's spokesman in Houston, had said earlier in the day that the fever had gone away, but he later corrected himself.

"It's an elevated fever, so it's actually gone up in the last day or two," McGrath told The Associated Press. "It's a stubborn fever that won't go away."

Doctors at Methodist Hospital in Houston have run tests and are treating the fever with Tylenol, but they still haven't nailed down a cause, McGrath said. Doctors also have put Bush on a liquid diet, though McGrath could not say why.

The bronchitis-like cough that initially brought Bush to the hospital on Nov. 23 has improved, McGrath said. The 88-year-old is now coughing about once a day, he said.

Continue Reading...

Via NJ.com/Statehouse Bureau.

Continue Reading...

"Les Miserables," which opened in 2,808 theaters, is now the #1 advance ticket-seller among all Christmas Day releases. Universal was hoping to make at least $10 million its opening day, but according to Deadline, the Tim Hooper adaptation's projected earnings from yesterday will exceed that by about $8 million. However, sales could decline by Wednesday or Thursday, with one studio exec noting that “Christmas Day has very unique play patterns by genre, region of the country, ethnicity, and target demo. You won’t really know where films are headed until Friday. But that’s a fantastic number for Les Miz.”

Continue Reading...

Maintaining good cheer in December 2012 appears particularly challenging. While holiday revelers had been taken by surprise at having to witness the drawn-out death of a beloved yellow Labrador in 2008’s “Marley & Me,” or watch abused horses perishing in the mud, their spindly legs taking a final stumble in the ooze of 2011’s “War Horse,” this year’s audiences have been provided with a veritable cornucopia of cinematic sadism.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

“Great idea,” I said. “Where we going to find a Santa?”

Rachael looked at me and smiled.

I knew that smile.

We had dumped good-paying gigs to open the kind of business no one had ever heard of. But starting a business and working with animals combined Rachael’s lifelong dreams.  She was convinced that doggy daycare was the next big thing. I did what I usually did. I went along. Besides, once Rachael set her mind to something, there wasn’t much point in resisting her. Especially when she hit you with that smile.

Rachael’s ambition and drive is what had first attracted me to her; those same attributes often made me feel steamrolled, demeaned and resentful. Relationships can be ironic — especially the doomed ones.

Starting a business on a shoestring budget is something everyone should do — once. We worked 12-, 14-hour days getting the place ready to open.

Continue Reading...

“I got you an invitation to their Christmas eve dinner.”

“You want me to have Christmas dinner with people I don’t know?”

“They’re good people, and she’s perfect. She’s blonde and was really good in school.”

“Come on,” I said. I was a good student only by his standards, and he was the one obsessed with blondes.

My father and I had never managed to figure out our relationship. When I was 10, my mother ran away with me to rural Virginia, where I learned he’d been a bank robber. Obsessed with crime, I went back to him five years later, to Vancouver where he ran the seafood business he’d started after prison. He worked hard while courting ruin with reckless spending, reminding me of how, in a story he told, he pulled a near-perfect burglary but later got arrested for a bar fight. The only crime he had left was buying illegal salmon from Native Americans, which he had me do in the dead of night. When I thought I was a badass, he gave me a baseball bat and sent me to collect money, just to prove I couldn’t. I ran away to Virginia, went back to him nine months later, fled again, and finally returned to live with him after graduation.

Continue Reading...

I refer, of course, to Pottersville.

In Capra's Tale of Two Cities, Pottersville is the Bad Place. It's the demonic foil to Bedford Falls, the sweet, Norman Rockwell-like town in which George grows up. Named after the evil Mr. Potter, Pottersville is the setting for George's brief, nightmarish trip through a world in which he never existed. In that alternative universe, Potter has triumphed, and we are intended to shudder in horror at the sinful city he has spawned -- a kind of combo pack of Sodom, Gomorrah, Times Square in 1972, Tokyo's hostess district, San Francisco's Barbary Coast ca. 1884 and one of those demon-infested burgs dimly visible in the background of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Continue Reading...

One of the challenges with watching old movies with your kids is that the mores have changed radically in the last half century. Many old cartoons are staggeringly racist. Almost everything made before, say, 1985 is egregiously sexist; there’s one awkward sequence in Rudolph the Red-nose Reindeer, for example, when Rudolph’s mother and Clarissa, his girlfriend, don’t chase after the red-nosed runaway because they are women, and they know it’s not their place. The men in old movies are forever on the verge of date rape (the old cartoons, too; I’m looking at you, Pepe LePew), always quick to resort to violence, to fix a stiff drink, to blow secondhand smoke in a child’s face, to slap a woman across the face to prepare her for lovemaking, to gay-bash. Is that how society was in the forties? I don’t know, but I’m not entirely comfortable exposing my kids to it.

Continue Reading...

Watch:

Continue Reading...

“Are those cowboys?” she guessed. “Security guards?”

As another holiday season is upon us, I caution you not to take such questions lightly. Holidays are the playoffs of the parenting game. Our ability to feed, clothe and educate our children is never more on display. We are expected to have them dressed properly for ritual events. They must be able to execute a thank-you note in a timely fashion. They should know the words to festive songs – and never, ever utter in public the lines “Batman smells/Robin laid an egg.”

Continue Reading...

Mattel is the maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, but this year its top selling toy is a plastic cell phone case, according to the Financial Times (subscription required):

 Whether a new Kindle Fire, or a hand-me-down iPad, analysts predict 2012 will be the year children as young as three-years-old will unwrap tablets at trendsetting rates. And that has the traditional toy companies scrambling to stay relevant.

“The top two guys, Mattel and Hasbro, they are terrified,” said Sean McGowan, managing director of equity research at Needham & Company, an investment banking firm. “They should be terrified, but the official party line is they’re not terrified.”

Continue Reading...

And whatever you do, don't call him Santa.

From funnyordie.com

Continue Reading...

Ah, the perfect Christmas gift. Hands down the best gift I ever gave was a little driveable wheel-loader to my then-2-year-old nephew. He's 15 now, and it's still his favorite gift ever. But it's not really a reliable go-to gift unless you've the Octomom or the Duggers and you've always got preschoolers on your list.

2. Mexican Cocoa Pacifica Candles

I love Pacifica candles, in all sizes and fragrances. This year my favorite is Mexican Cocoa. It smells like Christmas to me, but it works to make a house smell homey – which means, to me, that it smells like you have time to bake – any time of year.

3. San Francisco Giants swag 

Every year someone on my list gets some kind of San Francisco Giants swag; when my team wins the World Series, everyone gets something. That's now two out of the last three years: I'm happy about that, but it's getting expensive.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

This year, self-gifting has hit an all-time high. Shoppers are rushing to sales racks and frantically loading up on everything from tablets to trendy sneakers for that very special someone known as Me.

According to the Wall Street Journal, market research company NPD has discovered that the trend is a prime driver of holiday shopping growth this year. Before the recession, the firm found that around 12 percent of shoppers said they’d purchased items for themselves during the holidays. Last year the figure was up to 19 percent for surveys that went out before Christmas. And the post-Christmas surveys showed that 26 percent of respondents had made holiday purchases for Numero Uno. This year, the figure is already up to a whopping 32 percent.

Continue Reading...

Even the savviest shoppers can be tricked into buying things they don’t want or need. There’s no need to feel foolish; the retail industry spends an inordinate amount of time and money figuring out the science (yes, it is a science) of how to sell the most stuff. But it is a good idea for consumers to know what they're going into, especially around the holiday season, when stress levels are running high and stores are packed with shoppers spending money left and right.

Though far from a comprehensive list, here are six tactics retailers use to get you to part with your hard-earned dough.

1. Holiday ploys: The scents and sounds of the season.

Continue Reading...

According to a report in Science Daily:

Researchers compared the genome macrostructure for 157 gene families present both in conifers and flowering plants. They observed that the genome of conifers has remained particularly stable for at least 100 million years, while that of flowering plants has undergone major changes in the same period.

Continue Reading...