Ruh roh. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is being sued by Susan Hassett, the author of a book for people with Celiac disease, for plagiarism. From the AP:
Hassett said in the lawsuit that she sent Hasselbeck a personal note and copy of her “Living With Celiac Disease” book as a courtesy after the television celebrity disclosed she had the illness last year.
Hassett claims that Hasselbeck lifted word for word passages for her own book, “The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide”.
People with the disease, like Hasselbeck, are unable to eat foods with gluten in them. The book offers tips on how to live healthily with the disease. On top of plagiarism charges, Hassett is claiming that Hasslebeck’s book gives bad advice and can be dangerous for people with Celiac disease. Oh my.
I wonder what the ladies on The View have to say about all this. I can imagine that Mama Barbara won’t be pleased…
I’m spending this weekend with my college BFFAEAEAEAEs in Hoboken/Manhattan/Brooklyn and I will be chronicling some of the weekend’s adventures, naturally, on SWTCTW.
But before any of that, I’d like to relay a story from my college roommate, Mouse. Her boyfriend and a couple of his buddies — normal city folk who don’t hunt or fish or camp regularly — are experimenting with removing themselves from civilization and living in the woods (with no modern comforts) for a while. The experiment was supposed to last 90 days, and has eventually whittled itself down to one week. I mean, it happens.
I asked Mouse about the BF’s wildnerness status last night. She said that, in fact, she had gotten an unexpected phone call from the BF the day before. Though he wasn’t supposed to have access to things like cell phones, the BF and his buddies had to make an emergency trip to Milwaukee (they had been in the Wisconsin wilderness) to drop off some deer carcass. Um, yeah.
Turns out, the BF and his buddies had set up some snares to trap smaller animals to eat, and they accidentally trapped a deer. When they found it the next morning, it was still alive, but was suffering and had two broken legs. Somehow, these three city boys managed to put the deer out of its misery, skin it, and chop it all up. But rather than letting the portion of the carcass that three boys can’t eat in a few days go to waste (or feeding it to a bear, or whatever it is that you do with excess deer carcass), they decided to drive three hours back to Milwaukee to drop the deer off in a freezer.
Anyway, this side trip gave the BF the chance to call Mouse, and she asked him what he had been eating for the past few days, as the boys had been determined to not bring along any food. This boy, a regular city kid who likes buffalo chicken wraps as much as the rest of us, had eaten nothing but the following for the better part of a week:
Two earth worms
Four frogs
One larvae
A sparrow (eyeballs and brains and everything!!!)
A SPARROW? A sparrow.
This story made me enjoy today’s uhm-mahzing Thai lunch just that much more.
Last night I watched Bravo’s newest show, “Top Chef Masters”, fully expecting to see the always foxy Padma hosting. But no. There’s some new chick in town, and her name is Kelly Choi. Like Padma, she’s way too thin to be a food critic. EAT A FRIGGIN’ HAMBURGER… OR SEVEN. Honestly. There is such a disconnect between being rail thin and being a food critic. How on earth do they do it?
Kelly Choi seems a little wacky, so I did my research. She’s a model, duh. She hosts a show in NYC called “Eat Out, NY”. (Keep your dirty jokes to yourself.) SHE ALSO EATS RAW EGGS. And if you want to know more about her and all the other crazy things she eats every day, click here. She also drinks. A lot.
She did alright last night, but I’m still on Team Padma. What do you think of her?
So, we just drank a bottle of champagne, ate three pounds of food (some of it vegetables, I swear!), and spent an hour trying to create some sort of “Best of SWTCTW” list. The problem is, all of our posts are so amazing, and we are so witty and entertaining and wonderful, that it’s hard to pick just a few select posts. Slash we drank a bottle of champagne and it’s just too hard to deal with stuff like that.
The point of all this is that Six Words To Change The World turned one today!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SWTCTW! We were very excited when we realized this today, and you should be too. If you’ve been with us for the whole year (Dave, Susannah, Carlos, Mike, Abbey, Kelsey, Maddy, etc., we’re looking at you), thank you from the bottom of our bloggy hearts. (Kathleen: “I was just about to say, ‘Please write “bloggy hearts.” I hate you so much.'”) But seriously, thank you, everyone, for reading. Stick with us, and hopefully we can celebrate our second anniversary together next year. Until then, enjoy a little champagne, or maybe some cake, or maybe just this video (we’re still laughing, a LOT, a year later):
Kathleen must be given credit for finding this wonderful link to 25 of Nickelodeon’s Best Original Songs, but she didn’t post about it yet, so I win! Mwhaha.
I thoroughly enjoyed purusing these videos yesterday, because watching Nickelodeon took up about 50% of my childhood. The other 50% was spent eating some form of fast food almost every night. (My mom used to work late as a nurse and was horrified to discover, a decade later, that chicken fingers and french fries made up a substantial protion of her daughters’ diets. Thanks, Daddy!)
My sister and I love to try to remember all of the Nickelodeon shows that we were obsessed with, and this Top 25 Songs list helps with that. I mean, Doug is a given. But shows like My Brother and Me? Totally forgot about it! Clarissa Explains It All? Amazing. (Don’t pretend you didn’t have the biggest crush ever on Sam. It made me wish I lived on the second floor just so that my best guy friend could have a ladder and sneak into my room whenever he wanted.) And I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed that I still know all the words to the Salute Your Shorts theme songs. I could have used a few references to Wild ‘n’ Crazy Kids or Guts, but I’ll take what I can get with this brilliant piece of You Tube-y nostaglia.
These days, I feel pretty bad for the kids who weren’t allowed to watch as much teevee as I was. What happens if “Nickelodeon Shows” is a Kings category? What if people start talking about how weird it was that Alex Mack turned into silver goo, and you don’t get the reference? How humiliating. (If you are one of those kids, please do yourself a favor and memorize the songs from the Top 25 list. Then you can probably fake your way through most of the references.)
So, to get all big picture for a second…it’s sort of strange to think that I spent so much time watching the teevee and eating horrific fast food, and ended up turning out okay. Of course, I played outside a ton, and I’m sure my mom snuck some vegetables in my diet when my dad wasn’t looking, but if a kid exposed to all that trash and poison managed to get through college and has turned out reasonably healthy and normal, do parents these days really need to be obsessing over Baby Einstein and organic milk and French lessons? I wrote a few speeches on this in college, and now I’m sort of obsessed with this topic. There’s certainly a lot to think about, there. (If you want to read a legitimate article about this, not just the ramblings of an unmarried, childless 20-something, check out this NY Times Magazine article.)
But since I’m (erm, hopefully!) many years away from worrying about this stuff fer real, let’s all just join together and appreciate the awesomeness that was Nickelodeon in the ’90s:
And speaking of le television, if you need a new show to get addicted to this summer, and you’re four years behind the times like I am, please start watching Weeds. You won’t regret it.
KILLER UPDATE: From a Gchat conversation with my friend Rachel, because I know you love getting inside looks at my deep, deep Gchat convos. (Background: Rachel and her friend Meghan are frm South Orange, NJ):
Rachel: here’s a tidbit u will enjoy
they filmed pete and pete in south orange me: no way! Rachel: and used meghan’s house for hair and makeup etc me: NO FUCKING WAY! Rachel: not the whole thing of the show just parts me: THAT IS THE COOLEST THING IVE HEARD ALL DAY
It doesn’t take much to get me riled up on a Monday morning, I guess.
Just stumbled upon this delightfully voyueristic peek into the fridges and freezers of strangers. The photos are part of a series by photographer Mark Menjivar called You Are What You Eat. When you read his goals for the collection, you can see that it’s about a little bit more than voyeurism; Menjivar wanted to make a statement about consumerism and hunger in this country:
You Are What You Eat is a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.
For three years I traveled around the country exploring the issue of hunger. The more time I spent speaking and listening to individual stories, the more I began to think about the foods we consume and the effects they have on us as individuals and communities. An intense curiosity and questions about stewardship led me to begin to make these unconventional portraits.
A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, “May I photograph the interior of your fridge?” to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed “as is.” Nothing added, nothing taken away.
These are portraits of the rich and the poor. Vegetarians, Republicans, members of the NRA, those left out, the under appreciated, former soldiers in Hitler’s SS, dreamers, and so much more. We never know the full story of one’s life.
My hope is that we will think deeply about how we care. How we care for our bodies. How we care for others. And how we care for the land.
Here are a few photos from the collection:
I’m a little embarrassed to say that my roommate’s and my fridge looks most like the third photo, which (tellingly?) was taken of the fridge of a couple of college students. The only items consistently in our fridge are condiments, booze and assorted cocktail fixings, and eggs. The grocery store is just so far away when you don’t have a car! City living is hard! (Sorry, Mom.)
You can see the rest of the photos at the blog link above, but definitely check out Menjivar’s website to see more of his impressive work.
Remember Vince Offer? The ShamWow! hooker puncher? (His real name is actually Vince Schlomi. Teehee.) Well, here is remixed video of his Slap Chop infomercial, appropriately titled the “Rap Chop”. The person who made this ABSOLUTELY has too much time on their hands, but it is funny. Best part? “You’re gonna love my nuts”. Oh, Vince. How the mighty infomercial spokesman have fallen. And just for funsies, here is his mugshot.
Good, because I felt like looking up a bunch of Jack Handy and Mitch Hedberg quotes that I love:
“If God dwells inside us like some people say, I sure hope He likes enchiladas, because that’s what He’s getting.” [Jack Handy]
“Sometimes I wave to people I don’t know. It’s very dangerous to wave to someone you don’t know because what if they don’t have a hand? They’ll think you’re cocky. ‘Look what I got motherfucker! This thing is useful. I’m gonna go pick something up!'” [Mitch Hedberg]
“The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I’ll put a very large blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat. And if someone asks me why I didn’t get more meat, I’ll just say, ‘Oh, you mean this?’ and pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I’ve hidden it. Good magic trick, huh?” [Jack Handy, way better than David Blaine]
“When you go to a restaurant on the weekends and it’s busy they start a waiting list. They start calling out names, they say ‘Dufresne, party of two. Dufresne, party of two.’ And if no one answers they’ll say their name again. ‘Dufresne, party of two, Dufresne, party of two.’ But then if no one answers they’ll just go right on to the next name. ‘Bush, party of three.’ Yeah, what happened to the Dufresnes? No one seems to give a shit. Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing! You fuckers are selfish. The Dufresnes are in someone’s trunk right now, with duct tape over their mouths. And they’re hungry. That’s a double whammy. ‘Bush, search party of three, you can eat when you find the Dufresnes.'” [Mitch Hedberg]
Genius.
Also, my officemate and I were just discussing food metaphors that don’t make sense. Like “another bite of the apple,” which, according to her, is very common among lawyer types. Who only takes one bite of an apple? It’s your apple. I don’t care what you do with it; go ahead, take another bite! Then there’s “have your cake and eat it too.” What kind of crazy person wouldn’t eat their own cake? If I have some cake, I’m going to eat that cake, and I am not going to be made to feel guilty about such a thing.
Hilarious and brilliant! Here’s more from the Web site:
six words to change the world. 