
"I don't care too much for monkey, monkey can't buy me love!"
ComingSoon has discovered that "Fringe" co-producer and writer Brad Caleb Kane will be writing a movie based on Fisher-Price's View-Master toy. If you don't know what that is, just check out that photo above to jog your memory, I'm sure you'll know exactly what they are. These little plastic gimmicks first came out in 1939 and are designed to allow people to see a photo in 3D simply by looking through the viewfinders. Kane later confirmed the news on his Twitter adding that, "it'll be like the old 80's Amblin movies: Goonies, Young Sherlock… In that vein."
LOS ANGELES — A federal judge tentatively decided Thursday to dismiss the case against a Missouri woman who had been convicted of computer fraud stemming from an Internet hoax that prompted a teenage girl to commit suicide.
Lori Drew of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., was convicted in November of three misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing a protected computer.
The decision by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu will not become final until his written ruling is filed, probably next week. Wu said he was concerned that if Drew was found guilty of violating the terms of service in using My Space, anyone who violated the terms could be convicted of a crime.
The verdict was a blow to prosecutors who indicted Drew on what some called tenuous legal grounds after authorities in Missouri declined to file criminal charges. Drew was widely criticized after the 2006 death of eighth-grader Megan Meier, an acquaintance of Drew's daughter.
Prosecutors said Drew, her daughter and her 18-year-old employee used a fake profile of a teenage boy to flirt with Megan online via Beverly Hills-based MySpace. Megan hanged herself with a belt after getting a message, purportedly from the boy, telling her that "the world would be a better place without you."
At the May hearing, Wu grilled Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Krause at length about whether the government had prosecuted Drew under the appropriate laws when it asserted that violating MySpace's terms of service amounted to a crime.
"Is a misdemeanor committed by the conduct which is done every single day by millions and millions of people?" Wu asked. "If these people do read (the terms of service) and still say they're 40 when they are 45, is that a misdemeanor?"
Krause argued that Drew's acts were criminal because she signed up for the fake account with the intention of harming Megan by humiliating her. Drew knew her acts were illegal and deleted the account shortly after Megan's death to cover up her crime, he contended.
"Why do so many on the left have such an unhinged hatred of [Sarah Palin]? Why do so many alleged feminists and female members of the mainstream media openly and gleefully despise Palin?..."
Christina Applegate is now family to Drew Barrymore.
A source exclusively reveals to me that the Samantha Who? star has signed on for a role in Going the Distance, a romantic comedy starring Barrymore and her maybe-real-life boyfriend Justin Long as a couple in a long-distance relationship...
Applegate will play big sister to Barrymore's character, according to my source.
Iraqis jubilantly celebrate U.S. troop withdrawal.
U.S. forces handed over formal control of Iraq’s major cities today (it is already Tuesday in Iraq), “a defining step toward ending the U.S. combat role in the country.” In celebration, Iraqis launched fireworks and “thousands attended a party in a park [in Baghdad] where singers performed patriotic songs. … Loudspeakers at police stations and military checkpoints played recordings of similar tunes throughout the day, as Iraqi military vehicles decorated with flowers and national flags patrolled the capital.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had called the withdrawal a “great victory,” declared June 30 a public holiday.
If you think about Harry Truman ending the ban on racial discrimination, you see what real political courage is like and why finessing something like this may be more trouble than it's worth.
Unlike Clinton and Obama, Truman was the Democratic president who understood that there was really no way to finesse an issue like this if it's what you believe. You just have to do it.
I also tried to steer him to songs with more depth, some of them about real relationships -- we weren't going to make it with ballads to rodents (i.e. "Ben"). And Seth Riggs, a leading vocal coach, gave him vigorous warm-up exercises to expand his top and bottom range by at least a fourth, which I desperately needed to get the vocal drama going. We approached that record like we were going into battle. "Off the Wall" would sell 10 million copies.
Rod also brought in "Thriller" and Michael sang his heart out on it. At one point during the session the right speaker burst into flames, which none of us had ever seen before. How's that for a sign?
GOP leaders have a new complaint about President Obama: He's not reaching out to them nearly as much as he did earlier this year, when he road-tested his pledge of post-partisanship, only to get uniformly rebuffed on his first big legislative initiative.
Tomorrow is the deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq, a date Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is calling a “great victory.” But in a new interview with Washington Times radio, Vice President Cheney was still pushing the U.S. to stay in Iraq, saying that withdrawal would “waste” the sacrifice of U.S. troops