White House Correspondents' Dinner 2012

One of the best recieved jokes of the night were Kimmel's quips about recently ousted Current TV host Keith Olbermann.
Jimmy Kimmel's half-hour speech at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner Saturday evening had a few targets--Kim Kardashian, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Lindsay Lohan, Mitt Romney. But not everyone can take a  joke.

Olbermann, who did not attend the dinner and had instead been tweeting throughout the night about baseball ("Confirming: I would not, and have not voluntarily, attended the WHC Dinner since 1998. This conforms with my anti-torture stance," Olbermann wrote), didn't appreciate Kimmel's jabs. He took to--what else?--his Twitter account to explain why he felt Kimmel targeted him.

In response to his followers saying he shouldn't take it personally, Olbermann tweeted, "I'm not complaining about the Kimmel jokes - I'm fair game. I'm complaining about the revenge element. It reminds me of O'Reilly #nerdprom."

Where else can you see Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan rubbing shoulders with Rick Santorum? See Michelle Obama go head-to-head in a fashion battle against Martha Stewart... and Kate Upton? See Jimmy Kimmel make cracks about the president... with the president sitting right in front of him?

Then again, it was President Obama making the best jokes of the night. Looking at ease at the podium, he acknowledged his newly-cool, meme-tastic peer Hillary Clinton ("She won't stop drunk texting me from Cartegena!") as well as Miss Kardashian ("Why is she famous anyway?") He also poked fun at his graying image, dedicated a full video segment to Bo Obama (!) and made more than a few digs at Congress, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and even Donald Trump.

We swoon. Below, see POTUS, FLOTUS, and all the glamorous stars -- Reese, Charlize, Diane, Kim, Claire, and Alicia among them -- who came out for Washington D.C.'s "prom."

Small Earthquake In California

U.S. Geological Survey says the magnitude 4.1 Earthquake In California struck 8:07 a.m. Saturday. It was centered along the San Andreas Fault near Devore, in San Bernardino County. Some buildings swayed in downtown Los Angeles, about 60 miles to the west.

The Geological Survey says a small 2.0 magnitude aftershock hit about a half-mile away about two minutes later.

A San Bernardino County Sheriff's dispatcher in nearby Rancho Cucamonga said the station shook for a few seconds, but there were no calls about damage or injuries.

The USGS says a small 2.0 magnitude aftershock hit about a half-mile away about two minutes later. That was followed by a 1.8 magnitude shock at 8:14 a.m.

Dr. Lucy Jones with the USGS said the quake was located in an area where three faults come together. Early reports that the quake occurred on the San Andreas Fault were incorrect, Ms. Jones said.

Some buildings swayed in downtown Los Angeles, about 60 miles to the west, and residents reported shaking along Los Angeles County's beaches.

Paul Harrington was reading in bed at his home in Hesperia, about 20 miles north of the epicenter, when he felt the quake hit.

A clerk at an Albertson's market in Rancho Cucamonga said the store shook for several seconds but nothing fell from shelves.

The epicenter was approximately near the junction of the 15 and 215 freeways at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains below the Cajon Pass.

Delmon Young arrested, accused of hate crime-related assault in New York

Detroit Tigers outfielder Delmon Young was arrested and faces a hate crime-related charge in connection with a dispute outside a hotel along New York’s 6th Avenue early this morning, a New York police spokesman told the Free Press.

According to the report, the victim called 911. Cops quickly responded to the scene and arrested Young for aggravated harassment. Investigators are considering charging the athlete with a hate crime.
Young reportedly was taken to Roosevelt Hospital to sober up before he was booked and charged with assault in the third degree.

He was the first overall pick in the 2003 draft, and in recent years finally rounded into a very solid major league contributor. Young played a key role in the Tigers' near-run to the World Series last season, hitting three home runs as the Tigers beat the Yankees in five games in the Division Series, and two more in their six-game loss to the Rangers in the AL Championship Series.

Young is not in the lineup for tonight's game against the Yankees. It was unclear what triggered the incident at the Hilton New York at about 2:30 a.m., though it began with a group of four men and a panhandler wearing a yarmulke.
The detective said police interviewed witnesses, and Young was still “being processed” at mid-morning.
Young faces an “aggravated harassment hate crime” charge and will be processed through central booking later today, Cavitolo said.

The charge is a misdemeanor.
The victim, described as a 32-year-old male, was “knocked to the ground, and an arrest” was made outside the Hilton New York. He suffered an elbow injury and refused medical attention, Cavitolo said.

History Of The Arbor Day

Arbor Day 'April 27' is holiday celebration on appreciate trees.  Arbor Day, first observed in 1872, seems like an appropriate time to celebrate these early adopters of green living.

Learn how to recognize the trees in Martinez using the Arbor Day Foundation's interactive tree identification tool.

My father was part of a generation that left the South en massege, though what they knew about the earth never left them. Even as a child in Los Angeles, I could spot them. They were like my dad who, in the 1980s, long before the "urban farming" trend, seemed intent on turning our South Los Angeles backyard into a Farmville. He grew greens, onions, okra, cucumber, tomatoes and, for a time, sunflowers. The practice wasn't so strange; other people did it too. The neighbor a few doors down had chickens.

The trees and the school were born in the mid-1950s when my dad was a teenager. In those days the color line divided everything, even earth love. On Arbor Day, white students planted over here, African Americans over there.

This is Arbor Brewing's fourth year of hosting a fundraiser for Arbor Day.

David Borneman, Natural Area Preservation Manager, said the donations will go toward a variety of things for the program, including more trees, shrubs flowers and other native plants to help beautify Ann Arbor’s parks.

The Adopt-A-Park program helps to organize volunteers looking to enhance area parks with things like tree and shrubbery plantings, litter cleanup and general caring to the parks.

Today we have options that Carver and previous generations never had. In our high-tech world, soon anybody with a smartphone equipped with a tree identification app can stand in front of a tree and know it. Snap a photo of a leaf and the phone will function as an electronic field guide, providing vital information about the tree. Today, iPhone and iPad users in certain parts of the country already have this ability through the app known as Leafsnap. Imagine what Carver would say if he could see us now!

The President with Jimmy Fallon

President Obama was on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” on Tuesday. OK, OK, technically it was Wednesday in Washington, as NBC broadcasts the show at 12:35 a.m. Eastern time. Anyway, the appearance seems to have worked up quite a bit of buzz among the blognoscenti and twitterati
First off, there was the slow jam of the news. If you haven’t heard about this, it’s a recurring Fallon bit in which he and a guest talk/croon about a serious topic over a beat laid down by house band The Roots.

Obama returned to the topic while discussing his college years with Fallon. According to Obama, he and his wife, Michelle, accrued a large amount of debt while earning their undergraduate and law school degrees.

"For the first 10 years of our marriage, we were still paying stuff off, even when we were supposed to be saving for Malia and Sasha," Obama said. "We didn't pay off all of our student loans until about eight years ago."
When asked by Fallon what legislation he would enact if he could bypass Congress, the president shifted his focus to energy and high fuel prices, an area his critics have focused on as a potential weak spot.

As to other stuff, Obama said people send him Web links to dancing bears and cute cats. It’s good to know that even presidents have friends eager to waste their time. Also, one of his favorite movies is “Groundhog Day,” which, Obama acknowledged, came out before many students in the crowd were born.
Also, Obama said he and Mitt Romney are not friends, but he did not appear to mean that in a bad way. He said because Romney had been a governor, their paths hadn’t crossed much in the course of political business, whereas he’d gotten to know last opponent John McCain in the Senate.

Google Drive

Google Drive is a way to store your files on Google's servers, or "in the cloud." If you run the free Google Drive application, then you get a folder on your computer (Windows or OSX) that looks just like a directory on your hard disk that you can drag your files in to. Anything stored in that folder is kept on your hard disk and also copied to your account in the cloud. You can access those files from drive.google.com or from other computers, including mobile devices.
Google Drive is also the new name for Google Docs, which is Google's suite of Web-based productivity tools -- its word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. Documents you create using these tools now show up in your Google Drive. Sort of.


The Google Drive service, beginning today, gives users online storage similar to a hard drive’s, allowing access to files from computers and other devices, said Sundar Pichai, Google senior vice president. As much as 5 gigabytes of cloud- based storage is provided free, while users may pay $2.49 a month for 25 gigabytes and higher fees for more.
Google’s service helps the company expand beyond its search engine and query-based advertising. Apple has a similar offering called iCloud, while Microsoft provides one called SkyDrive. Google, based in Mountain View, California, says its service will encourage users to spend more time online with features that, among other things, enable creation of Web-based documents and sharing of photographs.

To get started with Google Drive, head to drive.google.com and enable the service. Once you have access to your Drive, you're ready to get started.
Right away, you'll notice that Google Drive looks and acts a lot like Google Docs -- you can create files, collections (folders), use the top bar to search, and upload files by dragging and dropping into the browser window.
However, unlike Docs, you can now manage your entire drive from your desktop by installing the Google Drive application. To get it, head to drive.google.com and select "Download Google Drive" in the left sidebar. After a short installation process, a Google Drive folder will be added to your desktop. That folder is synced with your Google Drive, so any changes you make to it will be reflected in the Web interface, and vice versa.
So, when you add a file to the Google Drive folder, it will be uploaded to your Web drive (as long as you're connected to the Internet).

The company may find users in the consumer arena, said Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of Los Altos, California- based Box Inc., which targets businesses with its online storage service. More than 100,000 businesses use Box.net and that will be a more-difficult market for Google to compete in, he said.
Google may also give up your data in response to a legal demand, like a subpoena. If you want your cloud storage to be a little more out of touch, you might be interested in Wuala, which has no storage servers in the United States. Or you might just want to keep your data off the Internet.