Julianne Hough on American Idol

Julianne Hough is a professional ballroom dancer and country singer. Born in 1988 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Hough -- whose brother, Derek, also competes on DWTS -- began dancing as a child and even trained and competed professionally in London. When she returned to the U.S. five years later, Hough moved to Los Angeles to jumpstart her dance career.
Her big break came when she was approached to participate on the fourth season of DWTS. As a direct result of her talents, Hough has earned two “mirror ball trophies” on the series and was recognized with an Outstanding Choreography Emmy nomination in 2008.
The multi-talent released her self-titled debut in 2008, which quickly rose up the country music charts. In June 2009, she was offered a role in the movie remake of Footloose.
Hough, who has pledged abstinence until marriage, is currently dating Ryan Seacres.

Ryan Seacrest talks about his girlfriend, Julianne Hough, says she saw Phillips and "I thought I heard her say 'yummy!'" They then show her off-stage, looking surprised and laughing. Hmmm, that's a first on the show; in 11 seasons of watching I don't remember him ever talking about anyone he was dating, that I can remember, let alone shown someone.


Julianne Hough may be dating American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, but she has her eyes on one of the show’s contestants. Last night, Seacrest revealed to the audience that Hough blushed when Phillip Phillips walked by and said that he was “yummy.”
Phillips, a fan favorite, sang Dave Mathews “The Stone” on last night’s American Idol. Lopez called Phillips’ rendition “too artsy” and the judges poked fun at his dance moves. The song did, however, seem to win over Hough.

Joel Ward Talks Racist

Joel Ward speaks with USA Today about the racial garbage on Twitter after Game 7: "It doesn't faze me at all. We won, and we are moving on. … People are going to say what they want to say." He also said Jeff Halpern showed him the Tweets on the team plane and apologized that Ward had to see them.

I think I’m about to write 17 consecutive blog posts that say the same thing, but here’s the basic message: the mood of Washington sports fans on the Internet late Wednesday night was as giddily happy as I can ever remember.
Within 24 hours, sports fans will have seen see the Caps vanquish both the Stanley Cup champs and their game 7 demons, the Nats improve to an utterly absurd 14-4, and the Redskins draft the most likable Heisman Trophy-winning franchise quarterback in recent memory.

"There is no lying about it. …I'm definitely the one black guy in a room with 20 white guys," Joel Ward said. "There are definitely some cultural differences, such as taste in music, but I've neard heard anything derogatory."
He says he has no concern about his safety moving forward in the playoffs.
"I'm pretty laid-back and I get along with a lot of people," Ward said. "I don't fear anything like that, and I have a good group of guys to protect me."
Capitals owner Ted Leonsis, in a blog post about the situation, called people making the comments "unforgivable."
“I hope they are now publicly identified and pay a huge price for their beliefs," Leonsis wrote. "There should be zero tolerance for this kind of hate mongering. Their messages should now stay glued into the algorithms to place a forever warning and a mark upon these people and their actions. They shouldn’t be able to escape their keystrokes.”
The Bruins also said they were "very disappointed" in the comments.
“These classless, ignorant views are in no way a reflection of anyone associated with the Bruins organization,” read a team release.
Several of the tweets were aggregated at Chirpstory.com; by Thursday afternoon, many of the offending accounts had been deleted.
The comments started shortly after the 31-year-old Ward, in his first season with the Capitals, backhanded Mike Knuble's rebound past Thomas, giving Washington a 3-2 win.
"When I saw the puck there, I just took a whack at it," Ward said after the game. "It was a sense of relief, a great accomplishment."

Octomom was Investigated

“Octomom” Nadya Suleman was fully cooperative when social workers and La Habra police looked into a complaint about her children's living conditions and that they found nothing to merit further investigation.
The La Habra Police Department and investigators from the Orange County Social Services Agency visited the home Tuesday after a complaint of “general neglect” regarding conditions at Suleman’s home, said Sgt. Daniel Barnes.

La Habra police Sgt. Daniel Barnes says officers and Orange County Department of Family and Children's Services officials examined Suleman's home in Southern California on Tuesday and did not find anything unusual.
The entertainment news website TMZ.com says Suleman's hairstylist told police the house was a mess and there was only one working toilet in the home.
Barnes told City News Service that someone reported filth in the home.
The 36-year-old Suleman became known as Octomom after she gave birth to eight babies in January 2009. They are the world's longest-living octuplets

The company behind the hair procedure Octomom dropped hundreds of dollars on while on welfare -- is mortivied by Octo's reckless spending ... and now, it's hatched a plan to make things right with taxpayers.
KTLA News reported the person who filed the complaint said there was only one functioning toilet in the home and that the children had to use portable toilets. The person also claimed the children appeared unclean.
Barnes said officers conducted preliminary interviews at the home and “no crimes were noticed.” He said no criminal investigation was underway, although there could be further examination from social workers.
Suleman was dubbed “Octomom” after she gave birth to octuplets in 2009.

The NFL Draft

The NFL draft begins Thursday night with the first round, continues Friday night with the second and third rounds, and runs through Saturday, when the final four rounds will be held at Radio City Music Hall. The Indianapolis Colts and St. Louis Rams both went 2-14 last season and had the top two picks, but the Rams traded the second spot to Washington.
While Andrew Luck and Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III will be the stars of the show, this year's draft will be more about defensive players than quarterbacks. In fact, only 3 QB's are expected to be picked in the first round while as many as four cornerbacks could have their names called early.

The New York Jets reached out Sunday to Alabama running back Trent Richardson, fueling speculation they will try to orchestrate a blockbuster move to trade up.
Richardson said Wednesday he received a call from the Jets soon after arriving in New York for pre-draft festivities.

It's common for a team to call potential picks a few days before the draft, but it's unusual to contact a player seemingly out of reach.
The Jets, picking 16th in the first round, are exploring the possibility of moving up for Richardson, according to league sources. But it's a long shot, considering they'd probably have to jump 11 or 12 spots.

Before an inexplicably large television audience and scored to the dulcet analytical tones of Chris Berman and Mel Kiper Jr., the Indianapolis Colts will take Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck with the first pick of the NFL Draft on Thursday. Shortly after that, the Washington Redskins will select Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III with their first pick. At which point … well, Berman and Kiper will still be there, loudly, but things get pretty cloudy pretty quickly. This is generally the case in the mis- and disinformation-muddled days before the draft, which are traditionally home to both a great deal of uncertainty and some middle school-level psy-ops from front offices.

Uncertainty is, of course, the name of the game in the draft even when anonymous scouts aren’t talking down various players for reasons owing to peevishness, strategy or both. First-round picks don’t provide any real guarantee of success, and the odds of teams scoring an impact player decrease as the draft drags on.

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.

Drinks Hand Sanitizer Cases

Hand sanitizer, which has 62% ethyl alcohol, produces a potent drink that can cause alcohol poisoning. Some of the cases involve teenagers who used salt to separate out the alcohol.
There were also 147 cases involving children ages 6 to 12 and 2,180 cases ages 0 to 5, believed to have accidentally ingested the gel, according to poison control service, part of the UC San Francisco's Department of Clinical Pharmacy.
The vast majority of all the cases statewide were minor and treated at home, but about 50 of the youths went to a hospital or were referred to a hospital for treatment.
In Los Angeles County since March, there have been 16 cases of teenagers requiring medical attention, according to the California Poison Control System.
Officials began separately tracking hand sanitizer cases in 2010.

Dr. Akikur Mohammad, Founder of Inspire Malibu, recognized by many as the top addiction treatment center in Malibu, California and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California (www.USC.edu), announced today that his team at Inspire Malibu is launching an awareness campaign designed to draw attention to the rising number of adolescents and adults abusing hand sanitizer throughout the United States.

Six teenagers have shown up in two Los Angeles emergency rooms in the past few months with alcohol poisoning after drinking hand sanitizer and public health officials said the cases could signal a dangerous trend.
Some of the teenagers used salt to separate the alcohol from the sanitizer, making a potent drink that is similar to a shot of hard liquor.

The recent cases involving teenagers surprised doctors. There were no such cases last year. The incidents also raised concerns about the lack of awareness among parents of the risks linked to the popular hygiene product. Even small bottles contain highly concentrated alcohol.

Facts About Mad Cow Disease

The case of Mad Cow Disease in six years sparked fears of illness that prompted at least one major South Korean retailer to suspend the sale of American beef.

However, public health officials said the risk for disease for Americans is extremely low given that the affected dairy cow in central California was not part of the human food chain and was not exposed to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) through animal feed.

The is the fourth instance of Mad Cow Disease to have been discovered in US history. It was long believed that cattle were infected with BSE by eating feed that included spine and brain tissue of other cows who had consumed the meat of sheep infected with scrapie. But some scientists have since hypothesized that the disease may develop spontaneously in cattle. Federal officials believe that the recent instance in California was a indeed caused by an atypical genetic malformation, as CBS reported. “It was just a random mutation that can happen every once in a great while in an animal,” Bruce Akey, director of the New York State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at Cornell University, told the AP. “Random mutations go on in nature all the time.” Federal officials further emphasized that the infected cow had not eaten contaminated feed.

South Korea is the world’s fourth-largest importer of U.S. beef.
South Korean agriculture officials are considering whether to formally suspend delivery of U.S. beef to stores by halting quarantine inspections, which would prevent the meat from clearing customs.

The new case of mad cow disease is the first in the U.S. since 2006. It was discovered in a dairy cow in California, but health authorities said Tuesday the animal was never a threat to the nation’s food supply.
The infected cow, the fourth ever discovered in the U.S., was found as part of an Agriculture Department surveillance program that tests about 40,000 cows a year for the fatal brain disease.
South Korea first imposed an import ban on U.S. beef in 2003 after mad cow disease was detected in a U.S. cow. The country lifted the ban in 2008 but faced a huge outcry from the public and months of candlelight protests.

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.