theCLog

Friday, Nov. 21

Food: Beaujolais Nouveau Wine Tasting Festival
Levine Museum of the New South
Viva la France! And viva la French wine, Lindt chocolate, jazz quartets, and a night to enjoy the sweetness of it all! Get your tickets now, and drink your fill on Friday.

Film: Twilight bites into cinemas, along with Bolt, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Ashes of Time Redux.

Music: Reba McEntire and Kelly Clarkson combine forces to rock the 2 Worlds, 2 Voices Tour at Time Warner Cable Arena.

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The good folks over at Cracked.com have a collection of photos that have been circling the web for awhile, but contrary to all belief are not Photoshopped! (For some great Photoshopped pics, scroll down to the Thanksgiving post below!)

Below are some of the unreal-but-utterly-real shots.

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From the great minds over at Facebook, a list of Charlotte-centric facts:

1. You can’t drive a mile in any direction without seeing yet another Harris Teeter

2. You know someone who has hit a deer while driving

3. You understand that Charlotte has four seasons: Humid, Very Humid, Insanely Humid, and Christmas

4. You thought Discovery Place was the best thing ever when you were a kid

5. People clean out the grocery stores whenever snow is forecast, and then it snows a quarter of an inch

6. You remember when Charlotte had a real basketball team

7. Everyone wears flip-flops in January…and can get away with it

8. No matter what you do or where you go, some crazy SUV driver will cut you off

9. You know that barbecue is a noun, not a verb

10. There is a Starbucks in every single shopping center

11. You know the Charlotte Knights are not even in North Carolina, let alone Charlotte

12. You know someone who works for BofA or Wachovia

13. You know to give directions that bypass that infamous intersection: Queens Road and Queens Road

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What’s more golden than digging? Silence. Kanye West was arrested last night, making this quote from Wednesday a bit more over the top than usual.

“I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade, I will be the loudest voice,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s me settling into that position of just really accepting that it’s one thing to say you want to do it and it’s another thing to really end up being like Michael Jordan.”

“There were people who had the potential to do it but they went on vacation, so when Justin [Timberlake] went on vacation I made albums,” he said. “And it just came out to be that.”

We know he’s speaking musically, because there is no way that Justin Timberlake would be the voice of anything more prestigious than a Disney character cartoon.

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Apparently a priest in our neighboring state of S.C. forgot one of the main messages of Christianity: all are welcome. No matter who you voted for.

A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

“Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president,” Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

Who knows what this priest would have said if you had voted for one of these guys?

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Friday, Nov. 14

Arts: Dance Charlotte!
Booth Playhouse
Charlotte Dance Festival brings the moves to Blumenthal with a variety of acts from N.C. and beyond.

Film: A shaken, but not stirred, Bond is back in Quantum of Solace, and Matt Brunson has the review.

Music: Ala Muerte brings haunting tones to the Milestone.

Saturday, Nov. 15

Food: Soul Food
All over
Discover the best soul food in the Queen City, just in time for some comfort on cold autumn days.

Arts: The play Cell Phone Blues is about Charlotte, so show love for your city at the Afro-American Cultural Center.

Music: The Re-Rapture Party, featuring the best alternative and obscure music from the’80s, rocks it at the Visulite.

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Courtesy of the land down under (Australia for the slow among us), a list of 56 healthy reasons for us ladies to have crazy hot sex:

1. US endocrinologists at Columbia University found that women who have sex at least once a week have more regular menstrual cycles than those who are less sack-happy.

2. Sex makes you happier than money does, according to a recent US study.

3. Work off those Mars Pods without hitting the treadmill. One 30-minute roll in the hay burns about 840kJ.

4. Nookie helps the brain produce neuro-transmitters, chemical messengers that help mellow our moods.

5. Get more zzzzs. Getting a sensual massage followed by some dancing in the sheets releases sleep-inducing endorphins so you snooze soundly.

6. Post-romp, you’ll experience a surge in the hormone prolactin, which develops new neurons in the brain’s olfactory bulb, improving your sense of smell.

7. Unless you’re a kinky, wayward politician, it’s free!

8. Kick colds to the curb. Researchers at Wilkes University, US, found that having sex once or twice a week boosts the immune system by 30 per cent.

9. Protect pearly whites by stepping up to the mic. Semen contains small amounts of zinc, calcium and minerals proven to fight tooth decay.

10. Watch a Sex and The City marathon without constant bathroom breaks. Sex tones the pelvic muscles that support your uterus, bladder and bowel, meaning better pee control.
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42-year-old Stephen Baldwin (the Baldwin from Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore) is making news today for befriending 15-year-old Miley Cyrus and tattooing her alter-ego Hannah Montana’s initials on his shoulder.

Stephen claims that Miley dared him to do it with the promise of a cameo on her TV show.

Stephen recently claimed that he would move to Canada if Obama won, but no reports of him packing his suitcases have surfaced. Since he seems to think 15-year-old teeny-boppers make the best of friends for 42-year-olds, I’m thinking maybe Canada doesn’t want him.

He’s also starring in a right-wing approved, violence-filled and sex-free film called Sharks in Venice. Is it Snakes on a Plane for the McCain crowd?

For what it’s worth, when Stephen Baldwin decided to crawl out from under his rock of obscurity, he did it in a big, creepy way.

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As outraged as we all were over Sarah Palin charging for rape kits, it seems she was just following marching orders. If it’s good enough for the Pentagon, it’s good enough for Palin. TRICARE, the Pentagon’s Military Health System that covers active duty members, doesn’t pay for forensic rape kits.

Women in the military are twice as likely to be raped as their civilian counterparts. In fact, “women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq,” Congresswoman Jane Harman, D-Calif., told the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs in May.

Currently, forensic examinations are not covered for beneficiaries in civilian health care facilities through TRICARE medical plans because TRICARE “may cost share only medically or psychologically necessary services or supplies. Forensic examinations are not conducted for medical treatment purposes, but for the preservation of evidence in any future criminal investigation and/or prosecution.”

The decision to treat rape kits as purely evidentiary, ignoring the very real medical and psychological benefits to the victim, is reprehensibly primitive thinking. Making sure that those legislative changes happen as planned would be a long overdue step out of the primal ooze that has slimed our military in the eyes of our citizens and the world.

Support for the troops should not just be lip service. Read the full article at AlterNet while I go in search for my lost faith in humanity.

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AIG loves your money so much that the company decided to take it out for a weekend get away to a spa resort. Oh, sure, the big-wigs are calling it a conference, but your money knows. Those hard-earned dollars you hoped to spend on silly things like food and medicine were spend in style on massages and spa costs. You know, the way money is supposed to be spent by a corporation that needed tax dollars for a bail-out. Besides, what’s a measly little 6-figure retreat in comparison to billions?

Days before American International Group received its latest government bailout on Monday, the troubled insurer hosted a $343,000 conference for independent financial planners at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak resort in Phoenix.

The company said sponsors picked up roughly 93 percent of the tab for the Nov. 5-7 conference, but the spending still drew the ire of a member of Congress and raised questions about how AIG should be operating when it is under such intense scrutiny

U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he was “shocked and disappointed” when he learned about the Phoenix conference.

“AIG is coming to the government claiming to be in critical condition and asking to be placed under intensive care, but they are still going out and partying and acting as healthy as ever,” Cummings said in a statement. “It is even harder to sympathize when this company’s executives continue to wade by luxury pools while the everyday American whose taxpayer dollars are being used to save the company are hard at work.”

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