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New eateries expand menu of options
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Akron vs. Mount Union — Liveblog
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Indians announce spring dates
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Mangini doesn't name a quarterback
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Flashes interested in another Cincinnati player
Cleveland Cavaliers:
Shaq: It’s All About Winning Championships
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Buckeyes Roll 100-60 / Season Outlook
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Report: Walsh baseball player commits
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More On The Fort Hood Jihadist
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Simply Incapable of Telling The Truth
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Health Care Financing Reform: (63) Commonwealth Fund Report on Primary Care
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Muffle Your Muffler
Car Chase:
Clock Tender- Extending the Life of Collector Car Clocks
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Rumors: Akron Starbucks Closing
Ohio Travels with Betty:
Jack is looking for a trip to Southern Ohio the week of November 16.
Sound Check:
Aeromsith looking for new singer as Steven Tyler contemplates solo career
HRLite House:
Personal Rant – Why People Do Not Live in Northeast Ohio
Akron Gamer:
Video: 'Modern Warfare 2' hits the streets
By Rich Heldenfels
Published on Wednesday, Sep 19, 2007
When The News Comes To Town. ''I did not answer the door in sweat pants with bed head and bad breath,'' writer and mom Trish Berg said Tuesday.
After all, ABC News was outside her Dalton home, taping a segment for World News Tonight with Berg about moms who blog. Berg has a Web site (http://www.trishberg.com) and a blog (http://simplifyingmotherhood.blogspot.com), as well as books like The Great American Supper Swap and the upcoming Rattled: Surviving Your Baby's First Year Without Losing Your Cool.
Married with four children, Berg said ABC found her through another blogger, Dawn Meehan (http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com), who also was interviewed by ABC.
More Berg. By e-mail, she said the morning session with the news crew was ''fantastic!
''They arrived at 6:30 a.m., which was crazy, but they wanted a typical day,'' she said. ''So they taped the kids all getting up and around for breakfast and school. They got shots of me with the kids, saying goodbye as they got on the school bus, and of me preparing my supper swapping meal.''
Still, she said, ''It is a very odd experience to have a film crew in your home telling you to just act natural, but we did our best.''
She's waiting for an air date for the segment.
Big Screen Special. The documentary The Real Low Calorie Diet will get a special showing at 8:30 tonight at Shaker Square Cinemas in Cleveland.
The documentary comes from Oberlin-based New Agrarian Center, a self-described ''network between rural and urban areas who are finding more in common with each other as the region confronts significant land-use challenges and questions about its economic future.'' (For more information, go to http://gotthenac.org.)
Admission to the showing is free, but NAC is asking for a $5 donation to support its programs. The film will be presented after a showing of the documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John, which is running regularly at Shaker Square.
Small Screen Doings. The television season takes a big leap forward tonight with the return of America's Next Top Model (8 p.m., The CW) and 'Til Death (8:30 p.m., Fox) and the premieres of four new shows: Kid Nation (8 p.m., CBS), Back to You (8 p.m., Fox), Kitchen Nightmares (9 p.m., Fox) and Gossip Girl (9 p.m., The CW).
Of special local interest is Back to You, which co-stars Bay Village native Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) and Kelsey Grammer (Frasier)as TV news co-anchors in Pittsburgh whose on-camera chemistry is complicated by off-camera tensions. The cast also includes another former Buckeye, Fred Willard, as a sports anchor at the station.
The first episode, airing tonight, is only intermittently funny, and the show feels clogged with characters tossing jokes. But the second episode is a considerable improvement, a farce with a lot of the style of Frasier at its most comic. Plus Grammer and Heaton play very well together.
More New TV. Kitchen Nightmares sends out Gordon Ramsay to help restaurants in trouble. In an episode I screened, a lot of the trouble included screaming and swearing; imagine a show where Ramsay is the calming presence, and you know how extreme and tiresome this one gets.
Gossip Girl is soap opera, based on a series of books and, in its pilot at least, not all that interesting. Kid Nation is the reality series about kids running their own community; it has generated a lot of questions about how the children were treated during its making. CBS opted not to make a preview copy available.
Book Booms. The Associated Press says that another 50,000 copies of If I Did It are being printed, as the first 200,000 copies are flying off the shelves.
The book is the repackaged version of the book by O.J. Simpson describing how he would have killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown ''if'' he had done it.
Simpson expected to cash in with the book, but the outrage over that idea got the book pulled before publication. A bankruptcy judge then awarded rights to the book to Goldman's family as part of their wrongful death judgment against Simpson.
More O.J. The book with new material and the subtitle Confessions of a Killer got a boost when Simpson landed in jail recently. He's facing charges in an alleged robbery of sports memorabilia in Las Vegas.
Speaking of which, when Extra asked Magic Johnson what he thought of the new O.J. case, Johnson said in part, ''The law is the law. If he broke the law, then he's going to have to pay the price!''
Which may not be what Simpson has learned from previous courtroom time.
Wedding Bell Blues. Gazillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife is in quite the divorce battle with wife Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife, says the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Besides money, the couple has fought over possession of a dog, artworks, antiques and ''even the date of their separation,'' the paper says.
More Scaife. The divorce ''could set a new record for a divorce settlement,'' says the paper, which competes with the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
There was no prenup and Scaife has already been paying the Mrs. $750,000 a month ''from a standing formula in the law that places temporary support at 40 percent of a husband's income.'' The previous temporary-support record in Pennsylvania was $275,000 a month.
I don't have enough fingers and toes to calculate those numbers.
Sopranos on DVD. On the heels of its best-drama Emmy win, HBO Video will release the final nine episodes of The Sopranos on DVD on Oct. 23.
The Sopranos: Season 6, Part II, will be available in regular DVD for about $100 and the two high-definition formats, about $130 each. Extras will include a piece on the making of Cleaver, a look at the use of music in the final season and four separate audio commentaries by Steven Schirripa, Dominic Chianese, Robert Iler and Steven Van Zandt.
Trivia Time. The answer to Sunday's question the name of the medical drama starring James Brolin and Robert Young is Marcus Welby, M.D. The prize winner is Stephanie Whims.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
When The News Comes To Town. ''I did not answer the door in sweat pants with bed head and bad breath,'' writer and mom Trish Berg said Tuesday.
After all, ABC News was outside her Dalton home, taping a segment for World News Tonight with Berg about moms who blog. Berg has a Web site (http://www.trishberg.com) and a blog (http://simplifyingmotherhood.blogspot.com), as well as books like The Great American Supper Swap and the upcoming Rattled: Surviving Your Baby's First Year Without Losing Your Cool.
Married with four children, Berg said ABC found her through another blogger, Dawn Meehan (http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com), who also was interviewed by ABC.
More Berg. By e-mail, she said the morning session with the news crew was ''fantastic!
''They arrived at 6:30 a.m., which was crazy, but they wanted a typical day,'' she said. ''So they taped the kids all getting up and around for breakfast and school. They got shots of me with the kids, saying goodbye as they got on the school bus, and of me preparing my supper swapping meal.''
Still, she said, ''It is a very odd experience to have a film crew in your home telling you to just act natural, but we did our best.''
She's waiting for an air date for the segment.
Big Screen Special. The documentary The Real Low Calorie Diet will get a special showing at 8:30 tonight at Shaker Square Cinemas in Cleveland.
The documentary comes from Oberlin-based New Agrarian Center, a self-described ''network between rural and urban areas who are finding more in common with each other as the region confronts significant land-use challenges and questions about its economic future.'' (For more information, go to http://gotthenac.org.)
Admission to the showing is free, but NAC is asking for a $5 donation to support its programs. The film will be presented after a showing of the documentary The Real Dirt on Farmer John, which is running regularly at Shaker Square.
Small Screen Doings. The television season takes a big leap forward tonight with the return of America's Next Top Model (8 p.m., The CW) and 'Til Death (8:30 p.m., Fox) and the premieres of four new shows: Kid Nation (8 p.m., CBS), Back to You (8 p.m., Fox), Kitchen Nightmares (9 p.m., Fox) and Gossip Girl (9 p.m., The CW).
Of special local interest is Back to You, which co-stars Bay Village native Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) and Kelsey Grammer (Frasier)as TV news co-anchors in Pittsburgh whose on-camera chemistry is complicated by off-camera tensions. The cast also includes another former Buckeye, Fred Willard, as a sports anchor at the station.
The first episode, airing tonight, is only intermittently funny, and the show feels clogged with characters tossing jokes. But the second episode is a considerable improvement, a farce with a lot of the style of Frasier at its most comic. Plus Grammer and Heaton play very well together.
More New TV. Kitchen Nightmares sends out Gordon Ramsay to help restaurants in trouble. In an episode I screened, a lot of the trouble included screaming and swearing; imagine a show where Ramsay is the calming presence, and you know how extreme and tiresome this one gets.
Gossip Girl is soap opera, based on a series of books and, in its pilot at least, not all that interesting. Kid Nation is the reality series about kids running their own community; it has generated a lot of questions about how the children were treated during its making. CBS opted not to make a preview copy available.
Book Booms. The Associated Press says that another 50,000 copies of If I Did It are being printed, as the first 200,000 copies are flying off the shelves.
The book is the repackaged version of the book by O.J. Simpson describing how he would have killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown ''if'' he had done it.
Simpson expected to cash in with the book, but the outrage over that idea got the book pulled before publication. A bankruptcy judge then awarded rights to the book to Goldman's family as part of their wrongful death judgment against Simpson.
More O.J. The book with new material and the subtitle Confessions of a Killer got a boost when Simpson landed in jail recently. He's facing charges in an alleged robbery of sports memorabilia in Las Vegas.
Speaking of which, when Extra asked Magic Johnson what he thought of the new O.J. case, Johnson said in part, ''The law is the law. If he broke the law, then he's going to have to pay the price!''
Which may not be what Simpson has learned from previous courtroom time.
Wedding Bell Blues. Gazillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife is in quite the divorce battle with wife Margaret Ritchie Battle Scaife, says the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Besides money, the couple has fought over possession of a dog, artworks, antiques and ''even the date of their separation,'' the paper says.
More Scaife. The divorce ''could set a new record for a divorce settlement,'' says the paper, which competes with the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
There was no prenup and Scaife has already been paying the Mrs. $750,000 a month ''from a standing formula in the law that places temporary support at 40 percent of a husband's income.'' The previous temporary-support record in Pennsylvania was $275,000 a month.
I don't have enough fingers and toes to calculate those numbers.
Sopranos on DVD. On the heels of its best-drama Emmy win, HBO Video will release the final nine episodes of The Sopranos on DVD on Oct. 23.
The Sopranos: Season 6, Part II, will be available in regular DVD for about $100 and the two high-definition formats, about $130 each. Extras will include a piece on the making of Cleaver, a look at the use of music in the final season and four separate audio commentaries by Steven Schirripa, Dominic Chianese, Robert Iler and Steven Van Zandt.
Trivia Time. The answer to Sunday's question the name of the medical drama starring James Brolin and Robert Young is Marcus Welby, M.D. The prize winner is Stephanie Whims.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
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