Jamie Oliver's restaurant fowl-up & other: 2008

Saturday, 23 August 2008

AHIP Welcomes New Pro-Reform Ad Featuring Harry And Louise

�America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) welcomed a new ad campaign by a broad stakeholder coalition that urges the next president and Congress to lay health care reform at the top of the national agenda.

Sponsored by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Hospital Association, the Catholic Health Association, Families USA and the National Federation of Independent Business, the ads feature the fictional characters Harry and Louise.

Appearing with the sponsor organizations at a news conference at the National Press Club, AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni applauded their focussing on cooperation and consensus building.

"We fully support this campaign because the seeds of workable reform are deep-rooted in efforts like this: diverse stakeholders from across the spectrum working together to find common undercoat," Ignagni aforesaid.

"Over the past 2 years, AHIP's Board of Directors has developed a range of comprehensive policy proposals to ensure that all Americans have memory access to affordable, high-quality health care. Our plan is coverage you can yield, coverage you can keep, coverage for all Americans," said Ignagni.

"While offering solutions is important, we know that real progress will non happen unless stakeholders get to out and work together. That's why we are pleased to be here to loan our support as the AHA, the American Cancer Society, the Catholic Health Association, Families USA and NFIB come up together to launch this new campaign," said Ignagni.

http://www.ahip.org

More information

Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Hot tracks ft Bloc Party

BLOC PARTY � Mercury.

With a harsh, mangle vocal sample and similarly discordant attitude, Kele�s
heroes have ditched the superimposed guitars for punky rhythms and sulky synths.
A bold tone.4

BROKEN RECORDS � Slow Parade. This second single is a shuffle of
emotional lyrics, docile piano and uplifting string section. 3.5

PHANTOM LIMB � Don�t Say A Word. This debut of ethereal
ethnic music sounds as old as the hills. 2.5

BOMBAY BICYCLE CLUB � Evening/Morning. Skittering rhythms, a
dirgey bass and Interpol-sounding guitars and vocals ticking all the right
boxes. 4

THE RYES � How Come Loretta. A galloping hoyden packed with catchy
melodies and harmonies. 3.5

BETH ROWLEY � Sweet Hours. Laid-back, smoky blues from Beth�s
top-ten album Little Dreamer. 3.5

JEREMY WARMSLEY � Lose My Cool. Unique mix of electronic textures
and rock guitars held together by verbal dexterity. 4

BECK � Gamma Ray. His best since he described himself as a loser.
4

NELLY FEAT AKON AND ASHANTI � Body On Me. Akon and Ashanti bring
the steamy vocals to Nelly�s funky trail. 3

LIZ GREEN � Midnight Blues. Beguiling late-night blues with
finger-picked guitar and forked bass. 3.5

More info

Wednesday, 2 July 2008

Review : The Mars Volta at Logan Campbell Centre

It's near impossible to outshine the two frontmen of The Mars Volta when they're in full flight during a show.Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is a tiny, afro-wearing guitar hero who shreds as effortlessly as he improvises, and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala, tonight dressed in skinny jeans with a bright red belt and a black polka dot shirt, is like a Latin Robert Plant with the high kicks and other moves of a young James Brown.But for much of tonight's show the crowd has eyes and ears only for drummer Thomas Pridgen, who joined the band last year.The Los Angeles-based prog-metallers were without a sticksman for a long time because, well, it takes a certain kind of beast to keep time for these boundary-pushing crazies.Judging by Pridgen's animalistic precision, they found the right man.The Mars Volta, on their fourth visit to New Zealand, are devastatingly brilliant.Only they would start a gig with a new song _ described as Intro Song on the set list _ clocking in at an epic 20 minutes.

The two-and-a-half hour non-stop show is deliciously sonic and chaotic with instruments ranging from bass clarinet, flute and saxophones (all played by hard-working Adri�n Terrazas-Gonz�lez), to shakers and keyboards, to twin guitars and Bixler-Zavala's shrill, operatic wailings.It's like John Coltrane and his band, brought into the future, and fronted by a pair of musical wizards who love salsa, funk and free jazz as much as they do Pink Floyd and metal.They are self-indulgent and proud but in contrast to past shows there is none of the earnestness that goes with it and the eight members look like they are having more fun than ever making this mental, yet brilliant, music.From new album The Bedlam In Goliath they rip and trip through Wax Simulacra, Agadez, Aberinkula, Goliath, and, best of all, the berserk Ouroborous.The band's second album Frances the Mute provides the most psychedelic, funk-meets-metal moment of the night on Cygnus ... Vismund Cygnus.Off the last album Amputechture there's the unrelenting thud and 70s funk of Viscera Eyes, and later Tetragrammaton, which starts with a beautiful Bixler-Zavala serenade that erupts into one of the night's most chaotic periods.Every player goes off on his own demented tangent, especially percussionist Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez (Omar's brother), who manhandles three shakers at once.Really, though, it's not about individual songs because they are all welded together and on occasion they circle back 20 or 30 minutes later to remind you of what song they are playing.It's extraordinary music. As a friend says, it's compelling enough to have 18-year-old bogans bopping through even the darkest of atonal bass clarinet solos.This is a mind-and-body meltdown dished up as only The Mars Volta can do.What a show, and it rates as their best New Zealand performance yet.

Sunday, 22 June 2008

Lost stars set to marry

Evangeline Lilly and Dominic Monaghan are reportedly set to marry.

The actors - who split briefly earlier this year - are said to be planning a quiet ceremony in Hawaii, as a tribute to Lost, the hit US TV show on which they met.

A source said: "Evangeline and Dominic have been spending a lot of time together during the show's hiatus and are very excited about the future.

"Evangeline accepted Dom's proposal while they were away together and they both agree Hawaii is the perfect place for the wedding - both as a location and for sentimental reasons."

However, the pair are in no rush to tie the knot, and are happy living as an engaged couple for the time being.

The source added: "The wedding might be next year or maybe the year after that. It's another 'Lost' mystery!"

Evangeline stars as Kate Austen in the TV show, which follows a group of plane crash survivors as they attempt to find a way off a mysterious island.

Dominic co-starred as Charlie Pace until he was killed off at the end of season three.

See Also

Saturday, 14 June 2008

Fear Before the March of Flame

Artist: Fear Before the March of Flame

   Genre(s):
Metal

Discography:

Art Damage

Year: 2004
Tracks: 11

Monday, 9 June 2008

Maria Muldaur

Artist: Maria Muldaur

   Genre(s):
Dance
   Pop
   Rock
   Blues
   Jazz

Discography:

Sweet Lovin' Ol' Soul

Year: 2005
Tracks: 12

Love Wants to Dance

Year: 2004
Tracks: 9

Sweet Harmony/Open Your Eyes Disc 2

Year: 2003
Tracks: 10

Sweet Harmony/Open Your Eyes Disc 1

Year: 2003
Tracks: 10

Maria Muldaur's Music for Lovers

Year: 2000
Tracks: 11

Meet Me Where They Play The Blues

Year: 1999
Tracks: 12

Southland of the Heart

Year: 1998
Tracks: 11

Waitress in a Donut Shop

Year: 1993
Tracks: 11

Maria Muldaur

Year: 1993
Tracks: 11

A Woman Alone With The Blues (Promo)

Year:
Tracks: 4

Best known for her seductive '70s pop staple "Midnight at the Oasis," Maria Muldaur has since become an acclaimed interpreter of precisely around every bar of American roots music: blues, early jazz, gospel, folk, country, R&B, and so on. While these influences were sure enough gift on her more pop-oriented '70s recordings (as befitting her Greenwich Village folkie past times), Muldaur really came into her have as a true roots music hairstylist during the '90s, when she developed a especial fascination with the 10000 sounds of Louisiana. On the drawing string of well-received albums that followed, Muldaur trussed her eclectic method together with the romanticist sensualism that had underpinned much of her best figure out ever so since the showtime of her career.

Muldaur was innate Maria D'Amato on September 12, 1943, in New York. As a child, she loved country & western music and began tattle it with her auntie at years five; during her teenage old age, she stirred on to R&B, early rock'n'roll & roll, and girl mathematical group pop, and in high school formed a group in the latter style called the Cashmeres. Growing up in the Greenwich Village field, however, she course became spell-bound with its stentorian early-'60s folk revitalisation and soon began participating in jam sessions. She also affected to North Carolina for a spell to study Appalachian-style fiddle with Doc Watson. Back in New York, she was invited to fall in the Even Dozen Jug Band, a gospeler mathematical group that included John Sebastian, David Grisman, and Stefan Grossman; they had secured a recording deal with blueswoman Victoria Spivey's label and she precious them to total some sexuality appeal. The young D'Amato got a crash trend in early blues, particularly the Memphis scene that spawned many of the original jug bands, and counted Memphis Minnie as one of her tribal chief influences.

Elektra Records bought out the Even Dozen Jug Band's take and released their self-titled debut album in 1964; nevertheless, straight to their cite, the band's unwieldy size made them an expensive engagement on the club and coffee shop circuit and they before long disbanded. Many of the members went off to college and, in 1964, D'Amato stirred to Cambridge,MA, home to some other vibrant folks shot. She speedily joined the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and began an affair with isaac Bashevis Singer Geoff Muldaur; the duo eventually married and had a daughter, Jenni, world Health Organization would later get a vocalizer in her possess right. When the Kweskin band broke up in 1968, the duo stayed with their label (Reprize) and began recording together as Geoff & Maria Muldaur. They stirred to Woodstock, NY, to take reward of the burgeoning music setting thither and issued two albums -- 1970's Pottery Pie and 1971's Sweet-scented Potatoes -- in front Geoff departed in 1972 to form Better Days with Paul Butterfield, a act that signaled non only when the last of the couple's musical partnership, only their wedlock as intimately.

Initially diffident about her musical future, Muldaur's friends bucked up her to follow a solo calling, as did Reprise chairwoman Mo Ostin. Muldaur went to Los Angeles and recorded her self-titled debut album in 1973, marking a massive Top Ten pop hit with "Midnight at the Oasis." Showcasing Muldaur's playfully sulphurous crooning, the Middle Eastern-themed song became a pop radio raw material for eld to come and besides made academic session guitarist Amos Garrett a frequent Muldaur quisling for eld to fall. Muldaur's side by side album, 1974's Waitress in a Donut Shop, featured a hit remake of her Even Dozen-era theme song air, "I'm a Woman." Three more than Reprise albums followed o'er the course of the '70s, broadly with the cream of the L.A. session crop, just besides with more and more diminishing results.

About 1980, Muldaur became a reborn Christian; she recorded a live album of traditional gospel songs, Gospel Nights, for the littler Takoma judge in 1980, and touched into full-fledged CCM with 1982's On that point Is a Love, recorded for the Christian judge Myrrh. However, this new steering did not raise permanent, and for 1983's Sweet and Slow, Muldaur recorded an album of jazz and blues standards (many with longtime age group Dr. John on forte-piano) that created precisely the mode its title suggested. 1986's showy Transbluecency won a year-end critics' prize from the New York Times. Muldaur spent the rest of the '80s touring, often with Dr. John, and too began performing in musicals, appearing in productions of Pump Boys and Dinettes and The Pirates of Penzance. In 1990, she recorded an album of greco-Roman nation songs, On the Sunny Side, that was specifically geared toward children; it proved a surprising succeeder, both critically and among its intended audience.

Part divine by Dr. John's New Orleans obsessions, Muldaur signed to the rootsy Black Top judge in 1992 and cut Pelican State Love Call, which established her as a versatile stylist well-versed in the blues, gospel, New Orleans R&B, Memphis blues, and soul. The record album won wide acclaim as one of the charles Herbert Best works of her career, offering a more organic, stripped access than her '70s pop albums, and became the best-selling record in the Black Top catalogue. Her 1994 followup, Get together Me at Midnite, was nominative for a W.C. Handy Award. Muldaur side by side cut a jazzier outing for the Canadian roots label Stony Plain, 1995's Jazzabelle. She later on sign-language with Telarc and returned to her previous steering, making her pronounce debut with 1996's well-received Fanning the Flames. 1998's Southland of the Heart was a less bluesy field day recorded in Los Angeles and was released the same year as a second gear children's album, Swingin' in the Rain, a ingathering of sway tunes and pop novelties from the '30s and '40s. 1999's Touch Me Where They Play the Blues was intended to be a collaboration with West Coast blues pianissimo legend Charles Brown, simply Brown's wellness problems prevented him from contributory much (merely one vocal on "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You"); hence, the project became more of a tribute.

Muldaur touched back to Stony Plain for 2001's Richland Woman Blues, a tribute to early blues artists (particularly women) inspired by a travel to to Memphis Minnie's tomb. Featuring a variety of special guest instrumentalists, Richland Woman Blues was nominative for a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. The children's record album Brute Crackers in My Soup: The Songs of Shirley Temple appeared in 2002. The side by side year saw the release of Fair sex Alone with the Blues, a ingathering of songs associated with Peggy Lee, on Telarc Records. Love Wants to Dance followed in 2004, too on Telarc. The for the most part acoustic Sweet Lovin' Ol' Soul was issued by Stony Plain in 2005, followed by Spunk of Mine: Love Songs of Bob Dylan on Telarc in 2006. Songs for the Young at Heart was besides released in 2006. The following year, the lowest in the prepare of tierce albums that nonrecreational protection to female the blues singers of the twenties through forties, Naughty, Bawdy and Blue (the other two were Richland Woman Blues and Sugared Lovin' Ol' Soul), came knocked out.

Sunday, 25 May 2008

Lisa Edelstein - House Spin-off In The Works

LISA EDELSTEIN's HOUSE character DR. LISA CUDDY is being lined up for a spin-off show, according to reports.

Cuddy is the boss of Hugh Laurie's character Dr. House in the show. During the programme's run, the two characters have enjoyed a sizzling but unconsummated sexual chemistry.

Producers are rumoured to be hatching plans to shift Cuddy to a show of her own - but the actress insists she knows nothing.

Edelstein says, "I've heard the same rumours. But the producers tell us nothing."

See Also

Wednesday, 21 May 2008

Steve Backley out of Dancing on Ice

Olympic javelin throwster Steve Backley has suit the latest renown to be voted off 'Dancing on Ice'.
Backley, wHO took voice in the series despite having a prosthetic hip, lost out to former 'Coronation Street' genius Zaraah Abrahams in last night's skate-off betwixt the backside two contestants.
Backley said subsequently: "I'm disappointed to go and there is no getting away from that. I am gutted."
"Having the prosthetic pelvic girdle is a big care, my stumbling block is acquiring o'er that just I am delighted to give got this far."