Many celebrities today claim to be health food nuts. You would think that they have a special garden of life where they can grow foods that make them look younger and thinner!
Here are some celebrities favorite health foods:
Kate Walsh – brown rice and sesame oil soy sauce
Jennifer Love Hewitt – Wasabi peas
Marg Helgenberger – tuna fish salad
Diane Farr – steamed artichokes
Virginia Madsen – popcorn made with olive oil
Ali Larter – red peppers and cucumbers with dip
Joely Richardson – vanilla frozen yogurt with strawberries
Dana Delany – Almonds
Merv Griffin passed away on August 12, 2007 at the age of 82 from prostate cancer. He was best known for producing a series of game show television shows including, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.
Merv was born July 6, 1925 in San Mateo, California. He started his entertainment career as a singer on the radio. However, he was overweight and his fans were very disappointed when meeting him. He vowed to lose weight and lost 80 pounds. He toured with a big band orchestra for four years and formed his own record album. During on of his nightclub acts he was discovered by Doris Day and landed a screen test at Warner Bros. He starred in the film So This is Love in 1953 with Kathryn Grayson.
Griffin hosted a game show and then was a guest host for The Tonight Show. This parlayed into his own show – The Merv Griffin Show in 1965. The show continued until 1986.
Griffin was a wise investor and invested in real estate, including buying the Beverly Hilton Hotel and Resorts Hotel and Casino. Merv has one son from a marriage to Julann Wright and two grandchildren. He shares the same birthday (July 6) with Nancy Reagan and they always exchanged birthday greetings each year. He was a pallbearer at Ronald Reagan’s funeral.
PayDay is one of those movies that you find on late night television. It was released in 1973 and stars Rip Torn (I think he is great) as Maury Dann, a country-western singer that everyone loves. However, the film delves into Maury Dann’s off performance live and we soon find that he is a real snake. Dann manipulates everyone around him and even blames his limo driver for the death of a fan that Dann stabbed. Don’t take a cash advance out to buy this movie, but if you have nothing else to rent, take a chance.
Although the film did not get good ratings, I found it interesting given all the Hollywood shenanigans that go on. Stars want to be loved, just not offstage!
Here is another phrase origin. You will often hear people use the phrase “dead ringer” in the following manner:
Julia is a dead ringer for Jessica Simpson.
The meaning, of course, is that they look exactly alike. The phrase originated in the horse racing scene. Often, horse owners would have two horses that looked exactly alike. One would be fast, the other slower. They would run the slow horse until the betting odds were increased. Then they would substitute the faster horse and rake in the money. The horse was known as a ringer.
Dead was added to the phrase to imply abrupt or exact (like in a dead stop).
The first Halloween movie was released in 1978. I was a Senior in High School. I never did see the movie at the theaters, but saw it much later. A whole franchise of movies arose about the Michael Myers legend and this year movie number nine is being released. Halloween the movie is written and directed by Rob Zombie. Rob Zombie has written other horror movies and even composed music for horror films. I think he will bring a fresh look to the Halloween series. And with a name like that, the movie should be really scary!
Halloween (2007) is again based on Micheal Myers, who after 17 years in a mental asylum, is mistakenly released and he returns to find his baby sister Laurie. Anyone who gets in Michael’s way is sure to get a very big surprise. Here is the trailer:
I try to avoid scary movies if at all possible, but my favorite scary movie is still Silence of the Lambs. I watched this movie all by myself and it totally terrified me. Here was a person that was so amoral. Killing was nothing. Hannibal Lecter reminds me of Michael Myers. They both have their agendas and they are going to carry them out.
Who are todays best paid young actors? Who is breaking the payroll software every time a check gets cut? Forbes made a list in 2006 and here are the results:
Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, $40 million
Scarlett Johansson, $16 million
Paris Hilton, $7 million (is she considered an actress?)
Nicole Richie, $2 million
All of these actresses are under 25 years old. And all of them (with the exception of Scarlett Johansson) are actresses that I don’t care to see in any movie or tv show!
Joan Crawford, super star of the 1930s and 40s, had a little obsession with bathrooms. Every time she stayed in a hotel room, she scrubbed the bathroom (including the toilets, tubs and bathroom faucets) herself before using it. Her other weird bathroom obsessions included:
After a workman installed a new toilet and bathtub in her home, he used them. She immediately had everything torn out.
Every time Joan married, she would change all the toilet seats in her house.
Joan wore gloves whenever she left the house because of her germ phobia.
The movie Mommie Dearest is starting to make a little more sense now!
I am often interested in the origin of words and terms, so I have added a new category – Word Origins.
Wallflowers – Wallflowers are any number of herbs of the mustard family. They got the name because they often grow on old walls, rocks or quarries. The plant name was first used in 1578. No one knows for sure how the name came to apply to women (or men) are dances who sat by the wall and did were not asked to dance. The first known recording of the term was in 1820 in the book County Ball by Mrs. Campbell Praed. The term is know used to apply to anyone not participating in an event (not just a dance).
