Ashton Kutcher plays a wealthy techie on the small screen, and now he's about to play one of the most famous techies on the big screen as well.
The Two and a Half Men star will play the late Steve Jobs in the indie film Jobs, Variety reports.
Report: Kutcher, Cryer offered two more years on Men ... but no raise!
Jobs will follow the Apple co-founder from willful hippie to running one of the most successful computer companies in the world. Matt Whitley wrote the script and Joshua Michael Stern (Swing Vote) will direct the film.
Kutcher, who is currently negotiating a deal to return to Men next season, will start shooting Jobs in May while on hiatus from the CBS sitcom.
ER star Noah Wyle previously played Jobs opposite Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates in the 1999 TNT movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.
Bobby Lashley. Ken Shamrock. Tito Ortiz. Dan Severn. Josh Barnett. Tim Sylvia. Those are just a few of the mixed martial artists that have dabbled in pro wrestling over the years, not to mention some of the Japanese talent that has flowed between both.
Arguably the biggest name of them all -- Brock Lesnar -- is reportedly set to make his return to the wrestling ring after a five-year sojourn to MMA that included a run as the UFC Heavyweight Champion and the biggest pay-per-view draw in the business.
According to Wrestling Observer founder Dave Meltzer, he has heard stories of Lesnar signing a one-year deal with limited dates and that he's in Miami for Sunday's Wrestlemania 28. Could the former champ make his presence made tonight? Talk about it here with our live discussion and results thread.
The event kicks off at 7 PM EST on pay-per-view with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson vs. John Cena headlining. MMA aficionado The Undertaker vs. HHH, Chael Sonnen BFF CM Punk vs. occasional MMA pundit Chris Jericho and Extreme Couture trainee Daniel Bryan vs. Sheamus round out the big matches.
Join in the live discussion below and get the results after the jump!
Tonight's the night.
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is all set to pull the trigger on its WrestleMania 28 pay-per-view (PPV) extravaganza tonight (Sun., April 1, 2012) at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, Florida.
I know what you're thinking: "What is this doing on an MMA site, then?" Well, as it turns out, not only is there a gigantic crossover appeal (like it or not), but the one and only Brock Lesnar could very well show up to crash the party.
The same Brock Lesnar, former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Heavyweight champion, who just recently retired from mixed martial arts (MMA).
Tonight's event features a main event match more than one year in the making, as "The Rock" returns to the WrestleMania ring for the first time in seven long years to take on the biggest star in the business today, John Cena.
Complete WrestleMania 28 results and live blog coverage will begin at 7 p.m. ET after the jump:
Star-divide
WWE WRESTLEMANIA 28 QUICK RESULTS:
The Rock vs. John Cena
Undertaker def. Triple H
CM Punk vs. Chris Jericho
Sheamus def. Daniel Bryan to win world heavyweight title
Big Show def. Cody Rhodes to win intercontinental title
Kane def. Randy Orton
Team Johnny def. Team Teddy
Maria Menounos and Kelly Kelly def. Eve and Beth Phoenix
WWE WRESTLEMANIA 28 LIVE BLOG:
King Combo here.
Broadcast is live.
First match of the night: Sheamus vs. Daniel Bryan-
Bryan gets a good luck kiss from AJ, only to turn around into a vicious Brogue Kick from Sheamus.
New World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus.
In the back now, Team Johnny getting psyched up for their match. The Miz couldn't get anything other than a few bad looks, and Mr. Laurinaitis, in a brilliant suit, does a much better job. Team Johnny, let's roll out.
Next up: Kane vs. Randy Orton-
Solid punches from Orton to start us off. Kane reverses and takes control. Off the ropes and Orton has to fight out of a chokeslam. Working over Kane's leg now, trying to wear the beast down. Draping DDT attempt but the Big Red Machine breaks out to power Orton to the mat. Near fall gets 2.
Kane has Orton in a sleeper hold. Orton, with some help from the crowd, works his way up and starts trading shots with Kane. Kane gets the better of it and goes for another pin. 2 count. Kane with more of his way, gets a side slam and another near pin fall. Working on Orton's neck again, really trying to wear down the Viper.
The 58-year-old True, whose extreme-distance running prowess is detailed in the book “Born to Run,” set out on what—for him—would have been a routine 12-mile run Tuesday from The Wilderness Lodge and Hot Springs, where he was staying. He left his dog at the lodge and never returned. A search began the next day.
Lodge co-owner Dean Bruemmer, who helped with the search Saturday, said he last saw his friend at breakfast. He said True gave no indication of a specific route, which made the search more difficult.
“There are a lot of trailheads up the road,” said Bruemmer, whose lodge is about four miles from the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument.
Though daytime temperatures in southwest New Mexico have been mild of late, temperatures dipped into the mid-20s on recent nights. True left for his run wearing shorts and a T-shirt and carrying a water bottle.
Fourteen search teams that were scouring the area Friday were supplemented with additional volunteer teams from across the state Saturday morning, state police spokesman Lt. Robert McDonald said. Teams were hiking and on horseback and ATVs. They also used dogs and employed a helicopter and plane in the search.
Bemis said crews likely would begin removing True’s body by horseback or litter team Saturday night. But he said the body probably wouldn’t make it out of the area until Sunday because of the terrain.
True, who had been friends with Bruemmer and his wife, Jane, for 10 years, would often visit their lodge while traveling between Mexico and his Boulder, Colo., home. As a result, Bruemmer said, True knew the trail system well—which made his disappearance all the more mystifying.
Michael Sandrock, a columnist who writes about running for The Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, knew True for at least 20 years and had run with him. He called True a pioneer of the sport of ultrarunning, which involves running extreme distances, often on grueling terrain and many miles longer than a traditional 26-mile marathon.
A bald friend of Barbie's would be available next year, CNN reports, though the doll will not be sold in stores.
The move comes after parents took to Facebook and Change.org to lobby the company to create a doll to help children suffering from hair-loss feel better about themselves.
The doll comes with wigs, hats, scarves and other accessories and unlike other Barbie dolls, the toy will only be available through hospitals, notes CBS News.
From the company’s Facebook announcement:
Play is vital for children, especially during difficult times. We are pleased to share with our community that next year we will be producing a fashion doll, that will be a friend of Barbie, which will include wigs, hats, scarves and other fashion accessories to provide girls with a traditional fashion play experience. For those girls who choose, the wigs and head coverings can be interchanged or completely removed. We will work with our longstanding partner, the Children’s Hospital Association, to donate and distribute the dolls exclusively to children’s hospitals directly reaching girls who are most affected by hair loss. A limited number of dolls and monetary donations will also be made to CureSearch for Children’s Cancer and the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.
Through a thoughtful approach, we made the decision not to sell these dolls at retail stores, but rather get the dolls directly into the hands of children who can most benefit from the unique play experience, demonstrating Mattel’s ongoing commitment to encourage play as a respite for children in the hospital and to bring joy to children who need it most. We appreciate the conversation around this issue, and are interested to hear what you think!
At birth, Melinda Star Guido was so tiny she could fit into the palm of her doctor's hand. Weighing just 9 1/2 ounces – less than a can of soda – she is among the smallest babies ever born in the world.
Most infants her size don't survive, but doctors are preparing to send her home by New Year's.
Melinda was born premature at 24 weeks in late August and is believed to be the second-smallest baby to survive in the U.S. and third smallest in the world. She spent the early months cocooned in an incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit in Los Angeles.
Despite hurdles, Melinda lived to her original Thursday due date. Doctors say it is too early to say how she will fare developmentally and physically when she grows up.
For now, her 22-year-old mother sits at her bedside almost every day and stays overnight whenever she can.
On Wednesday, Haydee Ibarra caressed Melinda through the portholes of the incubator where nurses pinned up a homemade sign bearing her name. Now 3 1/2 months old and weighing 4 pounds, Melinda gripped Ibarra's pinky finger and yawned.
"Melinda, Melinda," she cooed at her daughter dressed in a polka dot onesie. "You're awake today."
During her pregnancy, Ibarra suffered from high blood pressure, which can be dangerous for mother and fetus. She was transferred from a hospital near her San Fernando Valley home to the county's flagship hospital, which was better equipped to handle high-risk pregnancies.
There was a problem with the placenta, the organ that nourishes the developing fetus. The fetus, however, was not getting proper nutrition, blood and oxygen. Doctors knew Melinda would weigh less than a pound, but they were surprised at how small and fragile she was.
"The first few weeks, it was touch and go. None of us thought the baby was going to make it," said Dr. Rangasamy Ramanathan, who oversees premature infants at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.
Even if she survived, doctors told Ibarra and her husband Yovani Guido, children born this extremely premature can have developmental delays and impairments such as blindness, deafness or cerebral palsy.
Ibarra, who previously had a stillborn, told doctors to do whatever necessary to help her baby.
"They said, `We'll take the chance. Please try.' So we said. `OK we'll try,'" Ramanathan recalled.
Dr. Catalin Cirstoveanu runs a cardio unit with state-of-the-art equipment at a Bucharest children's hospital. But not a single child has been treated in the year-and-a-half since it opened.
The reason?
Medical staff he needs to bring in to run the machinery would have expected bribes.
So Cirstoveanu has launched a lonely crusade to save babies who come to him for care: He flies them to western Europe on budget flights so they can be treated by doctors who don't demand kickbacks.
That's what Cirstoveanu did last week for 13-day-old Catalin, who needed heart surgery. Cirstoveanu packed a small bag, slipped emergency breathing equipment into the baby carrier and caught a cheap flight to Italy, where doctors were waiting to perform the surgery.
The operation was successful. Two days later, though, a 3-week-old baby that Cirstoveanu whisked away to the same clinic in northwestern Italy – with tubes piercing her tiny frame – died before she was able to have lymph gland surgery.
"I was very worried it wouldn't work," said Cirstoveanu. "But in Romania, she would have died anyway."
The soft-spoken Cirstoveanu is fighting an exhausting and largely solitary battle against a culture of corruption that's so embedded in Romania that surgeons demand bribes to save infants' lives and it's even necessary to slip cash to a nurse to get your sheets changed.
It's one of the reasons why the country's infant mortality rate is more than double the European Union average, with one in 100 children not reaching their first birthday.
"To be honest, it's so deeply rooted into our system that it's really difficult to eliminate," Health Minister Ladislau Ritli said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Officially, the new cardio unit that Cirstoveanu runs at the Marie Curie children's hospital isn't functioning because jobs have not been filled. The real reason appears to be that Cirstoveanu has banned staff from taking bribes. That means that high-tech machinery lies idle because qualified experts do not bother to apply for jobs, as they know they cannot supplement their incomes with bribes.
It was the era of the parisienne, the professional French beauty, famous worldwide for her looks. Whole lives were devoted to it. Some went so far as to have their skin painted or enameled, a practice which sometimes led to facial paralysis, blood poisoning and even death. One social observer noted, "In Paris, half the female population lives off fashion, while the other half lives for fashion."
In the late 1870s a stunningly beautiful parisienne, Amélie Gautreau, dominated the social landscape. Madame Gautreau was born Virginie Amélie Avegno in New Orleans to French Creole parents. After her father was killed in the Battle of Shiloh, Amélie's mother moved her young daughters to live in Paris. Amélie began her ascent into Parisian society after marrying the wealthy Pedro Gautreau in 1878.
2012-03-29-strapless.jpg
Amélie captured the imagination of many young aspiring artists, chief among them John Singer Sargent, who became obsessed with the beauty and pursued her relentlessly in hopes of painting her portrait. He knew a successful portrait of Gautreau would result in future commissions from the rich and famous of Parisian society.
Deborah Davis's 2003 dual biography, Strapless, plots the course of the lives of two people whose stories will be forever woven together in this story of art, celebrity and scandal. The cast of supporting characters includes Richard and Cosima Wagner, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Davis vividly paints her own picture of life in nineteenth-century Parisian society and the scandal that rocked that world.
After getting her to agree to sit for the portrait, Sargent struggled for months with what he called "the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau." Eventually:
...he condemned Amélie, who hated remaining motionless, to one of the most tortuous poses in art history. He had her stand with her right arm leaning tensely on a table that was just a little too short to be a comfortable source of support. Her face turned sideways to draw attention to her remarkable profile, while her body pointed to the front. The muscles of her neck strained to keep her head at its awkward angle.
Between "Saturday Night Live," "South Park," Adult Swim and his various film roles, chances are Bill Hader had a hand in almost every comedy thing you've liked in recent years. This week on Bill Simmons' B.S. Report podcast, he dished on all of that plus his first encounter with Bill Murray, Jon Hamm's knockout "SNL" debut, and Stefon's secret to success.
Hader, now in his seventh season on "SNL" (his contract is up after next year) revealed a lot about how the show has shaped his comedic style throughout his life. When he was nine years old, he honed his timing by quoting Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer sketches and other bits, like a kid who plays "Stairway To Heaven" over and over again to learn guitar. The John Lovitz and Dana Carvey years were "his cast" but it was really Hartman, the show's best straight-man, who inspired him the most comedically.
Hader also praised the "SNL" hosts like Justin Timberlake who understand the notion that you don't really "act" on "SNL," you perform. He went on at length about Jon Hamm, who has only hosted three times but has become "Like A Baldwin" on the show. Hader cited his first time hosting on Halloween in 2010 as, "one of the best times I've ever had on the show."
And Hamm wasn't just fun to work with. According to Hader he was thrown a big curveball between dress rehearsal and showtime when Lorne Michaels was less than pleased with his Dean Martin impression in "Vincent Price's Halloween Special" featuring with Hader. Lorne asked Hamm what other characters he could do, and Hamm said he could do James Mason. That's why in the version that aired, below, Hamm ends up telling Dean Martin jokes with a James Mason accent. The costume and writing stayed the same. Simmons and Hader joked that Mason, who isn't exactly known for being a misogynistic drunk who wets his pants, was probably pretty confused and/or offended by the sketch:
