'Fairly Legal' Star Sarah Shahi Has a Crush on Danny DeVito
Sarah Shahi is a big fan of Danny DeVito and isn't afraid to admit it.
"I had a crush on Danny DeVito ever since I saw him in 'Taxi,' which I know is the weirdest thing in the world to say," Shahi tells PopEater.
The actress also chats with us about her new show 'Fairly Legal.'
On 'Legal,' which the star describes as "'Law & Order' meets 'Sex and the City,'" Sarah plays Kate Reed a legal mediator who works for her step-mother and is still tangled with her soon-to-be ex-husband.
"There's really great character dynamic on the show," she explains.
But Shahi wants to make it clear it's not the same old procedural. "It's like the anti-law law show."
Besides loving the role she plays, Shahi reveals another benefit of starring on the series -- the fashion.
"I did love the clothes. We were very designer heavy. She's the anti-lawyer, I didn't want her to look corporate and business like. I wanted her to wear more outfits and look thrown together," she explains of the wardrobe. "It was a lot of Alexander Wang, Phillip Lim, Thakoon, Dries Van Noten, Helmut Lang ... [just] young, great, hip designers."
The time may have come for those irate avians and thieving pigs to cease hostilities and join forces against a new and even less likely enemy.
Angry Birds, the time-wasting phenomenon that has ruled the smartphone roost for the last year, has finally been vanquished by a 14-year-old boy and the game he devised with the help of his mum and the local library.
On paper, Robert Nay's Bubble Ball – described as a "fun, new physics puzzle game" – does not look quite as thrilling as Angry Birds, which ushers players into an inexplicable realm where they can catapult feathered missiles into a variety of structures that shelter the green pigs who have stolen their eggs.
But the Utah wonderboy's brainchild has now been downloaded more than 2m times and last week knocked Angry Birds off its perch at the top of the free games in Apple's iTunes store.
And whereas the bird bombardment was devised by the 17-strong team at the Finnish game-making company Rovio, Bubble Ball was the result of little more than peer pressure and some serious after-school dedication.
"Since [his friends] know Robert's good with computers, they suggested that he should make one," Nay's mother, Kari, told ABC News.
The teenager accepted their challenge and went to the public library to investigate programs that would help him build his game.
Even with a little design help from his mum, however, it was not easy. "There were some times when I felt like, 'Can people seriously do this?' It seemed impossible," said Nay. "But then there were times when things just worked and I would be like: 'Maybe I can actually do this'."
Eventually, after more than a month and 4000 lines of code, he cracked it, and Bubble Ball – which "will test your ingenuity and thinking skills to get the bubble to the goal" – was born.
On 29 December last year, his company, Nay Games, launched an Apple-compatible version of the app. Within a fortnight, the game had caught the eye of the industry.
According to Carlos Icaza – the co-founder of Ansca Mobile, the company which makes the software developer's kit that Nay used, Bubble Ball quickly "brought the entire staff to a halt".
The key, he told ABC, was the game's apparent straightforwardness. "Because it's so simple, I think I can beat it," he said. "You go 'yeah right', and then you realise there's a lot of little tricks to make this actually work."
Ten days ago, Ansca chose Bubble Ball as its app of the week and it began creeping up the apps ladder.
Having dispatched the Angry Birds with vulpine ferocity, Nay is now giving some thought to his future.
Not surprisingly, he is keen to work in computing and is thinking of ways to make money from his talent. The next download, he said, would probably be one that smartphone users had to pay for. But when asked for more detail on how he might outdo the success, and addictiveness, of Bubble Ball, he remained cagey: "It's a secret for now."
Federal Government Closings, Arlington has declared a snow emergency to take effect at midnight tonight. All Arlington Public Schools will be closed Wednesday because of the snowstorm in the winter schedule.
During an emergency parking ban will be implemented in all streets and municipal parking. All vehicles parked on the streets during these hours will be subject to ticketing and towing.
The ban will be lifted on Thursday at 7 o’clock. Waste collection, recycling and disposal of Christmas trees will not take place on Wednesday. Trash normally collected on Wednesday will be picked on Thursday and there will be a delay of one day for the rest of the week. Friday pickups will be collected on Saturday, according to the city.
Undercover Boss Sheldon Yellen Has the Kindest of Employees
BELFOR CEO Sheldon Yellen probably has the most caring and supportive employees ever featured on 'Undercover Boss.' His company is comprised of roofers, painters, plumbers and carpenters, but what you have to remember is that BELFOR is the world's largest disaster restoration company. Their employees are dealing with people who have experienced great (often tragic) loss, on a daily basis.
They go into people's homes to erase signs of damage and sometimes death. "It's very emotional," says Yellen. "Our people are trained to deal with people who have suffered great loss. Employees spend as much time dealing with emotion as they do with construction."
Yellen has been building the company since 1984, and BELFOR now operates in 29 countries, providing post disaster relief and reconstruction services after fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters. About 6,000 employees assist both residential and commercial customers with losses from small, like leaky roofs, to major, like those caused by Hurricane Katrina. BELFOR employees are about to have their work cut out for them in Australia (as soon as the flood waters subside) -- but in the meantime, Yellen tried his hand at some smaller jobs for 'Undercover Boss.'
Into the trenches
For his first job, Yellen worked with a demolition supervisor on a house in Norfolk, Va., where there were roof leaks that damaged the walls and ceiling. Yellen got a taste of dealing with death when he had to remove a animal that fell down through the ceiling and expired after it couldn't get out of the wall. To get the job done, they started by removing the homeowner's furniture and other belongings. Yellen donned masks, goggles, protective jackets, and gloves while he worked.
sheldon yellen dust mask Yellen was surprised to learn that the supervisor has to do side jobs to make ends meet. This reminded him of his own experiences growing up poor and having to work 40 hours a week, starting at age 11, to help support his family so they could rise above the poverty line.
Restoration is hard work
Next stop was Denver, Colo., where Yellen worked with a restoration carpenter. "I was pitiful," he laughs, explaining how the fake glasses he was wearing obstructed his vision and made him unable to use the electric drill properly. Not only that, but hanging dry wall was much more difficult than he'd anticipated. His supervisor didn't feel like the two of them were connecting as a team and let Yellen go so he could finish the job by himself.
Yellen felt like a failure, but that didn't stop him from compensating his supervisor when he finally his true identity at the end of the show.
Yellen did a better job in Indianapolis, Ind., where he worked as a cleaning technician -- although his attempts to follow his mentor's jovial customer interaction fell flat. He made the mistake of asking which of the two white-haired women in the house was the mother and which was the daughter -- never a good idea with females.
Despite his faux pas, his supervisor confided in him that she used to be homeless, has been working full-time since she was 15, and never got a high school degree. He knew it was in his power to help her with that. In a tight squeeze
Last but not least, Yellen worked with a water technician in Chesapeake, Va., to repair water damage. Part of the job required slithering through an extremely tight crawl space; not only did Yellen put his mask on upside down, but his complaining also drew an admonition from his female supervisor to "buck up!"
She told Yellen that she started as a cleaning technician and was "promoted" to a water technician nearly a year ago, but got no increase in pay because "corporate says there's a raise freeze." "I put that pay freeze in place to protect everyone -- to save their jobs and to keep from having to lay anyone off during the economic crisis," he said. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone."
Yellen began his 'Undercover Boss' journey at the encouragement of his son, who watched the show for the first time with his roommates and immediately called his dad to tell him he needed to get involved. He did, and he has no regrets.
Although he was humbled, Yellen says he couldn't be prouder of the passion of his employees. "I was so impressed by their customer awareness," he said. "These are people with lives and challenges of their own, yet they go to work with an attitude of 'my problems are my problems, and I have to leave them at home and I have to give the homeowner everything I've got.'"
Gabrielle Giffords has breathing tube removed; doctors waiting to see if Congresswoman can speak
Gabrielle Giffords continued to make good progress on Saturday.
A week after the shooting that left six dead and 14 wounded, doctors removed the Congresswoman’s breathing tube, freeing her from the ventilator.
Doctors will also soon be able to see if the Congresswoman can speak.
Giffords, who has been breathing on her own since the shooting, had the tube inserted as a precaution and still remains in critical condition.
"Her recovery continues as planned," the hospital said in a statement.
The news came hours after the Safeway where the massacre took place was reopened following a somber moment of silence.
"While our store has been closed, we've been working to make sure our employees are getting the support they need to begin to recover from what happened in their workplace," Safeway said in a full-page advertisement in the Thursday edition of the Arizona Daily Star.
Another one of the shooting victims was also released from the hospital on Saturday.
For Giffords, it was just the latest step in what doctors have continuously called an encouraging recovery. On Friday, she continued to open her unbandaged eye, doctors told reporters. She also is able to move her limbs and following commands, according to the Arizona Daily Star.
"We're actually confident that she's making some progress now," UMC neurosurgeon G. Michael Lemole Jr. told reporters on Friday. "So we're very encouraged that she's continuing to make all the right moves in all the right directions. Obviously we're very cautious that she makes them at her own pace. But we couldn't have hoped for any better improvement than we're seeing now given the severity of her injury initially."
Doctors have refused to make future predictions for the Congresswoman, but believe she will not die from her injuries.
Jared Lee Loughner has been charged in the shooting, which authorities believe was an assassination attempt.
Well, it might have worked. There are moments, though not exactly whole scenes, in the new Seth Rogen film The Green Hornet when we get a glimpse of how this long-gestating movie might have been a kick, a refreshing change from the ponderously self-important superhero movies of the past decade.
The high point might be the opening scene, before the stars arrive on screen. Christoph Waltz, the suave villain of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, plays Los Angeles’s meanest drug dealer and villain, facing a middle-aged crisis as well as a swaggering young upstart (a sneak cameo by a Spider-Man alumnus and one of Seth Rogen’s former co-stars). The silly but deftly turned dialogue is enough to raise hopes that a genre overdue for a smart spoofing is about to get its due.
The Green Hornet is directed by Michel Gondry, known for his playful philosophical sensibility (The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Though he was first attached to the film back in the nineties, since then it has been associated with a string of different directors, stars and concepts. To its credit, the studio didn’t go the conventional route.
Gondry’s improbable creative partner here is writer-actor Seth Rogen (Superbad, Pineapple Express), the breakout star of the Judd Apatow school of raunchy-but-amiable bromances, who serves here not only as the star, but co-writer and executive producer with his creative partner, Evan Goldberg.
Instead of magical creative synergy, what happens here feels sad. Rather than a meeting of talents, we get a stand-off, an ungainly stop-and-start compromise between action and comedy: Juvenile verbal jousting, bombastic action, more juvenile humour, typically recapping what just happened. Gondry shows little evidence of his usually distinctive visual style, falling into the slick, antic style of mediocre action movies, and the 3-D effects, added in post-production, contribute little beyond an increase in the ticket prices.
The story is based on a 1930s radio show, conceived by Lone Ranger creator George Trendle, which subsequently became a comic book, a couple of movie serials and a one-season television show that introduced Bruce Lee to Western audiences in the 1960s. The role of the Green Hornet, Britt Reid, the heir to a Los Angeles publishing fortune, has been refitted for Rogen’s hard-partying slacker persona.
When his harsh father (Tom Wilkinson) dies suddenly, Britt is, in theory, compelled to grow up and accept adult responsibility, using the paper to fight for justice in a city mired in crime and corruption. Instead, he prefers to hang out with his dad’s coffee-maker and ingenious mechanic, Kato (Taiwanese pop star and actor Jay Chou) in his old man’s tricked-out black Chrysler Imperial. Along the way, they can pose as bad guys in order to infiltrate the world of real bad guys and enjoy a secret fantasy life as masked vigilantes.
There’s the germ of a good idea here, as Rogen and Goldberg’s script chooses not to ignore the childish wish-fulfilment aspect of superhero stories. But instead of exploring arrested development, it celebrates it. The one-note joke here is that there’s a major discrepancy between the would-be superhero, the ungainly Rogen as the Green Hornet, and his far more capable and cooler sidekick. It gets repeated endlessly.
Kato, who knows martial arts and has special vision that slows down the action (the brief effective use of 3-D), is clearly the genius, while Britt is the self-deluded front man. As a co-star, Chou is sleekly handsome, and enough of a pop star to help sell the movie in Asia, but his English is sometimes hard to understand. Rogen, who, while slimmed down, sticks to his familiar role as the wisecracking observer.
We wait, and wait, for this relationship to evolve. Instead, we have too much dull banter about the proper roles of heroes and sidekicks, and mocking the latently homo-erotic relationship between the two (“No tights,” they agree.). By the time The Green Hornet collapses into a mess of hackneyed car chases and flying glass and bullets, it feels less like the promised irreverent take on the superhero genre, and more like the latest iteration of the Rush Hour movies.
The Green Hornet
* Directed by Michel Gondry * Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg * Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou and Cameron Diaz * Classification: PG
"I had a crush on Danny DeVito ever since I saw him in 'Taxi,' which I know is the weirdest thing in the world to say," Shahi tells PopEater.
