Sesame Street star and kiddie role model Cookie Monster is cutting down on his consumption of cookies in an effort to reduce the obesity levels of American children.
A representative for the award-winning show said that the cuddly character's mantra will now change from "C is for Cookie" to "A Cookie is a sometimes food."
In addition, each episode of the show's new series will begin with a "health tip" about healthy foods and physical activity.
PHOTO: AFP
"We are not putting him on a diet, and we would never take the position of no sugar," said Dr Rosemarie Truglio, the show's vice president of research and education. "We're teaching him moderation."
The longtime manager of the late soul legend Ray Charles has unveiled plans and artist renderings for a tribute museum to the singer on the site of Charles' RPM studio site.
The three-story, 1,800m2 museum is slated to open in late 2007 under the auspices of the Ray Charles Museum Foundation.
PHOTO: AP
According to ex-Charles manager Joe Adams, the facility will include rotating exhibits and never-before-seen artifacts from Charles' career. It will also serve as an educational institute.
The lyricist who wrote the unforgettable words to the tune Over the Rainbow is to be honored with his own stamp from the US Post Office.
E.Y. "Yip" Harburg wrote the tune for the 1939 classic movie The Wizard of Oz as well as other hits like Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Lydia the Tattooed Lady, Down with Love, Last Night When We Were Young and Old Devil Moon.
The stamp features a portrait of Harburg, a rainbow and the lyric: "Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue." The left-leaning Harburg stopped writing for film, TV and radio after he was blacklisted in the 1950s for his liberal political views.
A prehistoric monster shark named Meg that makes "Jaws" look like a goldfish is set to terrorize the shores of California in a new movie.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Time Warner's New Line Cinema has picked up the rights to Meg, Steve Alten's horror adventure book. The story features a 27m-long prehistoric shark -- scientifically known as carcharodon megalodon, and believed by some to be an ancestor of the great white shark.
Two men from opposite points of view are forced to come together to neutralize the threat.
The movie will be directed by Jan De Bont, who directed Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life and Speed.
Stephen Sommers, the director of The Mummy and Van Helsing, has been tapped to write and direct a remake of the 1951 sci-fi film When Worlds Collide, Variety reported Monday.
The original movie was based on a group of scientists who discover that another planet is veering dangerously close to Earth, and they make plans for a small group of humans to leave the planet before the inevitable deadly
collision.
Now that Madonna has famously gone spiritual, teen idol Hilary Duff is taking over her mantle of shallow consumerism. The 17-year-old actress and singer is set to record a cover of Madonna's 1980s hit Material Girl, which will also feature as the lead single for her upcoming film-and-album project appropriately-titled Material Girls, according to reports.
In the project Hilary and her sister Haylie will play a couple of young heiresses to a cosmetics empire who are left penniless due to a corporate scandal. They take matters into their own hands, snooping around to uncover the rascal who did them wrong.
Pop diva Beyonce Knowles is in talks to star in DreamWorks' Dreamgirls, the adaptation of the Broadway hit that's a thinly veiled story of the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes, according to Variety.
Knowles has previously starred in Austin Power in Goldmember and will be seen this summer starring with Steve Martin and Kevin Kline in The Pink Panther.
A sobbing Michael Jackson in 1993 begged a mother for permission to sleep with her 13-year-old boy, the beginning of a relationship that ended in a US$23 million settlement and left her estranged from her son ever since, the woman testified. In sometimes emotional testimony, the mother said she deeply regretted trusting the pop icon and hadn't spoken to her now-25-year-old son since shortly after the family reached the out-of-court settlement with Jackson over child molestation accusations in the mid-1990s.
Martha Stewart must keep wearing her electronic bracelet and abide by home confinement rules despite complaints the terms were hurting her efforts to revive her namesake company and work on new television projects, a federal judge ruled on Monday. US District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum also denied Stewart's arguments that she should get a new sentence because of a US Supreme Court ruling in January that held that federal sentencing guidelines are to be advisory rather than mandatory. The judge said the highest court's ruling would not change her decision in Stewart's case.
US hard-core porn pioneer Al Goldstein, who went from being the multimillionaire owner of Screw magazine to being homeless on the streets of Manhattan after his sleaze empire collapsed, is making a comeback. Goldstein, 69, last employed as a greeter at a Kosher deli and as a wholesale bagel salesman working on commission, is back promoting smut, this time over the medium that helped push him from his porn pedestal -- the Internet.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby