Tiger Woods, whose marital infidelity led to a firestorm of scandal, will be featured in this week’s season-opening episode of the Comedy Central animated television show South Park.
A teaser clip with the label “All The Temptations” promoting Wednesday’s first show of South Park’s 14th season has already been viewed by more than 62,000 people according to a counter on the network’s Web site.
In the selection, an animated Woods stands at a podium much as the real one did last month in Florida when he made a public apology, speaking about how he felt he could get away with anything and deserved to enjoy “all the temptations around me.”
Only at the end of the clip does the scene expand to show Eric Cartman, one of South Park’s main characters, standing behind the cartoon Woods and looking up at him as he speaks.
The real Woods has taken an indefinite break from golf to work on his personal life in the wake of a scandal that saw more than a dozen women claim to have had affairs with the world’s number one golfer.
Rod Blagojevich has already lost one job. Now the disgraced former governor of Illinois is hoping to avoid the words “You’re fired!” as he fights for his favorite charity, and his reputation, on the TV show Celebrity Apprentice.
Blagojevich, who was impeached and removed from office, is awaiting trial later this year on charges of corruption and allegations that he tried to sell US President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat.
But he says he decided to compete in NBC’s TV show Celebrity Apprentice because he has been “maliciously wronged” and is publicly fighting back.
Billionaire property mogul and Apprentice host Donald Trump was impressed. “Governor. You have a hell of a lot of guts,” Trump told Blagojevich in yesterday’s season premiere.
“It took a lot of courage, under the pressure that he is under, for him to even do the show,” Trump said later. “I’ve known people, where they have had problems like he has got, that go into a corner and shoot themselves, or just hide.”
“He was highly competitive, he really worked very hard. He did a very good job,” Trump added.
Blagojevich joins 13 other celebrities including singer Cyndi Lauper, British reality show judge Sharon Osbourne, Poison rock band singer Bret Michaels, former baseball player Darryl Strawberry and Victoria Secret’s model Selita Banks who carry out business-oriented, women vs men and team tasks in New York.
Each celebrity is competing for a charity of his or her choice. Blagojevich is playing on behalf of the Children’s Cancer Center of Tampa.
In the first episode, the former governor takes numerous opportunities to proclaim his innocence as the teams are challenged to run a diner for a day.
“It is just another form of public service,” Blagojevich says of his assignment as a waiter for the diner challenge. “I didn’t do those things, by the way,” he tells one customer while delivering his food.
Michaels described the former governor as “fantastic.”
“I found him extremely nice. I thought he was down to earth. Every time we had to do anything together he was focused, and he is great at delegating. I think he embraced stuff and he was not scared to get his hands dirty,” the Poison frontman said.
Trump said Blagojevich’s time gets “pretty wild” but declined to say how long he lasts on the show, which ends each week with one contestant being told the now famous words “You’re fired!”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has done it. So has genome pioneer Craig Venter.
And now American film actress Glenn Close has joined a handful of celebrities to have their genome sequenced in the name of science.
Close, who stars in the FX television series Damages and is known for movie roles including Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons, said the offer was too good to pass up.
“For me, anything that can move the science forward is worthwhile,” Close said. “It’s pretty well publicized that I have mental health issues in my family.”
Close, whose family illnesses include bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, is a founder of the nonprofit group BringChange2Mind, which raises awareness about mental illness.
New sequencing technologies through companies like Illumina of San Diego, which did Close’s genome, have vastly reduced the cost of producing an entire map of the human genome.
Whereas the first human genome cost US$3 billion and took more than a decade to produce, Illumina charges US$48,000 for the kind of sequencing Close got.
Scientists say even newer technology will bring the price down to US$1,000 within five years, essentially less than the cost of an advanced type of X-ray called a CT scan.
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