The winner of this season’s “All-Star Celebrity Apprentice” will be announced May 19 and it all comes down to magician Penn Jillette and musician Trace Adkins.
Win or lose, Adkins is happy he’s been on the reality competition show twice. He’s convinced that its introduced him to people who weren’t fans of his music.
“They like the way I represented myself on the show and that made them start listening to my music,” Adkins tells me during an NBC party. It’s loud in the hotel lounge but Adkins has the kind of deep voice that can be easily heard. “I have people who come up to me in airports and the TV show is the only place they know me from.
“Extra” is reporting that Britney Spears will be starring in a Las Vegas show. In honor of her being in the Nevada city, it will be mandatory at all Blackjack tables that players must say “Hit me baby one more time.”
Shocking news about how the Post Office wants to discontinue Saturday mail delivery in August. The shocking part is that there are people who still use the Post Office.
Generally, this year’s Super Bowl commercials weren’t memorable. The most effective was the GoDaddy commercial that featured a slurping kiss between a nerd and Victoria Secret model Bar Refaeli. Dot-com domain sales rose 40%. Everyone is buying getthisoutofmy head.com, oohgross.com and Iamsellingmytv.com.
Lindsey Lohan has reportedly turned down a $550,000 offer to be on “Dancing With the Stars.” Makes sense. Did you ever try to do the Tango with a police ankle bracelet?
Disappointed about the news that Honey Boo Boo’s mom, Mama June, has lost more than 100 pounds. I was sure she dropped the weight by sending Honey Boo Boo to live with relatives. Because of the weight loss, “The Soup” host Joel McHale will have to stop calling Mama June the “human thumb” and now call her the human finger.
Hollywood film and TV producers often have to play the name game. Coming up with the right moniker for a character isn’t as easy as putting a first and last name together. There are often legal concerns. Imagine the grief anyone who happened to be named Hannibal Lecter would have gone through after the release of “Silence of the Lambs.”
It’s no big deal with stories based on real stories but even then some names get changed to protect the innocent.
In the film “Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away,” scheduled to open Dec. 21, the character played by acrobat/actor Erica Linz is named Mia. You might not have picked up on that unless you stay for the credits as her name’s only mentioned once.
Mia goes to a rundown circus where she’s smitten by the aerialist. He’s so distracted by here that he misses a grab and falls to the circus floor. Instead of being killed, he’s pulled down into a sandy vortex followed by Mia. She ends up in a wonderland of strange and weird characters not unlike Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
“A little known fact is my character is named for the actress who starred in the recent ‘Alice in Wonderland’ movie,” Linz tells me.
It was Mia Wasikowska who played Alice in the 2010 Tim Burton movie “Alice in Wonderland.”
Remember that video of Fresno-bred teen pop singer Ryan Beatty getting swarmed by teen girls in NYC? Well, a similar mob awaited the 16-year-old during his recent trip to an In-N-Out Burger in Las Vegas.
A few more of these videos and we might have to start talking about Beatty Fever.
It’s been a while since we checked in with Epic Meal Time, mainly because I don’t know if you all like bacon-wrapped everything and bleeped-out curse words as much as I do. But the episode released this morning is of specific Fresno interest.
For Epic Meal Time’s “Gentleman’s Episode,” the guys hit Las Vegas and hang with Fresno’s own Twitter celeb @YourFavWhiteGuy — aka Branden Hampton, the guy with the Facebook-spoof app — while cooking up epic beef wellingtons.
But wait, there’s more: If you pay close attention, at 4:26 you’ll see someone who looks a lot like Mr. Fresno Infamous Kirk Vartanian — which makes a lot of sense since part of the episode takes places in Privilege Gentlemen’s Club, which Vartanian now owns or co-owns or something. Turns out it’s not Kirk, we’re told, but his brother. But hey, a Vartanian is a Vartanian.
As usual with Epic Meal Time, this is borderline NSFW and might gross you out.
Danny Gans, voted Las Vegas’s “Entertainer of the Year” for 11 of the 13 years he lived in the city, has died at the age of 52. Cause of death has not yet been revealed.
I’d never seen his show, but anyone who has ever been to Vegas knows just how big a presence Gans was in the city — billboards for his show seem to have been placed one every ten feet or so.
I’m curious: did anyone ever see Gans perform?
I have this odd feeling like I missed out on something by not seeing him before his
untimely death.
The winner of this season’s “All-Star Celebrity Apprentice” will be announced May 19 and it all comes down to magician Penn Jillette and musician Trace Adkins.
