Shakexpear King,''Isn't it true I bring a new meaning to the word "EDIBLE"'''

Shakexpear King,''Isn't it true I bring a new meaning to the word "EDIBLE"''', originally uploaded by Shakexpear King.

Shakexpear King has been recieving a lot of accolades from fans and critics with his stint on Channel [V]'s EXHAUSTED.What really made him a hit with the masses is the fact that he worked really hard to stay awake to win the grandprize,but he was eliminated from the show,when a fellow contestant got the power to choose the one person,to be eliminated,and out of jealousy as was clearly seen,that contestant eliminated Shakexpear King out,to the chagrin of million of viewers of the hit show,where Vj,Juhi and Vj Gaurav were fantabulous on the show,there were eight contestants on the show and they were supposed to stay awake for 48 hours doing different tasks.

The sad fact is that first Anupama left,who happened to be a very good friend of Shakexpear and viewers loved theier chemistry,after she lost in a task round,later he was getting on well with Mizpah,and it was Mizpah who wanted to be eliminated because she could not stay awake anymore but when Shakexpear was eliminated everybody was shocked.Some corruptible use of power by the contestant babar

Locavore,Sarah Palin

When John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, hunting entered the national conversation in a way it hasn't since 2006, when Dick Cheney shot a donor instead of a quail. Palin, in fashioning herself as a leader for Joe Six-Pack America, has emphasized her prowess as a sportswoman. Her office has released photos of her with a dead moose, a dead caribou, and several dead salmon. She was recently spotted in Pennsylvania carrying a tote bag with the logo "Real Women Hunt Moose." One bowhunting company was so excited (or shameless) that it introduced a new model called the Sarah-Cuda in honor of the governor. Love the pink camo.
While Palin and Cheney are both hard-nosed Republicans, they represent different aspects of the hunting tradition. Cheney, who favors canned hunts on private game reserves, shoots his beasts in the manner of aristocrats. Palin, gutting moose in her neighbor's basement, is an heir to the "potlatch" hunters of the Colonial era, who wanted meat for the cabin table. When Palin was running for governor in 2006, she told USA Today, "We hunt as much as we can, and I'm proud to say our freezer is full of wild game we harvested here in Alaska." And if you look twice at the reasons why Palin hunts, they resemble an ideal cherished by city-dwelling, New York Times-reading folks. Sarah Palin is a locavore, harvesting meat from her local "foodshed."
She's also, of course, trying to harvest votes. Hunting has been a useful political symbol since Teddy Roosevelt. When Field & Stream posted Palin's hunting and fishing photos on its Web site, high-fives broke out among the assembled commenters. "You don't find people in Washington who would be seen with their hands on a bloody caribou," one wrote, while another dreamed, "Maybe if elected there's hope she will convert the White House pool into a trout pond?" Naturally, there were a few malcontents in the mix, suggesting that the photographed caribou had in fact been "gut shot" in ignominious style (i.e., the animal wasn't killed cleanly with a precision shot to the heart, lungs, or head). An anonymous commenter came to her defense:

For all you lefty city-slickers out there who are fixating on the blood back in the animals abdomen, that wound was from field dressing the caribou, the process whereby one incises the abdomen to remove the entrails and cool off the carcass quickly. Animals that are gut shot rarely leave a visible blood trail, as major blood vessels are not common in the entrails. So go back to sipping your lattes and gazing at pictures of your Ivy-league messiah. For you, meat comes from a grocery store. Please keep it that way, as we don't want you to handle firearms.
Time to add "buying meat from a grocery store" to the list of liberal sins. Yet we can thank this commenter for capturing one aspect of the cultural politics of hunting in 2008. Hunters hunt for many reasons—family tradition, love of the outdoors, friendship, the challenge of stalking big game—but the sport has always had a "frontier" appeal. I'm a hunter, a self-reliant individual living off the land; here, have some of my venison jerky.
Invoking the frontier theme, the major hunting organizations, such as the Boone and Crockett Club and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, all pay tribute to the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt championed hunting as a way to reinforce America's pioneer values, at a time (the 1890s) when the real frontier was closing. "The virility, clear-sighted common sense and resourcefulness of the American people is due to the fact that we have been a nation of hunters and frequenters of the forest, plains, and waters" is a typical T.R. exhortation. Roosevelt established the still-flickering idea that hunting teaches self-reliance and love of country.
Perhaps it's this patriotic element of hunting that makes hunting advocates fear for the country when they see their sport in decline. In surveys done by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife service, the overall number of hunters has fallen from a peak of 19.1 million in 1975 to 12.5 million in 2006. Why? Historian Daniel Justin Herman, in his essay "The Hunter's Aim," floats the theory that the middle-class businessmen who went duck and deer hunting in great numbers in the 1950s found a new natural arena to display their manliness, courtesy, and deadly aim: the golf course. If you read around on hunting sites, the anecdotal blame falls on suburbanization, single-parent households, and restrictive gun laws—but the real bile is saved for video games. Chad Love, of Field & Stream, echoed the sentiments of his fellow hunters in a recent blog post, when he recalled his boyhood "back before the dawning of the 'Stoned on Electronic Entertainment Age.' " His remark was greeted with this typical Amen: "We don't let our kids play outside, yet wonder why they are fat, full of allergies and lazy."
The decreasing number of hunters has only intensified the sport's hold on those who still do hunt. As Herman explained: "Hunting has become a counterculture among rural, blue-collar people. It's something that offends the snobs, the white-collar middle-class that has become so soft and opposed to the cruelty of animals." (For a glimpse of the extreme edge of this counterculture, watch an Exploding Varmints video on YouTube.) Herman also notes that the patriotic strain of hunting persists in the contemporary vogue for all-things camouflage. "Camo does double duty," he says, "I'm a hunter, and I'm ready to be a soldier when the call demands."
The outsider status of Sarah Palin-style meat hunting (as opposed to the insider status of Cheney-style hunting) harkens back to the olde days. Herman describes how the Founding Fathers were mostly not hunters, as hunting at the time was deemed "too Indian." It was an insult to call someone a "buckskinner." In addition, early Americans justified the taking of land from Native Americans on the premise that the Indians were hunters who were just passing through—not farmers like the white settlers. It was after the Civil War, as America began to industrialize, that hunting became popular as an aristocratic sport pursued by gentlemen, i.e., "sportsmen," while subsistence hunters found game where they could. Roosevelt built his political career around the gun but also started the conservation movement that set aside land on which average Americans could practice the invigorating, country-affirming act of hunting. Gilded Age women followed their manly men into the forests, as hunting was one way for the "new woman" to exhibit her burgeoning sense of independence.
Like most kids who grow up to be hunters, Sarah Palin was taught by her father—a hunting parent is the key factor in whether a child takes up the sport. Palin's dad, Chuck Heath, is a frontier-style, self-reliant pothunter. He recently bragged to the British Sun, "We raised our family to be able to support ourselves—90 per cent of our meat and fish we get ourselves." His comments are also in tune with our disastrous financial moment. Gun sales have been up this fall, and Tony Aeschliman of the Shooting Sports Association speculated that lack of work gives rural people more time to hunt and more incentive to "put a deer in the freezer." And by the deer carcass is where the shooters and the foodies meet. This week, the leading locavore, Michael Pollan, in an essay titled "Farmer in Chief," advised the next president, "You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat—meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever."
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In these divided times, I would love to propose a red state/blue state détente—you guys shoot the deer; we'll cook the venison in a lovely reduction sauce—but game markets didn't work so well in the past. A central tenet of preserving wildlife is that we must remove the economic value from an animal. Otherwise, extensive poaching and habitat destruction follow. So bringing back game markets on a massive scale wouldn't quite work, although Hunters for the Hungry is a worthy idea, and it's only slightly crazy to imagine city dwellers having "community supported hunters" in the manner of "community supported agriculture." There's also the whole moral question of whether hunting is a humane way to treat animals that I will gladly sidestep. Still, animal lovers, latte sippers, and muzzleloaders, please hold your fire for a moment and consider what we have in common: We may disagree about big, federal government, but we're starting to share an idea about small, local food.

Google and Facebook battle for your friends.

Every so often I am reminded how primitive the Web really is. This usually happens after chatting with someone who works for Google. Recently, I interviewed David Glazer, who thinks about "being social" for the big G. He pointed out the caveman quality of socializing online in 2009. We have friends on Facebook, shared items on Google Reader, blogs on Tumblr, bookmarks on Delicious, and a login at the New York Times, with each of these sites requiring different passwords and user names. Barbaric. And while there are smart companies such as FriendFeed and Plaxo that unite these activities in one place, we are far from what Google describes as the Holy Grail: "Any app, any site, any friend."
Glazer offers this mental exercise to understand how an online social nirvana might benefit you: Think of an activity you do on the Web in a solitary way, and then imagine how that activity would be better if the site knew about the other people that you care about. I read the New York Times every day. In Glazer's model, the Times would show me what articles my friends have read or give me a list of articles where they've left comments. That's kind of a cool idea, and one that the Times is trying to pull off with its Times People feature. Glazer believes that everything on the Web is better if it's social. Checking out a stock? It would be nice to read chatter from other potential investors. Baking a cake? Look at advice from those who have already tried the recipe. Tempted by a new restaurant? See if your foodie friends have eaten there already. The reason we don't do these things now is that the "barriers to social are too high." It's still too annoying to fill out all of those registration forms, and there's no universal way to manage your online identity and networks of friends. Google and its partners want to collapse the barriers to social and give each and every one of us an entourage.
There's just one hiccup in this plan: Facebook, the place where many of us already have our entourage. The pre-eminent social network announced that it has 150 million active users worldwide. My Facebook story may be like yours: I joined on a whim, filling out a rudimentary profile on a lazy afternoon. Facebook took that information and, like a hostess powered by four vodka tonics, kept sending friends my way. (The site is a relentless shoulder-tapper.) Without trying too hard, I had 50 friends, and I soon got interested in managing that network, tagging people by school, workplace, hometown, and family. Facebook was nudging me to do something I would never normally do: map out the networks that link my world together.
In an almost sneaky way, Facebook had become very valuable to me. It's my address book, only supercharged and more nuanced. Yet, as many Web commenters have pointed out, all of the work I've done on my "social graph" is held hostage on Facebook. I can't download it to my computer and take it with me. To offer one prominent example: When blogger Robert Scoble tried to scrape his Facebook data, Facebook closed his account. Mark Zuckerberg and the people who run Facebook, no dummies, fiercely protect the social graph that they have created with our help. They do this for the admirable reason of safeguarding our privacy and the practical reason that the network has enormous potential value. The entire business story of Facebook can be seen as an attempt to leverage this information in a way that doesn't feel like a home invasion.
This is where Google and David Glazer come back in, and why 2009 might see some serious social warfare between Google and Facebook. Last May, the latter announced a service called Facebook Connect, a set of tools that made it easier for Web developers to let people log in to sites with their Facebook ID and share things on their Facebook news feed. (A good place to try this out is the video site Vimeo.) Three days later, Google announced Friend Connect, a set of tools that made it easier for Web developers to do the same sorts of things, except outside the realm of Facebook. A site such as Qloud lets you join and comment with a Gmail or Yahoo account. So far, so good. But Facebook blocked Friend Connect from accessing its data, and now we have two rival social networks.
This may seem like an arcane, technical struggle, but I believe that a year from now, you are actually going to care who owns your social network. A lot of Facebook is flirting, photo sharing, and inane status lines, but we are also telling it how much we value certain people. I want to hear less about this person. I'm married to this person. Please block this person from ever contacting me in any way ever again. We are sorting out the entourage, or, to put it in a more utilitarian way, we are deciding which people are worthy sources of information.
One of the stresses of being on the Web is the vast amount of available information. It's a condition that Clay Shirky has described as "filter failure"—we don't know what sources to let in or what new sources have potential value. (Read this great interview for more Shirky insights.) One obviously great filter is our friends. And one of my favorite places for the random videos and fun links without which the modern workday could not be endured is my Facebook news feed. But my little salon of procrastination is under enormous pressure, as Facebook has yet to figure out the whole making-money thing. I would be bummed if the site had to spam me with ads in order to survive, yet I was forced to stay on Facebook because I wasn't able to take my friend list to new pastures.
Facebook also knows this and is trying to figure out how open to be. It has the advantage of a huge lead in the size of its network. (More people means more opportunities to find new friends for you.) Meanwhile, Google and its partners are gesturing: Come be free and frolic on our open platform. Google and Facebook have said that they will one day play nicely with each other, but a lot is at stake on the social frontier. Glazer put it best: "People are inherently social—killer user habits are built around connecting to other people." Killer user habits also make great marketing and advertising platforms.
The hope is that as Google and Facebook compete, we are fitfully making our way toward the benefits of portable social data, a sort of command center for our online self. The advocates of this openness discuss such sci-fi goodies as geolocation and "ambient controls" that would let us decide, like a dimmer switch, how much social information we want to receive. (If you need to get something done, change the setting to "Hermit.") Keeping a close eye on your online identity might feel burdensome, like putting on a second set of clothes, but consider how much nicer it will be to manage how you look, rather than letting some algorithm do it for you.

Obama is Our Soother-in-Chief

When these frightful times of financial confusion and credit constipation become too much, I dial up Barack Obama on YouTube to suppress my anxieties. The Voice works like aerosolized Paxil on my limbic system, reducing my blood pressure and lifting my mood.
If this president thing doesn't work out for him, I'm sure Obama could make a living recording evacuation tapes for the airline industry: "The aircraft … in which you are seated … is falling … at a rate that Bernoulli's principle … can not overcome. … As we crash … into the tarmac … please remain calm … unbuckle your safety belts … and walk in an orderly fashion … to the marked exits … to deplane."
Obama smeared the American psyche with his oratorical ointment Jan. 8 as he implored Congress to pass his stimulus plan, which he doesn't call a stimulus plan. That would sound too down. In the Obama version, it's the upbeat "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan."
If you listen to the words, Obama promises a grim recession that "could linger for years," produce a double-digit unemployment rate, and destroy a "generation of potential and promise" if his package doesn't pass. But when I watched him in the video below, flanked by a pair of U.S. flags as if still campaigning for the job that he won two months ago, he made me feel oddly good about the challenges of coming economic Armageddon.
Say, I said to myself, how does he do that?
For one thing, he's better at remaining calmer and more deliberate in his speech patter than John Wayne in a firefight—and better at it than any politician since Ronald Reagan. If he's calm, I'm calm—even if my portfolio was last sighted burning its way to the bottom of the Bentley Subglacial Trench.
Adopting a slightly scolding tone in today's speech without accusing anybody by name, he blamed such abstract scourges as corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, banks, "the halls of power in Washington, D.C.," and borrowers who took out loans they couldn't repay for the crisis. But like a dad who is tough-loving his wayward children back in line, he calls on us to "trade old habits for a new spirit of responsibility." Yes, we can be redeemed! Painting a sunshine-and-lollipop vista of fuel-efficient cars, high-quality health care, better schools, "new discoveries and entire new industries," a smart electric grid, and job security for cops and firefighters has a way of accentuating gain over pain.
Avoiding talk about pain is one of his secrets. If there is a downside to Obama's "Recovery and Reinvestment"—or even a chance the Recovery and Reinvestment scheme won't work—he shares not a peep. How much will this Recovery and Reinvestment operation cost? Obama wisely avoids putting a price tag on it. But, again, it's not what Obama says that narcotizes the citizenry, but the way he says it. He can't possibly be certain that his plan will work, but he sells it as a done, settled deal, never showing a speck of doubt.
Related in Slate
During the 2008 campaign, Jack Shafer attempted to decode Obama's rhetoric and explained why nothing the press throws at him sticks.
Continuity and this sort of "settledness" was a hallmark of Obama's campaign, and that strategy has evolved during the post-election period. At the exceedingly short press conferences that follow the introduction of some new administration hire, Obama often answers by saying he's answered that question before. Asked about the Iranian bomb on Nov. 7, he said, "Let me state—repeat what I stated during the course of the campaign." "Well, let me repeat a couple of things," he said on Dec. 11 when asked about Gov. Blagojevich's contact with his staff. When that didn't shake the reporters, he repeated his repetition. "In terms of our involvement, I'll repeat what I said earlier, which is I had no contact with the governor's office."
Here are a few more examples of Obama's thanks-for-that-redundant-question response:
"But as I have said consistently, I will listen to the recommendations of my commanders."—Dec. 1
"As I said throughout the campaign, I will be giving Secretary Gates and our military a new mission as soon as I take office—responsibly ending the war in Iraq through a successful transition to Iraqi control."—Dec. 1
"Well, keep in mind what I said during the campaign. And you were there most of the time."—Dec. 11
"As I have said repeatedly, I believe our government should provide short-term assistance to the auto industry to avoid a collapse."—Dec. 11
"With respect to the moratorium on off-shore drilling, what I said during the campaign was that I was open to the idea of off-shore drilling."—Dec. 15 [Emphasis added.]
On the page, these Obamaisms read a little snotty, but on the tube, he sounds like a confidence-inspiring paragon of consistency: Everything is under control. All contingencies have been considered. The ship is sailing straight and true. The Obama pacification express slows, however, when the press corps refuses to let him determine when an issue is "settled," as happened at a March press conference. As this clip illustrates, the Tony Rezko controversy wasn't going to disappear just because Obama thought his answers had vanquished it. "Come on, guys, I answered, like, eight questions. We're running late," Obama said as he retreated. It so shattered my vision of Obama that my acid reflux was out of control for a week.
Another way Obama stills the turbulent waters is by extolling bipartisanship, his old "there is no red-state America, there is no blue-state America" shtick. "American's security is not a partisan issue," he recently said. "I know we will succeed if we put aside partisanship and politics and work together as one nation. … I'm calling on all Americans—Democrats and Republicans—to put good ideas ahead of the old ideological battles, a sense of common purpose above the same narrow partisanship."
Obama's endless hunt for common ground, his desire to bring Kumbaya moments to all, endears him to the multitudes. He's willing to work with everybody from the Republicans to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even the Rev. Rick Warren, whom he has tapped to give a prayer at his inauguration. Defending his Warren invitation, which angered some gays and lesbians, Obama uncorked his stock explanation that we must be willing to "disagree without being disagreeable."
According to the Chicago Tribune (Aug. 4, 2004), Obama borrowed the disagree/disagreeable trope from Sen. Paul Simon, who pinched it from "three dozen self-help books." I always blanch when Obama uses this construction because it deliberately marginalizes the views of anybody unwilling to match Obama's temperament—which is to say the rest of the planet. And I don't know which is more damning—the fact that Obama's cliché was plucked from a self-help book or that so many bobble-head in agreement whenever he uses it.
"One of the keys to being well liked in Washington is to appear humble, which is why Washington is so full of people who are so unhumble when it comes to touting how humble they are. All of this comes naturally to Obama," Mark Leibovich wrote four years ago in an Obama profile for the Washington Post.
If I understand Leibovich correctly—and I think I do—we like Obama because he's likable, and he's likable because 1) he knows how to be likable, and 2) he wants to be likable. Barack Obama, the ocean that refuses no river, will remain everybody's best friend until he makes his first tough decision. Only then shall we really begin to know him.