Was Broadway Caliber PTC Production of “Cinderella”

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Was Broadway Caliber PTC Production of “Cinderella”. Last Friday night the Pomperaug Theatre Company started their three-day run of performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” and as usual, the PTC did not disappoint.

The show was about two and a half hours long including the fifteen minute intermission. Though it was a long show, it flowed smoothly and kept the audience entertained. Certain cast members gave the show a sense of professionalism that is not commonly found in public school theatre productions.

Sarah McVerry played the role of Cinderella and did an incredible job on opening night. Her adaptation to and of the role was reminiscent of former PTC member Katie Stevens, but better. McVerry, along with the Stepmother (Nina Paganucci), Grace (Tessa Newell) and Joy (Samantha McCloghry) had an on stage chemistry that really brought the play to life. Other notable acting performances include Joey Loglisci as Lionel, and Colleen Gunning as the Fairy Godmother.

Though some performances were stunning, one main role was lackluster. Tristan Mayes, who played the role of Prince Christopher, didn't seem to bring much to the show. His voice was outmatched by many of the other actors' and his acting seemed over the top at times.

The show’s smooth transitions from scene to scene, and the well coordinated costumes, were testament to the efficiency and dedication of the PTC crew, along with the expertise of the director, Mr. Paul Doniger.

All in all, watching the Pomperaug Theatre Company’s production of “Cinderella” Friday night felt less like sitting through a high school play, and more like I had gotten good bang for my buck at a Broadway caliber show.

I encourage everybody to go see their next play in the fall, simply because it’s a great deal: paying fifteen dollars (ten for students) to see professional-quality acting and production of classic plays and musicals is a quality investment, no matter what.

Convicted Over Nazi Camp Deaths John Demjanjuk

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Convicted Over Nazi Camp Deaths John Demjanjuk. MUNICH Retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk was convicted of thousands of counts of acting as an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp and sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison, a groundbreaking verdict that closed one chapter in a decades-long legal battle.

Judges ordered him released pending appeal, on the ground that he did not pose a flight risk.

Demjanjuk was found guilty of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for each person who died during the time he was ruled to have been a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the 91 year old was a piece of the Nazis' "machinery of destruction."

"The court is convinced that the defendant ... served as a guard at Sobibor from 27 March 1943 to mid-September 1943," Alt said, closing a trial that lasted nearly 18 months.

Demjanjuk (dem-YAHN'-yuk) sat in a wheelchair in front of the judges as they announced their verdict, but showed no reaction. He has denied the charges, but declined the opportunity to make a final statement to the court.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., asserted that "the Germans have built a house of cards and it will not stand for long."

Alt later ordered that Demjanjuk be freed during his appeal a process that is likely to take six months or more - though it wasn't clear when exactly he would leave the prison.

Such a release is not unusual in Germany, and Alt said Demjanjuk did not pose a flight risk because of his advanced age, poor health and the fact that the defendant, deported from the U.S. two years ago, is stateless.

Alt told The Associated Press that meant there were "no grounds" to hold him. "It's the law, and so it's justice," he added. "I say he's guilty, but it's not a final verdict."

Demjanjuk is not allowed to leave Germany. Alt said that the issue of whether or not Demjanjuk died in a German jail had "nothing to do" with the decision.

Defense attorney Guenther Maull said it wasn't yet clear where Demjanjuk would go once he is freed, but he was likely to live with members of the Ukrainian community in Munich. The court noted that Demjanjuk, who suffers from a variety of ailments, needs daily medical attention.

Charges of accessory to murder carry a maximum term of 15 years in Germany, which does not allow consecutive sentences for multiple counts of the same crime.

There was no evidence that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing - the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

Thomas Walther, who led the investigation that prompted Germany to prosecute Demjanjuk, said before the verdict that other low-ranking Nazi helpers could now face prosecution.

"It could be very soon that more are brought to the table," he said. "This case is a door-opener."

Integral to the prosecution's case was an SS identity card that allegedly shows a picture of a young Demjanjuk, and indicates he trained at the SS Trawniki camp and was posted to Sobibor.

Though court experts said the card appears genuine, the defense maintains it is a fake produced by the Soviet KGB.

The U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations also has said the card is genuine, but documents unearthed by The Associated Press indicate that the FBI at one time had doubts similar to those aired by Demjanjuk's defense about the evidence - though the material was never turned over to them.

Rudolf Salomon Cortissos, whose mother was gassed at Sobibor along with thousands of other Dutch Jews, cried softly in a back row of the courtroom, wiping his tears with a white handkerchief, as Alt somberly read out the names of the brothers, sisters and parents of people who joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, as allowed under German law.

"It's very emotional - it doesn't happen every day," he said, adding that he was happy with the verdict and sentence. "For me it is satisfying," he said.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk has been stripped of his U.S. citizenship and has been in custody in Germany since his deportation two years ago.

Cornelius Nestler, a lawyer for co-plaintiffs, said he likely would serve three years at most, given the time he has already spent in German custody.

But he said he, too, was satisfied with the sentence, which came close to prosecutors' call for a six-year term. That call took into account the defendant's age, and time he already served in Israel in the 1980s.

The verdict won't entirely end more than 30 years of legal wrangling. Along with the German appeal, and legal proceedings continue in the United States.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, called the conviction "a very important victory for justice."

"The verdict sends a very powerful message that, even many years after the crimes of the Holocaust the perpetrators can be brought to justice," he said by telephone from Jerusalem. "We're hopeful that this verdict will pave the way for additional prosecutions in Germany."

Zuroff said later, however, that he was "very surprised" by the decision to free Demjanjuk pending the appeal.

"We don't think that that's appropriate given the heinous nature of his crimes," he said.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel after he was accused of being the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death then freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling, saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions before joining the Vlasov Army, a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others that was formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

Demjanjuk's son said he was relieved at the decision to free his father "because he has never deserved to sit in prison for one minute."

But "after everything that he's gone through, it is hard to use a word like happy in any context," he said by phone from Cleveland, Ohio.

Prosecutors said that after his capture, the evidence shows Demjanjuk agreed to serve the German SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk was accused of having served as a "wachmann," a guard, the lowest rank of the "Hilfswillige" volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.

In a 1985 report, the FBI's Cleveland field office concluded that: "Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB."

That revelation has led to new court action in the U.S., with a District Court judge in Cleveland on Tuesday agreeing to appoint a public defender to represent Demjanjuk there, raising the prospect of renewing the decades old case.

Former ESPN Personality Charged With 3 Felony Counts Jay Mariotti

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Former ESPN Personality Charged With 3 Felony Counts Jay Mariotti. Jay Mariotti, the once-on-the-rise and now former ESPN Personality, who first gained fame as a biting sports columnist for the Chicago Sun Times and then on AOL Fanhouse, is in hot water again, and just less than a year after his headline making arrest on suspicion of domestic abuse.

It was after an altercation with a woman described then as his girlfriend that started with an argument at a club in Santa Monica, California and then ended with Jay's reportedly violent confrontation at her Venice Beach apartment.

Eventually, Jay Mariotti was charged with seven misdemeanor counts, but the four domestic-violence-related counts and charges of grand theft and false imprisonment were dismissed.

This time, Jay reportedly had some kind of confrontation or encounter with the same woman, and on the same day he was told by the LA court to stay away from her. He was charged with three felony counts on Wednesday.

According to the LA Times, His lawyer Shawn Holley said "These allegations are complete fabrications, made by an accuser who, since October of last year, has doggedly tried to have Mr. Marriotti arrested and charged on numerous past occasions without success."

If you recognize the name, Shawn Holley, she's the same attorney who regularly represents Lindsay Lohan. One thing's for sure, he's got a good chance of getting past this episode with Ms. Holley's help.

But.

What the hell's wrong with Jay Mariotti that he can't take his focus off this ex-girlfriend and on to restarting his career and getting back on ESPN? If the court told him to stay away from her, there are billions of other women on the planet, why not just find them?

If she's "tried to have Mr. Marriotti arrested and charged on numerous past occasions" that should be enough for him to first, stay away from her, and second, carry a camcorder to record those times when she approaches him first, and third, file a restraining order of his own.

That's what he should have done.

Play online for free, thanks to Google Angry Birds

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Play online for free, thanks to Google Angry Birds. Angry Birds is finally making a landing on the Web. For newbies and considering the popularity of the game, which extends across countries and continents, we're not sure how many of you there are out there Angry Birds is a point and click strategy game. It took off on iPhone, before moving to a range of other platforms, including Android, and in the year and a half since launch, it has been downloaded tens of millions of times.

But until this week, there was no Web version of the game. Enter the Chrome-branded Angry Birds, which was developed specially for Google's Chrome OS. (The timing is not accidental Google has just unveiled a pair of cheap, fast "Chromebooks.") "This is only a beta release of the game, and so far we have 63 levels of the original game available, with an additional 7 special Chrome levels," Rovio reps wrote on the official company blog.

VIDEO: Angry Birds birthday cake: Possibly the best food fight in history

More levels are reportedly in the works. So what does the introduction of a Chrome version of Angry Birds mean for Rovio? Well, for one, it means the Angry Birds domination of the Web and portable devices is almost complete. Here's the link to Angry Birds online.

As we reported back in March, Rovio is apparently prepping a Facebook edition of Angry Birds for release sometime this year and the port will involve some kind of "collaborative" functionality. Angry Birds invasion!

In a related development – and hat tip to CNET for this one a Finnish company called OptoFidelity has built a robot that excels at the Rovio title. How good? Three stars on every level good. "As OptoFidelity does a lot of work with touch panel testing and performance testing for mobile devices using video and optical measuring systems, it wasn’t hard to implement an application for this particular need," company reps wrote in a statement.

Think you can beat the Angry Birds playing robot? Drop us a line in the comments section. And in the meantime, for more tech news Angry Birds centric or not sign up for the free Innovation newsletter, which is emailed out every Wednesday.

Brad Pitt Teaches Sons To Fight In Terrence Malick's New Film Tree Of Life' Clip Video

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Brad Pitt Teaches Sons To Fight In Terrence Malick's New Film Tree Of Life' Clip Video. While big muscles, superhero bluster and wedding related insanity are already heating up the box office this summer movie season, it's a long-awaited tale from a legendary filmmaker that is serving as the most highly anticipated release for true movie connoisseurs.

Terrence Malick, a two-time Oscar nominated writer and director who makes up for the sparcity of his releases with their often lush textures and stories, is set to debut his eighth directorial feature, "Tree of Life." Sporting an all star cast featuring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, it tells the story of a child growing up in the 1950's with parents practicing wildly divergent personalities and methods.

In this exclusive clip, Pitt, the father, teaches his son Jack who will grow up into Penn's character to fight and defend himself. The aggression straddles the border between caring and reckless, with Pitt's determination and clenched jaw leaving the viewer questioning whether he's nurturing or something darker.

Here's the film's synopsis; check out the clip below it. The film opens May 27th.

From Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of such classic films as BADLANDS, DAYS OF HEAVEN and THE THIN RED LINE, THE TREE OF LIFE is the impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950's. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life.

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Its Reign in the South of France Angelina Jolie Hotness Continues Photos

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Its Reign in the South of France Angelina Jolie Hotness Continues Photos. Despite all the talk of Angelina Jolie perhaps being post-peak thanks to kids and work and age and such, I say, not a chance.

This MILF may no longer be in the debates for hottest celebrity in Hottieville, but she has such a reservoir of the good looks built up, she's still a ridiculously sexy woman with an amazing body and the veteran wiles to teach you young cubs a thing or too about hotness.

These Angeline Jolie pictures from Cannes and the pimping of the Kung Fu Panda a couple weeks ahead of the sequel release, well, she may no longer be wearing her lover's blood or making out with her brother or stealing men from Jennifer Aniston by sheer force of vagina power, but she's still a woman I'd gladly share my yurt with during the rainy season. Enjoy.









Lives Up to a Promise By Dropping Her Drawers in Playboy Mónica Farro Photos

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Lives Up to a Promise By Dropping Her Drawers in Playboy Mónica Farro Photos. Follow me here on a little South American geographical journey of hotness.

Remember when Paraguayan boobtastic hottie Larissa Riquelme promised to run nekkid in the streets if Paraguayan? Of course you do. Well, Uruguayan hottie TV celebrity and nipple slipping Dancing With the Stars (Argentina) contestant, Monica Farro, promised to do the same if Uruguay were to win the World Cup.

Well, last I checked, Spain won and we didn't get any of our Sudamericana promised nekkidness and, well, yes, I cried along with the rest of the Oglers Without Borders crowd.

But, hark, what hotness in yonder window lies? Yep, blessed be Monica Farro took to the pages of Playboy Tierra Del Fuego way and pulled off a stunning display of non clothed flashiness that made me forget all about soccer matches past, and just focused on glorious round orbs of an altogether different game.

I'm not sure what's up with all this nekkid street running promises by Latina hotties, but I know that I'm very much a supporter. Enjoy.







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Dancing with the Nipple Slip
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