| Break in double slaying
For the past week, while Sacramento police searched for Miguel Carranza in connection with the Nov. 8 double homicide of his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, he was already behind bars 103 miles away in Santa Rosa. Authorities there, apparently thrown off by a plethora of aliases, took days to realize Carranza, a Mexican citizen, had already been identified as a person of interest in the shooting deaths of 29-year-old Martha Lopez-Pacheco and Jever Lopez, 32. Though the two victims shared the same last name, they were living together and were not related. The couple were gunned down 10 days ago in a Northgate Boulevard parking lot as Lopez-Pacheco was leaving her job at a beauty salon. Though Lopez-Pacheco had applied for two restraining orders against Carranza, police had yet to arrest him, even though her allegations suggested she feared for her life.
'Enchanted' role fun for Sarandon
LOS ANGELES -- As a shape-shifting sorceress in Enchanted, Susan Sarandon is all camp, curves and cruelty. Yet for all the poisonous hags in the Disney pantheon of villainy, the Oscar-winning actress says it wasn't the witches of Waltville who frightened her when she was a child. "I was terrified of the dancing broomstick in Fantasia," she says. "And completely distraught over Bambi -- that whole thing." Still, even then Sarandon was savvy enough to realize "the evil ones have better scenes, better costumes and more fun -- certainly more than the princesses, who have to be sincere and never get angry ... I like the gal in Snow White. I thought she was really elegant and styling and completely unbalanced." In Enchanted, the princess in question is Giselle (Amy Adams), a wide-eyed innocent and soon-to-be daughter-in-law to Sarandon's towering Queen Narissa.
Reality TV could fill gaps caused by strike
The television writers' strike began Monday, but what that means for television depends upon how long it lasts. (The last strike went on for 22 weeks.) While shows that are produced on a day-to-day basis — such as "The Daily Show" and "Late Night with David Letterman" — will drop into repeats immediately, networks have stockpiled scripted shows, including full or half seasons of new series. In addition, networks typically take a break from airing new episodes over the holidays, which gives some breathing room. All of this means that network TV probably won't change all that much until 2008 — if the strike hasn't ended by then. And for those shows with extra episodes sitting around, there may be no noticeable difference. However, reality TV is ready to stand in and fill in the gaps if they start to appear.
Miss Herbert
"Miss Herbert is a thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form." - A.S.Byatt, Financial Times
"Miss Herbert is about the globalisation of the novel. (...) These moments of literary anecdotage, vivid, partisan, often eccentric, give Thirlwell his materials. (...) These stories and analyses are propelled in short, sometimes whimsically titled sections of brisk, bouncy sentences. Reading Thirlwell is like pounding along an unpredictable, slightly over-reactive boardwalk. It's a spoken style, sometimes the chummy side of spoken, sometimes the ear-bending side of chummy. Still, every page has good things. (...) Miss Herbert is not always original, not always sensible, and not always true, but it remains its own thing, and there is far more good in it than bad." - Michael Hofmann, The Guardian
"Miss Herbert is a sort of literary commonplace book, laden with assiduously researched stories about a very specific band of Euronovelists (....) All this smoke makes it hard to see whom Miss Herbert is aimed at.
Coconut cake is the glamour queen of confections
What's the fairest cake on any stand? Coconut, in all its frothy, layered Southern glory
04:30 PM CST on Wednesday, November 7, 2007 By LAURA H. EHRET / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
lehret@dallasnews.com Coconut is a great divider in the pastry world. There are those who love it and those who despise it; fence-sitters are few. .
North Naples woman who scammed investors sentenced to 25 years prison
A North Naples woman who scammed investors out of $211,500 through a mortgage investment pyramid scheme was sentenced Monday to 25 years in a state prison after proclaiming her innocence. Collier Circuit Judge Fred Hardt said he didn't see any “reasonable prospect of rehabilitation" for 57-year-old Lorraine Afshari, who sobbed as she blamed others for her crime, operating a bogus firm called Tuscany Mortgage & Investment Co. on U.S. 41 North in Naples. “She has just come up here and maintained she is innocent ... and was somehow framed by other people," Hardt said, adding that the long sentence would deter Afshari and others from committing scams. He noted Afshari has two 1992 convictions in Virginia involving fraud and had committed a similar scam in Naples under the name Mediterranean Mortgage & Investment Corp., which left a trail of dissatisfied investors before its 2003 dissolution.
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