In celebration of LITERALLY the hottest time of year, we’re pleased to announce and kick off the 1st Annual THG Bikini Body Summer Showdown! It’s not a complicated setup. Take a look at the two bikini-clad celebrities pitted against each other below. Choose your favorite. The winner advances. Friday’s battle? Katy Perry and Lady Gaga . Today? The future Mrs. Dustin Johnson, Paulina Gretzky and the former Mrs. Tiger Woods, Elin Nordegren! Who will win this first-round matchup? Cast your vote below! And the Winner is? Paulina Gretzky Click Here To Vote for Paulina Elin Nordegren Click Here To Vote for Elin Paulina Gretzky vs. Elin Nordegren: Who’s got the best bikini body? Vote in this first-round matchup of THG’s Bikini Body Showdown! View Poll » For more research before casting your virtual ballot, feel free to peruse THG’s extensive galleries of Paulina Gretzky pics and Elin Nordegren pictures . It’s good to be a PGA Tour pro.
A Florida police sergeant has resigned after posting nearly 300 graphic photos of herself on the Internet as part of the virtual game Red Light Center. Some of the lewd pictures featured her in uniform. She also admitted to sending the images to her lover using police computers and while on duty. Sgt. Penny Dane of the Daytona Beach P.D. “admitted she accessed and sent sexually explicit pictures as part of an online game called Red Light Center.” “[The photos were] extremely pornographic in nature, and in several of the photos we have discovered, she was in her uniform,” Police Chief Mike Chitwood said. When asked how she could fulfill her work responsibility of supervising other officers while playing “Red Light Center,” Dane reportedly told investigators: “I don’t want to say I didn’t have any idea what they were doing because then that would be very wrong. I did pay attention to my radio and listen to what they were doing.” Dane was suspended for “similar activity” back in 2012. The recent revelations came after Dane accused a colleague of sexual harassment. While looking into her claim, investigators uncovered Dane’s racy photos. As for the X-rated game she was playing this whole time, Red Light Center bills itself as a porn-themed online virtual world, similar to Second Life. Only more likely to get you fired and talked about on THG.
Fox is threatening to convert its entire operation to a pay-TV-only channel if Internet startup Aereo continues to “steal” its over-the-air television signal. News Corp., which owns Fox, said not being paid by Aereo threatens the economics of broadcast TV, which relies on both retransmission fees and advertising. Say what now? Anyone with an antenna can pick up a TV station’s signals for free. However, as we well know, cable and satellite companies typically pay stations and networks for the right to distribute their programming to subscribers. Industry-wide, those retransmission fees can add up to billions of dollars every year. Fees that Aereo is circumventing with its new business model: Aereo takes broadcast signals from the air with thousands of little antennas, recodes them for Internet use and feeds that to computers, tablets and phones. Subscriptions start at a mere $8 per month, which is much cheaper than a cable package, though the service is mostly limited to broadcast channels. Obviously, they were sued VERY fast, but last week, that industry was shaken after a federal appeals court issued a preliminary ruling siding with Aereo. The company contends that it doesn’t have to pay those fees because it uses thousands of tiny antennas to grab the signal, and a judge agreed. “This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal,” NewsCorp COO Chase Carey said in response. “But if we can’t do a fair deal, we could take the network to a subscription model.” While most people get Fox through a pay cable TV provider anyway, millions of other Americans rely on the free signal coming over their own antennas. If realized, Carey’s proposal would amount to a sea change in how Fox does business; currently, Fox sends its signal to TV stations across the country. Those stations, 27 of which it owns directly, relay Fox programming such as New Girl and Glee for free in local markets and add their own local news, etc. Carey didn’t explain how TV stations would be affected if Fox shut off the signals it sent to broadcasters and went straight over to a pay TV model. Later, the company said in a statement that any change due to the Aereo situation would occur “in collaboration with both our content partners and affiliates.” Last week, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said that Aereo could continue its service despite a legal challenge by Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS. In a split ruling, the court accepted Aereo’s position that having individual antennas meant that Aereo wasn’t retransmitting signals illegally for profit. Rather, the appeals court said that Aereo enabled its subscribers to do what they already could on their own with their own antenna and video recorder.
What does a $2 million pizza look like? Does it have gold leaf and saffron-infused white truffles? Is the cheese made from the milk of a thousand duck-billed platypuses? Is the sauce the really good Newman’s Own stuff with the garlic and basil? No! None of that! It looks like this: According to Motherboard , the pizza was purchased by Mike Lazio back in May of 2010 using an online currency called Bitcoins (BTC). 10,000 BTC to be exact. At the time, a BTC equaled about .3 cents, meaning that Lazio spent about $30 on it when he took to the Bitcoin forum to make an offer: you order me pizza in the real world, I’ll give you 10,000 BTC. It was the first time a real-world transaction had actually occurred using the virtual currency, and is believed to have sparked the intense inflation that has caused one single BTC to rise to about $234. So do the math: 10,000 BTC at $234 each means that if Lazio had kept that money instead of spending it on Pizza, he’d be sitting on an extra $2.34 million. Hopefully he enjoyed the pizza. I bet he could have found a lot of homemade pizza recipes that cost a lot less than $2.34 million to make.
A three-mile wide asteroid will fly by Earth over the next few days, offering astronomers and even average citizens a rare close-up … relatively speaking of course. The near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis will be just 4.3 million miles of Earth during its closest approach early Wednesday, nothing close to Deep Impact style. Asteroid 4179 Toutatis Heading For Earth! That’s too far away to pose any impact threat on this pass, but close enough to put on a pretty good show through top-notch telescopes, researchers say. The online Slooh Space Camera and Virtual Telescope Project, which will both stream live, offer free footage of the asteroid from professional-quality observatories. Both of those online shows will feature commentary from Slooh president Patrick Paolucci and Astronomy Magazine columnist Bob Berman, who said: “Slooh technical staff will let the public follow this fast-moving asteroid in two different ways.” “In one view, the background stars will be tracked at their own rate and the asteroid will appear as an obvious streak or a moving time-lapse dot across the starry field.” “In a second view, Toutatis itself will be tracked and held steady as a tiny pointlike object, while Earth’s spin makes the background stars whiz by as streaks.” “Both methods will make the asteroid’s speedy orbital motion obvious as it passes us in space.” Asteroid Toutatis was first viewed in 1934, then officially discovered in 1989. It makes one trip around the sun every four years, according to experts. The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., lists Toutatis as a potentially hazardous object, meaning that it could pose a threat to our planet at some point. The current flyby is no cause for concern, however. At its closest approach, Toutatis will still be 18 times farther away from Earth than the moon is. Toutatis would cause catastrophic damage if it ever did slam into Earth. In general, scientists think a strike by anything at least 0.6 miles wide could have global consequences, most likely by altering the world’s climate for eons. The asteroid thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was an estimated 6 miles across, so this one would be kind of it for us. Phew.
Young women bullied by their peers into committing suicide has become a staple of today’s news cycle, but as Anna Karenina demonstrates, it’s hardly a new phenomenon. Whether you’re talking about 19th-century Russian aristocrats or Midwestern teens in the age of Facebook, as Keira Knightley tells me, “The rules of society change, but the way that society works does not.” I sat down with Knightley and director Joe Wright to talk about their bold adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel and its continued relevance in our contemporary digital world. Their passion for the material is as palpable as the film’s lush production design. Check out the videos below to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on the most daring movie this Oscar season: Anna Karenina is now playing in limited release. Follow Movieline on Twitter . Follow Grace Randolph on Twitter .
If you haven’t noticed, there’s a fierce battle being fought out there for the right to heft a gold statuette at the Dolby Theater on Feb. 24 and forget to thank some vital member of your family. And though more than a half dozen pictures and performances that the blogosphere is touting as Oscar-worthy have yet to be seen by the public (and, in some cases, the very bloggers who are touting them), the virtual home office at Movieline has decided it’s time to throw open the doors to the Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics and start up the Oscar Index . How The Oscar Index Works This year, Movieline’ s Oscar Index will be presented differently than it has been in the past. We’ll soon add the now-iconic graph that tracks the weekly rise and fall of the candidates based on fluctuations in the Institute’s extremely sensitive media seismometers. What will be different is that, with each award category that we track, we’ll present four different rankings. Movieline Executive Editor Jen Yamato , Managing Editor Brian Brooks and myself will each provide our personal weekly rankings of the movies and actors in the running, and then those results will be weighted and averaged to determine an official Movieline ranking for each category. This week, we begin with the Best Picture category. Next week, we’ll weigh in on the Best Director, Best Actor, Actress and Best Supporting Actor and Actress races. Oscar for Best Picture 2013 Right now, Lincoln is the picture to beat with its heart-and-soul performance by Daniel Day-Lewis — his world-weary slump-shouldered walk alone is worth the price of admission — a beautiful script by Tony Kushner and some pitch-perfect scenery chewing by Tommy Lee Jones and James Spader. The picture finishes at the top of two of our three lists, and Awards Daily calls it “Arguably, the best film of the year so far,” adding: “Films this thoughtfully created don’t come around very often.” The consensus at a number of blogsites, such as Indiewire , is that Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Ben Affleck’s Argo and David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook are also going to be nominated for Best Picture. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master has also been mentioned, but the film opened so early in the race and, with the exception of Joaquin Phoenix’s comments about how he really feels about Oscars, the movie could use a second wind unless The Weinstein Company is shifting its weight to a Silver Linings push. But coming up fast is Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables , which our own Ms. Yamato notes, is “scaring” a lot of the other contenders. Meanwhile, Michael Haneke’s Amour and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild are long shots, but still in the race. Indeed, the latter film finished in the number 10 spot on each Movieline editor’s list. An even darker horse is Skyfall , but I (alone) agree with Deadline that the movie’s critical and box-office success and its popularity among Academy members bode well for a best-picture nomination. Here’s the rundown of each Movieline editor’s Best Picture picks in descending order: Frank DiGiacomo’s Picks 1. Lincoln 2. Silver Linings Playbook 3. Argo 4. Les Misérables 5. Life of Pi 6. Skyfall 7. Zero Dark Thirty 8 . Flight 9. The Master 10. Beasts of the Southern Wild — Jen Yamato’s Picks 1. Les Misérables 2. Lincoln 3. Silver Linings Playbook 4. Argo 5. Life of Pi 6. Zero Dark Thirty 7. Anna Karenina 8. The Master 9. The Hobbit 10. Beasts of the Southern Wild — Brian Brooks’ Picks 1. Lincoln 2. Silver Linings Playbook 3. Les Misérables 4. Argo 5. Life of Pi 6. Amour 7. Django Unchained 8. Anna Karenina 9. The Dark Knight Rises 10. Beasts of the Southern Wild And the winners are…
RZA ‘s anticipated Quentin Tarantino-approved martial arts epic The Man With The Iron Fists already blends hip hop with kung fu and Eastern cinematic tradition with the rapper-turned-filmmaker’s unique sensibilities, and a new animated prequel is here to add to the buzz machine ahead of its November 2 debut. [ GALLERY: Eye-Popping Images From The Man With The Iron Fists ] Watch the “prelude,” courtesy of Machinima, in which RZA narrates the story of his Man With The Iron Fists character The Blacksmith – a gorgeous Chinese ink drawing-style tale of the Blacksmith’s early encounter with some of the film’s fearsome foes. Stay tuned this week as we bring you more on The Man With The Iron Fists , starting with our exclusive chat with Bobby Digital himself, RZA. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
When Entertainment Weekly posted an exclusive photo of actor Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin, the super-villain who rocks Tony Stark’s world in the upcoming Iron Man 3 , it resurrected a thorny question around the virtual office here. In the Marvel universe, the Mandarin is the son of one of pre-Revolutionary China’s wealthiest men and an English noblewoman, as well as a descendant of Ghengis Khan. So, why, as Executive Editor Jen Yamato wondered when news broke that Ben Kingsley would play him, did the job go to a half-Indian, half-English actor? The answer, according to Marvel Studios Kevin Feige , appears near the bottom of the EW post. As a villain, it turns out, the Mandarin is kind of a mutt. According to EW, Feige says Marvel “wanted to blur the background” of the Mandarin portrayed in Iron Man 3 . “It’s less about his specific ethnicity than the symbolism of various cultures and iconography that he perverts for his own end,” Feige explained. ” As EW further explained: “From his samurai hair, to his royal robe, to his bin Laden-esque beard, and the AK-47 he keeps at his side, Kingsley’s interpretation is a hodgepodge of various warrior motifs. That way, I guess no single ethnicity, particularly one with a population of 1.3 billion, can be offended by Kingsley’s portrayal or his character’s evil doing. Please feel free to weigh in on the debate. Or, if you just want to look at pretty pictures. USA Today also posted some exclusive shots from the film. Here are a couple: Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Join the hip-hop trio Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET on MTV.com By Rob Markman Future, DJ Khaled and Juvenile Photo: Getty Images “RapFix Live” is ready to turn up. Last week, Sway welcomed Ace Hood and TDE’s Schoolboy Q on the red couch, but this week, he’ll have to make even more room because Future , DJ Khaled and Juvenile will all be stopping by to kick it Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET on MTV.com. On Tuesday, Future is dropping his debut album, Pluto. To celebrate, he will swing through the “RapFix” set and make an appearance on MTV’s new weekly talk show “Hip Hop POV” on Wednesday. The “Tony Montana” rapper’s first shot features R. Kelly, T.I., Juicy J, Snoop Dogg and Trae Tha Truth. His single “Magic” peaked at #10 on the Billboard Hip-Hop/R&B charts, and his next record, “Same Damn Time,” is starting to bubble as well. It’ll be quite the moment if the rap newcomer crosses paths with veteran MC Juvenile , who will also be in the studio. Juvie began his career as the shining star on Birdman’s Cash Money Records. His 1998 LP, 400 Degreez, was a pivotal hip-hop album and ultimately established Cash Money as a musical force to be reckoned with. It spawned singles like “Ha” and the rump-shaking “Back That Azz Up.” Juvie left CMR in 2002 and has largely carried on by himself. He dropped his last solo album, Beast Mode, in 2010 and earlier this year released his Mardi Gras mixtape with DJ Smallz. Now you can’t have a party without DJ Khaled . Since 2006, the Miami representative has been carving his lane as a hitmaker. On his debut LP, Listennn… the Album, Khaled paired artists like Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Jadakiss and Beanie Sigel on high-powered collaborative cuts. He successfully improved on the formula through the years and has delivered with hit records like “I’m So Hood” featuring T-Pain, Rick Ross, Trick Daddy and Plies, as well as last year’s inescapable single “I’m On One” with Drake, Ross and Lil Wayne. Khaled’s latest track, “Take It to the Head,” partners Chris Brown, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj on a single track. His sixth studio album, Kiss the Ring, is due later this year. Catch Future, DJ Khaled and Juvenile on “RapFix Live” Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET on MTV.com, and be sure to join the Twitter conversation using the hashtag #RapFixLive. Send your questions for the artists to @MTVRapFix! Related Artists Future DJ Khaled Juvenile
