Michael Jackson's former doctor has been charged with involuntary manslaughter by prosecutors in Los Angeles today. Dr Conrad Murray is expected to deny the charges in court. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

The King of Pop died at his home last June at the age of 50, his death was ruled as homicide, mainly caused by the anesthetic Propofol. A cocktail of drugs - including sedatives Midazolam and Diazepam, the painkiller Lidocaine and the stimulant Ephedrine - were also detected in his body, a coroner confirmed.

The statement came after several days of negotiations, where Dr Murray's lawyers tried to arrange for him to surrender to prosecutors in an attempt to avoid him being handcuffed and arrested.

Speaking before the charges were filed, the physician's defense lawyer, Ed Chernoff, said the doctor was prepared for the legal battle ahead. "We'll make bail, we'll plead not guilty and we'll fight like hell," he said.

Originally from Grenada, Dr Murray moved to the US and trained as a doctor. In 2000, he opened his own practice in Las Vegas, expanding with a second clinic in Houston in 2006. However, he encountered financial difficulties and reports suggest he filed for bankruptcy in 2002 while living in California.

Jackson hired Murray on a salary of more than $150,000 a month in May 2009. Yes, you read that right, it's not a typo -  $150,000 a MONTH. Money can and does buy you whatever and/or whomever you want! Unfortunately for Michael, he didn't get the best for his money.

I was reading my daily round up of design and tutorial blogs today and came across this great article on web typography. With so many fonts out there to use, why use the same "safe" ones all the time in your design? There are countless others that come standard on both the PC and the Mac.

Here is a run down from author Amrinder Sandhu from his article Revised Font Stack. The font stacks and stats for both serif and sans serif are after the more jump.

Revised Font Stacks

* Some of the fonts, like: Garamond, Baskerville and Didot are not as readable on screen as Georgia. Feel free to make your own selection.
* Due to smaller x-height; Caslon, Didot, Garamond, Baskerville and Hoefler Text should be set at minimum of 14 pixels or above.
* Lucida Grande, Futura and Tahoma are mechanically obliqued to fake an italic.
* Geneva, Baskerville Old Face and Big Caslon has no bold and italic. They are faked to bold and italic.
* Avoid using Helvetica or Helvetica Neue for body text, especially below 14px.
* Futura, Gill Sans and Franklin Gothic Medium should be carefully stacked and used because of their unusual weight.

Continue reading

Their previous video of Thriller has over 38 million hits! Now the inmates are at it again. To celebrate the DVD release of the late Michael Jackson documentary This Is It, Jackson's choreographer Travis Payne and dancers Daniel Celebre and Dres Reid went to the Cebu Provincial Dentention and Rehabilitation Center and staged this FANTASTIC dance tribute to the pop star with 1,500 inmates to "They Don't Really Care About Us."

Check this out, it's pretty amazing....

Major bummer reading about this today. One of my favorite characters is not returning to Mad Men. After having a male client make advances on his character, which were not returned, he gets the can AFTER the clients switches the situation on him and calls in a favor to his bosses that he doesn't want Sal on the job any more. When confronted by Sal's boss, Don Draper, he is let go even though he let's him know the whole story. Money talks and Sal walks. He packs his bags and we see he wander off - last seen near the park disheveled and in a fog.

Claims the Broadway Buzz...

Bryan Batt, the Broadway vet who made a splash on the Emmy-winning Mad Men as art director Salvatore Romano, won’t be returning to the hit show, according to TV Guide.

“I was supposed to be notified by December 31,” Batt told the magazine, “and nothing.” Sal was fired by Don Draper (played by heartthrob Jon Hamm) after resisting a male client’s advances on the October 11, 2009 episode, but the character’s future was left uncertain. Shooting for the show’s fourth season begins in March.

“We don’t murder people on our show, but for there to be any stakes, there have to be consequences,” Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner said about the loss of Batt. “I know how people felt about Bryan. I obviously love working with him, and he has been an indelible character since the pilot. But I felt it was an expression of the times that he couldn’t work there anymore. It’s the ultimate case of sexual harassment.”

Batt’s Broadway credits include understudying Albin in the 2004 revival of La Cage aux Folles, Saturday Night Fever, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sunset Boulevard, Beauty and the Beast, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Starlight Express and Cats. Off-Broadway, he gave a memorable performance in Jeffrey and appeared in several versions of Forbidden Broadway.

So will Batt’s next move be a return to the Great White Way? “From your mouth to the producers’ ears,” Batt told Broadway.com in October. “There’s nothing like Broadway.”

Heidi Montag, star of MTV's The Hills has recently come under fire for undergoing 10 plastic surgeries in one day. Pretty crazy for a 23 year old.  Usually it is her crazy husband and wannabe celebrity, attention whore Spencer who does the outlandish, but not this time.

She was such a beautiful girl to begin with! The Hollywood machine is eating her up alive! I can only guess this is due to the pressures to look amazing and be the celebrity and paparazzi favorite she craves, but I think it's a case of no self esteem. I thought she looked younger before the Barbie transformation. Such a shame.

In lieu of the controversy, I founds this hilarious video spoof of her recent interview with Billy Bush of Access Hollywood.

Egypt's president said on Sunday his security forces would quash Islamist groups threatening stability in Egypt and the region, highlighting worries about al Qaeda building up strength in places such as Yemen.

President Hosni Mubarak also defended building a barrier on the Gaza border, saying it would stop militants crossing. See the post we did here. The move has drawn criticism from inside Egypt and other Arabs who say Cairo is colluding with Israel to blockade the Palestinians.

To read more about this click here to go to the Washington Post article by Marwa Awad.

Yes on Prop. 8 supporter Meg Whitman just wrote a $20 million check to her campaign to become the next Governor of California and has said she will spend more than $100 million of her own money to buy herself the job. You read that right — $100 million! Meg got her money from her start up, you might have heard of it - Ebay.

But unlike our current Republican governor who has refused to defend Prop. 8 in federal court and who has signed dozens of LGBT rights bills, Whitman has advocated for eliminating our right to marry. If elected, she would likely defend Prop. 8 in court with taxpayer dollars — not to mention what she could do with the stroke of a pen to pro-LGBT bills that pass the legislature.

While we can't match her dollar for dollar, we can fight her anti-equality efforts on the ground. But we can't do it without your support.

Help EQCA’s PAC fight Meg Whitman and other candidates who supported Prop. 8 and oppose LGBT equality. Make a donation today.

1. Celine Dion, $747.9 million. Dion pulled in $522.2 million in concert-ticket sales for the decade. Adding $225.7 million worth of album sales during those same 10 years, she trumped all comers.

2. Kenny Chesney, $742 million. Close behind Dion was this road warrior, who toured hard and promoted records the old-fashioned way year in and year out. His total includes $455.6 million in concert ticket sales and $286.4 million in album revenue.

3. Dave Matthews Band, $737.4 million. Matthews' decade concert total of $529.1 million put him first on the list of top North American live music attractions of the decade, as calculated by the concert-tracking publication Pollstar. The band posted $208.3 million in album sales.

4. The Beatles, $627.3 million. Although the quartet disbanded 30 years before the decade began, the Beatles still managed to generate $392.3 million from sales of 30.2 million albums (using an average of $13 per album). We folded in the individual box office figures racked up by ex-Beatle Paul McCartney ($221.4 million) and Ringo Starr ($13.6 million), given that their concert audiences consist in large part of Beatles fans. The Fab Four also logged the single bestselling album of the decade, the "1" hits collection, with 11.5 million copies. And counting.

5. U2, $609.7 million. The Irish rock quartet brought in $391 million at the box office and $218.7 million in album sales.

6. Toby Keith, $591.9 million. The second of three country acts in the Top 10, the Oklahoma singer and songwriter logged $273.8 million on the concert trail, $318.1 million from album sales.

7. Bruce Springsteen, $588.3 million. On the road, both with the E Street Band and his various non-E Street tours, the Boss brought in $444.3 million. His album take: $144 million.

8. The Rolling Stones, $569.6 million. The Stones also benefited heavily from touring, earning $426.9 million at the box office in addition to $142.7 million in album sales.

9. Tim McGraw, $550.7 million. Strictly as a solo act, the country singer-songwriter ranks No. 14 on the list. But he toured several times with his wife, Faith Hill, during the decade. California being a community property state, we are awarding him half the revenue those outings generated. So his total includes $322 million in album sales, $133.7 million from his own tours and $95 million for his half of the McGraw-Hill shows.

10. Britney Spears, $494.3 million. Despite a rocky decade personally and professionally, Spears pulled in $195.7 million at the box office and sold $298.6 million worth of albums for the 10-year period.

These stats are taken from an article in the Los Angeles Times. For further information click here.

A friend of mine sent this to me and I found it alarmingly strange that a behemoth such as Disney is not pressing any charges. I have heard of stealing, but this is amazingly blatant plagiarism if indeed it is true. Not knowing what the IMHO meant in the signature "IMHO Matt Bateman" I Goggled and found it to mean In My Humble Opinion.

Click the image to see enlarged version to read the "script" changes!