So apparently Julianne Hough is now blogging! (You can find her here.) You know what makes blogs good? Bluntness! By that measure, Julianne is a great blogger. Here's what she had to say about her and Cody's "DWTS" elimination:

"Don't be sad. Someone has to leave; too bad it was us, but it's the name of the game. Cody and I hoped for the best and expected the worst. We definitely got the worst. We’re OK with it, though. He came to terms with it. He came such a long way since the beginning, and I’m so proud of him. When I first me him, I thought he was going to be this young, immature kid, but as I’ve gotten to know him, I've realized that he’s a deep, loving young man."

Bitter, much? Actually, I think she's right. The judges sure seemed to have it in for Cody.

Oh, and Julianne wants us all to vote for her brother Derek.

- Posted by Kate

Meiko updated fans on her blog at MySpace on Wednesday (November 19). The singer songwriter tells readers: What I ride I was on… I just completed the Hotel Cafe Tour last night at the Henry...

Zenoss on Wednesday announced the addition of a native Mac OS X installer to Zenoss Core 2.3, an open-source IT monitoring...

I see this dumbtastic egg-case-style Bajca emoticon keyboard and the only thing I wish is that somebody actually brings it to market, sends it to me to test, and then I get a hammer to smash all those stupid emoticons like it was a Whac-a-Mole game. Maybe it's just me and you will love it's design—which admittedly is pretty but not very useful. That's until they tell you you can turn the emoticons into jewelry beads.

Then you realize this thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Next: the one-key LOL keyboard. [Crunchgear]

Extract not available.

-- From California's governor and Britain's prime minister to hip-hop legends, TV stars and renowned innovators, entrepreneurial celebrities are lending their fame and support as ambassadors of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The Week, Nov. 17-23, offers a

JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- Health ministers of the ...

Greta Garbo Victoria Beckham most certainly is not. When she arrived at Heathrow airport recently in skintight black quilted designer leather, and big black cap and sunglasses to match, the result was more "leave me the hell alone" than "I want to be alone". Get you, Little Miss Sunshine. Whatever, this was among her finest sartorial moments to date, and a welcome change from the supercharged WAG aesthetic for which she is best known.

Jesca Hoop checked in with fans on her blog at MySpace on Sunday (November 16) after wrapping up her tour supporting Elbow. The American folk pop artist tells readers: This past tour was my absolute...

One grown man chucks a coin at another grown man, that grown man hurls it back with interest and other grown men around the country reel off the clichés about the beautiful game turning ugly. And in the background the Football Association's Respect campaign slips ever further into its inevitable irrelevance, uprooting a few ironic headlines on its descent.

Sometimes the unlikeliest people come up with the wildest ideas. Dame Monica Mason's appointment of Wayne McGregor – a cybergeek who grew up without going near a ballet class – to a post once filled by Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan might have seemed counterintuitive. But Mason knew success when she saw it. And Chroma, McGregor's last work for the Royal Ballet two years ago, was the most dangerously thrilling thing to have happened on the Opera House stage in years.

E! Online - Not every story can be a good one.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that a 47 year old man named Jing Hua Wu, after being laid off from his job at a fabless digital radio semiconductor startup in Santa Clara called SiPort, came back to the office on Friday afternoon with a gun and killed three people. Sid Agrawal, the company’s CEO, and Brian Pugh, VP Operations, were killed along with one other as yet unidentified woman. Wu is still at large according to the latest reports.

This is obviously a very sad day in Silicon Valley, and our heart goes out to the families of the victims.

The event reminds me of a 1993 shooting at a law firm in San Francisco. I was a summer intern in the legal department of Bank of America, just down the street, and the incident affected the legal community for years afterward. There is no quick or easy way to get past something like this.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Rising costs in key foreign markets, including China, and a slowdown in the escalation of U.S. costs associated with things such as pollution control and employee benefits has boosted the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers over the past two years, according to a report released by two leading manufacturing groups.

But the report concludes that, despite these gains, the U.S. still faces a substantial cost disadvantage, arising mainly from relatively high corporate taxes.

The report, released by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI and paid for by consulting firm Deloitte & Touche, is the latest version of a cost analysis first done in 2003 and updated in 2006. “These new numbers show that even though global wage differentials are narrowing, policy-induced costs in the United States, especially corporate taxes, continue to undermine manufacturers’ ability to compete with our largest trading partners,” said Thomas Duesterberg, chief executive of MAPI.

The report focuses on “structural” costs, including energy prices and the cost of defending against lawsuits, which are largely outside the direct control of producers, and compares the U.S. against nine of its major trading partners, including China, Mexico, and Germany. In 2006, the analysis suggested structural costs added nearly 32% to unit labor costs of U.S. manufacturers relative to key competitors. Today, that figure has fallen sharply to 17.6%. –Timothy Aeppel

In the auction scene from William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar, props and dancers are dragged forward and displayed to the audience. Agnes, the main speaking character, tries to keep control. As she harangued audience and dancers, I wondered if Forsythe was aiming for a Monty Python effect: absurd detail, manic action, surrealism. If so, it falls flat.

And Romeo and Juliet lived happily ever after. While you digest that information, consider why a dance iconoclast who until now has avoided straight romance in his work would take on the biggest boy-meets-girl story of them all – a story, what's more, that has spawned many satisfying dance treatments already. What is truly baffling about Mark Morris's Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare (the title chosen by Sergey Prokofiev for his 1935 ballet score) is not that he thought it might be a good idea to make known a hitherto unknown early draft of that magnificent music. It's that he turns out to be woefully not up to the task.

Sometimes I get e-mail tips from readers (thank you, readers!) and sometimes I just get e-mails from my friends that have URLs and something along the lines of "dude, check this out" in the body. Well, dude, check this out:

Yes, that is Jesse Csincsak of "The Bachelorette," and, yes, he is telling us in detail about how DeAnna broke up with him. Poor guy! Needless to say, this brings the total number of successful pairings on "The Bachelor" up to...1 in 17? 1 in 18?

- Posted by Kate

Bloomberg covers the demise of Highland’s Crusader fund, formerly one of the biggest names in the market:

Highland Capital Management LP will close its flagship Highland Crusader Fund and another hedge fund after losses on high-yield, high-risk loans and other types of debt, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.

Highland, whose total assets under management has shrunk to about $33 billion from $40 billion in March, will wind down the Crusader fund and the Highland Credit Strategies Fund over the next three years, said the person, who declined to be named because the decision isn’t public. The hedge funds had combined assets of more than $1.5 billion.

The Dallas Morning News adds that:

Highland said it would sell 20 percent of that fund’s assets during the next six months, and another 20 percent in the following six-month period. It will sell the remaining assets in the next few years.

Crusader first ran into trouble during the summer, as it saw a significant increase in redemptions, or requests from investors who wanted to take their money out.

Highland said then it would honor the requests but would need up to nine months to give investors their money back.

Meanwhile (from Bloomberg, accompanied by a decidedly evil image of Henry Paulson):

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said his plan to inject capital into financial companies is focused on banks and thrifts, indicating unregulated firms such as hedge funds won’t initially get government aid.

This is just the beginning of a predicted hedge fund fallout, which people have been talking about for some time.

I’ve been eyeing my own hedge fund investment cautiously for a little while. I don’t want to pull out, because I figure I already lost most of what there was to lose.

The fund’s manager appears to be elated at the prospect of cheap stocks. I’m with him. Even if the market falls more, I have faith that his stakes will pay off in the long run. I may even purchase more of his fund.

I’m staying. Anyone else riding it out with hedge funds?

I didn't really attend the New York Asian Film Festival; I'd decided I wanted to see November before it ended its run, decided it might be a good idea to use the day-trip to see a game in Yankee Stadium before they knocked that down, bought tickets for those and the bus ride, and then found out that NYAFF started that weekend. So, much like Fantasia, I spent the next two weeks refreshing Subway

Remember Barry Nolan, the cable news guy who courageously took a stand against some backwater TV organization giving Bill O'Reilly a prize for working once in the greater Boston metropolitan area? Well, Nolan learned the hard way that "speaking truth to power" only works if you're Nelson Mandela. Otherwise it gets you fired and you have to wash cars, mow lawns, or give blowjobs in the Dunkin' Donuts men's room to pay your rent.

After telling the Boston/New England Emmy organizers that Bill O'Reilly was a dangerous bullying mental case, Nolan took his cause to the People. That's right: he handed out pamphlets at the actual award ceremony, and these pamphlets contained quotations by the mental case bully himself, Bill O'Reilly, so everybody knew exactly what kind of behavior those awards were honoring. Nolan writes:

[O]n May 10th at the Emmy Awards dinner, I quietly passed out a document that contained - not my opinion - but O'Reilly's own words and quotes from his sexual harassment lawsuit. And that is what got me fired. I got fired from my job on a news and information network for reporting demonstrably true things in a room full of news people.

So chalk up one for Bill O'Reilly, one for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and negative one million for Truth.

Barry Nolan: The Story Behind My O'Reilly Protest [Think Progress]
Anchor Spun From Job for O'Reilly Protest [ABC News]