Wednesday, April 14, 2010

_**GLEE**_


Glee is an American musical comedy-drama television series that airs on Fox in the United States. It focuses on a high school glee club called "New Directions", at the fictional William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. The pilot episode of the show was broadcast after American Idol on May 19, 2009, and the first season began airing on September 9, 2009. On September 21, 2009, Fox officially gave the series a full-season pick-up. Glee aired its mid-season finale on December 9, 2009 and returned from a four-month hiatus on April 13, 2010, picking up the remaining nine episodes of the season. The show's creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan first conceived Glee as a film. Murphy selects the series' music, maintaining a balance between show tunes and chart hits. Songs covered in the show are released on iTunes during the week of broadcast, and a series of Glee albums will be released through Columbia Records, beginning with Glee: The Music, Volume 1, which was released on November 3, 2009. The music of Glee has been a commercial success, with over two million digital sales. The show has received generally positive reviews from critics. The series won the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series—Musical or Comedy and received three additional nominations for Best Actress (Lea Michele), Best Actor (Matthew Morrison), and Best Supporting Actress (Jane Lynch).





Sunday, April 11, 2010

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American television host, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history. She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century and beyond,the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was once the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, including being raped at the age of nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.


Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race,an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate.