Rob Ford Weight Loss

Rob Ford Weight Loss, Mayor Rob Ford announced Sunday that he has abandoned his diet three weeks before the scheduled end of the “Cut the Waist Challenge” he launched in January with his brother, Councillor Doug Ford. A look back at the highs and lows of the brothers’ unique — and uniquely competitive — public weight loss quest:

January 10: Doug tells NewsTalk 1010 that he and Rob will soon be launching a weight loss challenge for charity. He says they will weigh themselves weekly — on a giant scale they will borrow from their family’s label company — and that making their goals public will help them succeed. “When you tell 3 million people that you’re gonna lose weight,” he says, “you sure better lose weight.”

January 11: Doug tells the National Post that he and Rob will challenge other mayors to join them. “The first mayor we might target is our friend over in Calgary,” he says, “because he has a little beef on the front of him.” When told of the comment, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi responds: “Did they call me a fatty?”

January 16: John Tory, a “recovering politician and recovering fatty,” emcees the first mayoral weigh-in; the phrase “mayoral weigh-in” enters the lexicon; Rob and Doug both say they want to lose 50 pounds by mid-June; Rob weighs in at 330, Doug at 275. Doug mocks Rob for mistakenly reading the scale as “229” rather than 329. “When you were in grade school you were 229,” Doug scoffs.

Rob is in high spirits, but he turns somber when talking about why he launched the diet. “Enough’s enough,” he says. “It’s the heaviest I’ve ever been. And Doug and I went down to Florida and we just discussed it. I’ve got young children, and this is not healthy. You can’t be running the city, you can’t be doing all this, at 330 pounds. You guys know it, I know it.”

May 13: Appearing on the radio show for Mother’s Day, Rob and Doug’s mother, Diane, scolds Doug for continuing to make fun of Rob’s KFC visit. Rob announces that he will now be weighing in only every two weeks. “I love how the mayor just changes the rules,” Doug complains. “All of a sudden, boom, bang, every second week now. Doesn’t matter: June 18, there’s no escaping it, we’re weighing in.”

May 22: Rob cancels the weigh-in for the fifth time in the last nine weeks. As usual, he provides no explanation.

May 27: Doug threatens to drag Rob to the weigh-in the next day. Rob announces that he has given up: “I don’t care about the weigh-in. I’m not even dieting anymore. It’s gone! It’s water under the bridge. So I gotta — we gotta refocus.”

Mermaids & The Body Found

Mermaids & The Body Found, As if we didn’t have enough probably fictitious but possibly real beings to worry about. All over basic cable, people are searching for Bigfoot, hunting down ghosts, looking for extraterrestrials. Now, it turns out, we need to add mermaids to the list. An animated scene from “Mermaids: The Body Found.”

At least we do if you take “Mermaids: The Body Found” seriously. Which you shouldn’t. The film, Sunday night on Animal Planet and part of its Monster Week, is a fictional account built on a few strands of fact and made to look like an actual documentary. If you know those ground rules, it’s a rather enjoyable and intriguing piece of work, in the same vein as “The Blair Witch Project.”

The film, created and written by Charlie Foley, begins with the real, actual fact that the Navy’s use of sonar systems is suspected by some scientists of contributing to whale beachings. And it takes note of an odd underwater sound known as the Bloop that was recorded in the Pacific Ocean in 1997.

From there “Mermaids” gives us two supposed scientists who are going rogue and telling all about a secret government investigation that has more or less proved the existence of mermaids. It turns out that whales haven’t been the only creatures beaching themselves; two boys in Washington State caught something else on a cellphone camera before the authorities swooped in and pressured them into silence. Also, remains found inside a shark in South Africa were decidedly mermaidlike.

Great Gatsby 2012 Trailer

Great Gatsby 2012 Trailer, From the uniquely imaginative mind of writer/producer/director Baz Luhrmann comes the new big screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. The filmmaker will create his own distinctive visual interpretation of the classic story, bringing the period to life in a way that has never been seen before, in a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.

“The Great Gatsby” follows Fitzgerald-like, would-be writer Nick Carraway as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz and bootleg kings. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan. It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.

Academy Award(R) nominee DiCaprio (“J. Edgar,” “Aviator”) plays Jay Gatsby, with Tobey Maguire starring as Nick Carraway; Oscar(R) nominee Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) and Joel Edgerton as Daisy and Tom Buchanan; Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke as Myrtle and George Wilson; and newcomer Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker. Indian film legend Amitabh Bachchan will play the role of Meyer Wolfsheim.

Oscar(R) nominee Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge!”) directs the film in 3D from a screenplay co-written with frequent collaborator Craig Pearce, based on Fitzgerald’s book. Luhrmann produces, along with Catherine Martin, Academy Award(R) winner Doug Wick (“Gladiator”), Lucy Fisher and Catherine Knapman. The executive producers are Academy Award(R) winner Barrie M. Osborne (“Lord of the Rings — Return of the King”) and Bruce Berman.

Two-time Academy Award(R)-winning production and costume designer Catherine Martin (“Moulin Rouge!”) designs as well as produces. The editors are Matt Villa, Jason Ballantine and Jonathan Redmond, and the director of photography is Simon Duggan. The music is by Craig Armstrong.

$114,000 Debt Paid In Cash

$114,000 Debt Paid In Cash, Last week, a Reddit user posted a photo of a $114,000 student loan bill – paid in cash – that elicited thousands of comments and dozens more when it was posted at businessinsider.com. Since then, the anonymous alum has stepped forward as Alex Kenjeev, a 2009 law school graduate of the University of Toronto.

Kenjeev, who works for venture capitalist firm O’Leary Ventures, told Business Insider the $114,000 payment was the last chunk left of $190,000 in loans he took out during school.

He’d spent years dragging out his payments while pouring most of his income into a start-up. As for why he paid in cash, Kenjeev said he wasn’t proving some point about the dangers of credit cards or trying to show off. He just thought it’d be really funny.

“It was stressful enough to carry such a big debt load. I thought it would be worth getting a few laughs out of it,” he said. “Neither bank thought it was as funny as I thought it was.”

Robin Gibb & Kidney Failure

Robin Gibb & Kidney Failure, Robin Gibb’s son has opened up about the star’s tragic death, calling his passing “peaceful and dignified” and revealing it wasn’t cancer that killed his father. The Bee Gees star was in remission from colon and liver cancer at the time of his death May 20, 2012, and his son Robin-John has now explained the music legend suffered kidney and liver failure in his final days.

He also reveals he was with his dad until the end, along with his mother Dwina and his siblings. Robin-John tells the Sunday Express, “The end was peaceful and dignified, there were no theatrics. It was only later that I cried and cried…

It wasn’t the cancer that killed my father; those reports are wrong. Dad had actually gone into remission and the cancer was completely unrecognizable, it was too small to detect. No scan could see it. He actually died of kidney failure.”

He goes on to explain that Gibb was battling back from a bout of pneumonia which left him in a coma when he suffered a seizure, which led to a sharp decline in his health: “Three days before (he died), he was sitting up and watching DVDs and then suddenly he had a seizure. He was then dosed with sedatives to deal with the side effects of his chemotherapy and his liver just couldn’t process them.

He deteriorated to the point where it started to affect his kidneys as well. Basically my father died of kidney and liver failure. It was a really sudden downturn.”

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