If you like the delicious taste of pumpkin and/or cinnamon then you will love the Sweet Potato Cheesecake from the Sweet Auburn Bread Company. Ashtyn Evans is giving away a cheesecake from this top Atlanta Bakery thanks to a generous donation from Chef Sonya, Sweet Auburn’s owner. The cheesecake was reviewed by Ashtyn and Dominick (who both say it deserves five stars) on Ashtyn’s Watching Food TV Website.

Winning a cheesecake is easy. All you have to do is leave a comment about your favorite local bakery (Dunkin’ Donuts and other franchises do not count). The most interesting entry will be chosen by Ashtyn or perhaps by Chef Sonya herself!

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I remember fondly the day I turned ten years old. For that birthday, I was lucky enough to get my very first Nintendo. They were new that year and I wanted it more than anything. Nearly twenty years later, I am still Nintendo loyal. In fact, I am waiting anxiously for the chance to get a Wii (anyone want to help me out here?). Seriously though, Mario has always been my favorite franchise in Nintendo and Super Mario 3 was always my favorite game.

I am sure this was a big deal, at least to some extent, when it was on television, but I honestly do not remember ever seeing in on. However, when I heard Shoutfactory was putting this out on DVD and I was asked to review it, I knew how I would be spending my weekend. I knew, just like when I was ten years old, it would be me and Mario back together again.

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Before sitting down to watch Home Improvement for this review, I think I had forgotten just how funny the show really is. Based on the comedy of Tim Allen, Home Improvement stars Allen as family man and Neanderthal Tim Taylor. Tim is married to wife Jill and they have three kids, Randy, Brad, and Mark. Being married and having three kids can be hard work, but the Taylors rely on next-door neighbor, Wilson Wilson (they call him Wilson) for sound advice along the way.The show focuses on Tim at work, where he does a show in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Tim runs “Tool Time” with his friend Al Borland. However, Al is much more the handyman, while Tim’s strategy is to add more power, bigger engines, and eventually blow things up.

This season of Home Improvement offered some of the biggest changes because the boys were all older so Jill was focusing more on getting her Psychology degree, and Tim was busy going through various stages of a mid-life crisis. There are some strong messages here that include lessons on drugs, alternative lifestyles, and personal issues. The laughs are still there, but there are those moments of seriousness that weren’t so prominent in previous seasons.

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For fans of the mighty “Z” films (we’re talking bottom of the barrel with no hope of ever seeing daylight) the very indie Back Woods well, it might just be right up your alley.

David C. Hayes stars in the title role of Luther, a 300 pound transvestite, redneck, ex-genius who goes on a killing spree after he witnesses the death of his Mama (Jim Edberg), who is run over by a van of sex starved teens on a camping trip.

Before Mama is killed off, she manages to give birth to Luther at the tender age of 30, which isn’t a pretty sight. See, Mama’s been a pissed off woman since she impregnated on the night of her prom and her boyfriend ran off.

Getting back to the movie Luther dons her prom dress and after finding the horny teens starts to kill them off one by one. Don’t expect anything really gory since we’re talking about a movie that was probably made with profits from a lemonade stand (and we know how much a lemonade stand can pull in).

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It’s very rare to find movies with a major actor who willingly will bare all for the camera and that’s exactly what Daniel Craig does for the 1998 film Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon.

The publicity wags tout the film with Daniel doing full frontal (and he does near the end of the movie) but for those you who just want a quick glimpse, then this movie really isn’t for you. You’d probably be better off finding the scene on a male celebrity nude website.

Of course curiosity killed the cat here and I shelled out the money for the film which was a bad mistake since it’s a very slow moving film.

As a period piece it works well, and this is the story of British painter Bacon (Derek Jacobi) and his lover George Dyer in the 1960’s. Their relationship begins when the small time crook breaks into the painter’s studio.

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I never had a chance to see Mystery Science Theater 3000, but after seeing this I am going to look it up. The premise of this movie is so simple and yet completely hilarious. First, it’s a movie within a movie. Instead of just watching any horrid movie on it’s own you get to see a horrid movie, with absolutely hilarious voice tracks mixed in.

In Hollywood After Dark you get to spend the evening with three nice guys who want to make sure that a bad movie is seen no matter what. Chances are you would not have found this one on your own. Thus, they are bringing it to you so that everyone suffers in equal amounts. Of course, thanks to the commentary you will be sure to laugh more than you cry (you would have without the tracks).

The three guys are Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett. The movie, which I decided to look up since they don’t tell you the title (or if they did, I missed it) is called Walk the Angry Beach. On IMDB it has a rating of 1.9 and if you saw it without the commentary you’d know why, although, one faithful fan said they felt it could have been the star’s big break into major films. I’m not sure he and I saw the same film, but that’s a topic for another day.

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The follwing is the uncut version of a recent opinion piece published in one of my local papers (Click Here to Read). After reading Dominick’s recent piece on disability rights, I felt it fitting that I should resurrect my own. This piece was originally written for Professor Donna Flayhan’s Media Ethics class at SUNY New Paltz.

“My name is Michael LaPenna and I was born with Cerebral Palsy.” That sentence, though it might be phrased differently with each time its contents are uttered, garners a wide variety of reactions from the many people I encounter in my daily life. Responses range from the simple, “Oh, really?” to the inquisitive, “What’s that like?” and the ever popular and furthermore blatantly ignorant, “Wow, it’s great to see you out!”

These examples vary only slightly with each time one is said, but nevertheless they are said with such ease and frequency that recalling them as I speak now, is almost as easy as blinking my eyes. Moreover, personal experiences such as these cause me to wonder what in our general society causes people to think, act, and react in this way. This case study is my attempt to answer this question with uncompromised honesty and integrity. In doing so I have come to the conclusion that such uninformed and ignorant reactions are not necessarily the fault of those who give them but more so reflect the misinformed nature of the mainstream media at it relates to disability.

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It’s always great to hear of stories about people that would do anything for a friend. Of course, I would hope that my friends had a little more restraint than Felix Rivera, 23, from Connecticut. Felix has recently confessed to the murder of his friend. No, he wasn’t mad at him. He liked his friend. The reason for this crime is a little more inventive then bad blood between friends. It’s more about the inability to hold your drugs when mixed with alcohol.

Felix was celebrating with Charles Gerber, 34, due to their recent release from jail. They weren’t doing anything heavy mind you. They just popped some pills and drank some alcohol, but next thing you know, Charles wasn’t breathing.

Well, when that happened, what was a friend to do? The only logical answer, at least to Felix was to let his paranoia run wild and to stuff Charles in a metal drum to hide him. Of course, nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Charles was a little too big for the drum. Now what could he do?

The only easy answer was to cut off his friend’s head, hands, and feet so that he could cram him into the drum. Once he had him in the drum he rolled it into the Seaside Park water. Unfortunately, it later resurfaced in the Pequonnock River.

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Fans of true crime movies are going to love the release of Zodiac but when a movie comes in at nearly two and a half hours there has to be a downfall.

Zodiac is based on the true events of the Zodiac killings from the 1960’s and 1970’s in San Francisco. Leading the ensemble cast is Jake Gyllenhaal, a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle who befriends crime reporter Robert Downey Jr. (Paul Avery) and eventually becomes obsessed with Avery’s reporting and the killings.

This is sort of like two movies in one.

It starts out with the murders and how the killer eludes the police and the budding relationship between Robert (Gyllenhaal) and Melanie (Chloe Sevigny). When the killings seem to stop and Avery quits the paper it becomes Gyllenhaal’s movie in which he becomes obsessed with finding out who the killer is, which puts him and his family in danger.

While the killer was never caught in reality the movie does a great job at keeping you guessing for the first half, but the energy fizzles during the second half when Gyllenhaal takes over. We do get a sense of his urgency and obsession for finding the killer and there is a great tense scene near the end of the movie, but if the overall quality of this movie was based on the second half of the movie it would have been a box office disaster.

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Yesterday, in preparing for my next blog post, I stumbled across something on C-Span. It was about yet another hearing concerning the misconduct of Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. This time around wasn’t about firing attorneys (for which Gonzales is still under a hell of a lot of pressure to resign), but rather it was Gonzales’ alleged usurping of power of then hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft while attempting to get permission for a secret counterintelligence program that had him in boiling HOT water.

According to testimony given by several of those in the room with the then ailng Ashcroft, he was in no condition to make decisions at the time after having gallbladder surgery. The then acting Attorney General James Comey had said the interaction between “Gonzo” and Ashcroft was mostly one-sided as Gonzales did most of the talking. He even stated that when Gonzales asked Ashcroft’s permission to carry out the undisclosed program in question, Ashcroft deferred to Comey. However, Gonzales stated just the opposite to Congress just yesterday saying that not only was Ashcroft “lucid” but he was doing most of the talking. Comey has testified that he felt compelled to resign after witnessing the interaction of a person “taking advantage of a sick man”. He did resign shortly thereafter. I believe Comey.

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