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2007 Wine Festival
Like a mighty oak from a little acorn, the San Antonio Express-News Wine Competition has grown from modest beginnings into a major event attracting 450 vintners from the United States and across the world. "I knew San Antonio was ready to be considered a real wine city," said wine aficionado Marsha Hendler, a floor monitor in the judging for the seventh annual competition, which was held Jan. 27 in the Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort & Spa. "I liked keeping up with the results of competitions in other cities and finding that a wine I knew and enjoyed had won a medal. Some of us local wine lovers began nagging (then-Express-News wine columnist) Bill Stephens to initiate a competition here." That nagging led to an event that grows in stature annually.
Contest promoting Fox's 'Wedding Bells' a piece of cake
THERE'S NO better way to celebrate the miracle of enduring love - or the premiere of a new show - than to have five prospective brides run a wedding-themed obstacle course that ends with the contestants tearing apart a wedding cake in search of a three-karat engagement ring. That's was happened earlier this week at the Grove in Los Angeles, where participants donned oversized wedding gowns and made fools of themselves all for a promotion of the new Fox romantic comedy "The Wedding Bells." Written by David E. Kelley ("Boston Legal," "Ally McBeal"), "Bells" stars Teri Polo, KaDee Strickland and Sarah Jones as Jane, Annie and Sammy, respectively, sisters who operate the family wedding-planning business. The show premieres tonight (see review below). Together, the sisters must assuage frayed nerves ("We've got a runner!" is an early line in tonight's first episode), broker peace between bickering family members and prepare for the unexpected disasters that accompany virtually every wedding day.
THE MOGAMBO GURU, E-ECONOMIC NEWSLETTER
-- Watching the economic idiocy all around me, and the impending collapse of the housing bubble which has been dubbed by some as The Biggest Speculative Bubble In Freaking History, my days are now spent almost exclusively in fear and frenzied activity, mostly in angrily stockpiling gold, silver, oil, ammo, and these terrific little frozen pizzas that score a bulls-eye with those of us whose tastes run to yummy pork products. During my spare time, I am compiling long, long lists of people to persecute mercilessly, on the way to their well-deserved and handily pre-ordained "guilty" verdicts, when I am finally crowned Omnipotent Emperor Mogambo and take over the joint, starting with the horrid Alan Greenspan. His insanely irresponsible over-creation of money and credit, while chairman of the Federal Reserve, directly or indirectly caused all of our problems, as this massive deluge of money worked its way into the prices of things, as it must, as there is nowhere else for the money to go! So I am laboring and grunting and muttering "Inflation's gonna kill us! Inflation's gonna kill us!" under my breath when, in the midst of the aforementioned labors, I got a funny email, and, as a writer of sorts, my sense of humor was partially restored by the runner-up in the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
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