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Drop Dead Gorgeous (film)
''Drop Dead Gorgeous'' is a 1999 American satirical mockumentary black comedy film about a small town beauty pageant, directed by Michael Patrick Jann, and starring Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin, Brittany Murphy, Allison Janney, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, and Amy Adams in her film debut. The satirical dynamics of a Minnesota town unfold as multiple contestants in the regional American Teen Princess Pageant begin to die suspiciously. The film has gained new fans with time and is now regarded as a cult film. Plot In 1995, Mount Rose, Minnesota is preparing for the annual Sarah Rose Cosmetics Mount Rose American Teen Princess Pageant beauty pageant. Ambitious Amber Atkins, an optimist, signs up to follow in the footsteps of her idol Diane Sawyer. Her mother, Annette is a former contestant. Amber works after school in the mortuary, applying makeup to corpses. They live in a small trailer near their friend Loretta. Fellow contestant Rebecca ("Becky") Leeman is the daughter of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Patrick Jann
Michael Patrick Jann (born May 15, 1970, Albany, New York) is an American actor, writer, and director best known as a cast member on MTV's ''The State''. Career Jann attended New York University, where, as a freshman, he joined the then-new comedy troupe The New Group, which was eventually renamed to The State. The troupe continued performing after college, and in 1993 they gained their own series on MTV, the sketch comedy show ''The State'', which ran until 1995. Jann and David Wain directed a majority of the sketches on the series. In 1999, Jann directed the film '' Drop Dead Gorgeous'', which is his feature film directorial debut. Jann produced, and directed many episodes of the 2003-2009 Comedy Central series ''Reno 911!'', which was created by several members of The State. He co-wrote the 2006 film ''Let's Go to Prison'', along with The State members (and ''Reno 911!'' cast members) Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. He directed most of the episodes of the 2008 HBO show ''Li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allison Janney
Allison Brooks Janney (born November 19, 1959) is an American actress. In a career spanning three decades, she is known for her performances across multiple genres of screen and stage. Janney has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and seven Primetime Emmy Awards, in addition to nominations for two Tony Awards. Born in Boston and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Janney received a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art following her graduation from Kenyon College. After years of minor and uncredited film and television appearances, Janney's breakthrough came with the role of C. J. Cregg in the NBC political drama ''The West Wing'' (1999–2006), for which she received four Primetime Emmy Awards. In 2014, she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Margaret Scully on the Showtime period drama ''Masters of Sex''. For her portrayal of Bonnie Plun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tax Evasion
Tax evasion is an illegal attempt to defeat the imposition of taxes by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. Tax evasion often entails the deliberate misrepresentation of the taxpayer's affairs to the tax authorities to reduce the taxpayer's tax liability, and it includes dishonest tax reporting, declaring less income, profits or gains than the amounts actually earned, overstating deductions, using bribes against authorities in countries with high corruption rates and hiding money in secret locations. Tax evasion is an activity commonly associated with the informal economy. One measure of the extent of tax evasion (the "tax gap") is the amount of unreported income, which is the difference between the amount of income that should be reported to the tax authorities and the actual amount reported. In contrast, tax avoidance is the legal use of tax laws to reduce one's tax burden. Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they desc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Food Poisoning
Foodborne illness (also foodborne disease and food poisoning) is any illness resulting from the spoilage of contaminated food by pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites that contaminate food, as well as prions (the agents of mad cow disease), and toxins such as aflatoxins in peanuts, poisonous mushrooms, and various species of beans that have not been boiled for at least 10 minutes. Symptoms vary depending on the cause but often include vomiting, fever, and aches, and may include diarrhea. Bouts of vomiting can be repeated with an extended delay in between, because even if infected food was eliminated from the stomach in the first bout, microbes, like bacteria (if applicable), can pass through the stomach into the intestine and begin to multiply. Some types of microbes stay in the intestine. For contaminants requiring an incubation period, symptoms may not manifest for hours to days, depending on the cause and on quantity of consumption. Longer incubation periods tend to cau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico covers ,Mexico ''''. . making it the world's 13th-largest country by are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swan
Swans are birds of the family (biology), family Anatidae within the genus ''Cygnus''. The swans' closest relatives include the goose, geese and ducks. Swans are grouped with the closely related geese in the subfamily Anserinae where they form the tribe (biology), tribe Cygnini. Sometimes, they are considered a distinct subfamily, Cygninae. There are six living and many extinct species of swan; in addition, there is a species known as the coscoroba swan which is no longer considered one of the true swans. Swans usually mate for life, although "divorce" sometimes occurs, particularly following nesting failure, and if a mate dies, the remaining swan will take up with another. The number of bird egg, eggs in each :wikt:clutch, clutch ranges from three to eight. Etymology and terminology The English word ''swan'', akin to the German language, German , Dutch language, Dutch and Swedish language, Swedish , is derived from Indo-European root ' ('to sound, to sing'). Young swans are kn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tap Dance
Tap dance is a form of dance characterized by using the sounds of tap shoes striking the floor as a form of percussion. Two major variations on tap dance exist: rhythm (jazz) tap and Broadway tap. Broadway tap focuses on dance; it is widely performed in musical theater. Rhythm tap focuses on musicality, and practitioners consider themselves to be a part of the jazz tradition. The sound is made by shoes that have a metal "tap" on the heel and toe. There are different brands of shoes which sometimes differ in the way they sound. Ok History The fusion of several ethnic percussive dances, such as West African step dances and Welsh, Irish, and Scottish clog dancing, hornpipes, and jigs, tap dance is believed to have begun in the mid-1800s during the rise of minstrel shows. As minstrel shows began to decline in popularity, tap dance moved to the increasingly popular Vaudeville stage. Due to Vaudeville's unspoken "two-colored rule", which forbade blacks to perform solo, many Vaudevi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canadians, Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creole language, creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutination, agglutinative morphology. ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in West Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has been propagated w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deaf
Deafness has varying definitions in cultural and medical contexts. In medical contexts, the meaning of deafness is hearing loss that precludes a person from understanding spoken language, an Audiology, audiological condition. In this context it is written with a lower case ''d''. It later came to be used in a cultural context to refer to those who primarily communicate through sign language regardless of hearing ability, often capitalized as ''Deaf'' and referred to as "big D Deaf" in speech and sign. The two definitions overlap but are not identical, as hearing loss includes cases that are not severe enough to impact spoken language comprehension, while cultural Deafness includes hearing people who use sign language, such as Child of deaf adult, children of deaf adults. Medical context In a medical context, deafness is defined as a degree of hearing difference such that a person is unable to understand speech, even in the presence of amplification. In profound deafness, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mobile Home
A mobile home (also known as a house trailer, park home, trailer, or trailer home) is a prefabricated structure, built in a factory on a permanently attached chassis before being transported to site (either by being towed or on a trailer). Used as permanent homes, or for holiday or temporary accommodation, they are often left permanently or semi-permanently in one place, but can be moved, and may be required to move from time to time for legal reasons. Mobile homes share the same historic origins as travel trailers, but today the two are very different, with travel trailers being used primarily as temporary or vacation homes. Behind the cosmetic work fitted at installation to hide the base, mobile homes have strong trailer frames, axles, wheels, and tow-hitches. History In the United States, this form of housing goes back to the early years of cars and motorized highway travel. It was derived from the travel trailer (often referred to during the early years as "house traile ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diane Sawyer
Lila Diane Sawyer (; born December 22, 1945) is an American television broadcast journalist known for anchoring major programs on two networks including ''ABC World News Tonight'', '' Good Morning America'', ''20/20'', and '' Primetime'' newsmagazine while at ABC News. During her tenure at CBS News she hosted '' CBS Morning'' and was the first woman correspondent on '' 60 Minutes''. Prior to her journalism career, she was a member of U.S. President Richard Nixon's White House staff and assisted in his post-presidency memoirs. Presently she works for ABC News producing documentaries and interview specials. Early life Sawyer was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, to Jean W. (née Dunagan), an elementary school teacher, and Erbon Powers "Tom" Sawyer, a county judge. Her ancestry includes English, Irish, Scots-Irish, and German. She has an older sister, Linda. Soon after her birth, her family moved to Louisville, where her father rose to local prominence as a Republican politician and commu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
