Upfront

A Dump of Snow Can’t fix EverythingJust days after the end of an embattled season that saw near record snowfall but a dip in visitors at Mt. Bachelor, the brass at POWDR Corp. is apparently clearing house in Bend.
A tipster told Upfront that several front office folks at Mt. Bachelor got their walking papers on Tuesday, including President Matt Janney.
Mt. B's former marketing director, Carly Carmichael, confirmed that she had been let go by her employer on Tuesday, just one day after the season ended on the mountain.
Carmichael said she couldn't comment on anything related to her departure.
"They told me they were restructuring," she said.

Maybe it was the hangover from an unusually cold or snowy winter, but the number of people who believe that the temperature of our planet is rising has dipped in the past year, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.
Roughly 71 percent of Americans believe in the theory of global warming, compared to 77 percent at the beginning of 2007, the study found. Not surprisingly the biggest dip came amongst Republicans. Those in the GOP who believe that global warming is real are now officially in the minority in the Flat Earth Party, down to 49 percent from 62 percent in 2007. Democrats also saw a small slip in their numbers dropping from 86 percent to 84 percent. Roughly 75 percent of Independents say they believe the Earth is growing hotter - down slightly from 78 percent.

It's All in the Finger of the Beholder
the chick with the most clicks.Who's the sexiest woman in the world? Upfront has our own opinion (we'll get to that later) but according to the men's on-line magazine FHM, it's Megan Fox, the 21-year-old star of the Transformers movies.
The shapely brunette, notable for her blue eyes and plentiful tattoos, beat out three Jessicas (Biel, Alba and Simpson), two Jennifers (Aniston and Love-Hewitt) and a swarm of Nicoles, Lindsays, Beyonces, Keiras, Charlizes, Halles and Giselles, plus a Fergie, to take top honors in the highly unscientific, on-line poll.

Big Bomb Theory
Stein is a lot of things, but movie star ain’t one of them. Ben Stein has had a checkered career - speech writer for Richard Nixon, TV game show host, business columnist, movie actor. But his latest foray into the entertainment world as movie producer doesn't seem to be panning out too well.
 
Stein's movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed opened last weekend with mediocre box office numbers and less than mediocre reviews. It's a purported documentary intended to support the theory of "intelligent design" and show how proponents of intelligent design face discrimination and harassment in academia. Among other subtleties, it attempts to link Darwinism to Nazi genocide and the Berlin Wall.

A big T.S. Eliot fan – honest. In news that will bring sorrow to the hearts of porn aficionados everywhere, Upfront has been informed that Sunset Thomas has shot her last XXX-rated feature.
A news release from Vavoom Films (we are not making this up) informed us that Thomas, the self-styled "Princess of Porn," has completed her final sex scene in what will be her final adult film, Into the Sunset. (We suspect the title is a pun.)
"Into the Sunset marks the end of quite an amazing career for this renowned adult superstar," the news release stated. Amazing indeed: The 36-year-old Sunset has starred in more than 100 porn movies going back to the early '90s, including such classics as Red Beaver Bonanza, Lesbians in Tight Shorts, Muffy the Vampire Layer and, most recently, Misty Beethoven, the first porno musical.

A couple of cowboysHe was Moses, Ben-Hur, Michelangelo, El Cid, Andrew Jackson and John the Baptist, not to mention about a hundred other less-well-known historic and fictional figures. But on the screen, Charlton Heston was always Charlton Heston.
Born Charlton Carter in Evanston, IL in 1923, Heston began his acting career on the stage and in TV and appeared in his first movie in 1950. His big break came two years later, when Cecil B. DeMille cast him in the circus movie The Greatest Show on Earth. But it was his performance as Moses in DeMille's 1959 epic The Ten Commandments that turned him into a Hollywood icon.
Other larger-than-life roles followed - notably as the title character in Ben-Hur, where Heston thrilled the kids with the famous chariot race scene (still considered one of the greatest action sequences ever filmed) and made their moms go weak in the knees by displaying his well-sculpted torso as a galley slave in a loincloth.

Your Terminated, "S"ucker. Carla Has the Brits Swooning
 
Members of the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Fan Club - which includes Upfront, we are proud to state - will be happy to know that they'll have an opportunity next month to purchase a nude photograph of the French first lady.
The catch is that it's expected to cost in the neighborhood of $4,000.
The photo, taken in 1993 by Swiss photographer Michel Comte, will be up for bids at a charity auction April 10 at Christie's in London, along with works by other noted photographers such as Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon and Leni Riefenstahl.

A macabre milestone was passed on Sunday: The 4,000th American soldier was killed in Iraq. The 4,000th death was recorded when four troops were killed by a roadside bomb that exploded near their vehicle in southern Baghdad.
The American death toll since the invasion of Iraq five years ago this month has now exceeded by 1,002 the number killed in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. It does not, of course, include the nearly 30,000 US troops who have been wounded in action, nor the Iraqi civilians who have been killed, a number that probably will be forever unknown but that has been estimated at more than 600,000.
Vice President Dick Cheney (he of the five Vietnam-era draft deferments) was interviewed by ABC News on Monday and asked to comment about the 4,000 American troop deaths. He seemed to think they were not that big a deal, pointing out that those who went to Iraq all volunteered for military service.