Elinor Burkett, appearing Tuesday on HLN’s “The Joy Behar Show,” said Roger Ross Williams’ charge that she ambushed him is wrong.

” ‘Ambushed’ makes it sound like I was just some woman who stormed up on the stage,” Burkett said.

Williams and Burkett worked together on “Music by Prudence,” a half-hour film about a Zimbabwean woman who overcomes a severe disability and family rejection in one of the world’s poorest countries. It won the Academy Award for best short documentary.

Williams was 10 seconds into his acceptance when Burkett, 63, edged him from the microphone.

“He tried to make sure I couldn’t get there before him,” Burkett said. “He just didn’t seem to think I would be so rude to interrupt him.”

Burkett told Behar that Williams “big-footed me” by running to the stage while she was slowed by Williams’ elderly mother.

“I couldn’t get out,” she said.

“I think you get up and wait for me to get up, and we go up together graciously,” she said. “He starts talking when I’m halfway up.”

Video of the event showed Williams jogging from the rear of the Kodak Theater to the stage to take the gold Oscar statue and the microphone.

“Oh, my God, this is amazing,” Williams said. “Two years ago, when I got on an airplane and went to Zimbabwe, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I’d end up here. This is so exciting.”

By that point, Burkett had reached him.

“Just like a man, never lets a woman talk,” she told the Oscar audience. “Isn’t that just the classic thing?”

She explained to Behar that “either I could let him blather on for 45 seconds, or I could interrupt so I could get to talk.”

She wanted the acceptance speech to be about Prudence and the musicians in the documentary, “not that ‘I am so happy,’ ” she said.

Williams quietly watched as Burkett spoke, until the Oscar director cued exit music a minute into the speech.

“Prudence is here tonight,” Williams said, pointing to the audience. “This is for Prudence.”

Williams, appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Monday night, said the incident was “a little shocking.”

“I was there to talk about Prudence,” he said. “We were there to honor Prudence and her incredible message and her incredible story.”

King allowed Williams 80 seconds of airtime to complete his acceptance speech.

Williams said he and Burkett were no longer friends.

“There’s always, in the creative process, you get in disputes,” he said.

The incident, which played out before a television audience estimated to be more than 40 million viewers, has been compared to rapper Kanye West’s infamous interruption at the American Music Awards last fall.

West jumped on stage to declare his belief that Beyonce should have won the award, not Taylor Swift.

Burkett said it was not the same, since “Kanye didn’t get the Oscar.”

“We should have been able to flip a coin on who would speak,” she said.

“Music by Prudence” will make its television debut in the United States on HBO on May 12.

Author Jackie Collins has been churning out hot novels for more than four decades

With the rise of the tabloid culture, people now have many more outlets for gossip. That doesn’t bother Collins though.

“I still think I know more,” she said. “So many people want to tell me everything.”

Those tales of bad behavior have been shaping her books for many years. Her latest, “Poor Little Bitch Girl,” is no different.

Collins has been titillating fans with plotlines featuring a heavy dose of sex since she was first published in 1968, and her work was even banned early on in a few U.S. cities.

Right now, she’s producing a movie, “Paris Connections.” It’s being filmed in Paris and stars Charles Dance, Nicole Steinwedell (formerly of the television show “The Unit”) and Trudie Styler, best known as singer Sting’s wife. It’s about one of her popular characters, Madison Castelli.

The New York Times best-selling author spoke with CNN about being the queen of racy novels, why she’s not threatened by gossip sites and her secret obsession.

M.C. Frontalot’s “Nerdcore Rising” drops classic geek references ranging from Dr. Who to the Atari 2600

The South by Southwest Interactive conference kicks off Friday in Austin, Texas, offering up as pure a convergence of geek and rock sensibilities as you’re apt to find.

Started in 1987 to showcase Austin’s burgeoning alt-rock scene, South by Southwest added interactive and film gatherings in 1994.

Now, more than 17,000 people attend those two events, and South by Southwest is becoming as well-known for launching digital game-changers like Twitter as for musical acts like Beck.

All that is as good an excuse as any to round up our list of the top 10 geek anthems of all time.

From love songs about writing HTML code to synth-fueled denunciations of the cool kids, these odes to geekery are as good as it gets.

Which tunes did we leave out? This list could easily have been a Top 20. Click the player on the left to hear samples of our 10 songs, then join the conversation in the Sound Off section and make your case.

Our choices:

If men stay in good shape, they can enjoy more years of good sex, a study says

And a healthier sex life could mean a longer life.

That’s according to a paper written by University of Chicago researchers that was published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal. While the supposition that men think about sex more than women isn’t new, the paper’s findings have wider implication for attitudes toward public health and how patients respond to doctors’ advice, said Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and geriatric medicine who spearheaded the research.

“If you are a man diagnosed with diabetes or high blood pressure and I tell you that you need to lose weight and take medication, and I can say the benefit is five extra years of sex life, you might be more inclined to do what I tell you,” she explained.

Lindau said that women generally reported wanting less sex or receiving it less often for three reasons: Women outlive men by an average of five to six years and without a partner, women are less likely to engage in sex. Secondly, there’s a Western cultural acceptance — and removal of stigma — of men who have erectile dysfunction and have turned to relatively recently marketed drugs such as Viagra; women don’t have that.

“Also, there’s a difference in how we treat women for other diseases that affect their sexual desire,” Lindau said. “If a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer and she has, for example, her breasts removed, and we never counsel her about her sexual function, we start to realize how many years of life she’s losing. Not doing those things could mean 10 years of lost sexual activity.”

There are no FDA approved treatments for female sexual dysfunction other than estrogen to treat pain with intercourse, she said.

Lindau’s paper was sponsored by the nonprofit Institute of Medicine.

The paper considers data from two previously published studies that included more than 6,000 men and women, split into two co-ed groups: The first was age 25 to 74. The second group was age 57 to 85. Ninety-eight percent of participants reported having sexual partners only of the opposite sex, she said. Roughly 80 percent of men and 65 percent of women in the study were married or living with a partner.

None of the study’s participants was in a nursing home.

Questions were presented that asked them to give their relationship status and rate their health and the quality of their sex life from poor to excellent.

Excellent was defined not by the number of times someone had sex but the emotional and physical satisfaction of the experience. But, the survey described having sex “regularly” as two to three times a month, said Lindau.

Sex was defined to the 57- to 85-year-old group as “any mutually voluntary activity with another person that involves sexual contact, whether or not intercourse or orgasm occurs” in the past year. For the same time frame, those in the 25-74 age group were asked if they had “had sex with anyone.”

Participants had the option of assigning a number rating to their sex life, including “0″ for “the worst possible situation.” That phrase was up to them to interpret, said Lindau.

The physician concluded that men are more likely to be sexually active, have what they believe is better sex and are consistently more interested in sex than women. This drive for sex among men and the feeling that the sex they get is high quality doesn’t diminish with age. Lindau said it was difficult to ascertain exactly how many of these participants might have taken erectile dysfunction drugs.

If men stay in good shape, they can enjoy more years of good sex, the study says. At age 55, men in very good or excellent health on average gained five to seven years of sexually active life compared with their peers in poorer health. Women in very good shape gained 3 to 6 more years of a quality sex life than women who are less healthy.

For women 60 years and older, sex dropped off significantly overall and was even lower among those without partners. For men in that age range, having a partner didn’t matter — they still wanted sex consistently, the study found.

Among 75- to 85-year-old men, four out of 10 were still having sex, compared with two out of 10 women that age. Women whose partners were still alive, however, were having just as much sex as men, said Lindau.

“I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that older women don’t desire sex,” she said. “There’s a glass half full here. There’s a big hunk of older women still having sex. Women who initiate relationships later in life — they describe passionate love and sex like the way younger people do.”

Lindau said she was frustrated that her sampling was limited to heterosexuals, a typical quandary many experience when testing this topic, she said. She hopes to conduct another study focusing on aging homosexuals, bisexuals or people whose biological sex cannot be classified as either male or female.

]]> http://maxxza.com/Home/2010/03/10/23849/feed/ http://maxxza.com/Home/2010/03/10/lost-boys-actor-corey-haim-dies-aged-38/ http://maxxza.com/Home/2010/03/10/lost-boys-actor-corey-haim-dies-aged-38/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:04:24 +0000 Asiri http://maxxza.com/Home/?p=23847

A spokeswoman said he passed away in the early hours of Wednesday morning at Providence St Joseph Medical Centre.

A post-mortem will determine the cause of death and no other details have been released as yet.

The Canadian-born star’s first role was in the 1984 hit Firstborn. In recent years, he appeared in reality TV show The Two Coreys.

The series, which also starred Haim’s friend Corey Feldman, was cancelled in 2008 after two series.

The pair, who both have battled drug problems in the past, starred in the 1988 movie License to Drive together and became well known for their on and off screen partnership.

After Firstborn, Haim landed a role in the 1985 TV movie A Time to Live and also appeared in several episodes of the TV show Roomies.

He went on to become a teen heartthrob after starring in the 1986 film Lucas, alongside Charlie Sheen and Winona Ryder.

Haim starred alongside Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys, about a group of friends who do battle with a band of teenage vampires.