Ben Stein became a ladies man when Nancy Pimental, a screenwriter and writer on Comedy Central's "South Park" series, joined him as co-host on the hit Emmy Award-winning game show, "Win Ben Stein's Money." Pimental replaced veteran Jimmy Kimmel, who served as co-host for the first 65 episodes of the fourth season of the series, which debuted April 17th. Pimental took over for the remaining 65 episodes, which began airing on Monday, September 11th.[…]

Pimental, a Massachusetts native, graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a degree in chemical engineering and studied classical acting at a theater conservatory in Boston. After moving to Los Angeles, she performed stand-up and improv comedy and was hired as a writer for Comedy Central's animated hit, "South Park" in March of 1998.[…]

Laurie Anderson will tour a new solo work in performing arts centers across the United States. Anderson's new solo work will feature stories and simple, mainly acoustic instruments. Like much of her work, this one will look at contemporary culture, through various filters: synthetic language, love songs, animal communication and techno burn out.

The first live tests of Troy Hurtubise's grizzly-proof suit have found that its best protective feature is its bizarre appearance. Hurtubise donned the suit and squared up to a 145-kilogram (320-pound) female grizzly last week but the bear just found it too weird.

When confronted by Hurtubise in the Ursus Mark VI suit, the bear smelled a human, but saw an alien. "There's no grizzly that's going to come near you in that suit," the bear handler told him, after he spent 10 minutes in a cage with the cowering animal.

A team of explorers working off the western coast of Cuba say they have discovered what they think are the ruins of a submerged city built thousands of years ago. […]

The images the robot brought back confirmed the presence of huge, smooth blocks with the appearance of cut granite.

Some of the blocks were built in pyramid shapes, others were circular, researchers said.

They believe these formations could have been built more than 6,000 years ago, a date which precedes the great pyramids of Egypt by 1,500 years.

Junkets these days are no longer the legendary sleaze circuses of the 1970s and '80s, when the studios arranged all-expenses-paid mini-vacations for dozens of hacks to Paris or Aspen or New Orleans, complete with first-class airfare, bottomless bar tabs and, according to rumor, sometimes other delights as well. In 1989, for example, I attended a notorious four-day blowout in Memphis for "Great Balls of Fire!" a disastrous biopic that starred Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis. The junket reportedly cost more money than the film actually made in U.S. release, and the resulting publicity helped break the back of struggling Orion Pictures. (Since I live in New York, my graft level from the "Lord of the Rings" junket was pretty modest: an excellent grilled tuna sandwich, a bottle of Evian and two cups of coffee. Of course, there were also the standard grab-bag items: a CD of the score, a tie-in coffee-table book and a truly cheesy Gandalf goblet that lights up in red. No wizard's wand or Elvish Hotties calendar or anything.)

I know this: I will not have a wireframe Rudolph or Santa. I will not, God help me, have a projector that splashes Holiday Scenes against the side of the house. I will not have purple lights, no matter how much Target wants me to have purple lights - this is a Christmas display, not a marquee for a Prince-themed whorehouse. I will have a wall of white twinkling on the hill. I will have a smattering of gold lights in the bough that bends over the back staircase. I will have soft glowing red lights in the trees in the yard.

I will have a wife's elbow in my side every night, asking me if I turned them off before bed.

I will have a timer.