Kristin Cavallari Sexy Bikini Pics

Kristin Cavallari was eliminated from Dancing With the Stars this week. She's taking it pretty well, but that doesn't mean she's not surprised and disappointed. Oh well now she has some more time to go to the beach

Walter Payton book paints disturbing picture of Bears legend

He popped painkillers like candy and covered his body with a topical gel used on horses when he played professional football. When Walter Payton retired, he took even more painkillers.
He kept a mistress for years and had other extramarital affairs, even while he publicly maintained he was happily married to his longtime wife, Connie.
At his Hall of Fame induction — which should have been a highlight in his life — his wife sat in the front row. And his flight attendant girlfriend sat in the second. His longtime assistant was in charge of keeping them apart. Payton was miserable.
And in retirement, he constantly told friends he wanted to kill himself, at one point even holding a gun while telling his agent of his dark plans.
So claims a new biography of the Chicago Bears’ legend, Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton,which is scheduled to be released next week .
The book paints a startling picture of the career and post-retirement days of the NFL’s one-time leading rusher and one of the game’s all-time greats.
But best-selling author Jeff Pearlman also lays out a far more complicated portrait of a man who many in Chicago still idolize 12 years after his death from a rare liver disease — a portrait that is at times poignant and heart-wrenching and at other times unflattering and salacious.
“He was addicted to laughter,” Kimm Tucker, former executive director of Payton’s foundation, says of her boss in the book. Payton would often insist on first playing catch with kids who asked him for autographs and then offer them words of inspiration.
But after retiring in 1987, the book recounts how depression set in. He was often bored because he had several assistants to handle his legal, financial and personal affairs. He tried race-car driving but was nearly killed. He tried repeatedly to become an owner of an NFL team — but failed.
“His football career done, his auto racing days over after a near-fatal crash and his dream of owning an NFL franchise having fallen through, Payton often found himself suffocated by darkness,” says the book, excerpts of which were first posted on Sports Illustrated’s website Wednesday. “Oh, he wouldn’t let on as such. He laughed and told jokes and pinched rear ends and tried his best to come across as the life of the party. Inside, however, happiness eluded Payton in the same manner he had once eluded opposing linebackers.”
In a statement issued Wednesday and signed by “Connie Payton and family,” Walter Payton’s relatives said the book included fact and fiction.
“Walter, like all of us, wasn’t perfect,” the statement reads. “The challenges he faced were well known to those of us who loved and lived with him. He was a great father to Jarrett and Brittney and held a special place in the football world and the Chicago community. Recent disclosures — some true, some untrue — do not change this. I’m saddened that anyone would attempt to profit from these stories, many told by people with little credibility.”
The Chicago Bears also issued a statement that did not directly address some of the accusations in the book, but said, “When we take the field each Sunday, we represent the great players like Walter who helped build the rich tradition of our organization. Nothing will change our feelings for a man we have the deepest respect for and miss having around Halas Hall to this day.”
Many former teammates Wednesday declined to comment on the book.
Pearlman, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, said in an interview posted on SI.com that he knew little about Payton when he began writing the book. He defended including some of the ugly details of Payton’s life, which he dug up after interviewing 678 people over 21/2 years.
“There’s something important about learning that even the greatest among us have their burdens. Whether you’re a Hall of Fame running back or a guy moving cement, we all have issues. No one lives up to the pedestal. . . . The goal is to find out who he was and how he lived. I’m very defensive about that. You want to write an honest and accurate biography.”
Pearlman wrote that Payton’s drug use could be traced in part to the punishment Payton took on the field. He started using painkillers — “pills and liquids, usually supplied by the Bears,” Pearlman writes.
“I’d see him walk out of the locker room with jars of painkillers, and he’d eat them like they were a snack,” Payton’s longtime agent, Bud Holmes, says in the book. He “also lathered his body with dimethyl sulfoxide, a topical analgesic commonly used to treat horses,” Pearlman writes.
Payton kept tanks of nitrous oxide — laughing gas — in an RV he took to training camp, which he shared with other players, the book says.
“The goofy laughter could be heard throughout the training facility,” the book says.
After his playing days, Payton continued to use nitrous as well as a combination of Tylenol and Vicodin. His drug use got so bad, Pearlman writes, he once went to several dentists complaining of tooth pain, enabling him to get multiple prescriptions for morphine. A pharmacist tipped police but he got off with a warning, the book says.
Despite the many tales of Payton’s rigorous fitness regime during his playing career — including running up and down a steep hill repeatedly — the biography says that changed once he retired, and he started drinking beer and eating tons of junk food.
An executive from Wendy’s even gave Payton a card granting a free lifetime supply of hamburgers at the fast food chain — freebies he routinely collected, Pearlman writes. Payton dumped 10 sugar packs into each cup of coffee and enjoyed pork rinds with hot sauce.
His marriage became “a union solely in name,” the book says. Kimm Tucker said she didn’t realize Walter and Connie were still married until a year after she started working for him in 1987. The book says Payton planned to divorce Connie after their kids finished high school so as not to pull them through “the rigors of a celebrity divorce,” Tucker said in the book.
Longtime friend Ron Atlas told Pearlman that Payton feared if “he left Connie, all the work he’d done to his image would go by the wayside.”
The dual life came to a head in the days before Payton was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1993 because his longtime mistress had insisted on attending the ceremony, and was staying at the same hotel as his wife and kids, Pearlman writes. Payton put his executive assistant, Ginny Quirk, in charge of keeping Connie and his girlfriend — identified only by an alias, Lita — apart.
“Four full days, and Lita and Connie were like two ships passing in the night,” Quirk said in the book. “If Connie was scheduled to come late, I’d make sure Lita was there early. If Connie was coming early, Lita would be there late. I can’t describe the horror of that trip.”
According to the book, Payton stayed in his hotel room with Lita and missed most of the Hall of Fame functions — including one “that left a Hall official fuming and earned the scorn of Bears legend Gale Sayers, who blasted his attitude. Ray Nitschke, the great Packers linebacker, issued an impassioned plea to Payton to make himself more available. It didn’t work.”
But the book says the two women ended up talking after the ceremony, and Connie allegedly told her, “You can have him. He doesn’t want me or the children.”
Despite his affairs, Payton was lonely, and would call his assistants at all hours to talk or confide, Pearlman writes. His behavior became erratic and he often suffered from mood swings. He’s described in the book as being “giddy one second, despondent the next.”
On multiple occasions, Payton threatened suicide. The threats came, according to the book, after fights with Connie or Lita or when he worried about finances, Pearlman writes.
His agent recalls a time when Payton, with a gun drawn, called him from his South Barrington home. “Walter would call me at the time saying he was about to kill himself,” Holmes is quoted as saying. “He was tired. He was angry. Nobody loved him. He wanted to be dead.”
The books says Holmes rushed to Payton’s side after that threat — but Payton had already pulled out of the funk. Holmes didn’t take his threats seriously again. Payton, meanwhile, refused to see a therapist.
Pearlman writes of Payton penning a letter to an unnamed friend, saying he needed to get his life in order. In the letter, Payton writes he’s afraid of doing something he’d regret — and admitted regularly thinking of suicide. Thinking about “the people I put into this f----- up situation, maybe it would be better if I just disappear,” Payton wrote, according to the book.
Payton said he imagined picking up his gun, murdering those around him, then turning the weapon on himself. “Every day something like this comes into my head,” he wrote. He was distraught over these persistent thoughts about wanting to “hurt so many others” and not thinking “it is wrong.” Payton ended the letter by admitting that he needed help but that he had nowhere to turn.
The excerpts released Wednesday do not indicate whether doctors believe Payton suffered brain damage while playing, something that could have affected his mental state.
The book describes Payton’s further downward spiral when his health failed him and how he dealt with breaking the news to his family, friends and fans.
Quirk tells Pearlman that, after he appeared thin and gaunt at a 1999 news conference announcing his son’s decision to attend Miami University, many people asked her if he was dying of AIDS.
It was really a rare disease called primary sclerosing cholangitis, which blocked the ducts carrying bile from his liver. It had been diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic in December 1998.
The book describes how Payton told his family after the diagnosis, gathering them in the basement of their South Barrington home. Payton was positive, telling them how a liver transplant would solve the problem, according to the book.
He told his fans about his diagnosis three days after his son’s press conference. The news conference, in which Payton broke down and told people “Hell yeah, I’m scared” — had behind the scenes drama, too.
According to the book, Payton was furious that Connie was there, screaming at his aides and demanding to know “which one of you did this?”
The book also details Payton’s final days — and how his former backfield mate, Matt Suhey, stepped up big time even though they had not been extremely close in the preceding years. Suhey stopped by Payton’s house on most days, and blocked for him once again when Payton needed privacy. Teammate Mike Singletary also became a regular visitor, even though the two had been distant since 1985 when Singletary, a religious man, first confronted Payton about his infidelity. Payton also brought other old teammates to his home, essentially to say goodbye.
“I was there with about 30 other guys,” offensive tackle Jimbo Covert is quoted as saying. “Walter took time to go around to everybody personally and grab him and say, ‘What are you doing?’ . . . Can you imagine how strong a person he had to have been to do that? He knew he was going to die.”
The book also tells how Payton reached out to his children as he was dying. Payton, who also kept a home in West Dundee, had moved back into the South Barrington home in July 1999 and took turns staying in Jarrett’s and Brittney’s rooms.
“At the time I didn’t get it,” Jarrett says in the book, “but now I think it’s so cool he wanted to share himself with us.”
That November, on the day Payton died, Brittney remembers rushing home after being called out of school.
“Do you want to see dad one last time?” her mother asked, the book says. Brittney said she hugged her father and “told him I loved him. I was sad, but a part of me was relieved. . . . Now, he was at peace.”
this story featured at: SunTimes

Amanda Palmer gets graphic with 'Evelyn Evelyn'

Amanda Palmer has had a multitude of gigs over the years: singer, songwriter, punk cabaret "piano-slayer," author and living statue, among them.

Now she can add graphic novelist to the list. Palmer is co-writer with fellow musician Jason Webley on Evelyn Evelyn, a hardcover book from Dark Horse Comics out in comic shops Wednesday and available at bookstores and Amazon Oct. 4. Gorgeously illustrated by Cynthia von Buhler, the graphic novel chronicles the story of conjoined twin sisters Eva and Lynn Neville
Used to be the lead singer, pianist, lyricist/composer of the duo The Dresden Dolls, but has now started a successful solo career and is also half of the Evelyn Evelyn duo. I've been listening to her album 'Who killed Amanda Palmer' and also 'Amanda Palmer plays.... Radiohead' on Spotify and love it! See what you think: Amanda's myspace page

Did Nicole Richie get a boob job?

Did Nicole Richie get a boob job?
According to Us Weekly, the reality star-turned-designer -- who just celebrated her 30th birthday -- has gone under the knife to increase her breast size.
Richie has reportedly talked to her friends about getting some work done, and after recent photos of her vacationing in Mexico surfaced, it looks like she might have decided to take the plastic plunge.
"In the past, she said she wanted a lift, though we never thought she was serious," a source said about Richie.
For more about Richie's reported plastic surgery, head over to Us Weekly.

Brandi Glanville or Leann Rimes? Tough Choice Eddie Cibrian

BRANDI GLANVILLE:

VS.

LEANN RIMES

LeAnn Rimes clearly isn't the only person who can rock a tiny two piece. Her husband's former wife and new Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member Brandi Glanville showed the country singer how it's done as she splashed around in a barely there black bikini in Malibu yesterday. The former model flashed her long lean limbs and enviably flat stomach as she strolled along the shore line with a big grin on her face.
Brandi has been spending a lot of time on the beach recently having recently returned from Hawaii where she shot her first scenes for Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alongside Camille Grammer, Kyle and Kim Richards, Taylor Armstrong and Lisa Vanderpump.
The mother-of-two was married to actor Eddie Cibrian for nine years before he left her following an affair with Rimes, whom he then married earlier this year. The pair met while filming Northern Lights, a Lifetime TV movie, in the summer of 2009 and began an affair.
Since their wedding in April, LeAnn has been seen showing off her own skinny bikini body in a vast array of tiny two-pieces on a very regular basis.
SO WHO WOULD YOU RATHER BE WITH??

NFL -Bears Return for nothing..Greatest Punt Return?

Bears' 'incredible' return goes for naught Devin Hester fakes out the Packers punt coverage team, freeing up Johnny Knox to score almost untouched. The plan is brilliant -- except for a holding penalty that negates the TD. CHICAGO—It will go down as one of the strangest special teams plays in NFL history—and it didn't even count.

With 1:09 left in Sunday's game and the Packers holding a 27-17 lead over the Bears, Green Bay's Tim Masthay punted from the Chicago 46. The Packers' coverage team converged on Devin Hester, the Bears' extraordinary return man, who seemed to be preparing to field the kick.

Devin Hester fakes out  the Packers' punt coverage team, freeing up Johnny Knox to score almost untouched. The plan is brilliant -- except for a holding penalty that negates the TD.

The Packers didn't realize that Masthay's punt drifted left toward the Bears sideline, where Johnny Knox caught it and, with a couple of blockers to clear the way, returned it 89 yards for a touchdown. But wait. Penalty on the play. Chicago's Corey Graham was called for holding, nullifying Knox's long return. That backed up the Bears to their own 10, and the game ended three plays later.

Packers coach Mike McCarthy called it "poor awareness" by his coverage unit. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers called it something else.

“That was the most incredible play I’ve ever seen in seven years and being a sports fan,” Rodgers said. “I think everyone on the sideline was wondering what the heck just happened as he’s running down the sideline with two blockers in front of him. Honestly, we were just talking about it in the locker room. That was the most incredible play that I’ve ever seen. Everybody went with Devin, I think, and Johnny fell off. Incredible.”

Someone asked Rodgers is he was relieved to see the yellow flag, which prevented the Bears from closing to within three points.

“Hell, yeah,” he said, smiling. “We would have had to cover an onside kick.”

LINDSEY WIXSON FALLS AT VERSACE SPRING 2012: MILAN FASHION WEEK (PHOTOS)

LINDSEY WIXSON FALLS AT VERSACE SPRING 2012: MILAN FASHION WEEK (PHOTOS):

Lindsey Wixson may be one of our favorite gap-toothed models, but that's her only imperfection. The 17-year-old model, known for her plump pout and precious dimples recently took a tumble on the Versace Spring 2012 runway (an incident conveniently edited out of the show's video below). While she recovered in time to continue her catwalk, we wonder what Donatella had to say after the show. This isn't the first time Wixson has stumbled; the Wichita, Kansas native also fell last May when walking the runway for Fashion For Relief in Cannes. Let's hope this doesn't become a pattern.

Sly Stone Homeless- living in a van

Soul music legend Sly Stone, best known as the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, has squandered his fortune and is living homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.

“I like my small camper,” Stone told the New York Post in an article co-written by William Alkema, director of a documentary about the band. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.” Stone once lived in a Beverly Hills mansion and a Napa Valley compound. But the Post reported that his fortune was stolen “by a lethal combination of excess, substance abuse and financial mismanagement.” He lives now in a white camper that he parks in L.A.’s Crenshaw neighborhood. A retired couple feeds him daily and allows him to shower in their home, the paper reported. Stone said he has been recording new music on his laptop. Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Stone+homeless+streets/5460856/story.html#ixzz1Z78PzWfM

Jacoby Ellsbury joins 30-30 club, AL MVP discussion

Jacoby Ellsbury joins 30-30 club, AL MVP discussion: Jacoby Ellsbury had a nice little Sunday. Not only did the former Madras High School and Oregon State standout become the first Red Sox player to join the 30-homer, 30-stolen-base club, but he also kept Boston in the driver's seat of the American League wild card race with a game-winning, 14th-inning three-run homer. Ellsbury has his MVP moment: There have been 23 players -- including Ellsbury this year, obviously -- who have pulled off the 31 HR/103 RBIs/117 runs/208 hits statistical four-pack, with it being accomplished a total of 33 times. Lou Gehrig did it five times, Chuck Klein three, and four players did it twice, including Alex Rodriguez and Todd Helton, who is one of three Coors Field legends on the list, along with Ellis Burks and Larry Walker. Jacoby Ellsbury Makes Final Case For 2011 AL MVP: It's a feat no one thought possible but which now makes him a complete five-tool player and one of the best all-around players in MLB. So what do you think? Should Jacoby Ellsbury win the American League MVP?

NFL Poll - Torrey Smith or Lee Evans?

When the Baltimore Ravens brought in veteran WR Lee Evans, a lot of fans felt the team had the perfect complement to possession receiver Anquan Boldin. One of the main reasons the Ravens traded for Evans during Training Camp was that they were not comfortable going with rookie WR Torrey Smith opposite Boldin as starters at wide receiver. Word was that Smith was not grasping the playbook and was actually behind fellow rookie Tandon Doss, and perhaps even second year pro David Reed. Evans hurt his foot and despite playing the first two games of the 2011 regular season, he obviously was not himself and seemed slowed by his injury. This resulted in being inactive for yesterday's game at the St. Louis Rams with the hope and plans being that the rest would have him ready for next week's big game when the Ravens host the New York Jets on Sunday Night Football. That meant the team's 2nd round draft pick, Smith, would have the chance to step up and show the team what he could add to the offense in place of Evans. No one expected the record-setting performance that Smith put on, showcasing his talents that now have the Ravens facing a relatively enjoyable and peasant conundrum. When the Jets come to Baltimore, which WR should the Ravens start next to Boldin now will be a tough decision. Should it be the veteran Evans, who could be completely healthy and ready to do what he did in pre-season, which was to stretch the field and take attention away from the other options in QB Joe Flacco's crosshairs? Or should it be the hot kid, who now will command respect from the secondary who previously rolled coverage towards Boldin or crept up to the line of scrimmage to stack the box and dare Flacco to throw? The chances of Smith repeating that sort of afternoon are relatively slim, but not as remote as you think, as even one score a game would be enough to raise him to star status. Even if he starts and does not catch a single pass, the thought is already planted into the Ravens opponents that he could break out again at any moment and do to them what he did to the Rams. Therefore, he has become that "deep threat" that the Ravens wanted when they selected him in April. Lee Evans already has that respect, so either of the two has already made their mark on the Ravens passing offense after only three games in the 2011 season. This is not a print to the finish, it is still a marathon, with over three quarters of the regular season remaining. The Ravens will get a week of after the Jets game, as their Bye comes in week five. It seems only natural to give Lee Evans another two weeks of rest before the Ravens return in week six to host the Houston Texans in what should be expected to possibly be an offensive showdown. Playing the "hot hand" with Torrey Smith will both save Evans for the rest of the season and continue to give Smith the confidence to be a part of the offense and contribute on a regular basis. Luckily for the Ravens and unluckily for the Jets and the rest of the Ravens opponents, this is a great place to be for a tough decision.