Powerball rises to $320 million, fourth-largest jackpot ever

Powerball rises to $320 million, fourth-largest jackpot ever

Get your tickets — the Powerball jackpot has grown to $320 million for Wednesday’s drawing, the fourth-largest prize in the lottery's history.

If taken as a lump sum, the cash value of the jackpot is $213.3 million, according to powerball.com. The prize grew after no one matched all six numbers in the multistate lottery drawing on Saturday. Although no one hit all six winning numbers — 4, 13, 39, 46, 51 and 1 as the Powerball — five tickets won $1 million because they matched five of six winning numbers. Those tickets were sold in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The national drawing, which is held in 42 states and the District of Columbia, is set to be the fourth-largest in Powerball history. In 2006, the top prize of $365 million went to eight workers in a ConAgra meatpacking plant in Lincoln, Neb., New York Lottery spokeswoman Christy Calicchia told FoxNews.com. (The largest all-time U.S. lottery winning occurred in March when three winning tickets split a Mega Millions prize of $656 million.)

The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 175 million, while the odds of winning any prize — including $4 for selecting the Powerball — are 1 in 31, according to the lottery’s website. No one has won big in Powerball since June 23, when a couple from Connecticut won $60 million, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Each Powerball ticket costs $2 and drawings are held twice weekly at 10:59 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Five numbered balls are selected from 59 white balls and one red ball — the Powerball — is drawn from 35 balls. Sales of tickets are stopped at least 59 minutes before the local drawing time and winners can select an annuitized prize paid in 30 payments or a lump sum payment, according to its website.

In April, three Maryland public school employees won a share of the record Mega Millions $656 jackpot, ending a mystery that involved a McDonald's employee who claimed she had the golden ticket.

Maryland Lottery Director Stephen Martino said the anonymous employees would each receive $34.997 million after taxes. The trio bought a total of 60 tickets at three different locations throughout the state, or a total investment of $20 per person for the $218.6 million portion of the grand prize.

At the time, the winners — a woman in her 20s, another in her 50s and a man in his 40s who referred to themselves as "The Three Amigos" — said they planned to purchase new homes. One had planned a backpacking trip through Europe, while another intended to finance his daughter’s college education. A third winner hoped to tour Italy's wine country, Martino said.

The announcement ended a two-week mystery following the record-breaking, $656 million drawing on March 30. Mirlande Wilson, a single mother of seven who worked at a Baltimore-area McDonald’s, claimed to have one of three winning tickets and went as far as alienating her co-workers by claiming she bought it separately from tickets she purchased for a pool of 15 co-workers.

The two other winning tickets were sold in Kansas and Illinois.

Baseball’s Drug Stain Continues With Suspension of Melky Cabrera

The fastball left Matt Harrison’s hand at 93 miles per hour, headed for the inner half of the plate, belt high. This was the All-Star Game, last month in Kansas City, and any hitter might have done what Melky Cabrera did to that pitch: lash it on a line into the left-field bullpen for a home run.

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images

Melky Cabrera, 28, the most valuable player of the 2012 All-Star Game, is hitting .346 with 11 home runs and 60 runs batted in.

Cabrera alone did not win the game for the National League — the score was 8-0 — but he was the best player on the field. He went 2 for 3 and earned the most valuable player award, a crystal bat named for Ted Williams. With his mother and grandmother by his side, he thanked the fans of Kansas City, where he played last season, and the fans of his new team, the San Francisco Giants, who voted him to start.

“I think the one person that has the most influence on me is the Lord,” Cabrera said that night. “He is the one that embraced me in terms of playing better.”

Harrison had to stand there and take it. It was his first All-Star Game, too, a reward for a strong first half in which he bounced back from losing Game 7 of the World Series. That was a road game for the Texas Rangers, in St. Louis, and they had hoped to secure home-field advantage this season with a victory in Kansas City. Not so.

On Wednesday, Major League Baseball suspended Cabrera for 50 games after he tested positive for testosterone, a banned substance. Cabrera acknowledged his guilt in a statement, apologizing for using a substance he should not have used.

“Anytime you hear about something like that, with someone that’s had success against you, it’s disappointing,” Harrison said Wednesday by his locker in the Rangers’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium.”You know that they got a little advantage over you because of something they took. But at the same time, it’s over with now. You move on. That’s something he has to deal with. It’s not my issue.”

Yes and no. If you follow baseball and care about it, and certainly if you play it, it is your issue, too.

The last generation is so stained by steroid use that three headliners on this winter’s Hall of Fame ballot — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa — are unlikely to be elected. So the career home run leader, the only seven-time Cy Young Award winner and the only man with three 60-homer seasons would be left out of Cooperstown, at least initially, a searing indictment of the era.

The game has the power to amaze and inspire, to rise instantly above the bad news. Just hours after the Cabrera suspension came down Wednesday, Felix Hernandex tossed a perfect game under glorious Seattle sunshine. But the cheaters keep pulling baseball down.

“You’re surprised, that goes without saying,” said Cabrera’s former teammate, the Yankees’ Derek Jeter. “That’s the initial reaction. You feel bad. You feel bad that you even have to be sitting here talking about it.”

The Cabrera suspension, Jeter said, at least shows that the system works. And M.L.B., on some level, is certainly glad to have a clear victory after losing the Ryan Braun arbitration hearing this spring. Braun tested positive for testosterone after a playoff game last October, but he avoided a 50-game ban by challenging the collection procedure.

Still, Braun’s Milwaukee Brewers won that playoff series, and the next month he was named the National League M.V.P. Just as Harrison cannot go back in time to face a different hitter at the All-Star Game, the Arizona Diamondbacks must live with the outcome of a playoff series during which the other team’s star player hit .500 while testing positive for testosterone.

“I’m sure they were pretty upset once they found out,” Harrison said. “He pretty much beat them himself in the playoffs.”

Cabrera’s transgression, at least, will cost his own team. The Giants are tied for first place in the N.L. West and have lost Cabrera for the rest of the regular season, plus the first five games of the playoffs, should they qualify.

But Cabrera is entering free agency this off-season, and surely he has cost himself dearly. Nobody truly knows if Cabrera is an All-Star in peak physical condition, or the doughy-bodied, rather ordinary player he was for the Yankees and the Atlanta Braves.

The Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, who has admitted using steroids when he played for the Rangers, encouraged Cabrera to work out with him after the 2010 season. This is not unusual for Rodriguez, who has worked out with other young players, like Kansas City’s Eric Hosmer and Baltimore’s Manny Machado, during off-seasons in Miami.

But the results were immediate for Cabrera, who had 201 hits for the Royals in 2011. Kansas City was unconvinced, trading Cabrera for pitcher Jonathan Sanchez, yet Cabrera seemed to cement his star status this season. His positive test, of course, makes you wonder how it really happened.

“It’s not my job to sit here and speculate,” Rodriguez said. “I saw someone who had a great run with us. He was a huge part of our world championship year in ’09, had a down year in Atlanta and decided to take his career and work extremely hard, and I saw him do that. He had a great run.”

That run is over now, or at least on hold, and Cabrera’s reputation will never be the same. Rodriguez said Cabrera was probably “sad and confused” now, but the confusion part is hard to believe. Just ask Cabrera’s victim at the All-Star Game.

“Everybody tries to have an edge, but that edge should be doing it the right way,” Harrison said. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t. I just don’t understand why you would take that chance when you know you’re going to get caught. I just don’t understand that.

“I guess it’s all good and everything, until you get caught.”

Julia Child and Me

On June 22, 2002, I interviewed Julia Child at her home in Santa Barbara. After ten minutes of ringing the front doorbell, I timidly ventured round to the backyard to find her seated on a patio vibrant with plantings and comfy outdoor furniture. She greeted me with a hand wave and smile, gesturing that I should join her.

I came bearing gifts: an apron I'd sewn especially for Ms. Child and a bottle of champagne. Ms. Child unwrapped the apron -- all ruffles and at least 10 sizes too small -- held it up and in her distinctive voice said, "Oh, dearie, dainty doesn't do in the kitchen." Then she sweetly handed it back to me. I quickly produced hostess gift #2. Sliding the bottle from its bag, she rewarded this present with a nod and murmured notation that this gift she would not be returning.

Seated across from one another at a small, cloth-covered table, we talked while she ate a simple lunch of an unadorned hamburger patty and sipped a pint carton of milk through a little straw. We conversed about my apron journey, the storytellers whose apron memories I'd collected and her personal apron story. In case my tape recorder failed to capture every syllable of her priceless recollection, I took down her words on a little notepad, utilizing a sort of frantic shorthand I hoped to God would later be decipherable.

Ms. Child told me that she hadn't had much experience in the kitchen and hadn't even worn an apron until she met her husband. Newly married in 1949, they moved to France, where she tasted French food and knew right then she wanted to learn about French cooking. Following the tradition of the Cordon Bleu cooking school, she began wearing the chef-type blue denim apron with a towel draped over the waist ties. "When Paul and I cooked together, he wore the same type apron, only folding the bib at the waist and hanging a towel from the apron pocket," she told me.

As soon as she began talking about her husband, sadness misted her face, and I was no longer sitting across from an icon. I was in the presence of a woman who'd lost the love of her life. "Paul and I always had breakfast and most of our meals with one another. After his retirement, we often ate at home in our kitchen. Upon his death in 1994, Paul and I had eaten together for almost fifty years." Fifty years.

Perhaps it was her sigh, or the controlled tidying of her cutlery, but in that instant she was my mother, also widowed and emotionally adrift without her prince charming. And just as quickly, my nervousness left me and for the next hour, we conversed easily, like old friends.

With Ms. Child in the lead on a shiny blue walker with handle bars, hand brakes and a basket, we walked single file from the back patio through the house. Graciousness personified, she acquiesced to my request for a photo of her in the doorway of the kitchen -- a miniature replica of the kitchen in the home she and her husband had lived in that is now housed in the Smithsonian.

Tying on her apron, she perched on a stool and noted the wall-mounted microwave as more an annoyance than convenience. Kitchen chitchat with Julia Child. I was in heaven.

The digital recording of that interview has been in a fireproof box for a decade, so fearful am I of erasing it.

Recorded is over sixty minutes of conversation, revelation, poignant recollection and homey, personal advice and wisdom that I've integrated into my life. Julia Child was a teacher of more than cooking.

Since misplacing the key years ago, I've decided to just let that day stay as is: locked away from sight, but not of memory.

Julia Child's apron story is published in The Apron Book (Andrews McMeel, 2006) by EllynAnne Geisel.

Ron Palillo Dies at 63; Played Horshack on TV

The 1970s TV show “Welcome Back, Kotter” featured, from left, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, John Travolta, Robert Hegyes, Ron Palillo (as Arnold Horshack) and Gabe Kaplan.

Ron Palillo, who portrayed the goofy high school underachiever Arnold Horshack in the hit 1970s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter” with such definitive oddballness that he had trouble for years afterward finding work as an actor, died on Tuesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 63.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his agent, Scott Stander.

“I know him, love what he does, not right for the part,” Mr. Palillo said in a 1997 newspaper interview, repeating what he said was the mantra of every casting director he met after his years on “Kotter,” which was on ABC from 1975 to 1979. “Everybody thought of me as Arnold Horshack. I resented Horshack for so many years.”

“Welcome Back, Kotter” starred Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher returning to his alma mater in Brooklyn to take over an unruly class of remedial students known collectively as the Sweathogs (because their top-floor classroom was always hot). The Sweathogs were Vinnie Barbarino (played by John Travolta), Freddie Washington (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes) and Horshack, to whom Mr. Palillo imparted two trademarks: a braying laugh that sounded like a DisposAll with a utensil caught in it, and a wild waving of his hand to answer Mr. Kotter (usually wrongly) while grunting: “Ooh, ooh, Mista Kahta! Mista Kahta!”

Mr. Travolta was the only one of the four to become a star. Mr. Hegyes died in January at 60.

After the show ended Mr. Palillo had supporting roles on television series like “The Love Boat” and “The A-Team.” But the Horshack typecasting became chronic. “I think producers could smell the desperation in me,” he told The Akron Beacon Journal in 1997.

Things changed in 1991 when he moved to New York. He was in the daytime drama “One Life to Live” for a year and had the lead role in an Off Off Broadway production of “Amadeus.” He taught drama at the University of Connecticut, his alma mater. In 2010, in West Hartford, Conn., he directed the first production of “The Lost Boy,” a musical he wrote based on the life of J. M. Barrie, author of “Peter Pan.”

Mr. Palillo was born on April 2, 1949, in Cheshire, Conn. He became involved in high school theater as a way of managing his stuttering, which abated over the years. Soon after graduating from college he was cast as an understudy in Lanford Wilson’s Off Broadway play “Hot L Baltimore,” the job he held when he landed the Horshack role.

Last year Mr. Palillo, who moved to Florida in 2010 to be near his aging mother, became a drama teacher at the G-Star School of the Arts, a charter high school in West Palm Beach. His survivors include his partner of 41 years, Joseph Gramm, as well as two brothers and a sister. His mother died last year.

Mr. Palillo made his peace with Horshack in recent years. The character was based largely on the person he was in high school, he told The Miami Herald in 2009. “He was the smartest kid in school,” he said.

The dumb act, he said, was a bluff. “He was giving up his aptitude in order to be liked. Then and now, that is a very common thing in teenagers.
”

Katy Perry Gets Cheeky After Water Park Wardrobe Malfunction

'I really think I deserve a season pass for that ass,' Perry writes after bikini bottom betrays her at California water park.

Katy Perry's bikini bottom may have betrayed her over the weekend at a California water park, but she's trying to turn that negative into a positive.

Yes, just hours after photos of her suffering a wardrobe malfunction at Raging Waters in San Dimas, California, began making the rounds (Napoleon was probably too busy on the water slide to notice), Perry took to her Twitter account to address the situation ... and, rather than chastise the pesky paparazzo that snapped the pics, she decided to get, uh, cheeky.

"Let's be fair, I really think I deserve a season pass for that ass," she wrote. "Oh, and some flip-flops."

We're sure the folks at Raging Waters would have no problem accommodating either request — mostly because, after filing our original story, they reached out to MTV News via Twitter, writing: "FYI-We're sending @katyperry a Season Pass, flip flops, & a new swimsuit."
Making things happen! Perry hit the park with some pals (John Mayerwasn't one of them) and has been in the process of unwinding following the whirlwind success of her Teenage Dream album. Just last month, at the premiere of her "Part of Me" 3-D film, Perry told MTV News that her plans involved little more than "go[ing] the f--- away."
"I'm going into hiding. I want to go and write songs in the woods or something," she said. "I'm gonna unplug, take my hair extensions out, feel my head again. I'm gonna unplug and recharge, if that makes any sense."
Unless, of course, she wants to use that Raging Waters Season Pass.

Taylor Swift blasts ex-boyfriend in new song, ‘Never Ever Getting Back Together,’ from upcoming album ‘Red’

Taylor Swift blasts ex-boyfriend in new song, ‘Never Ever 


Getting Back Together,’ from upcoming album ‘Red’ 


 
Taylor Swift with current boyfriend Connor Kennedy during a date on Cape Cod.

Even as her relationship with Kennedy scion Connor seems to blossom, Taylor Swift unveiled a brand-new song about a previous breakup.

On Monday — the same day news broke of Swift's purchase of a $5 million vacation pad near the Kennedy family's Cape Cod compound — the 22-year-old singer debuted her new track, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together."

Swift with fellow Taylor, Lautner, during Teen Choice 2011 Awards last August.

The pop/country crooner introduced the song, available on iTunes, during an online chat with fans, People reported. The track will be on her next album, "Red," which lands on Oct. 22.

Fans have already started speculating which of Swift's previous boldface boyfriends she's "never ever, ever getting back together" with. Among her previous heartbreaks are "Twilight" star Taylor Lautner, actor Jake Gyllenhaal and singer-songwriter-cad John Mayer.

The singer with then boyfriend John Mayer in Dec. 2009.

Swift herself didn't spill the beans during an interview on "Good Morning America" Tuesday morning. But she did shed some light on the origin of the song.

"This guy walks in who is a friend of my ex's and starts talking about how he's heard we're going to get back together. And that was not the case," Swift told "GMA." "So I start telling them the story: break up, get back together, break up, get back together – just, ugh, the worst! And I picked up the guitar and [songwriting partner Max Martin] said, 'This is what we're writing.' "

JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC

Swift and Joe Jonas at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards.

Helen Gurley Brown, I'll Miss You

Helen Gurley Brown, I'll Miss You

As a kid growing up in rural Minnesota, I remember watching Helen Gurley Brown on "The Tonight Show." An insomniac, I'd probably tossed and turned for a long time before finally slipping out of bed and padding down the hall to find my mother sitting in our darkened living room. A poor sleeper herself, mom would be drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.

The program was still in black and white and Johnny might be in the middle of his monologue, a skit or even "stump the band." Commercials would follow and next there would be the parade of guests -- first in the chair and then moving to the couch. I'd curl up on our own couch and get ready to enjoy the show.

Witty, trendy and impossibly thin, Helen Gurley Brown was one of Johnny's favorites. She appeared many times over the years and always said something that made Johnny laugh and often something that shocked him a little. Totally at ease, she spoke casually about New York nightlife, single women, fashion, gossip and sex.

I was mesmerized.

She had written that famous book that I'd heard about and wanted to read, "Sex and the Single Girl." I remember telling some of my grade school friends about it and feeling very brazen saying that word. Sex.

Almost a decade would go by before I got my hands on a copy and learned (to my dismay) it wasn't a how-to manual with pictures, but a more highly sophisticated book about the sexual revolution, feminism and women having it all. I was also surprised the author's name wasn't spelled the way I thought it was.

It was not, Helen Girly Brown.

When I found out Girly was actually Gurley, I was taken aback and perplexed. How could I have gone years and years and never known this? I'd felt an affinity for this woman who could appear so relaxed and so at comfortable in her own skin. Her nickname, "girly," made her relatable. Even a kid from the sticks could identify with a grown woman who wanted it all and yet be girly at the same time.

As I grew older, I subscribed to "Cosmopolitan" magazine, and I got to know Helen Gurley Brown as a writer, editor and groundbreaker. She was someone who saw what might be, and then strived to convey those ideas and possibilities to her readers. I wouldn't say I was ever a real "Cosmo Girl," but I liked a lot of her message.

I indeed wanted it all, and she made it alright to be female and yet strive for everything on my list -- the career, family, travel, relationships, books, music, clothes, and so much more.

Helen Girly Brown. Thank you. You made your mark and I will miss you.