Charlize Theron 's dart skill

Academy Award-winning beauty Charlize Theron knows how to throw a good arrow.

The 30-year-old Monster star hustled a group of hardened miners to play darts with her - and won, contactmusic reported.
Theron, during her stay in a Minnesota mining town to research her character for the new movie North Country, thought she could give the locals a run for their money and beat them at the timeless pub game.

The website claimed her dart-throwing skills won her plenty of money and accolades in pubs throughout the area.

"I just needed some extra cash to chip in towards the film's budget," she said, according to contactmusic.com.

Earlier this week, Theron confessed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno that she's horrified when she has to speak to large groups of people. As she says, "I'm horrible with public (speaking). (Alcohol) helps. Acting is actually quite intimate. It's a very intimate process and it's a smaller environment and it's not like theatre or anything like that. I get blackness and white spots and then I break out in hives (before making a speech). And I'm just always so scared I'm gonna offend somebody or forget to mention somebody. I'm a horrible public speaker, so I'm always nervous."

But Theron reckons she feels just like any other woman ... "Some days I look in the mirror and feel hot. Other days I say, 'I've got back fat'."

Yeah right!

The Green Goddess beckons

Posted by John Dickman, Food Service Manager

Another of our chef candidates has come, cooked, and left us with this tangy offering. (Previous recipes are here.)

Green Goddess Dressing

1 bunch green onion, ends trimmed
10 sprigs parsley, stems removed
6 sprigs fresh thyme
2 tsp. dry tarragon
5 sprigs fresh dill
5 anchovy fillets
1 c. mayo
3/4 c. sour cream
3/4 c. white or red wine vinegar
1 T. sugar
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground black pepper
2-3 cloves garlic

Throw all ingredients in a blender (preferably rinsed of margarita residue), and blend, blend, blend. If you've got time, let it sit overnight - this helps marry the flavors and enhances the tarragon.

Transfer the dressing, rinse blender well and resume margaritas while waiting to serve Green Goddess on your favorite salad, as a veggie dip, or as a sauce for fish or chicken. If refrigerated it will last up to a week or more.

Feed the world

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer, Google Reader

So we've added a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Reader, a service we hope helps you spend more time reading what's important to you (or is, if you'd prefer, nicely diverting). The Reader team is excited to begin iterating in public, and now that Jason Shellen's announced it at Web 2.0 we're excited to get your feedback on this early-stage effort.

We often get asked how anyone's supposed to keep up with the firehose of stuff launched from the web's spigot, so we're offering Reader as a way to help. Like the Personalized Homepage, it's a part of Google's ongoing effort to bring together personalized web content to make information more relevant to users.

And, because I rarely get a forum like this, I'd personally like to thank Google for being able to participate in building Reader with the sorts of accomplished engineers who help keep these web bits pretty interesting. (Waves to Search, Gmail, Maps, Print, News, Suggest, etc.) Thankfully, we're not alone -- everyone involved from corporate entities to thousands of independent developers seem to be focused on lowering the barrier to entry for actually making feeds useful.

For a quick intro to Reader, take the tour, or just get started. I'd make recommendations from my starred items, but a quick scan reveals "still waters running deep" isn't me - I keep my item pool filled with snark (Gawker) or techno-fetishism (Engadget, I'm looking at you).

So go to Google Labs and give it a try. If you're interested in making Reader better, please let us know, as we plan on keeping the experiment alive and kicking as long as there is stuff being syndicated.

Google goes to Washington

Posted by Andrew McLaughlin, Senior Policy Counsel

It seems that policymaking and regulatory activity in Washington, D.C. affect Google and our users more every day. It’s important to be involved - to participate in the policy process and contribute to the debates that inform it. So we’ve opened up a shop there. The first member of our Washington team is Alan Davidson, a veteran thinker and advocate for issues we care about.

Our mission in Washington boils down to this: Defend the Internet as a free and open platform for information, communication and innovation. OK, that sounds a little high and mighty, so let me break it down into something a bit wonkier with a sampling of the U.S. policy issues we’re working on:

Net neutrality. As voice, video, and data rapidly converge, Congress is rewriting U.S. telecommunications laws and deregulating broadband connectivity, which is largely a good thing. But in a country where most citizens have only one or two viable broadband options, there are real dangers for the Internet: Should network operators be able to block their customers from reaching competing websites and services (such as Internet voice calls and video-on-demand)? Should they be able to speed up their own sites and services, while degrading those offered by competitors? Should an innovator with a new online service or application be forced to get permission from each broadband cable and DSL provider before rolling it out? Or, if that’s not blunt enough for you, what’s better: [a] Centralized control by network operators, or [b] free user choice on the decentralized, open, and astoundingly successful end-to-end Internet? (Hint: It’s not [a].)

Copyrights and fair use. Google believes in protecting copyrights while maintaining strong, viable fair use rights in this new digital age. We support efforts by the U.S. Copyright Office to facilitate the use of orphan works (works whose rights-holders can’t be found), while fully respecting the interests of creators. We applauded the Supreme Court’s carefully calibrated decision in the Grokster case, but worked to defeat legislation that would have created new forms of liability for neutral technologies and services like Google.

Intermediary liability. As a search engine, Google crawls the Internet, gathering information everywhere we can find it. We’re a neutral tool that allows users to find information posted by others – like a continuously updated table of contents for the Internet. Not surprisingly, we don’t believe the Internet works well if intermediaries and ISPs are held liable for things created by others but made searchable through us. That’s why Google will continue to oppose efforts to force us to block or limit lawful speech; instead, we focus on providing users the information, tools, and features (such as SafeSearch) they need to protect themselves online.

This is just a taste. We’re also engaged in policy debates over privacy and spyware, trademark dilution, patent law reform, voice-over-Internet-protocol (VOIP) regulation, and more. The Internet policy world is fluid, so our priorities will surely morph over time. And, of course, Google is a global company. In a future post, we’ll introduce you to some of the policy issues we’re confronting outside the U.S.

How I got to Google, ch. 1

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

-- via craigslist, and thanks for asking. Our engineers, though, tend to come by more varied, and occasionally odder, routes. Some get recruited out of grad school, or by friends or former colleagues. Others just send their resumes to jobs@google.com. For a few engineers, though, the path has been more interesting. Peter Bradshaw, for instance, built “a music playing system based on printed cards with barcodes and webcams. Includes lego!” (No, I don’t know what that means, either.) Over the next few weeks, we’re going to post some of their stories.

Like this one, from Systems Administrator Aaron Joyner:


My story started when I came into work one morning and was unable to look up something on Google. Being the sysadmin for my company at the time, it was my responsibility to resolve the problem, so I started poking around. It turned out that our DNS server [ed: all the jargony stuff you'll hear in this anecdote refers to the software that websites use to connect and talk to each other] was returning an error when trying to look up google.com, specifically a server failure error. Just as I’d convinced myself that it wasn't our problem but Google’s, the problem suddenly resolved itself. I promptly forgot about it and went back to my regular work.

But then I came in the next morning and had exactly the same problem, so I started looking at Google's DNS responses very closely. It became clear that the specific combination of delegations and glue records they were returning [ed: see note above] would result in an eventual error approximately once per day, and this would then take it about five minutes to give up and try again. Not entirely convinced that I should point the finger at Google yet, I posted a message to my local Linux Users Group asking if anyone had had problems with resolving google.com addresses and got a couple "Yeah, I did have a problem like that once recently" responses.

Thus reinforced, I headed over to Google.com, found the "Contact Us" page and the "Report a problem" link, chunked in a brief problem description and a link to the archived copy of the long technical description from that same mailing list thread, and thought to myself, "Gee, I'll never hear about that again." But then one afternoon a week later I get an email that said, basically, "We've received your problem report, and forwarded it on to the appropriate department, if they need any further information they’ll contact you. Thanks." Again, I thought, "Gee, how nice. I'll never hear about that again."

But that evening I got an email from Dave Presotto (the guy who wrote the DNS server for Plan9) saying that he was looking into it and would get back to me. Forty-five minutes later I got another email, this one describing how he believed they had accidentally fixed the problem earlier in the week due to general code cleanup, and asking what I thought of the solution. After I recovered my senses and stopped bouncing around the room, I had a few email exchanges with Dave, in the course of which I asked casually if they needed any good sysadmins out in Mountain View. He referred me, and the rest is history.

A Friday visit to the database of intentions

Guest post by John Battelle

Over the past few years I’ve made at least a dozen 90-minute treks from my forested perch at the north end of San Francisco Bay down to the Googleplex, which sits at the heart of Silicon Valley. The reason? I was writing a book, and Google was a major part of the story. I always enjoyed the drive, I’d go down to interview the founders, early product managers, recent hires and advisors, and I’d drive up with a full tape recorder and plenty to think about.

But last Friday I drove down for another reason. My book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, has just come out, and much to my astonishment, Google invited me down to give a talk. While Google staffers were extremely generous with their time, the fact remained that the book told the story as I heard it from many different sources, inside and outside the company. And on my own Searchblog, where I cover search and its implications, I've been known to call Google out as often as I offer praise.

As I drove down, I fretted over any number of things. Who might show up for the talk (what if no one did?!). What mistakes might be pointed out - flaws in my reporting, my writing, or my conclusions? What if the famously combative Google culture turned on me?

I needn’t have worried. My host Karen Wickre, whom I’ve known since my days as a cub reporter at MacWeek, met me at the door, and before I could make my way to the lecture hall, a clutch of friendly folks had surrounded me. Once there I saw Louis Monier, founder of Alta Vista and the star of Chapter Three, who had recently left eBay to join Google. And Peter Norvig, Google’s director of search quality, who helped me understand Google’s core search service and even presented at my Web 2.0 conference last year. And many more, many of whom I had spoken to, but most of whom I had never met.

I began by explaining how I came to write the book, a three-year odyssey which started with a link, back in late 2001, to Google’s first Zeitgeist. I read how I came to the idea of the Database of Intentions, and I read some funny emails from webmasters who had encountered the early BackRub crawler. And because it was clear the audience wanted to ponder the future of the company they had joined, I read from the chapter entitled “Google Today, Google Tomorrow.”

The best part, by far, was the Q&A that followed. Googlers are some of the most sincere questioners I've ever encountered. The exchange felt very much like conversations I've had with graduate students when I was teaching at Berkeley - no agendas, just a desire to challenge and to learn. Afterward folks lined up to have me sign their books. As the line dwindled, I looked behind me and there was Eric Schmidt, who more than any other source went out of his way to lend me his time and insights. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming, and I have to say, I was honored by the gesture. I did my best to be fair in the book, but it's never easy to read about yourself, to be the subject of someone else's conclusions. The same could be said of the entire Google team who came to listen and to converse, and I'm truly grateful for the experience.

Taiwanese model Lin Chi-ling receives qi gong treatment

Taiwanese model Lin Chi-ling, paid a secret visit to Hong Kong this week for treatment in the ancient Chinese healing art of qi gong to improve her singing ahead of the release of her first album, a magazine reported.

Lin, who fractured six ribs after falling from a horse while filming a commercial in China in July, is having trouble with her breathing, the Ming Pao Weekly magazine reported this weekend.

Qi gong involves meditation, relaxation and breathing exercises. Masters of the art are believed to be able to heal others by channeling their energy.

Lin aims to release her debut album by the end of the year, Ming Pao Weekly reported.

Lin's agent wasn't immediately available for comment.