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Showing posts from October 8, 2010

Granada-Hills-Based Charity Operation Blankets Of Love Featured On Animal Planet

The things I miss by not having cable. To wit, Animal Planet's Pit Boss: "Shorty, aptly named, and his three cohorts happen to be little people with the biggest hearts for these adorable dogs, who often are bigger than they are... Pit Boss follows the everyday drama and joy of these buddies and business partners as they hit the streets of Los Angeles in their fight to overcome stereotypes — for themselves and the pit bulls they save." The interesting thing about this program — aside from the obvious question of how many screenwriter suicides can be directly attributed to the green-lighting of unscripted shows just like this one — is that it features Granada Hills' own Eileen Smulson of Operation Blankets of Love, doing what she does best -- providing comfort to shelter animals. American entertainment has come a long way since the days of circus sideshows. It's thoroughly tickling that we can now turn the channel to watch little people performing generous

Party Crashin' Grandma Makes Boss Sauce

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"Are you a spicy woman?" I am, but sometimes, a girl's just not in the mood for sausage. So Bill swaps out the hot link on my combo for the BBQ meatball sandwich, flanked by a spicy chicken taco, a pulled pork taco, and a little cup of baked beans, which Bill Kelley, a/k/a Smokin' Willie, has strongly advised me to try. "It's my mom's recipe for barbeque baked beans, and so is the classic barbeque sauce," he says. "It's the recipe she's been making since 1969." When I take a bite of the pulled pork, I'm instantly envious; my mom never made anything that tasted like this. Kelley, owner of Smokin' Willie's BBQ Truck, used to work for Warner Brothers Records for 26 years until AOL bought Time Warner and he lost his job "the American way," to outsourcing. After a stint in another doomed gig — the mortgage business, Kelley says, "I saw this crisis coming and said I was never going to work for a big corpora