the buzz log
Crossbows, a New Drill, and the Sisterhood: Buzz Week in Review
Outbursts, rebukes, and undercover videos made for a raucous week, but the Buzz sat up and took notice of some tough femmes going on the offensive this week.
Prey Tell
In their maiden alligator hunts, two females armed with crossbows bagged some mighty big prey.
New mom Arianne Prevost, 23, took a break from diaper duty and snagged an 11-footer in Florida. Over in South Carolina, 16-year-old Cammie Colin was better known for being a softball player and a junior varsity cheerleader, until she went out in the dead of night with her male kin and brought down a gator measuring 10' 5" and 353 pounds. Their beginner's luck have
made them Fox News darlings
for being straight shooters. Both Florida and South Carolina issue limited hunting permits for alligators as part of state programs to control their reptile populations.
Drill Major Drill
Teresa King—or Command Sgt. Maj. to you—will be the first female top honcho of the U.S. Army Drill Sergeant School in Fort Jackson. The daughter of a sharecropper, King learned about strict discipline from the get-go with her dad being a strict disciplinarian to his 12 kids. A 28-year army vet who has served in South Korea and Europe, she'll start her new job Sept. 22.
Telling West Where to Go
The celeb sisterhood rallied around singer Taylor Swift after Kanye West lost his mind and his manners at the MTV Video Music Awards. West, who has a long history of speaking out, interrupted the 19-year-old's acceptance speech for Best Female Video. His behavior got a chorus of boos and even two presidential vetos, but the firmest slap-downs came from Pink, Katie Perry, Kellie Pickler, and Kelly Clarkson, who used firm and decidedly unladylike language in angry tweets and blog posts. Since the Sunday outburst, West apologized on "Jay Leno," his website, and finally to Swift herself after she appeared on the ultimate sisterhood cocoon, "The View."
Also buzzing this week...
- A passing of three entertainment eras with the deaths of Henry Gibson; Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Patrick Swayze...
- Dan Brown's instant bestseller's out, but don't forget Jane Austen's sea monsters...
- One year after Lehman Brothers falls, the recession's over...
Filed under: Music, Hunting, Military, Women, Week in Review, Scandals, Wrap Up
June 2009 Buzz
As if to make up for the relative quiet of May, June brought news of transportation mayhem, historical revolutions, political scandals, and celebrity passings. Below, the stories that reverberated on Yahoo! Search and beyond.
In Memoriam
The word icon was invoked repeatedly with shocking deaths, sad passings, and unexpected departures. In the TV arena, David Carradine's apparently accidental hanging exposed a startling private life, while Ed McMahon's end reminded us the importance of sidekicks. Farrah Fawcett's strength to the end underscored the sex symbol's dignity. The unexpected death of pitchman Billy Mays brought in many tributes. But, it was the King of Pop's passing that stunned the world. News and questions persist over his death, but the loss restored the luster of his legacy.
International Relationships
President Barack Obama reached out to the Muslim world at Cairo University, managed to find destinations for Guantanamo's Uighurs, and pulled out troops from Iraq. That might've been enough drama on the world stage, but Iranians took to the streets and online in a historic protest over presidential election results, putting the country's theocracy in doubt. Leadership issues also explain North Korea's bristling stance (with two American journalists embroiled in the morass), and a coup in Honduras.
Domestic Affairs
A superstitious mind might start considering the label 'possible 2012 presidential candidate' a curse, at least among the GOP. The first extramarital confession came from Nevada senator John Ensign, but his startling admission was soon overshadowed by the mysterious case of the missing South Carolina governor. Mark Sanford's reapperance and rambling confession of an Argentinian liasion gave new meaning to hiking the Appalachian trail—and finally pushed "Jon & Kate Plus 8" from headlines. All these scandals made Alaska governor Sarah Palin look good, especially after her victory in a (TV) late-night spat.
Search Terms with the Biggest Percentage Changes
| Biggest Search Terms |
Filed under: Politics, Celebrities, Monthly Wrapup, Recaps, Death, Scandals, Wrap Up
The Other Woman Speaks, an Ex Is Defended, and the Sanford Saga Continues...
Did an ex-boyfriend of Maria Belen Chapur leak the illicit email exchange to a South Carolina newspaper? Or could there be yet another nefarious figure lurking in the already muddled tale of governor Mark Sanford?
Chapur, a former TV producer, confirmed in a June 28 statement that she is the Argentinian Other Woman. Her 200 words mostly focused on "evil act" of email hacking, which she blamed for destroying people's lives (as opposed to the affair itself). While she says she has a "firm suspicion" of who it is, she does clear the "one friend with whom I shared days in Brazil in the Rolex Regatta."
That should absolve the ex. The New York Times had pointed to him as the culprit just a day earlier, based on the word of Chapur's former boss. Rather than a man scorned and out looking for revenge, her former boyfriend also received the chain of lovelorn pillow talk which included Chapur's description of him as a "very nice guy, great heart" and her admission, "Unfortunately I am not in love with him. You (Sanford) are my love." Ouch. (Sanford, for his part, nobly declared he didn't want her to walk away from "some guy (I take it the younger guy you mentioned at dinner) because of me — and what we both have to see as an impossible situation," in between quoting I Corinthians 13 and referencing "The Thornbirds.")
Whoever sent the emails to The State, the action turned out to be moot. As mentioned in a previous post, the newspaper couldn't confirm them. It posted the exchange only after Sanford made his famous ramble to Argentina via the Appalachian Trail.
So why did Chapur's former boss, a Buenos Aires TV exec, accuse the former beau? Who hacked into her Hotmail? Should The State (and everyone else, including us) be ashamed of publishing the emails six months late, or publishing them at all? Whatever the answers, the South Carolina saga ain't over yet.
The Six-Month Wait for Governor Sanford's Emails
South Carolina governor Mark Sanford seemed to take every step to make revelations about his indiscreet affair global news:
- Be MIA on Father's Day (and seven days total).
- Don't alert staffers you're not showing up to work.
- Throw in an Appalachian Trail red herring.
- Have a weepy news conference admitting wrongdoing.
- Be the former chairman of the Republican Governors Association and another 2012 self-imploding GOP possible.
In the huge outbreak of Sanford searches from the past 7 days, look-ups for "first lady jenny sanford" pushed her into the top 500 searches (bypassing her husband), as well as quirkier terms like "sanford and son," "don't cry for me argentina," and "appalachian trail map."
Now the newest round of searches: "sanford emails." The release of the rusty Romeo's electronic messages to his Argentine paramour Maria Belen Shapur have sent readers gagging and chortling at the same time (not an easy feat). Newsweek felt compelled to warn, in italics, about the super cheesy factor.
So how did the South Carolina paper, The State, get those emails so fast? Crackling investigative reporting? Hacking? RSS feed to Naughty Political Notes? Actually, according to the New York Times, the newspaper had these emails since December...yes, for six months. Naturally, reporters wanted to confirm the messages were real, so they sent an email...to Ms. Shapur. Exactly what they asked her, for instance "are you one that gives magnificently gentle kisses," was not revealed.
Of course, The State made up for that lapse by sending its reporter, based on an anonymous tip, to greet the governor when he landed in Atlanta. Her gung-ho account, on The State's website, includes her parenthetical musing, "I always will wonder if the story would have broken if I had failed to catch him in the airport." Maybe if she had tried sending another email.
Beauty Pageant Gets Uglier?
We've heard of puppet governments and Manchurian candidates...but a shadow beauty pageant winner?
As has been over-reported in the Buzz Log and elsewhere, all Carrie Prejean wanted was the chance to win a custom-made tiara, a New York Film Academy scholarship, and that Jessica Simpson swimsuit wardrobe. Instead, a politically explosive question landed on her rhinestone-encrusted lap, and she became a brief lightning-rod on the talk show circuit.
Just when Miss California's time as a sideshow attraction in the media circus was up, leaked lingerie photos from her past inspired yet another round of Web-ogling: Prejean got double the amount of Web lookups than during pageant week.
The briefs-only pictures gave California pageant officials the chance to purse their lips disapprovingly and milk the pseudo-drama by declaring a Monday press conference to announce whether her state crown would be lost over contract violations.
And of course, the conference came and went with the decision to be made Tuesday by pageant master Donald Trump, known for forgiving errant contestants. Prejean's chances also look good, if his compliments about her body during a radio interview is any clue. Trump hadn't seen the photos yet because his people were "sending" them to him...via Pony Express, perhaps.
But, according to E! Online, the officials have appointed a "a shadow Miss California, installing runner-up Tami Farrell as the official ambassador to the pageant's newly launched Beauty of California initiative." She'll be making appearances throughout the Golden State in a role "which sounds an awful lot like Prejean's current role."
Shadow crown-holder or not, Trump's not worried about Prejean's future, and neither are we. If she gets ousted from the Golden State, she could always head to Utah, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and about six other states that led the nation's "carrie prejean" lookups in the past 7 days: Her home state of California barely elbowed its way into 10th place. Miss Utah might want to watch her back.
top movers
| Rank | Subject | 1-Day Move |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ford 400 | Breakout! |
| 2 | Indonesia Ferry | Breakout! |
| 3 | Jordan Chandler | 3481% |
| 4 | Evan Chandler | 2322% |
| 5 | American Music Awards | 1841% |
| 6 | John F. Kennedy | 1529% |
| 7 | Turkey Stuffing Recipes | 1361% |
| 8 | Liam Hemsworth | 1172% |
| 9 | Lou Dobbs | 1142% |
| 10 | Hendrick Motorsports | 888% |
top leaders
| Rank | Subject | Move | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Black Friday | +340 | 1290 |
| 2 | NFL | +489 | 670 |
| 3 | Jennifer Lopez | +451 | 515 |
| 4 | New Moon | -67 | 250 |
| 5 | American Music Awards | +236 | 249 |
| 6 | UFC | -36 | 239 |
| 7 | Miley Cyrus | +66 | 169 |
| 8 | Hulu | -11 | 154 |
what's the buzz?
A subject's buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.
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