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TV BATMOBILE from Mattel in 2007

Warner Bros. Consumer Products, DC Comics, and Mattel, Inc. recently announced the production of a line of Hot Wheels® die-cast cars inspired by the original Batmobile featured in the 1966 “Batman” television series. The original design by custom automotive legend, George Barris, was based on a futuristic 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car that was never put into production. George Barris’ iconic crime-fighting vehicle has since become an enduring symbol of the beloved Batman franchise. The launch of the Hot Wheels® Batmobile models commemorates the 40th anniversary of the first “Batman” television series.

“While the vehicle has been reinvented numerous times over the years in comic books, animated series and feature films, the TV Batmobile is still held in the highest regard with countless fans who will truly appreciate this exciting endeavor,” said Karen McTier, Executive Vice President of Domestic Licensing and Worldwide Marketing, Warner Bros. Consumer Products. There is no denying that Barris’ classic version of the Batmobile is world-renowned and the Hot Wheels® reproductions will be the first of their kind bringing one of television’s most recognized vehicles to a new generation of Batman fans and collectors alike.

Mattel will produce multiple scales of the Hot Wheels® Batmobile, including a 1:64th scale model that will appear on store shelves in spring 2007 as part of the Hot Wheels® basic car line. In fall 2007, there will be an additional 1:64th scale model introduced as well as a 1:43rd scale replica model and a 1:18th scale, which will have three tiers of detail and finish. The ultimate version, the Hot Wheels Elite™ special edition Batmobile, will have enough detail to delight even the most discriminating of Batmobile aficionados and die-cast collectors alike.

In order to re-create the stunning original the Hot Wheels® team headed up by Chief Designer Larry Wood, took precise measurements and also placed white powder all over the TV Batmobile to scan it for working on the design digitally. Then they made a 3-D image and cut the tooling from those images to insure an accurate reproduction.

“This is the car that every collector has been asking for,” said Geoff Walker, Vice President of Wheels Marketing, Mattel Brands. “This Batmobile is the version of the Caped Crusader’s car that everyone will instantly recognize. We’re thrilled at the opportunity to create the Hot Wheels® version of this iconic vehicle.”

George Barris himself had this to say, “We received thousands of letters asking when the TV Batmobile will be available, and are pleased that Hot Wheels® is bringing the original to life through different scales and detail. I take great pride in the vehicle’s design and know that the Hot Wheels® team will do it justice in capturing the details of the original. It is my honor to be a part of the 40-year history of the Batmobile and to have this most famous car released by Mattel for consumers.”

You Know your a REDNECK when…

1. You take your dog for a walk and you both use the same tree.

2. You can entertain yourself for more than 15 minutes with a fly swatter.

3. Your boat has not left the driveway in 15 years.

4. You burn your yard rather than mow it.

5. You think “The Nutcracker” is something you do off the high dive.

6. The Salvation Army declines your furniture.

7. You offer to give someone the shirt off your back and they don’t want it.

8. You have the local taxidermist on speed dial.

9. You come back from the dump with more than you took.

10. You keep a can of Raid on the kitchen table.

11. Your wife can climb a tree faster than your cat.

12.. Your grandmother has “ammo” on her Christmas list.

13. You keep flea and tick soap in the shower.

14. You’ve been involved in a custody fight over a hunting dog.

15. You go to the stock car races and don’t need a program.

16. You know how many bales of hay your car will hold.

17. You have a rag for a gas cap.

18. Your house doesn’t have curtains, but your truck does.

19. You wonder how service stations keep their rest-rooms so clean.

20. You can spit without opening your mouth.

21. You consider your license plate personalized Because your father made it.

22. Your lifetime goal is to own a fireworks stand.

23. You have a complete set of salad bowls and they all say “Cool Whip” on the side.

24. The biggest city you’ve ever been to is Wal-Mart.

25. Your working TV sits on top of your non-working TV.

26. You’ve used your ironing board as a buffet table.

27. A tornado hits your neighborhood and does $100,000 worth of improvements.

28. You’ve used a toilet brush to scratch your back.

29. You missed your 5th grade graduation because you were on jury duty.

30. You think fast food is hitting a deer at 65.

Still Evel….

CLEARWATER, Fla. — The crippled grandfather of extreme sports inhales deeply. He sits in his leather easy chair, mind clouded by meds, bones throbbing with arthritis. As he watches an NFL game, on which he has bet $1,000, the cantankerous stuntman clutches oxygen tubes supplying life to hardening lungs.

It is a shock to the senses, if not the sensibilities, to see ultra-cool Evel Knievel, 68, looking so feeble, so frayed around his graying daredevil edges, right down to his gnarled knuckles and wobbly gait.

His ravaged, 155-pound body isn’t composed of original parts. He has a new liver and a replacement hip, and most recently doctors inserted a drug pump in his abdomen. It gives little reprieve from the excruciating pain in a fused spine mangled by hundreds of perilous, cringe-inducing motorcycle jumps from the 1960s and ’70s.

“Ever see one of them before?” Evel asks, lifting a pajama top to reveal a pain-relief gizmo under his pale skin. “This sends morphine and synthetic heroin into my back 24 hours a day. It’s awfully strong — it affects your thinking, your brain.”

For years he cheated death, sometimes spectacularly so. Numerous crashes cemented his legend and all but guaranteed premature infirmity. These days, in what might be his last great gamble, Evel flies down the cosmic ramp of his final jump — the leap of faith.

While he has avoided the inevitable countless times, he no longer feels invincible. In fact, the bank robber-turned-international icon sounds apprehensive. After decades of hard jumps and harder living, including bouts with alcoholism, Evel tries to bridge the psychological chasm between mortality and eternity.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Father-son daredevil team mends fences

He figures he will be judged not just as a cult-like figure, but also as Robert Craig Knievel, the temperamental show-biz performer from the wrong side of the tracks in Butte, Mont.

“I think about God a lot more than ever,” he says, “though I used to ask him, ‘Help me make a good jump.’ I’m awfully tough to get along with, but I’ll tell you what: I am a good person. I wish there was such a thing as reincarnation.”

Suffering from the aftereffects of a stroke, Evel bets that a life of crime, fame and indulgence can be outweighed by his good works to those he inspired: children in burn wards, the downtrodden, soldiers.

“Veterans have told me that, for some reason, I made a difference in their lives, that they were headed for disaster,” he says. “God, at least I have done something.”

His hair is thinning, his face remarkably unmarked yet gaunt. Evel looks nothing like the handsome, devil-may-care Western buck with the swept-back mane, walking stick, flying cape and — to the chagrin of hardened bikers everywhere — the white leather jumpsuit, festooned with stars and stripes and inspired by Liberace.

Evel was a gritty caricature of a superhero whose outfit was as ostentatious as his act was audacious. For decades, he was lampooned in pop culture, but there is no doubt the charismatic showman had a definable aura and mass appeal.

Men admired him. Their sons wanted to be like him. Women just wanted him. (And according to Evel, thousands got their wish.)

Tending the Evel legend

The swagger has been reduced to a struggle simply to get up in the morning and get to the phone. He is a stickler about extending the Evel legend, preserving the Evel persona and creating new business, long after the end of his lucrative stuntman paydays and afternoons of high-stakes golf in which he would bet up to $100,000.

In true Knievelian style, he is determined to stave off the effects of pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that involves scarring of the lungs for which there is no cure.

“God,” Evel says, “never made a tougher son of a bitch than me.”

Nor a more skilled self-promoter, a man who unintentionally spawned a phrase for the generations: “Who do you think you are — Evel Knievel?”

There is only one Evel, and he knows it. He retains a sense of self-importance as expansive as Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, the site of his famously failed hurtle 32 years ago. He retains tightfisted control of everything, and everyone, around him. He can be charming and pseudo-gruff. It might be a photographer (“I don’t smile. Kiss my ass.”) or a buddy talking point spreads (“You can take your newspaper ‘line’ and shove it — how’s that?”).

Last month, Evel sued Kanye West and AOL over the rapper’s use of his trademark name and likeness in a music video that parodied the Snake River Canyon jump. Two years ago, a judge ruled the cult hero could not hold ESPN liable for publishing a photo of him with two women and the caption: “You’re never too old to be a pimp.”

He battled the IRS and Montana over allegedly unpaid taxes; survived abandonment by his parents, who left him with grandparents at 6 months old; endured jail, bankruptcy and divorce — he even ran over a Hells Angel. He continues to fight today … to live a little longer, for better deals, for the affection and respect of friends and family.

“All (my grandmother) wanted was to talk with me and to rub her feet. I just hate myself for not spending (more) time with her and telling her ‘I love you’ one more time,” Evel says. “The saddest thing is when a guy is paying so much attention to the world and everything going by that he can’t take the time for his own mother,” which is what he considered his grandmother.

Last summer, he and his youngest son, Robbie, 44, who traced his dad’s professional footsteps, appeared back home at Evel Knievel Days after years of feuding. The father’s on-again, off-again relationship with his son bears the emotional scars of a lifetime because, as Robbie says, “I’m the only one in the family who stood up to him.”

Now, he says, “My dad realizes love is everything. To do what he’s doing now — to have a talk with God and be loving to his family — I love him to death for it. God loves Evel. Figure that one out.”

“I love Robbie,” Evel says.

Kelly, Evel’s oldest son, owns a construction firm in Las Vegas. (In 1995, Kelly’s telemarketing company was sued by Missouri for targeting senior citizens with high-pressure calls. He agreed to stop the calls, and the company paid $150,000 in restitution.)

Evel’s family includes daughters Alicia and Tracey, 11 grandchildren and ex-wives Linda Knievel and Krystal Kennedy, 37, the former Florida State golfer who remains his caregiver and companion despite their brief, troubled marriage.

He says he thinks often about his creator and prays for forgiveness.

“If there is a heaven, I don’t know anything else I can do to get there — and neither do you,” he says. “There are some personal things that I would never do again. … God made us. He’s in charge of everything, right? If he didn’t like us, why didn’t he change us?

“Hey, I faced every challenge that came along. I just did everything. I have no regrets.”

Driven to be the best ever

A longtime friend, Jack Ferriter, 72, says he regularly traveled cross-country with Evel and Linda and remembers their animated discussions involving the spiritual.

“She always was trying to promote (him) being a nice guy and to straighten up his act, preaching to him about heaven,” Ferriter says. “He would say, ‘Linda, I’m not so sure I’m interested in heaven (unless) they’ve got beautiful women up there and golf courses.’ She was a Holy Roller, and he resented it.”

The cruel irony for the Knievel clan is watching its willful patriarch slowly waste away. At his madcap zenith, Evel could have met his demise on any of his failed motorized leaps over rattlesnakes, cars, water fountains or double-decker buses.

“He never wanted anyone to surpass him,” Robbie says. “For years, it seemed like my dad was pushing me off, like I was his competitor. He just never wanted to move over. I could never fill his shoes, anyway. It’s like being Elvis’ daughter or Muhammad Ali’s son.”

With age and debilitating injury, Evel eventually became quite the uneasy rider. He formally retired in 1981. During his wild and woolly years, he broke nearly 40 bones, including his back seven times.

He was in a coma for weeks in 1968 when he crashed after jumping over the fountain at Caesars Palace. The $3 million, closed-circuit TV caper propelled his popularity and fueled record audiences for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, where Evel and his act became a fixture.

The old daredevil’s crashes are now positively pedestrian: slipping in a Jacuzzi, falling on a golf course. The last time he rode a motorcycle, a few years ago at a mall appearance, he snapped his left ankle. “It’s no laughing matter when they put me under the gas,” Evel says. “I gave at the office already.”

A fortune won and lost

Back in the ’70s, promoter Billy Rundle recalls Evel telling adoring fans of his next planned exploit: “I am going to jump from an airplane from 40,000 feet without a parachute and land in a haystack.” Offstage, Rundle asked him about his sincerity. “I’m serious — you can bet on which haystack I’m going to land on,” Evel said. Rundle remembers thinking, “This guy’s crazy.”

Marketing risk is what he did for a living. One of the all-time self-promoters, Evel still loves being in the entrepreneurial mix. One potential venture is the Knievel Motorcycle Co., to be based out of Pittsburgh, 30 years after his last major show, a flopped practice run over a tank of sharks in Chicago.

The phone rings. It’s a memorabilia dealer. “You want me to sign 1,500 pictures? How much you gonna pay me?” Evel asks. “You’re going to pay me $30,000? Well, I’d rather you come in December. I might be dead in January.”

His popular stunt cycle toy was reintroduced in 2005 after, he says, various Knievel toys grossed $300 million. He says he earned $30 million over his peak years but lavish spending — big-boy toys included yachts and Ferraris — whittled much of it. In his modest condo, he shows off his latest version of the cycle, an Evel bobble-head and a bottle of Evel hot sauce.

“I was the first one to ever do a wheelie on a motorcycle while standing on a seat — ever,” he says.

Today’s Gen-X motorcycle performers don’t conduct themselves properly, he says. “One kid looked at the camera and stuck out his tongue and made a goofy face. A young man’s brain is no more developed than his body. They say with age comes wisdom, right?”

Maybe. It didn’t help when Evel imbibed long after his doctors told him to quit, before his liver transplant seven years ago. At the time, doctors told him he had less than six months to live. (For years, his favorite cocktail was a “Montana Mary,” a scorching blend of Wild Turkey, beer and tomato juice.)

Perhaps his vices can be traced to a hardscrabble youth, when he frequently ran afoul of the law. Fame and prosperity often were tough to handle, he says.

“You feel important when you’re not,” he says. “That’s the point I reached. I actually had a talk with myself years ago (after) I punched a maitre d’ in the puss. I said to myself, ‘Who do you think you are?’ “

The quest to uncover value and meaning from his earthly existence has greater urgency these days. Evel takes a notepad off a chair-side table and begins to read something that sounds like a eulogy, which friends say he has written.

“I hope I have lived a life that matters … I am ready to leave my loved ones …

“My wealth, my fame will amount to naught … My grudges, frustrations, resentments and jealousies will finally disappear.”

Evel glances at his visitor, who asks him if he ever thought life on Earth might be heaven, after all.

“No,” he says, staring death in the face with a weary smile. “God wouldn’t do that to us.”

A Note from Britney Spears….

Dear Fans,

It has been a while since I’ve addressed you personally here on my official website. The last couple of years have been quite a ride for me, the media has criticized my every move and printed a skewed perception of who I really am as a human being. Behind every decision I have made in my public life there always seems to be an apparent contradiction. I have come to terms with that which is why I usually don’t pay much attention to it.

The last couple of years have been very enlightening for me and now that I’ve had the time to be “me,” I’ve been able to sit down and think about where I want to go with myself as an entertainer with absolutely no strings attached. I am now more mature and feel like I am finally “free.” I’ve been working so hard on this new album and I can’t wait for you all to hear it and to go on tour again! I would like to exclusively tell you that I am working hard to release the new album sometime later this year, but the date is of course not certain yet. I look forward to coming back this year bigger and better than ever, and to also reaching out to my fans on a more personal level. I noticed today that one of my biggest fansites is shutting down soon and I want you all to know that I do understand all the reasons that went behind making that decision, and I am sad to see it closing. If I were you I’d be unhappy too if I had to read what I’ve been reading every day. But trust me, I get it. I know I’ve been far from perfect and the media has had a lot of fun exaggerating my every move, but I want you all to know that I love my fans so much, and I appreciate everything you have done for me, so Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

Love,
Britney

Marijuana Fights Alzheimer’s

The active ingredient of marijuana could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s than any currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of the disease.

Scientists report the finding in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.

About 4.5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, which gradually destroys memory. As more people survive into old age, cases of Alzheimer’s disease are expected to triple over the next 50 years. There is no known cure.

The researchers looked at THC, the compound inside marijuana responsible for its action on the brain. Computer models suggested THC might inhibit an enzyme with the tongue-twisting name of acetylcholinesterase (also called AChE) that is linked with Alzheimer’s.

AChE is known to help accelerate the formation of abnormal protein clumps in the brain known as amyloid plaques during Alzheimer’s. This enzyme also helps break down the brain chemical acetylcholine, which is linked to memory and learning. Acetylcholine levels are reduced during Alzheimer’s.

In lab experiments, the scientists found THC was significantly better at disrupting the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins. THC could completely prevent AChE from forming amyloid plaques, while two drugs approved for use against Alzheimer’s, donepezil and tacrine, reduced clumping by only 22 and 7 percent, respectively, at twice the concentration of THC used in the tests.

“We’re not advocating smoking dope, but if we can make analogues of THC, it could play a role in treating Alzheimer’s,” researcher Kim Janda, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., told LiveScience. “It would be nice to do more animal studies along these lines.”

Past research on human brain tissues and experiments with rats have suggested that synthetic analogues of THC can reduce the inflammation and prevent the mental decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

However, marijuana is not necessarily good for the mind. Prior investigations have shown that years of heavy marijuana use, consisting of four or more joints a week, can impair memory, decision making, and the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time.