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Side show
By SHARON FINK, Times Staff Writer WHOOOOOOOOO IS SHE? Here's a dossier on the Gainesville woman among the 16 people in Survivor: Marquesas, culled from CBS.com and the Gainesville Sun: Gina Crews, who turned 29 Thursday, was born and raised in Alachua. She received a bachelor of science degree in wildlife ecology and conservation with minors in zoology and secondary education from the University of Florida. She also took courses at the University of Central Florida and Santa Fe Community College. She's a big Gators football fan. Her most recent jobs were naturalist at a nature center and promotions coordinator for the Florida Watermelon Association. She was the Newberry Watermelon Queen, the Florida Watermelon Queen in 1996 and the National Watermelon Queen in 1997. In 1998 she won the annual seed-spitting contest with a distance of 37 feet, 11 inches. She taught science at Union County High School in Lake Butler for three years. She resigned in April, saying she feared for her safety because she was being harassed by a female student. The student was suspended for three days in connection with the harassment allegations. Union County sheriff's Deputy Billy Townsend, who is the high school's resource officer and worked with Crews, tells the Sun he's sure she did well on Survivor. "She's an awesome person. The situation last year was trying, but she handled it as well as anyone could have," he says. "She can survive pretty much wherever she goes." SURVIVOR: GUANTANAMO BAY: It's a good thing President Bush has jumped on that Geneva Convention bandwagon, but he's way behind the producers of Australia's version of Survivor (not to be confused with the American version of Survivor filmed in Australia). The contestants' rice ration on the Port Lincoln, South Australia, set was based on the minimum daily calorie intake for a prisoner of war, as specified in the Geneva Convention, Brisbane's Courier-Mail says. Still, somebody was a little greedy. The final two contestants ran out of rice the day before the final tribal council. SPEAKING OF THE PRESIDENCY: HBO is developing a reality show that has the potential to be as all-at-once sordid, lurid, boring, annoying, sexy, turgid, fascinating and repulsive as the rest of them: Candidate 2012, the chronicle of a young person's effort to mount a grass-roots campaign for the 2012 presidential election. "I thought it would be interesting to see someone approach the whole process in a different manner," series originator Plowden Schumacher tells the Hollywood Reporter. "What if a young person went out and pressed the flesh and did it almost as a career?" AND NOT EVEN AN OSCAR NOMINATION: It seems as if the World Trade Center was in too many movies to count. But if you don't count disaster films, it was the star of just four, says James Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies: Three Days of the Condor, the remake of King Kong, The Wiz and Other People's Money.
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From the wire |
