Culturite

With 1 in 10 Americans is chronically sleep deprived people are looking for anything to boost their energy.

First there were Red Bull and double espressos, but now comes the latest — canned oxygen!

CBS 2 HD decided to examine whether this is all just hot air.

It’s the latest way to boost your energy. it claims to do everything from helping your workout to boosting your memory, relieving stress to curing a hangover. Kevin DelGaudio, the inventor of instant oxygen, turned to oxygen for his own energy needs.

“You know you start falling asleep at the wheel a couple of intakes of ox and I’m wide awake,” DelGaudio said.

It’s all over the Web and around the world. People looking to reverse the effects of pollution and inject more energy into their lives are turning to oxygen, whether bought at a bar or now, in a can. Instant Oxygen, which claims to be 99 percent pure oxygen, is sold at the pharmacy counter of Duane Reade stores.

“It’s flying off the shelves,” one store employee told CBS 2 HD.

Gmail is having a systemwide outage affecting multiple countries, and a whole bunch of its 100 million users are screaming about it on Twitter. Around 20 million people visit Gmail each day, according to Comscore, and they’re all seeing the same message. The first outages were reported at about 2 pm PST, 44 minutes ago. The Gmail blog is silent on the outage, instead giving readers some useful tips on customizing web clips.

We’re waiting on Google for a comment on the reason for the outage

Comedian Bernie Mac’s family had expected him to fully recover from the bout of pneumonia that put him in a hospital three weeks ago, his daughter said Sunday.

However, Je’niece Childress said that as time passed she and her mother braced for the possibility that he could die.

Mac, 50, died Saturday from what his publicist said were complications from pneumonia.

Childress said Mac had been at Northwestern Memorial Hospital since the middle of July.

“Initially when he was hospitalized we expected him to come back home, but as the weeks went on, I kind of knew,” Childress told The Associated Press.

Mac also suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease, but he had said the condition went into remission in 2005. His publicist, Danica Smith, has said the pneumonia was unrelated to the sarcoidosis.

Fans and friends of Chicago comedian Bernie Mac, who died Saturday, are invited to a public memorial celebrating Mac’s life.

Services are scheduled for noon Saturday in the 10,000-seat House of Hope, 752 E. 114th St., Chicago, said Danica Smith, Mac’s publicist. Donations in Mac’s honor may be sent to the Bernie Mac Foundation for Sarcoidosis, 40 E. 9th St., Suite 601, Chicago, IL 60605, Smith said.

Rumors of the death of rapper Lil’ Wyane’s daughter have been exaggerated as shit. That’s according to both Wayne’s record label, Universal Motown, which issued a denial to hip-hop website SOHH and an anonymous comment posted on his MySpace, purportedly from his aunt. The comment reads: “I am pleased to inform you that this report is false. It is merely a rumor started by someone who obviously is miserable in their own skin that they would even have the notion to attack a child. Rest assured Reginae is tucked away in her bed at this very moment trying to get past the hurt this ugliness has caused her and our family.”

Lil’ Wayne’s daughter, Reginae Carter, has been killed in a car accident, reports say.

Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry encapsulated the Palestinian cause, will be buried in the West Bank on Wednesday, a day later than planned, Palestinian officials said.

The funeral had initially been scheduled for Tuesday.

The 67-year-old writer died on Saturday from complications following heart surgery in a U.S. hospital in Houston, Texas.

Officials in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s office said the funeral had been put back one day because of a delay in releasing Darwish’s body in the United States.

The funeral in the West Bank city of Ramallah will be the first sponsored by the Palestinian Authority since leader Yasser Arafat died in 2004.

The poet, born in territory now Israel, had made his home in Ramallah since returning in the 1990s from a long exile during which he rose to prominence in Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.

In the 38 reviews of ” The Dark Knight” by Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics,” 90% of which are favorable, readers will find 40 references to the film’s darkness, most of them admiring. Reviewers speak of the feature’s “dark vision” (Christopher Orr, the New Republic) and the way it “turns pulp into dark poetry” (Richard Corliss, Time). In this paper, Kenneth Turan praised the film for its “darker-than-usual themes that have implications for the way we live now.” Manohla Dargis of the New York Times observed that “Knight” “goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind,” and Newsday critic Rafer Guzman called it “a dark and highly complex drama [with] more brains than any other movie this summer.”

If “dark” is the new “smart,” what do critics mean when they laud a film for its darkness? A number of things, to be sure, beyond aesthetic gloom to moral complexity and psychological depth; they’re welcoming the material’s serious exploration of primal impulses and clear-eyed depictions of corruption and amorality.

The oppressive, visceral power of “The Dark Knight” is rooted in such timeless themes but also taps into an urgent, of-the-moment despair that has resonated with critics. “Things are worse than ever,” a nameless reporter in the film declares with no small amount of anguish. And the official response he receives — “The night is darkest just before the dawn” — echoes with all the hollowness of today’s newscast sound bites.

“The Dark Knight” remained the number one movie at the nation’s box offices this weekend, and is now the third-highest-grossing movie of all time.

Only “Titanic” and “Star Wars,” have sold more tickets than the latest Batman movie, according to Media By Numbers, an Encino firm that tracks box office receipts.

“The Dark Knight” is estimated to be on track to sell $26 million in tickets this weekend, Media By Numbers reported, bringing the Warner Bros. release up to an estimated $441.5 million in business in the United States and Canada alone by the close of business Sunday night.

At this rate, “The Dark Knight” appears to be on track to surpass 1977’s “Star Wars” and all its re-releases over three decades, which have grossed an estimated $461 million in sales. “Titanic,” released in 1997, remains in the number one all-time spot, having sold $600 million in tickets. 

Girl Talk has already created a bit of post-millennial tension with his new album, Feed the Animals, and now he’s looking to take things to the next level: post-apocalyptic.

When we caught up with him backstage at Lollapalooza — while we were in the midst of his so-called “Party Patrol,” no less — he spilled the beans on plans for his final show, firmly scheduled to take place on December 21, 2012: the end of the Mayan calendar and the date when many are predicting the world might very well explode.

So, you know, it should be a relatively killer show.

“I want this to end when I’m on top. So I’m planning my final show on December 21, 2012. It’s when the Mayan calendar ends. It’s the day when solids become liquids and liquids become plasmas,” GT — a.k.a. mild-mannered Gregg Gillis — laughed. “So I’m building up to that — we’ve got four years — so maybe there’s going to be a couple other small releases in the works. The album just came out, so I have no plans for another release, but I’m constantly starting to work on new stuff, just for the live shows.”

And while Gillis is still keeping details of his apocalyptic farewell close to the vest — er, sleeveless T-shirt — he did let us know that he’s planning on making it a marathon, not a sprint. After all, this is the End of Days we’re talking about here — it’s gotta be epic.

“I used to play very short sets, and now I kinda play a standard 45-minute to one-hour set, so I think I wanna do a 24-hour set, [and] I want it to be a stage production, but one where the lines become blurry between reality and complete stage me. I want it to be an endurance test, and I want it to be miserable and equally fantastic. I want the best of both worlds,” he explained. “I think [in] too many shows, people are too aimed at pleasing the audience. If you want to do a really great show — which I haven’t fully done yet — you have to really make it bad for them for like 20 hours and then you can kill it for four hours, and everyone will be really excited. I think people ignore the dynamics of how you can work with an audience.”