Orlando Bloom, star of Pirates of the Caribbean series, The Lord of the Rings, and Elizabethtown.  Orlando’s UK home uses solar technology and recycled products.

Harrison Ford, whose credits include the Star Wars Series, Indiana Jones series, and Bladerunner, donated Wyoming property as a conservation easement to the Jackson Hole Land Trust.

Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s starred in Titanic and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a member of Global Green USA and International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Tom Hanks, star of Big, Forest Gump, and The DaVinci Code, is an electric car advocate and supporter of The Nature Conservancy.

Adrian Grenier is star of “Alter Eco” on Planet Green.  Following a trend in green building, he has a saline pool (instead of the less eco-friendly chlorine) and he drives a Prius.

Many of the main characters changed as the series evolved, but the Taylor family was a constant in every episode. Get to know them!

Coach Taylor

Coach Eric Taylor is your typical football coach, a man overwhelmed by the expectations of a small Texas town and the responsibility to become a father figure of sorts for his players, yet a man who knows no other way. Described by director Peter Berg as “a typical Texas high school football coach”, Taylor is fiercely loyal to his family and football team and grudgingly accepts the hoopla that surrounds high school football in the town of Dillon, Texas.

Midway through the series, Dillon High School splits into East Dillon and West Dillon, and Taylor is sent to coach at the much poorer, more urban East Dillon. As Coach Taylor always does, he works for the respect of his players and builds a power at East Dillon despite the rough conditions.

The marriage between him and his wife, Tami, is the focal point of the series and is the “rock” of the show as the rest of the characters and situations are constantly changing.

Tami Taylor

If the Taylor marriage is the rock of the show itself, then Tami is Coach Taylor’s rock throughout all five seasons. Tami, played by Connie Britton, who was also the coach’s wife in the movie Friday Night Lights, is a strong and intelligent character who works as a guidance counselor, principal, and guidance counselor again throughout the show.

Tami is often Eric’s moral compass, especially with situations that involve one or more of his players. She urges Eric to do the right thing when faced with issues involving players, coaches, administrators, and his own career and family and really provides the guiding force for the Taylor family.

Julie Taylor

One of the more interesting subplots to Friday Night Lights is the maturation of Julie Taylor, the teenage daughter of Coach and Tami Taylor. Julie begins as a high school freshman new to Dillon and struggling to adjust to being the coach’s daughter in a small town that lives and dies with football. Eventually, she thrives in Dillon and uses her considerable amount of academic talent to her advantage. She even follows her father to East Dillon when the schools split despite being a student at the much more well-off West Dillon.

Julie’s relationship with Dillon quarterback Matt Saracen is a major part of her role in Friday Night Lights, and their innocence gives a tenderness to a show otherwise going heavy with hyperbole. They fall in love in Season One and go through the trials and tribulations of a typical teenage romance, and even by the end of the series we are left unsure of their future together.

Credit: SavvyManager.net

Ask natives of the state how it should be pronounced, and odds are good they’ll say Nev-a-da (the first “a” should sound like the “a” in “add”). Nevadans despise the “East Coast” pronunciation of the state, which sounds like “Ne-vah-da.”

Even though the mispronunciation is derisively blamed on those from the eastern U.S., it actually stems from the Spanish pronunciation of the word.

One Nevadan is trying to promote the alternative pronunciation: Democratic Assemblyman Harry Mortenson. He’s pushing for a resolution in the 2011 legislative session that will make the “Ne-vah-da” pronunciation equally acceptable to as the one with the short “a.”

Mortenson says he doesn’t want his state’s native to change how they say it — rather, he wants the Spanish pronunciation officially recognized by residents. As if state legislators don’t have enough problems to deal with, they’ll soon be in the midst of a linguistics battle.

The mother, a 29-year-old resident of Auckland, NZ, was giving a bath to her 13-month-old when she stepped away to check her Facebook page.

When she returned to the tub, she discovered that her child had drowned. Instead of calling her husband or emergency medical technicians, the woman simply wrapped the baby in towels, left the body on her bed, and then returned to Facebook. She remained on her account for another half-hour before her husband returned from work and discovered the child’s death.

The woman, whose name is being withheld to protect her identity, had apparently had trouble coping with both her 13-month-old and another 5-year-old. After an abusive incident with the baby’s father, the woman had moved into a refuge center for several months, where case managers became concerned over her mental health.

Prosecutors insist that the drowning was intentional, but the woman’s interview with police claims otherwise. She said she thought the infant “would be … just playing around with his toys that I put in the bath and he would be fine.”

Sometimes, there’s a big difference between what your job responsibilities are on paper and what you actually do.

No one knows that better than cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. On his Dilbert Blog, he gave readers a creative assignment: “Describe your own job in one sentence, preferably in a humorously derogatory way.”

Although there were hundreds of responses, Adams was able to narrow them down to these ten job descriptions:

1. Fast food worker — Making food that is as healthy when it goes into someone’s body as it is when it comes back out.
2. Technical writer — Writing words that no one wants to read.
3. Assistant horse trainer — Cleaning up after an animal that makes more money than I do in a year.
4. IT director — Repeatedly fixing what employees repeatedly break.
5. Quality Assurance tester — Making people feel bad about their work.
6. Landscape photographer — Showing people how beautiful the Earth would be if they didn’t live on it.
7. Incident manager — Calling people who know what they’re doing — and then asking them what they’re doing.
8. College professor — Talking in other people’s sleep.
9. Baseball umpire — Standing on a field and getting yelled at for hours.
10. Divorce lawyer — Helping people hate one another.

Does summing up your job in one sentence make it sound different — or funny? Share your own descriptions in the comments section below.

As part of the “Race to the Top” federal education grant program, dozens of states applied for the highly sought-after funds to help struggling public schools. To determine which states would be granted the aid, each had to fill out a lengthy application that was then scored on a 500-point system.

New Jersey state officials had hoped to win the federal funding, but the recent results showed the state finished as first runner-up, just three points behind the lowest-scoring grant-recipient, Ohio.

Losing out on the grants was hard enough, but looking at the scoring documents from the applications shows that New Jersey received zero points on a section because the state included budget figures for 2010-2011, rather than the 2008-2009 figures that were supposed to be attached.

The section was worth 4.8 points on the scoring chart, and would have been just enough to place New Jersey ahead of Ohio.

Governor Chris Christie claimed there would be no negative consequences for the paperwork error, which has been attributed to a single unidentified staffer in the state’s Department of Education.

A recent United Airlines flight from Burlington to Washington, D.C. was deemed “too heavy to fly” by the pilot, so a number of passengers were needed to step off and take the next flight out.

However, instead of asking for volunteers, choosing a random selection of passengers, or asking those seated last to take a later flight, the flight crew demanded that the 20 least profitable customers exit the plane. The gate agent made the announcement to the entire plane, so the 20 people who were removed in order of how much they paid for their tickets were made to feel as embarrassed as possible.

It was only after a Twitter user posted running commentary on the incident that United stepped in. The airline’s Twitter representative acknowledged the event “shouldn’t have happened” — but it’s unclear whether it was talking about the price segregation or the fact that it was announced to all the passengers on the aircraft.

Folks of Riverhead, Long Island, were in for a surprise when officials started using Google Earth’s satellite image service to scan backyards across the city. What were they looking for? People with residential pools who never obtained the proper permits. So far, the city has spotted around 250 pools, and all owners have been asked to either obtain permits or pay hefty fines.

More than $75,000 has been collected with the aid of Google Earth.

Riverhead’s chief building inspector, Leroy Barnes, Jr., has said “pool safety has always been my concern,” and the city just wants to ensure that residents’ electrical and plumbing work meets local and state regulations.

But citizens claim the “Big Brother” action is all about the money. Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., says it’s becoming a more common move for cash-strapped local governments. “The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible,” said Coney.

Google claims it doesn’t know of any other local governments using its Google Earth program in a similar fashion.