On May 15, 2007, Hachette Filipacchi released Ty Pennington at Home, a one-off magazine that hit newsstands 10 days after he was arrested for a DUI. Now that the Extreme Makeover Home Edition host is cleaned up – albeit bloated, red-faced, and showing major signs of aging – the publisher thinks they've got a hit on their hands: They're turning the single shot title into a quarterly, with the first issue of the now-regular Pennington hitting newsstands today. It goes up against Hearst's O at Home, Reader's Digest's Every Day with Rachael Ray and, let's face it, the eventual launch of supra-designer Nate Berkus' own title.
The sad thing about this press release is that the event it's promoting – 7Up's launch of its new organic version – already happened or, for all we know, is still happening.
As part of its push to notify all would-be lemon-lime fizzy drinkers that all the unpronounceable chemical compounds will no longer be found on the ingredients label – unless they're considered "all natural," that is – the soft drink rounded up Ty Pennington to unveil a "2-3 story 7UP Natural Bottle" at Greeley Square (6th Ave and 34th Street).
Spectacle, we know. But after last year's live billboard in Times Square, it takes a lot more to impress us. So that's where these personalized notes from publicists come in:
FYI –
A $1 donation will be made to the Fresh Air Fund for every bottle of 7UP 100% Natural sampled today…Plus you can stalk Ty Pennington and gawk at a 24foot tree shaped like a 7UP bottle.
We'd rather wait for late November for a 65-foot-plus version of an actual tree. The full carbonated release, after the jump.
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Bulldozers, sledgehammers and new dry wall aren't always the keys to happiness (neither, apparently, are the keys to news cars the keys to happiness). That's the case for the Leomiti-Higgins family, which had their home knocked down so ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition could build them a brand new manse.
Now ABC and the show's producers are on the receiving end of a lawsuit from the Higgins kids, who have since left the house, leaving their adopted Leomiti parents with the home. The kids, who range in age from 14 to 21 and lost both their parents in 2004, claim the Leomitis used their sob story to attract producers' attention. But after the crew packed up, they turned it into a hostile environment (claims of physical abuse and racial name calling) for their adopted kin and are factoring Ty Pennington & Co.'s involvement into their trauma.
All this, every media outlet would like to point out, is just another example of how reality television isn't always how it appears. Except on The Real World, because all that is straight shooting. Right? Right?!
