Quick Takes: Valerie Harper on ‘The Doctors’
Actress Valerie Harper plans to discuss her brain cancer with some television doctors.
The daytime talk show “The Doctors” said Harper will appear Monday to talk with Travis Stork, Lisa Masterson and Andrew Ordon, as well as her own team of doctors.
The 1970s sitcom star has been diagnosed with a rare brain cancer and told she has as little as three months to live. She said her husband briefly withheld the diagnosis from her because it was so dire.
Harper, now 73, played Rhoda Morgenstern on television’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its spinoff, “Rhoda.”
She’s given the full hour of Monday’s talk show, and is surprised by former costars Ed Asner and Cloris Leachman.
Valerie Harper to appear on Today, The Doctors
—Associated Press
‘SimCity’ launch hits turbulence
Gamers expect headaches when it comes to “SimCity”; solving tough problems is part of the addictive nature of the bestselling franchise. Yet Electronic Arts’ much-anticipated update to the genre-defining 1989 original, released this week, has thus far been hampered by server issues.
A significant number of players have had trouble so much as launching the game, even prompting online retailer Amazon.com to offer a warning to potential buyers. “Many customers are having issues connecting to the ‘SimCity’ servers,” the retailer posted. Electronic Arts noted that its back-end infrastructure is “aggressively undergoing maintenance” to correct the issues.
While “SimCity” has garnered early rave reviews, it requires users to be constantly connected to the Internet in order to run it. Although this could provide such benefits as allowing much of the game’s data to live in the cloud and the game to be played anywhere, it also means users are at the mercy of the company’s servers.
Early buyers of the game, which was released Tuesday, have reported numerous horror stories online, such as the server locking mid-game and destroying the majority of a built city. “This is, obviously, not the situation we wanted for our launch week and we want you to know that we are putting everything we have at resolving these issues,” wrote senior producer Kip Katsarelis on the game’s official message boards.
An online petition on Change.org to remove the restrictions that made it necessary to be connected to Electronic Arts’ servers to play the game has garnered more than 20,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.
—Todd Martens
Kelly Osbourne confirms seizure
Kelly Osbourne’s seizure hasn’t stopped the “Fashion Police” host from tweeting about her ailment from her hospital bed.
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“Thank U all 4 UR beautiful well wishes yes I did have a seizure they are just trying to figure out why?” she confirmed on Twitter, linking to a close-up photo of an IV needle in her tattooed arm.
The lavender-haired daughter of Brit rocker Ozzy Osbourne and “The Talk” alum Sharon Osbourne suffered a 30-second seizure Thursday while taping her E! show. She told her co-host, Melissa Rivers, that she wasn’t feeling well before collapsing on the set. According to reports, there was an EMT in the audience who came to her aid and the commentator was rushed to a local hospital shielded in white sheets.
After performing tests and confirming a seizure, doctors deemed the 28-year-old “awake, alert and in stable condition,” according to her rep. As a precautionary measure, Osbourne spent the night at the hospital.
—Nardine Saad
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