Life wasn’t that great for Connie Culp after her husband, Thomas Culp, shot her right in the face, shattering her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and an eye. Also, hundreds of fragments from the shot as well as bone splinters were shattered all over her face. Connie Culp survived, though, but it was a tough life she had ever since 2004 when the incident happened. But then, face transplant became an option – you can see the results of the face transplant, as well as a video in this article.

Connie Culp endured 30 operations culminating with a 22-hour long one in which Dr. Maria Siemionow and a team of doctors replaced 80% of Connie’s face, in the fourth face transplant in the world and the first in the US. It was an incredible and impressive operation: bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels had to be placed on Connie Culp’s face, and even though her expression now is a bit wooden and bloated and squarish, it is still much better than before when she couldn’t breathe for herself, nor eat or smell.

Now, five years after the incident, Connie Culp admits that the face transplant changed her life and she is now a different woman: the procedure is still not over, since doctors still plan to remove the extra skin once the body accommodates with the new one and the blood vessels and nerves. But still, it’s impressive. Just check out the images below to see how much this person’s life was changed thanks to this face transplant.

And here is a short video of Connie Culp talking about the face transplant:

Google just announced via the official AdSense blog that they have released yet another great feature for those who use Google AdSense to monetize their websites: the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center!

This “Publisher center” will be used by publishers to provide all sorts of details regarding their websites, in order to attract even more and direct advertising to their sites. Here is the official description:

“In the new Publisher Center within Ad Planner, you can claim sites you own and customize the descriptions for each. For each site, you can also add up to five categories that describe your site’s content, and the types, sizes, and formats of ads that your site supports.”

Further more, you can share your Analytics data with the advertisers, so they can see your traffic stats, but I am sure some publishers wouldn’t like that information to become public. However, you’re not obliged to show that, so it’s still a great deal. After all, it’s more exposure for all the websites and clearly something worth trying!

So go right now to the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center and claim your site (either through Webmaster Tools or DoubleClick Directory) and start experiencing the future! Check out below a video presenting how the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center works:

A new super cool and super themed wedding took place in the UK, a Star Wars wedding! This follows just weeks after another geeky yet awesome wedding, the Shrek wedding.

However, this one was just as awesome: we have the groom dressed as Han Solo, Princess Leia is, of course, the bride while Chewbacca was the best man! Everybody else wore Star Wars costumes, from droid C-3PO to Jedis and Sith Lords and so on… which is, in my opinion, a great deal of fun, even though the original cast was not present (although the couple invited Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and George Lucas).

However, they still went on and had fun. For example, the groom pledged his love by saying: “I promise to protect you from the Dark Side, through hyperspace and into the far reaches of the galaxy.” After that, Darth Vader made a speech, and the party started.

“We wanted to do something different and they’re just great films,” said the groom about the wedding to the Sun. I’m sure they managed to impress quite a few people, I know I’m one of them!

What about you? Do you find these themed weddings fun? Would you like your own Star Wars themed wedding?

People might know the high class Vertu brand, a company that specializes in creating high quality cell phone designs which are both elegant and very, very pricy. What you certainly don’t know is that somewhere in the world – let’s say China, fake phones are created just so people like you and me (and generally those without tons of cash in their back pocket) have their share of snobbish fakeness.

Therefore, the Lamborghini Vertu fake phone you can “enjoy” in the image to the left is nothing but a phone-fake, one created to rival against Ferrari Vertu phone, the original created by Vertu. (Of course there are not two Vertu companies, one is a fake!)

Interestingly, the Lamborghini Vertu is not a rip off phone but an original one, with this fake phone offering a camera, media player, FM radio, Bluetooth support, and a microSD memory card slot – none of which are fake, but probably jut of low quality. Also, this fake Vertu Ferrari phone is quite small, with dimensions of 95×35×15 mm and a weight of 102 grams.

What do you think? Would you purchase a fake phone just to show off, or not?

Wow… there are bad costumes out there and there is the costume that Madonna wore during the 2009 MET Costume Gala. I mean… I know it was a costume party, but everything should have a limit!

The singer didn’t. She forgot that, after all, she isn’t the cute and sexy little girl she was 20 years ago and, even though she still has a great body and looks incredible, she still can’t act like that anymore. I mean… it’s way too 80s, with her blue costume and high heels and that… strange thing she’s wearing on her head. Simply horrible – watch for yourself below the advertisement!

Here are the Madonna images with her super-ugly costume:

The other day I found out that Eminem was happy he got rid of his pain pills addiction, and today I hear that another star has problems with the “wonder pills”: Paula Abdul. And, yes, it appears that these pills are worse than one could imagine.

Talking with USMagazine, Paula Abdul said: ““I couldn’t cancel my tour. I didn’t want anyone to count me out. I tried to keep everything hush-hush.”

She didn’t manage to do that, though. By 2005 she was diagnosed with “reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome” a neurological disorder that causes sever pain. She said that, due to the problems, she wore a patch that delivered a pain medication about 80 times more potent than morphine and took a nerve medication to relieve her symptoms. Other times she had to use a muscle relaxer… which sounds quite bad.

So, no, after all the news, it seems that being a star is not really as good as it appears to be when we look at them on TV. To suffer like hell and have to smile all the time… that’s simply incredible! But let’s just hope that Paula Abdul is OK now.

The most common and usually the most profitable income method for your blog is Google’s AdSense, but there might be times when you would like to try making money with your blog using other means. A good Google AdSense alternative in such a case would be AdBrite, an ad marketplace that offers a lot of banners and advertising opportunities.

Unlike Google AdSesnse, AdBrite is an Ad Marketplace that gives you complete control on the ads that run on your website: you can review, select and approve or reject ads, and you can also use them to directly sell your ad space to possible advertisers visiting your website. There are also many other features offered by AdBrite when you sign in, including the option to display full page ads (interstitial ads), inline text ads and a very good way of monetizing the images on your website!

So, no matter if you want an alternative to Google AdSense or you simply want to add a new network to increase your profits, AdBrite is a top choice and you will soon start counting lots of money from them: they’re easy to use and implement, they’re feature rich and they’ll probably make you rich too since you’ll be choosing which ads to be displayed on your website. It really can’t get much better! So give AdBrite a try and earn more money with your website!