Sunday night, the Cadillac of music awards shows, the Grammys aired their 50^th anniversary show, and by the time the dust had settled, Amy Winehouse walked away with five awards. Nominated in six categories, Winehouse’s wins included those in the categories of Best New Artist, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year for her smash hit, “Rehab.”

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Amy Winehouse is a throwback to soulful R&B/Motown-era singers like Tina Turner, Martha Reeves, and Gladys Knight — women with a darker edge of hardened reality to their voices. A refreshing change of pace from candy-coated pop tarts, Winehouse offers heavy ’60s powerhouse soul vocals in a modern punk package. A fairly troubled soul, Winehouse’s inner demons forced her into the place she “no, no, no”-ed, namely rehab. Hopefully, Amy Winehouse kicks her addictions and continues putting out solid albums.

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It has been an incredible couple of weeks for the team at CostumZee.com. We finally have pushed live the new version V.2 of the website!

If you haven’t had a chance to browse the website, here are some of the new features and improvements we made:

• A new design, a new logo! First of all, we have spent quite some time coming up with a clean look for the website, the design should allow you to better navigate and find what you are looking for.
• The CostumZee Billboard: this is a new feature that we’re really excited to introduce. It will complement the top 100 popular costume ideas that has been one of the most used feature on the website but with the introduction of the billboard we are not able to separate popular vs bestselling costume ideas. We also added the billboard at the costume idea level, you can now easily see if a costume idea is popular or if it’s a has-been!
• Community Driven: we added several features to let you, the users, help us to make CostumZee an even greater resource for costume ideas. Starting this week, any of our members can add a description to any costume idea, as well as adding links, photos and videos! Do you know a great website or blog that covers a costume idea, submit it! Do you have pictures or videos of yourself dressed in a costume? Find the costume idea page using the search in the header, and submit it! Check out the spiderman costume page for instance.
• Who’s visiting: we added widgets all over CostumZee to show you who’s visiting the website. Don’t forget to add an avatar to your profile cause if you do not, you’ll get the generic shadow avatar It’ll take a second to do so and it will look a lot nicer!
• Enhanced discussion forum: we have improved the forum and its functions to make it easier to use. You can also now browse the forum discussions by tag, by category or by search.
• Earn points: you will get rewarded for your actions on CostumZee! Add a picture, a link, a video, a description, a discussion, a comment or simply signup and you will earn points. Even though the current rewarding system is purely symbolic, we might look into turning those points into real rewards! More about this later on this year.
• Coupon codes and deals for our members: to thank you for being part of the CostumZee community, we are giving you access to coupon codes and shipping deals available at some of our online partners. We will make sure to list the latest offers and soon will integrate those savings directly at a product level to make it easier to save on your next costume purchase… stay tuned!
• Spread the word about CostumZee - Help us grow! We are always looking to get known even more, so please DO NOT hesitate to share CostumZee with your friends and family. You can send an signup invite up to 3 people at a time using the Tell your Friends form.
• Don’t miss any Holidays! We have added new sections: a Holiday and a Theme section. You will be able to keep track of upcoming Holidays and make sure you get your costume on time! We are also working on theme related sections such as the presidential candidates , cosplay and school plays.

And a lot more… Browse around, you’ll see it all! So how did we do? Is the new version of CostumZee easier to use? Is it missing features that you would like to see?

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It’s always sad hearing the passing of someone young and famous. Unfortunately, this week, Heath Ledger tragically passed away. I was really looking forward to the premiere of the super anticipated movie “The Dark Night“, the Batman sequel, to see those incredible stars reunited in the movie: Chris Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman… pretty amazing. But I am sure this won’t be fun for anybody from the movie and production to be there watching premiere without Heath.

Simply tragic.

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As American as apple pie and Chevrolet, the Super Bowl is one of the most-watched spectacles on television each year. Even if you’re not a football fan, there’s always the commercials to look forward to with the men and women of Madison Avenue knocking themselves out to come up with memorable minute-long spots vying for the eye of discriminating Super Bowl viewers.

And if that doesn’t get you, the Super Bowl is yet another excuse to party your tail gate off! If hosting your own Super Bowl party, make it something even more festive in addition to pizza, chip, dip, and cold brewskis. Deck yourself out in your favorite team’s colors and jerseys. And if you’re favorite team doesn’t make it to the Super Bowl, that’s all the more reason to pick up some football-flavored costumes. Ladies can glam it up with sexy ladies football costumes or as a cheerleader

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“It’s astounding! Time is fleeting! Madness takes its toll!” Over 27 years later, The Rocky Horror Picture Show maintains a fan following so rabid that the film refuses to be merely contained to DVD or the silver screen. Sure, you can check out the cult classic on DVD or at various midnight showings still staged throughout the country. However, the only way to truly see The Rocky Horror Picture show is at a costumed showing, acted out by the fans in tandem with the actual film shown on screen.

All over the country, fans turn out in droves, dressed in full costume regalia as their favorite characters from the film. A select few participate as leads by acting out the roles of the principal characters, but the entire audience takes part interacting with the film. From chucking toast at the screen when “A toast!” is called for to doing The Time Warp out of their seats, everyone becomes a part of the wild and wooly festivities.

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Wow, this is really unbelievable news. We were already really excited and proud to be featured on Tech Yahoo.com in a blog post written by Dory Devlin earlier this month.

The article actually made the Yahoo homepage on Monday night. The exposure on Yahoo drove an incredible amount of traffic within hours to CostumZee, and has tested the solidity of our web servers :-).

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Judging by the 5.4 million viewers who tuned in to see Poison frontman Bret Michaels pick a new girlfriend on Rock of Love, it’s safe to say that celebrity reality theme shows are quite popular. The celebreality show’s Season 1 finale drew the second-highest rating ever for VH1 in the history of the cable channel.

This Halloween, show some love and capitalize on the popularity of these celebrity-themed reality shows by throwing together your own “celebreality” costume!

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We just wanted to take a moment to thank Dory Devlin for mentioning CostumZee today on her Yahoo Tech blog!

The post is entitled Halloween Costume Ideas on the Web, and you can read it here.

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Last night i was reminded of a story that took place in Pittsburgh last week, and wanted to point it out because it’s the second time this year I think I have noticed something similar happen.

“Two women in Pittsburgh dressed as ninjas and carrying swords were videotaped robbing a gas station, according to investigators.” read the rest of the story here.

And there even more:

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Did you see this today? “Ginormous” made it in the English dictionary.

And should you thank for that, honestly? Buddy the Elf! Yes, Buddy (ie: Will Ferrell) from Elf - the movie, used that word quite in a funny way…

If you never watched that movie, oh boy you’re missing on something, this is a super funny movie. But wait for this Winter, I am not sure you’ll appreciate the Christmas spirit in that hot Summer heat

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