At Marshall Field in Chicago, I had them take a big bed into the menswear department, one with black sheets. I'd get in bed wearing a nightcap, and my fans would get in bed with me, one at a time, and I'd sign their memorabilia. And then I'd give them a free pint of Ben & Jerry's.

Once I.D.W. folks saw that people like Ben Shapiro were generally smart, highly informed, and often princely in difficult conversations, it's more understandable that occasionally a few frogs got kissed here and there as some I.D.W. members went in search of other maligned princes.

Sometimes I become attached to a character because I've gotten to explore him for so long, like in the case of Ben, but sometimes I fall in love with a throwaway character who exists for only one scene in a video game like The Drunken Villager in 'Diablo III' or Sandal in 'Dragon Age.'

Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called 'Reporter' about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.

There's a guy in London named Ben Cohen who is doing great things. In a way, we need people like Ben - we need straight guys to come out and say, 'What're you worried about? Get over yourself.' That's what we need! Because no one's listening to us - certainly, no one is listening to me.

With 'The Host,' I think the actors could be really big names. That would be cool. I'd love to see Robert Redford put on a beard and be Jeb; he would be amazing... Matt Damon has some very Jared-esque qualities, and then Casey Affleck as Ian and Ben Affleck as Kyle. Imagine the interplay.

Baseball may be our national pastime, but the age-old tradition of taking a swing at Congress is a sport with even deeper historical roots in the American experience. Since the founding of our country, citizens from Ben Franklin to David Letterman have made fun of their elected officials.

The most important thing to Ben and me was starting a family, so as soon as we got engaged, we booked Gurney's in Montauk - which is just a few miles down the beach from our summer home - as our wedding venue a full year and a half out, and then we immediately started trying to get pregnant.

Conservatives, in general, are anti-immigrant for the same reasons they have always been anti-immigrant - a proud tradition in our nation of immigrants going back to the days of the Founders, when Ben Franklin thought we were going to be overrun by Germans. But Business likes illegal workers.

Like Netflix, Looker started as nothing more than an idea. Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield were two brilliant engineers who had figured out a better way for businesses to see and analyze their data, and they asked me to join them to help out with the ABCs - that's short for Anything But Coding.

My beauty tricks revolve around eyes. For the early morning shoots, I pop eye pads in the freezer the night before, and when I take them out in the morning they are already cold and active and are great under my eyes. I keep my eye pads right next to my red velvet Ben & Jerry's in the freezer.

My first job was playing 'Nurse 2' in a film by Ben Elton called 'Maybe Baby,' and the first actors I worked with professionally were Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson. I was totally star-struck. I got that job on my final day of drama school, so it was a nice bridge into the professional world.

Ben Askren, he is a very strong wrestler, probably the best in the division, I think. But then again, when you're in the fight game like this, some of the other things you have to improve. It can't just be wrestling all the time. You got to continue to work on your striking, get better at that.

I'm one of those people, in any country I'm in, if somebody could just put me in a car or a bus, I'll look out the window and say, 'OK, there's the Tower of London, there's Buckingham Palace, there's Big Ben,' and if it all takes about five minutes, perfect. I've seen all of it and I can go home.

The danger of leaving overwhelming wealth and power in the grasp of a small minority is a lesson that leaders such as ousted Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak have learned a little too late, as the demonstrations across the Arab world indicate.

The Globe is a missing monument. There's no existing example of a theater from Shakespeare's time. You have Roman theaters, Greek theaters, all kinds of theaters, but none in which the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Marlowe were performed. Scholars feel that it would be of immense value to have one.

I'll tell you this: you can look at all the masculine toughies you want - the Ben Roethlisbergers, the Russell Crowes, the David Petraeuses - but if you want to look at what a man should be - persevering, honest, a person who manifests his intellect into action - you need look no further than Roger Ebert.

I've been lucky enough with my NBA money to make some investments in some pretty cool things, whether it be partnering up with Ben Sturner and the Leverage Agency; being involved in an analytics company called Simatree; or creating a production company and working with brands and creating content in house.

I have been influenced by many different artists at many different stages of my life. Starting out, it was people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Fiona Apple. As I got older I got deeper into the work of bands like the Beatles, artists like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Etta James, and Joni Mitchell.

We spent a few days up Ben Nevis, which is the biggest mountain in the U.K., and there was one day when we had to make a decision whether we were going to go to the summit or not. It was already getting dark, but we made the call to go and made the summit, but as soon as we got there, this blizzard just hit.

As a child, I walked with my friends to Rosa Parks Elementary and then to Ben Franklin Middle School. I rode Muni to Galileo High School. And thanks to amazing teachers who believed in me and supported me along the way, I was able to matriculate to another public school: the University of California at Davis.

When I started, there were no Indians on television or films, except for Sir Ben Kingsley. I was an actor in high school, college, and I played leads. And when I graduated, I knew that I couldn't go to Hollywood and audition for shows or films. I could try, but where was the evidence that it was going to happen?

At one point, I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham but, rather, set out on his own path and ran money his way, by his own rules... I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor.

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

America really started to die when the Federal Reserve was founded, and it really started to die in 1971 when the gold backing was taken away from the dollar, and this currency with Ben Bernanke just printing up or counterfeiting as much money as he wants and destroying the economy is really destroying the economy.

When we were shooting 'The Book Thief,' I was keeping all these journals. And I remember talking to my mom, really trying to verbalize all the experiences I was having. And I remember my mom saying, 'Ben, reflection is a retroactive process.' When you're going through it, that's the time to just let it wash over you.

I'm a sucker for gag reels and teaser trailers for new seasons. One of the great parts of panels, especially on a show like 'Supernatural,' which can be so dark, it's fun to get up there and laugh and remember we're only telling a story. Seeing Eric Kripke and Ben Edlund up there being so funny always makes me laugh.

I mean, if you are director like Lars Von Trier who is able to get actors on a table like Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, James Caan, Nicole Kidman, Chloe Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier, all in the self-service situation in the same room, the same trailer, no money, then you must have something that everybody accepts.

One of the people who most influenced me was Ben Shapiro, a marketing professor at the business school. He used to rant and rave and pound his fist: 'It's all about the customers!' And he was right. He was also right that, at that time, retailing was devoid of really talented people; he urged me to go in that direction.

Dr. Ben Carson has the most moving personal narrative in modern presidential politics. His mother, one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education. She was married at age 13, bore Ben and his brother, and then raised the boys as an impoverished single mother in Detroit. As a young boy, Carson was a terrible student.

I got to talk with some of the great offensive minds in football. Bruce Arians, Byron Leftwich, Andy Reid, Ben McAdoo, Bill O'Brien, I met all those guys and tried to take something away from each of them. Hue Jackson, people that are known for developing quarterbacks, I got exposed to a lot of stuff I hadn't seen before.

Horror is like comedy. Woody Allen's comedy is going to be very different from Ben Stiller's comedy which is going to be different from Adam Sandler's comedy which is going to be different from Judd Apatow's comedy. They're all comedy, but they're all very different types and you can enjoy all of them. Horror is the same way.

Producer Michael Davies - who did 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' - offered me a TV show, but I turned it down. I wasn't negotiating: It just didn't sound like a good idea. Then he offered me another show, and I said, 'No thanks' again. When I heard about 'Win Ben Stein's Money,' I thought, 'OK, that sounds like a good idea.'

The thing that I always respected about Bruce Arians was, when he was at Pittsburgh, he let Ben Roethlisberger decide what he liked. I used to do that. You can put something in and force-feed it to a quarterback. But if he doesn't like it and have his heart in it, it's not going to be as good as when he really likes something.

The States is run by the Federal Reserve, an institution that answers only to itself and to a few large banks. It's modelled on the Bank of England. Ben Franklin said that one of the main reasons America revolted was to get away from the Bank of England, the mother of all central banks - the most pernicious and insidious of all.

Ben & Jerry's evolved into what it is doing and is trying to transition its supply chain, but this is essentially retrofitting. In the social enterprise movement, we see companies whose essence, the products they make, the reason they exist from day one, is because these people see something out in the world that they cannot accept.

It was 1995, the year Ben Crenshaw won the Masters. I was watching on TV, and I remember watching him sink his final putt on the 18th hole. He broke down in tears because his coach, Harvey Penick, had just died. I sat there watching with a box of Kleenex, wiping tears from my eyes and going, 'OK, this is crazy - I'm crying over golf!'

Ben Karlin is a friend of mine and was a writer on 'The Daily Show.' He's just put out a book and asked a bunch of writers from various disciplines to contribute. It was called 'Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me,' and of course I agreed, and then I actually had to sit down and write it. God, writing fiction is terrifying.

Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'

Hank Paulson, obviously, had spent his career on Wall Street, had a deep knowledge of the Street, and also was a very forceful personality, had a very good relationship with the president, and was in a very different place, for example, than Ben Bernanke, who is an academic, quiet guy: spent most of his time thinking about monetary policy.

Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hippy sensibility to bear. Buyers saw the brand as saying 'all-natural, organic and Fairtrade.'

Obviously, as you get a little older, you are not going to be quite as quick or quite as strong, and so I might be regarded by some as the underdog... There is actually a statue of Big Ben and I in Perth, Ont., and I was on a Canadian stamp once, and normally you have to be dead to do either of those things, and, well, here I am, still going.

I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.'

So much business is based on the belief that we should do whatever we can within legal limits to make as much money as we can. Ben & Jerry's was based on values, and we try to operate a business that not just sells ice cream but partners with all our stakeholders - whether that's suppliers or customers - to bring about a more sustainable world.

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