Quotes, URL's, Links And References-by:older Femmes, Butches, Ftms, Mtfs, Queer, Etc.

[sweetlady]

(l) (l) (l)


March 25, 2007

Into the Mystical Unreal Reality of the Faroe Islands

By STEPHEN METCALF


In a small cafe in a town called Nolsoy, on an archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic, surrounded by barflies and the blue fug of cigarette smoke, I am trying to be unobtrusive. This is not going so well. There are precisely two occupied tables in the establishment, the barflies’ and mine. At mine, English is spoken, pallid beer is sipped, and all eye contact is avoided. At theirs, they speak a derivative of Old Norse, drink a rigorous liquor and shoot glances my way, accompanied by throaty chuckles. I, in fact, look not only like an American and a tourist, but also like an idiot, having walked up onto the quayside at Nolsoy, through its most famous landmark — the bone archway formed by the massive jaws of a sperm whale — and into its one bar wearing a flotation suit. A giant, puffy, one-piece flotation suit. Ten minutes ago, thudding across freezing harbor waters in a Zodiac, a flotation suit had seemed like a good idea. Now it makes me look like a Power Ranger. The chuckles are starting to crescendo. As I exit the place, from behind me I hear, “Zay hallo to George Bush.”


Nolsoy is a higgledy-piggledy little village, and the locals in its one bar are fishermen on extended hiatus. On a Sunday, Nolsoy’s few aimless streets are deserted, as is the eerily well-kept football pitch that straddles the waterfront. The men, ominously, have filed out of the bar behind me. But when they approach, they approach tentatively, almost shyly, until one finally speaks. “You are American, yes?” “Yes.” “We have something we want to show you.” I follow them down the slope of the village, toward the harbor, where they lead me to a small, padlocked boat shed. In the middle of the shed sits an exquisitely handcrafted rowboat — a kind of modern Viking variation on the old New England dory, with a raised prow, a small mast stacked with running lights and the words “Diana Victoria” painted along its stern. So this is it, I think. This is Ove Joensen’s boat.


If you are to understand the Faroe Islands, maybe the most curious place left on earth, you would do well to start with Ove Joensen’s boat. Joensen was a sailor in Nolsoy who, in his spare time, built the Diana Victoria by hand, and for one purpose only: to row the 900 miles, via the Shetland Islands, all the way to mainland Europe. Joensen wasn’t a glory seeker; he wanted to raise money for Nolsoy so that it could afford a new town swimming pool. Nonetheless, in 1986, when he arrived in Copenhagen and leapt out of the Diana Victoria to kiss the statue of the Little Mermaid, he was greeted by a roaring throng — there are about 10,000 Faroese living in Denmark — as cameras threw the images back to the Faroes on live TV. Joensen had completed the brutal task in just 41 days.


The men around the Diana Victoria relay the story carefully, piece by piece, each detail of Ove Joensen’s life laid out delicately, like a tiny wreath. They conclude by telling me, mostly in gestures, that after the journey, Joensen’s hands never fully unfurled. Three months after his triumph, he slipped on the deck of a boat and slid into the icy waters below. Ove Joensen, whose feat is still celebrated in the Faroes with festivities every August, was dead by a freak accident at the age of 39. In the interior gloom, the men’s eyes glint with pride as their hands stroke the flanks of the rowboat. When I note how unusually small the blades of Joensen’s oars are, one of the men snorts and says, “That’s your problem. Why are your oars so big?”


The Faroe Islands are an archipelago of 18 upthrusted hunks of igneous rock in the middle of precisely nowhere, the stretch of North Atlantic halfway between Norway and Iceland. It is oddly temperate, thanks to the currents of the Gulf Stream, and oddly green, thanks in part to the two million pairs of seabirds — guillemots, fulmars, storm petrels and, of course, the famously cute puffins — that carpet the islands in guano each breeding season. The Faroes are easily the most moodily beautiful place I have ever been. Each island is a giant slice of elaborately tiered basalt, tilted to one side and covered in green, tussocky felt. Streamer clouds, almost mannered in their perfection, encircle the mountains. Rocky cliffs, topped in arêtes and tarns, plunge into the sea, while up from the water jut massive, looming sea stacks. It rains here a lot, and waterfalls flow pretty much continuously. Driving to my hotel from the airport, the only thing I could make out through the mist was the dull nacre of the rills, dozens of them, snaking their way down the sides of the mountains.


Vikings settled the islands more than a thousand years ago, and almost 50,000 of their descendants now live here, sharing space with 75,000 more or less freely roaming sheep. Although the Danes took formal possession of the Faroes in 1380 and have never fully relinquished it, “We are not Danish” is a common refrain here. (When a country woman said it to me, her eyes flashed hotly before settling back into Scandinavian stolidity.) No, the Faroese are nothing if not Faroese. They speak their own language, recite their own sagas, dance their own raucous chain-formation dance (based on the old French branle simple) and still sing quarter-note, Gregorian-like chants. Their icon remains the turf-roofed house. When the Vikings first arrived, they made rock foundations in the shapes of their boats, turned the boats over on top of the rocks and then, to stabilize and insulate these makeshift houses, put sod on the hulls of the boats. It is not uncommon to come upon a Faroese mowing his roof.


To this day, when a Faroese man, looking out to the harbor, cries “Grind,” every man in town, from the barkeep to the mayor, drops what he is doing, reaches for a metal implement and sprints toward the water. The cry means whales have been spotted, are being herded into the harbor and now need to be slaughtered, in a ritual called a grindadrap. Within minutes, the harbor waters are drenched in red and the corpses of pilot whales lie on the dockside in a row. The precious meat and blubber is distributed, first according to who spotted and who killed, then according to need, with a special emphasis on the elderly, sick and poor.


Early in my stay I visited with Eydun Dal-Christiansen, an artist and a stonecutter whose torso is so huge I thought he had to be wearing a chest protector beneath his shirt. (He wasn’t.) Dal-Christiansen lives on the main island of Streymoy, a short drive outside of Torshavn, at 18,000 inhabitants Europe’s smallest capital. Dal-Christiansen builds sinewy lamps out of stones he quarries while hiking alone in the mountains. Sitting in his kitchen, over instant coffee and diced-up candy bars, he told me that he considered his stones to be living things and added slowly, in halting English, “Here in the Faroes, we live close to nature. Up in the mountains, in the fog, nothing can harm you.” I had been struggling to understand the Faroes, and then one thing occurred to me: for being so unapologetically sexist, Faroese culture permits an immense and spiritual tenderness on the part of Faroese men. And for being so isolated, the Faroes may be the last place in Europe where you can still succumb to a mystical Yeatsian reverie, and without so much as a hint of kitsch.


Jah, Jah, come in, come in. In the Faroe Islands, everyone invites you in. The wives serve coffee, then disappear. The men drink coffee and talk. And in recent times, the men talk about oil: “We have just one leg to stand on. The fish are not enough. If we find oil. . . .” More than 95 percent of the islands’ exports come from fishing, but oil companies are prospecting in Faroe waters. A discovery would allow the Faroese to maintain their comfortable European lifestyle — thanks in part to a large Danish subsidy — but more in accord with their self-image, as a fiercely hardscrabble and thoroughly un-Danish people. Over and over again, I was cautiously supplied the latest rumor: “You know, they had Champagne flown in to the rig last week.”


The Faroese speak English well — maybe not as flawlessly as the citizens of mainland Denmark, but they’re often fluent or near-fluent. “Oh, yes, thanks to MTV we learn it early now,” John Eysturoy, my contact at the modest tourist board, tells me. “The town council tried to take MTV away in the ’90s, but the young people held a protest. So they took away BBC World instead.” Dal-Christiansen and Eysturoy are old friends, and in the former’s kitchen, they alternate between ripping on each other mercilessly and reflecting carefully on the status of the Faroes. Early in the Cold War the United States and NATO deemed the Faroes strategically important, stuck an early warning system on one of its mountaintops and told the Danes, in no uncertain terms, to increase their subsidy to the islands — to use the teat, in other words, to stave off a growing independence movement. In a generation, with the help of a robust fishing industry, the Faroese went from village poverty to zesty, car-loving, suburban-style affluence.


And yet the islands have stayed essentially an ancient place. In part, this is a matter of scale. You could fit the entire Faroese population in Rose Bowl — almost twice over. “That’s the stupid thing about the Faroe Islands,” Eysturoy says, pointing at Dal-Christiansen. “One hour after he’s done something stupid, I know about it.” Unlike, say, the Shetlanders to their south, the Faroese have carefully preserved their language. (I was introduced to a snow-haired man in a tweed jacket, a professor known as “the protector of the Faroese tongue.” He is tasked with creating new words in Faroese, for things like “helicopter” and the “at” sign in e-mail.) And compared with the Icelanders to their north, their rituals have yet to be taken over by the trappings of tourist simulacra. “In Iceland, you can see a Viking town, but it is not real,” Eysturoy tells me.


Eysturoy is a soulful hangdog of a 50-something man. He loves the Faroe Islands deeply, but honestly, and applies his favorite epithet — “stupid” — to them liberally. After about 10 minutes in his acquaintance, I knew I had a friend for life, but I did manage to step out of bounds once. I had lamented having missed, by a scant 10 days, a whale kill, and as we sat drinking at his men’s club in Torshavn, trading insults, I asked Eysturoy if he would kindly swim out into the Atlantic and lead a pod of pilot whales in a chain dance. At this he grew silent. There is no funning the grindadrap, a source of both considerable pride and anxiety to a native islander. Greenpeace used to agitate about the kills, in spite of the fact that the pilots are not endangered and that the Faroese use every ounce of every one of the 1,000 whales taken in an average year. “The kills are very humane,” Eysturoy said. “A veterinarian designed the method.” I tried to make up for my blunder by asking him, “So, if someone yelled ‘Grind’ now, you would head to the harbor?” Without pausing, Eysturoy replied, “Of course. Or I would not be Faroese.”


Later, a few miles out of Torshavn in Kirkjubour, the most ancient of ancient places in the Faroes, Eysturoy holds an old whaling knife up to my nose. The smell of blubber on the blade is rich and dank. The knife, like everything in Kirkjubour, is very old. Settled life began here more than a millennium ago. With no trees (hard basalt lies too close to the surface of the soil), all the early houses were built out of driftwood. Kirkjubour’s original sod-roof farmhouse, known as the Roykstovan, still stands, and is the oldest inhabited wooden structure in Europe. Here, more than anywhere, one feels the spirit of the Faroe Islands. “Roykstovan” means “smoke room,” and everything happened in this, the one room where the tribe could afford to make a fire, by burning peat. They slept, ate, combed wool, slaughtered and danced the chain dance for days to keep blood flowing through the bitter cold. It is in this farmhouse, beneath its hulking, fire-singed beams, that Eysturoy encourages me to take in the smell of a grind knife, and says pointedly, “This is not a place for gold and silver. There is nothing that glitters in this house.”


As we’re preparing to leave, we run into Joannes Patursson, whose family has lived in the house and on its surrounding farmstead through 17 generations. This fact, so astounding to visitors, remains wholly unimpressive to him. “I don’t think of it much,” he says, leaning on the bumper of his pickup. His young sons run out of the truck and chase each other toward the house. “Jah, jah, that is Generation 18.” Will they grow and farm the land, as Joannes has? “Maybe. They’re still boys. You never know.” How did the land stay intact for so long? And here I learn the most incredible fact about the scarcely credible Faroese: they have retained the custom of primogeniture. Leaseholds are impartible — that is, if you are the eldest son, you get everything, and if you are a younger son, you get nothing but screwed. “You can’t split it up, or else you destroy it,” Eysturoy says, gesturing to the farmstead.


A helicopter from one of the offshore rigs suddenly judders by. “Maybe in the future we will find a well, get some oil,” says Patursson, the most deeply phlegmatic man alive, with a shrug. “The Shetlanders themselves did not benefit from it.” He looks up to the sky and sniffs. It has done nothing but rain since I arrived, but he says, “Tomorrow it will be clear.” A heavy downpour continued through the following morning. And then, just as Patursson said it would, the mist lightened and turned to fleecy strands, backed by merciful patches of blue.


The coastal village of Tjornuvik is a small cluster of timber houses with a population of about 70. It lies snugly slotted in the hollow of a massive glacial bowl, facing an equally massive ocean channel formed out of an Ice Age fjord. The setting is almost laughably sublime. Hulking mountains shelter the channel, which funnels a roaring surf right up to the village’s front edge. In choral reply, waterfalls cascade down from the high escarpment behind the village. Out in the distance loom Risin and Kellingin, the two most iconic sea stacks in the Faroe Islands, known as “the witch” and “the giant.” (As legend has it, the two ne’er-do-wells were towing the Faroes from Norway to Iceland when the sun came up, and they turned to stone.)


Once a year, on a Saturday in early fall, well-heeled professionals make the hour’s drive from Torshavn to Tjornuvik for the Stakksdagur, the festal day that inaugurates the community’s slaughtering season. In spring, a handful of rams are abandoned to the most remote corner of the village commons, to roam wild over the summer. Come autumn, the village men don traditional Faroese caps, sing traditional Faroese hymns and then, carrying seven-foot spiked wooden fence poles, make the punishing mountain hike to fetch the rams. The men build a makeshift pen from the poles, into which they herd the panicked animals, who are hiked back down the mountain and, with much fanfare, into the village. There they are slaughtered and put up for auction.


The year before my visit had marked a milestone: the first woman was allowed to join the Stakksdagur. This year, I will be its first weak-ankled vegetarian. The leader of our party is a young man named Jogvan, whose family has farmed and shepherded in Tjornuvik for generations. Jogvan is about 30, with jet-black hair and a pair of black swoosh eyebrows set atop a rectangular face. “You like American football,” Jogvan says cheerily. “We, we like collecting sheep.”


After a round of hymning, a group of about 30 of us ascend to the tottering uppermost heights of a headland, then descend, fully off-trail, into the massive inner rim of a neighboring cirque. The Faroese, it goes without saying, are experienced hikers, as measured by the near total absence, even after hours of precipitous climbing, of dirt anywhere above the sole of their boots. My jeans, meanwhile, are quickly mud-spackled up to the thigh. The hike is exhausting, and I lag badly.


After crossing a long alpine meadow, we finally arrive at a cliff edge suspended over the sea. Karis, the pioneering suffragette from the previous year, kindly hikes alongside me. “So where are the rams?” I ask, and she laughs. Karis, who looks to be in her early 20s and has hennaed hair and blue-saucer eyes, points out to the water. Hundreds of feet offshore, rising hundreds of feet out of the surf, sits a grass-topped sea stack. “You’re joking.” Karis shakes her head solemnly and laughs again. The sea stack is reachable only by a crude trolley of a welded aluminum chair rigged up with pulleys on a ropeway suspended 400 feet above roiling whitecaps. We will have to tow ourselves across the chasm, two at a time, and make our high-wire return with rams on board. ‘’We all have to die sometime,” Karis says, and I understand perfectly. The spirit of Ove Joensen is everywhere in the Faroes.


Crossing to and from the sea stack goes off without a hitch. The return hike is less difficult, and I fall in with Jonhedin, a native of Tjornuvik who now works as a jack-of-all-trades (a journalist, D.J., teacher and, of course, shepherd) in Torshavn. “My grandparents would say to me, ‘You romanticize village life. We were poor. We owned a quarter of a cow,’ ” says Jonhedin, who loves Tjornuvik but refuses to sentimentalize it. “They were tenant farmers. They lived off of land they didn’t own.”


Later, Jonhedin and I stand together in a makeshift basement slaughterhouse. (Every house in Tjornuvik and most village houses in the Faroes have such an abattoir. “We live with death, here in the Faroes,” he says, fully aware of his double entendre.) Here the first ram of the season will be slaughtered. A cartridge gun drives a bolt into the ram’s brain, shuddering its body, and then its throat is slit. I’ve never seen a slaughter, and I watch intently. Blood pours down from the opened throat. The ram kicks and kicks, and death spreads through its body. The blood falls into a bucket, and the bucket is stirred continuously, to prevent clotting, so it can be used later for sausage. “We use every part of the ram except for the feet and part of the stomach,” Jonhedin tells me as he holds out the stirrer. The blood clots instantly, and looks like freshly pulped raspberries.


This ram had grazed in the wild for six months. All the water it consumed came from sea breezes and wet grass, so there’s little fat between its dermis and its tissue. To skin the animal without breaking its hide, a very large man in a blue rubber apron and rubber boots, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, repeatedly drives his hand up into the carcass, both with great force and great care. The village elders look on, goading him with clucks. A father holds up his toddler son to afford him a better view. Between strokes, the man plunges his hands into a bucket of cold water and swigs from a schnapps bottle, then sets upon the ram again, his entire body torquing like a Greco-Roman wrestler’s. Finally, the hide separates and — success! — the carcass is laid on a dressing table, severed hooves in the air, its hypodermis an unbroken white balloon. The chest cavity is opened, the organs carefully removed, the stomach pumped with water and lanced. The waft of cut grass instantly fills the room.


Over coffee in the kitchen of Jogvan’s in-laws, a small group gathers to discuss the day’s events. The rams have come in light this year. Jonhedin blames global warming. “There were fewer sand eels this year,” he explains. “The puffins eat fewer sand eels, they fertilize the grass less, the sheep weigh 10 pounds less.” The conversation drifts away from the Stakksdagur. “There is a rumor,” says Jogvan. “Someone at the airport says the drilling crew ordered a case of Champagne to be choppered out to the rig.” A round of slow nods. The men of Tjornuvik are convinced that the Faroe Islands, should they discover oil, will do with its riches what Tjornuvik would: create a giant community development fund. Jah, jah, a development fund. More careful nods. Then Jogvan says, “Of course, I’d like to buy a Humvee, and all that.” Laughter, as Jonhedin adds, “A solid-gold Humvee. Now, can you imagine Jogvan driving up the mountain in that?”


That night I call John Eysturoy to tell him about my remarkable final day in the Faroe Islands. Jah, jah: he had already heard.


A week later, at home in Brooklyn, idling in front of my computer, I Google “Faroes,” “discovery” and “oil.” The story I click through to reads: “Drilling by Statoil off the Faroe Islands has been completed. No commercially viable oil or gas volumes were found.”

ESSENTIALS

GETTING THERE: The easiest way to arrive is through Copenhagen, from which there are several daily flights on Atlantic Airways (www.atlantic.fo). Atlantic also flies from Reykjavik, Iceland; London; and (summer only) Aberdeen, Scotland.

LAY OF THE LAND: It’s easiest to get around the islands by car and ferry. Most visitors base themselves on Streymoy, which is home to the capital city, Torshavn. Of the remaining 17 islands, those most worth visiting are the beautiful Suduroy; Mykines, for bird watching; Eysturoy, for its charming fishing villages; and Koltur, which is inhabited by one couple and has medieval ruins (you can reach it only by an inexpensive Atlantic Airways helicopter flight).

HOTELS: Hotel Foroyar Pleasant hilltop property, overlooking the harbor and the city, with a good restaurant. Torshavn; 011-298-31-75-00; www.hotelforoyar.com; doubles from $228. Hotel Torshavn Right down by the harbor, and recently refurbished. Torshavn; 011-298-35-00-00; www.hoteltorshavn.fo; doubles from $193.

RESTAURANTS, CAFES AND BARS: Café Natur Great bar popular with locals, with good bar food and live music. Aarvegur 7; 011-298-31-26-25. Gallari Jinx Café Good coffee and simple snacks. Aarvegur 3; 011-298-31-71-01. Restaurant Gourmet New upscale restaurant with serious culinary aspirations. Gr. Kambans Gota 13; 011-298-32-25-25; entrees $18 to $40.

SIGHTS AND ACTIVITIES: The best overall resource is the Bradt Travel Guides’ Faroe Islands (Globe Pequot, $22); for a list of festivals, hikes and events, go to www.visit-faroeislands.com. In Torshavn, stop by Nordic House (011-298-35-13-51; www.nlh.fo), which offers exhibits, seminars and concerts, and the National Gallery (011-298-31-35-79; www.art.fo). On Streymoy don’t miss the beautiful drive to the village of Saksun. The old schooner Nordlysid (www.nordlysid.com) sails around the islands; Captain Birgir Enni will take you to the grottoes and bird cliffs and to Nolsoy, and will also feed you great seafood.




(y) There is a video that accompanies this article and the slide show ay www.nytimes/travel for those interested.





Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(y) (y)


CW!!

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/23/business/24online.190.jpg



March 24, 2007

What’s Online

Apple Cult Becoming a Religion

By DAN MITCHELL


APPLE will not release the iPhone until June, but Leander Kahney, the writer of “The Cult of Mac” blog, posited this week on Wired News that the new phone is already partly responsible for a major change in how the company is perceived (wired.com). After nearly three decades, Apple is finally being taken seriously not just by the true believers, but by just about everybody.


According to Mr. Kahney, this shift has taken place in the last few weeks, as both the iPhone and, more recently, Apple TV, have quickly become “must have” products. “A lot of people thought Apple got lucky with the iPod,” Mr. Kahney wrote. “It was a one-hit wonder, a fluke not likely to be repeated.” But the iPhone is already thought of as an “industry-changing smash hit,” and Apple TV, which at first drew shrugs, now may even eclipse the iPhone, according to the predictions of some (though by no means many) people (ipodnn.com).


Apple TV, which began shipping this week, stores up to 50 hours of video, which can be wirelessly beamed from a computer to a television set. Like several other competing products from the likes of Sony, Microsoft and TiVo, it aims to capitalize on the increasing availability of downloadable movies and TV shows.


Apple’s decision to move to Intel processors is another big reason for what Mr. Kahney says is “a cultural shift that’s changing the way people think about the company.” The Mac’s ability to run both Apple’s operating system and Microsoft’s Windows (by using BootCamp software, which is still in beta), means some organizations are able to save money by using more-expensive Macs. Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, for example, recently dumped all its Windows-only machines in favor of Macs because the university now can do just as much with fewer computers (computerworld.com).


The “dual boot” functionality also means that it is far easier to find needed software. “The old argument against Macs is moot,” Mr. Kahney writes. “New Intel Macs can run Windows software as well as any PC.” And technology managers like the Mac’s relative protection against computer viruses and security breaches.


Perhaps most intriguingly, Mr. Kahney points to Apple’s steadfastness in keeping its products proprietary as a main reason for its success. Apple for decades has weathered criticism that the reason it was marginalized by the likes of Microsoft was its refusal to allow third parties to develop related products. But “Apple’s traditional closed system,” Mr. Kahney writes, “is now a selling point.”


The popularity of the iPod and iTunes, he writes, shows that consumers seem to prefer buying “products and services from one company that are guaranteed to work well together.”


Financial Wisdom Get-rich-quick schemes abound in the personal finance sections of bookstores, encouraging everyday people to play the derivatives market or promoting “no money down” real estate investing.


But hidden among the sillier works are helpful volumes. J. D. Roth presents 25 of what he says are the best of them on his blog, Get Rich Slowly (getrichslowly.org). Some are well known, others less so. There is “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey and “Miserly Moms” by Jonni McCoy. They emphasize saving, avoiding too much credit, and living well but simply. None, Mr. Roth writes, “go into much detail about any one subject, but they provide motivation to get started. And that’s what’s most important.”


Google: Not Worried SearchWithKevin.com promises that “every time you search the Web, you stand a chance of winning a prize from Kevin Federline. It’s that simple. Really.”


Simple, indeed. The Yahoo-powered site features a photograph of Britney Spears’s estranged husband playing poker, smoking a cigarette and apparently enjoying some kind of brown liquor over ice. The company behind the site, Prodege, offers prizes including Mr. Federline’s autograph on an 8x10 glossy, his latest CD and a T-shirt bearing his carefully cultivated bad-boy visage.




:| :| Dual-boot is great but please not with Windows. That OS (operating system) is like putting a blonde wig on a gorilla! :|


8-| The solution for me is to have a Mac (and NOT dual OS either) as well as a new PC with Linux and Windows and not using the Windows OS! (y) (y)




(f) Have a lovely Sunday and start of your week. (f)




Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l)



"Style," Elsa Peretti says, "is to be simple."


http://www.tiffany.com/shopping/category.aspx?menu=1&cid=96662&mcat=148204&isMenu=1



Elsa Peretti Gold:

http://www.tiffany.com/search/search_results.aspx?search_params=t+-s+0-p+2-l+-h+-c+-r+135+143-x+




Elsa Peretti® Swirl cuff. 18k gold. Original designs copyrighted by Elsa Peretti®.
$4,200:

http://www.tiffany.com/shared/images/products/product_images/10665787_FL_LRG.jpg






(l) I bought a signed, open heart back in 1981 using some $ from a commission check (I was in sales...). :| And it wasn't this price back then AND pieces aren't signed either:


Open Heart pendant, large. Eighteen karat gold, 1.25" wide, on a 30" chain. Original designs copyrighted by Elsa Peretti®.
$1,350:

http://www.tiffany.com/shared/images/products/product_images/10667313_fl_lrg.jpg



Open Heart pendant, large. Eighteen karat gold, 1.25" wide, on a 30" eighteen karat gold Mesh chain. Original designs copyrighted by Elsa Peretti®. $1,950:

http://www.tiffany.com/shared/images/products/product_images/11593739_fl_lrg.jpg



(y) Elsa Peretti® Bone cuff, medium, for the right hand. 18k gold. Original designs copyrighted by Elsa Peretti. :| $7,200:

http://www.tiffany.com/shared/images/products/product_images/10665728_FL_LRG_1.jpg




Wiki about this artist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Peretti


Answers.com: http://www.answers.com/topic/elsa-peretti




The Designer

by Benjamin Mark

Now ... I could play this thing again and see if you can get it ... or I can play it straight. Thing of it is ... this one would be a tad tougher. So which will it be? By a show of hands ... who wants to try and guess? Who wants to play it straight and have the answer given to them at the end of this Tidbits?

You all get a hint. I give you gender identification. She's a she.

It's the 1980's. It's a bull market. Everybody's making money. You can't hardly let one go without it turning into hard cold cash. Desirability is directly linked to designer names. A gold heart is nice. An Elsa Peretti heart is nicer. There is a fashion feeding frenzy for innovative and bold jewelers. She made her first collection for Tiffany. It was her debut. She was a hit. Vogue said she redefined real jewelry in a modern sense.

It was a time when everyone who was anyone wore diamonds. To do otherwise was surely a tad gauche. Except for her. She took a different direction. She designed with semi-precious stones. And and large ones too. She said she like them big. Stones that is. Gemstones that is. Certain things, dear reader ... need clarification. Wouln't you agree? Jewelry of her's had been presented with a 52.62 carat kunzite and a 284 carat peridot. She was the child of two famous painters and attributed her flair to this fact. She was brought up with color and bathed in creativity.

One of her pieces that I very much like is called a Scribble Brooch. She became a well-respected figure in the world of French fashion.

By now you are probably chomping at the bit and wondering which vote was the larger by that show of hands I took earlier. There may even be some skeptics amongst you who are saying balderdash ... there was no show of hands. Those of you who are saying that probably don't believe in magic either. This of course is rather sad ... for magic is what makes the world go round. By a show of hands ... who thought it was gravity?

As to our designers name ... and the result of the earlier vote ... well ... it seems you'll have to wait till next week. Majority rules and all that. I personally have had no say in this. I went with
the vote of the crowd. Email me with your thoughts if you like ... I'll tell you if you were right. Now go ... go ... enjoy the brooch. This chit-chat is over.

This article was published on Saturday 03 February, 2007.


http://www.tyler-adam.com/article_info.php?articles_id=538




(i) I just *knew* that RLM's work reminded me of someone whose work I owned. I remembered it earlier today. :)




Veni, vidi, volo in domum redire,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f) (f)


HAND IN HAND Brian Orter, in glasses, with his boyfriend, Josh Helmin, on West 46th Street. “It is very important that we feel safe,” Mr. Orter says.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/25/nyregion/25gay.600.jpg



In the search for a home, gay men have migrated northward from the Village to Chelsea and now to Hell’s Kitchen. Will it ever truly feel like home?


People respond at www.nytimes.com and Under The City section



March 25, 2007

Under the Rainbow

By DAVID SHAFTEL


ON New Year’s Eve, about 50 guests crammed into Addison Smith’s apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up in a former tenement on Ninth Avenue near 51st Street. The party had been billed as a refuge for friends who were still at loose ends for the holiday, and most of the merrymakers were 20- and 30-something gay men, many of whom lived in the neighborhood.


To increase the space available for mingling, Mr. Smith had turned his roommate’s bed on its side and propped it against the wall so he could use the space for a sound system and a table heaped with an array of cheeses and salmon cooked in a stove-top smoker. By 3 a.m., when the final guests left, making their way through the still-thick crowds in Times Square, all agreed it had been a pretty good evening.


That Mr. Smith and his roommate could persuade so many young, modish gay friends to do their New Year’s reveling in Hell’s Kitchen might not have been possible a decade ago. But these days such gatherings are an increasingly familiar sight, evidence of a gay migration that has traveled up the West Side from the West Village and then from Chelsea.


This new gay presence, however, is very different from what went before. In the West Village and Chelsea, gay culture was in many respects the prevailing culture. But in Hell’s Kitchen, the gay community is just one of many subcultures that share and sometimes compete for a common turf.


“When I moved here in 2001, the neighborhood had kind of a transitional character,” said Mr. Smith, a tall, lean 28-year-old with a rakish haircut who works for a nonprofit agency that gives money to gay and lesbian causes. “Chelsea is more of a rainbow flag-flying destination, like Christopher Street. Hell’s Kitchen didn’t have any one character. It just had the cheapest rents around.”


Like many of the neighborhood’s new arrivals, Mr. Smith, who moved there from Harlem in 2001, was drawn by the twin magnets of cost and location. Rents were reasonable — in Mr. Smith’s case, $1,500 for his current two-bedroom apartment — and the commute to Chelsea, then and still the center of fashionable gay life in New York, was easy. But he did not immediately feel as if he lived in an up-and-coming gay neighborhood.


“When I first moved here,” Mr. Smith said a few days after the New Year’s Eve party as he sat amid the detritus of merriment, “I felt specifically that it wasn’t a gay neighborhood. Hell’s Kitchen didn’t really have an identity other than its identity being danger.”


Over the years, that reputation for danger has become more quaint than accurate. Though long home to immigrant communities, and at various times the neighborhood of choice for everyone from bootleggers and dockworkers to stagehands, in recent years it has been gentrified by New Yorkers who yearned for West Side living but were priced out of Chelsea and the Upper West Side.


And despite Hell’s Kitchen’s growing appeal to many of the city’s young gay men, an attraction fueled by its strengthening gay identity, many residents predict that the area may never have the gay identity that Chelsea has and that the West Village was once famous for, that it will endure simply as a gay-friendly district, less a scene than simply a neighborhood.


Hellsea? NoChe? Hell’s Kitty?

Historians disagree on the derivation of the name Hell’s Kitchen, which designates the area bounded by 34th and 59th Streets between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, and which was largely replaced in the 1960s by the more respectable-sounding Clinton. But not surprisingly in a city that loves to rename its communities, Hell’s Kitchen has been increasingly rebranded, with names spawned in equal measure by real estate agents and gay tastemakers: Mid West, NoChe (North of Chelsea), Hell’s Kitchenette, Hell’s Kitty and, most ubiquitous, Hellsea.


Whatever people call it, the message is unmistakable: Hell’s Kitchen is getting gayer and gayer.


Though it is hard to measure changes in a neighborhood’s population with respect to sexual orientation, the demographer Gary Gates has tried to do just that. A co-author of “The Gay and Lesbian Atlas,” published in 2004, Mr. Gates analyzed census data broken down by ZIP code and concluded that Chelsea’s central ZIP code, 10011, followed by the West Village’s, 10014, had the city’s highest numbers of households made up of same-sex unmarried couples. By 2000, when the most recent census was taken, the 10036 ZIP code in Hell’s Kitchen already had the third-highest number of gay couples, indicating that the gay settlement of Hell’s Kitchen was already well under way.


Anecdotal evidence supports these numbers. Within the last year, a raft of new gay establishments has arrived, among them Vlada Lounge, a Russian-inspired vodka lounge on West 51st Street, near Eighth Avenue, and the Ritz, a bar on 46th Street at Ninth Avenue. The gay-friendly restaurant Vynl, a neighborhood staple where gay patrons mix amid kitschy décor with theatergoers and actors, has moved into a bigger space on Ninth Avenue near 51st Street and is still packed before, after and between Broadway performances.


The Coolness Factor

The conventional wisdom is that the emergence of Hell’s Kitchen as a gay-friendly neighborhood simply continued the gay migration up the West Side. That is only partly true.


“I wouldn’t say it’s just a migration; it’s also a new generation of gay people,” said Gregory Angelo, who, as a Hell’s Kitchen resident and until recently the editor in chief of the weekly gay listings magazine Next, monitors gay lifestyle trends in the city.


In the magazine’s Jan. 12 issue, Mr. Angelo published a map depicting the reshuffling of the city’s gay landscape. Red arrows atop a map of Manhattan proclaim that “SoHo is the new East Village,” “Chelsea is the new West Village” and “Hell’s Kitchen is the new Chelsea.” An optimistic red arrow points to the Upper West Side and beyond.


Even as a child growing up in suburban Connecticut, Mr. Angelo knew that if you were a gay man living in the city in the 1980s, you simply had to be in the West Village. When the real estate market in the West Village became saturated, the denizens got a little older and the onset of AIDS cast a pall over the neighborhood, younger gay men found they could find affordable rents or buy cute fixer-uppers in Chelsea and still be close to the scene in the West Village. By the mid-’90s Chelsea had supplanted the West Village as the center of urban gay life.


“When I started going out in New York as a gay man and making gay friends in New York,” said Mr. Angelo, who is 28, “it was all about Chelsea. By then the West Village was starting to look like something of a relic.”


In 2002, when Mr. Angelo was ready to move to the city, he could neither find nor afford an apartment in Chelsea; what he called the “luxury set” had taken over. “But Hell’s Kitchen was close enough,” said Mr. Angelo, who is now in his second Hell’s Kitchen apartment. “I found there were enough young gay men and women who, like me, wanted to be a part of Chelsea but didn’t have the funds and couldn’t find an apartment there. So we all moved into Hell’s Kitchen.”


When he arrived, he discovered a nascent network of gay and gay-friendly bars and restaurants. The following May, Next magazine created a separate “Hell’s Kitchen” heading in its night life listings, a roster that now includes 10 gay bars and clubs, including Barrage on West 47th Street and Therapy on West 52nd Street, the latter a two-floor lounge bar with a bold sound system.


Another mainstay of gay night life listings is Posh, an unassuming bar whose bouncer and D.J. are all that distinguish it from a typical, uncluttered neighborhood watering hole. Posh, on West 51st Street near Ninth Avenue, was opened in 2000 by the chef and restaurateur John Greco.


For the first two years Mr. Greco saw only a trickle of customers. But today Posh is a neighborhood cornerstone, packed every night. Last year, buoyed by its success, Mr. Greco opened Bamboo 52, a bar and sushi restaurant around the corner that is gay but has a large nongay clientele. Its prospects have been bolstered by the 44-story luxury apartment building rising on the same block.


“It’s very much a gay neighborhood now,” Mr. Angelo said. “Which is basically the way I hear older friends of mine describe Chelsea when they moved there in the ’90s, and how other gay friends described the West Village when they moved there in the ’80s.”


Now, when friends new to the city ask him where they should live, Mr. Angelo does not hesitate. “Go to Hell’s Kitchen,” he says. “That’s where you want to be as a young 20-something gay man who wants to live and experience gay New York.”


Holding Hands, or Maybe Not

Like many others in the new generation of gay residents of Hell’s Kitchen, Brian Orter ended up in the neighborhood almost accidentally. A 33-year-old photographer and commercial lighting designer, Mr. Orter has lived in the West Village, the East Village and Chelsea, and he speaks with the authority of a man who has experienced the diversity of New York’s gay enclaves. He currently lives in a tidy studio in a luxury high-rise at 42nd Street and 10th Avenue. On his walls are prints by the graphic artist Shepard Fairey and Mr. Orter’s own photographs, including a panorama of Eighth Avenue in Chelsea.


For Mr. Orter, the increasing gay presence in Hell’s Kitchen is welcome but sometimes uncomfortably spotty. “If they open up two or three gay bars, even if we don’t use them, we feel better about it,” Mr. Orter said. Still, he added, the presence of a few gay bars isn’t always sufficient to make him feel comfortable.


“It is very important that we feel safe,” said Mr. Orter, looking preppy this day in jeans, sweater and glasses with designer frames. “I remember growing up in the city being gay in the ’70s and ’80s, and it was scary. So I’m not going to go and move into a neighborhood where I am scared. I want to be near Chelsea and the West Village, where there are safe, gay people.”


Gay residents of Hell’s Kitchen cite the occasional rude comment lobbed at them by people in front of some of the neighborhood’s straight bars, usually places that cater to the just-out-of-college crowd. But the consensus is that at this point, the straight people in the neighborhood will just have to deal with their gay neighbors, rather than vice versa.


And gay couples find some parts of Hell’s Kitchen more welcoming than others.


“My boyfriend and I will hold hands and walk arm in arm down Ninth Avenue,” Mr. Orter said, “but we won’t do it down Eighth or 10th. It’s still kind of sketchy.”


Even on Ninth, he finds the picture mixed. “We’ll walk down Ninth between 43rd and 53rd Streets holding hands,” he said, “then after 53rd, we’re like, ‘Ooh, doesn’t feel so good over here,’ so we’ll stop holding hands.”


And because of the proximity to transit hubs like the Lincoln Tunnel, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the cruise ship terminal and Penn Station, along with Midtown tourist attractions like Times Square, even gay-friendly sections of Ninth Avenue may never resemble the gay bazaar that is Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, a largely forgotten strip until gay culture seeped in.


“We have our little scene up here,” Mr. Orter said, “but it’s superimposed on an existing tourist culture and an existing restaurant culture. This neighborhood has always serviced Midtown, and it’s chockablock with tourism.”


Another difference between Hell’s Kitchen and its predecessors is that Hell’s Kitchen has no established cruising center, no place where men can hang out, flirt, meet friends at any hour of the day or night, and, in general, just be gay. There is no place here, for example, like Big Cup, the Chelsea coffee shop that may have been the city’s most beloved cruising center before it closed in August 2005, in what many local residents saw as evidence that rents in Chelsea have become untenable.


Gay New Yorkers mourn the loss of the Big Cup as a place to hang out, browse the city’s array of free gay publications, trade apartment news and people-watch. Hell’s Kitchen residents have waited, so far in vain, for such a spot to open up in their neighborhood.


“I could always tell you where the center of Chelsea was,” Mr. Orter said. “It was Big Cup. I can’t tell you where the gay center of Hell’s Kitchen is.”


Porno Bingo in the Dive Bar

It was a Wednesday night in January, and Will Clark, a former adult-film actor, was the M.C. of the 100th installment of “porno bingo,” a weekly bingo-for-charity promotion at the Ninth Avenue Bistro, a dive bar near West 48th Street.


Mr. Clark’s guest this night was the cartoonishly buff adult-film actor Diesel Washington, who appeared in various stages of undress throughout the evening, removing a layer of his baggy combat fatigues each time a patron achieved bingo. Mr. Clark, whose own outfit was accented by subtle nods to gay leather subculture in the form of a wallet chain and motorcycle boots, provided a running commentary to an audience slumped over their beers and bingo cards.


Like Cleo’s Ninth Avenue Saloon, a gay hangout a block to the south, the Bistro has been in the neighborhood since time immemorial, or so it seems to local residents. The Bistro differs from an ordinary dive bar only in the scattering of rainbow flags and the jauntier selections on the jukebox — evidence that not all gay bars in Hell’s Kitchen are as upscale as some of the newcomers.


This particular evening, patrons were mostly locals and regulars, some foppish, others seemingly oblivious to fashion, and ranging in age from barely old enough to buy a drink to elderly.


“We were always a very diverse group,” Lee Compton, chairman of Community Board 4, which serves Hell’s Kitchen, said of the neighborhood. “We were always blue collar, from the left edge of the island, and we worked in the factories and warehouses and wharves. Now we are suddenly hot.”


Plans for a West Side stadium, although abortive, along with other revitalization proposals for the West Side rail yards, are making real estate agents and speculators take increasing notice of the area. Not all the area’s gay residents are thrilled about this, among them Mr. Smith, who held the impromptu New Year’s Eve party.


He is aware of the neighborhood’s elevated status but plans to remain where he is. His apartment is rent-stabilized, and he has just asked his boyfriend to move in with him, a gesture that signals his intention of staying put for a while.


It’s like having fallen in love with a band during its early years, Mr. Smith said. “You feel like, ‘I listened to them early on, and now I can’t even get a ticket.’ I hear people say that Hell’s Kitchen is over. I don’t even know what that means.


“Yeah, the rents are going up, but they are going up everywhere. I don’t care. I’m not leaving.”




(y) (y)



ANCORA IMPARO, ("I am still learning."),

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(h) (p) 's


A recent Weekend in New York column challenged you to go on a photo scavenger hunt in the city. Did you find the most expensive pizza slice? A bad parallel parking job?


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/05/travel/20070305_HUNT_SLIDESHOW_1.html




Someone using a pay phone: An uncommon sight in New York these days.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/12/travel/Payphone_LisaDavidson.jpg





Best/worst dressed dog: Captured at 67th and Madison.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/07/travel/snowflake-dog-650.jpg





Best/worst dressed dog: Spike was dressed up for a St. Patrick's Day parade in Sunnyside, Queens.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/05/travel/hauser_dog_650.jpg





Most dogs with one human: One human walks eight dogs on West End Avenue.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/05/travel/Eight_Cold_Dogs.jpg





Most yellow cabs in one photo: Parked on the Upper West Side.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/05/travel/keddy_taxis_650.jpg





Biggest crowd waiting for a brunch table: At 12:45pm on Sunday, there's a long line outside Good Enough To Eat on Amsterdam Avenue. According to the photographer, "it is like this every weekend!"

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/05/travel/greville_brunch_650.jpg





Biggest crowd waiting for a brunch table: Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, under the Brooklyn Bridge, doesn't offer a brunch menu, but this Brooklyn pizza joint almost always has a line outside, so the judges will allow it.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/05/travel/romines_brunch_650.jpg





ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer

[sweetlady]

:| :|


March 25, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

When Will Fredo Get Whacked?

By FRANK RICH


PRESIDENT BUSH wants to keep everything that happens in his White House secret, but when it comes to his own emotions, he’s as transparent as a teenager on MySpace.


On Monday morning he observed the Iraq war’s fourth anniversary with a sullen stay-the-course peroration so perfunctory he seemed to sleepwalk through its smorgasbord of recycled half-truths (Iraqi leaders are “beginning to meet the benchmarks”) and boilerplate (“There will be good days, and there will be bad days”). But at a press conference the next day to defend his attorney general, the president was back in the saddle, guns blazing, Mr. Bring ’Em On reborn. He vowed to vanquish his Democratic antagonists much as he once, so very long ago, pledged to make short work of insurgents in Iraq.


The Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast between these two performances couldn’t be a more dramatic indicator of Mr. Bush’s priorities in his presidency’s endgame. His passion for protecting his power and his courtiers far exceeds his passion for protecting the troops he’s pouring into Iraq’s civil war. But why go to the mat for Alberto Gonzales? Even Bush loyalists have rarely shown respect for this crony whom the president saddled with the nickname Fredo; they revolted when Mr. Bush flirted with appointing him to the Supreme Court and shun him now. The attorney general’s alleged infraction — misrepresenting a Justice Department purge of eight United States attorneys, all political appointees, for political reasons — seems an easy-to-settle kerfuffle next to his infamous 2002 memo dismissing the Geneva Conventions’ strictures on torture as “quaint” and “obsolete.”


That’s why the president’s wild overreaction is revealing. So far his truculence has been largely attributed to his slavish loyalty to his White House supplicants, his ideological belief in unilateral executive-branch power and, as always, his need to shield the Machiavellian machinations of Karl Rove (who installed a protégé in place of one of the fired attorneys). But the fierceness of Mr. Bush’s response — to the ludicrous extreme of forbidding transcripts of Congressional questioning of White House personnel — indicates there is far more fire to go with all the Beltway smoke.


Mr. Gonzales may be a nonentity, but he’s a nonentity like Zelig. He’s been present at every dubious legal crossroads in Mr. Bush’s career. That conjoined history began in 1996, when Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, was summoned for jury duty in Austin. To popular acclaim, he announced he was glad to lend his “average guy” perspective to a drunken driving trial. But there was one hitch. On the juror questionnaire, he left blank a required section asking, “Have you ever been accused, or a complainant, or a witness in a criminal case?”


A likely explanation for that omission, unknown to the public at the time, was that Mr. Bush had been charged with disorderly conduct in 1968 and drunken driving in 1976. Enter Mr. Gonzales. As the story is told in “The President’s Counselor,” a nonpartisan biography by the Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio, Mr. Gonzales met with the judge presiding over the trial in his chambers (a meeting Mr. Gonzales would years later claim to have “no recollection” of requesting) and saved his client from jury duty. Mr. Minutaglio likens the scene to “The Godfather” — casting Mr. Gonzales not as the feckless Fredo, however, but as the “discreet ‘fixer’ attorney,” Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen.


Mr. Gonzales’s career has been laced with such narrow escapes for both him and Mr. Bush. As a partner at the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, Mr. Gonzales had worked for Enron until 1994. After Enron imploded in 2001, reporters wanted to know whether Ken Lay’s pals in the Bush hierarchy had received a heads up about the company’s pending demise before its unfortunate shareholders were left holding the bag. The White House said that Mr. Gonzales had been out of the Enron loop “to the best of his recollection.” This month Murray Waas of The National Journal uncovered a more recent close shave: Just as Justice Department investigators were about to examine “documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role” in the administration’s extralegal domestic wiretapping program last year, Mr. Bush shut down the investigation.


It was Mr. Gonzales as well who threw up roadblocks when the 9/11 Commission sought documents and testimony from the White House about the fateful summer of 2001. Less widely known is Mr. Gonzales’s curious behavior in the C.I.A. leak case while he was still White House counsel. When the Justice Department officially notified him on the evening of Sept. 29, 2003, that it was opening an investigation into the outing of Valerie Wilson, he immediately informed Andrew Card, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff. But Mr. Gonzales waited another 12 hours to officially notify the president and inform White House employees to preserve all materials relevant to the investigation. As Chuck Schumer said after this maneuver became known, “Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence.”


Now that 12-hour delay has been matched by the 18-day gap in the Justice Department e-mails turned over to Congress in the dispute over the attorney purge. And we’re being told by Tony Snow that Mr. Bush has “no recollection” of hearing anything about the firings. But even these literal echoes of Watergate cannot obliterate the contours of the story this White House wants to hide.


Do not be distracted by the apples and oranges among the fired attorneys. Perhaps a couple of their forced resignations were routine. But in other instances, incriminating evidence coalesces around a familiar administration motive: its desperate desire to cover up the corruption that soiled what was supposed to be this White House’s greatest asset, its protection of the nation’s security. This was the motive that drove the White House to vilify Joseph Wilson when he challenged fraudulent prewar intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D. The e-mails in the attorney flap released so far suggest that this same motive may have driven the Justice Department to try mounting a similar strike at Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney charged with investigating the Wilson leak.


In March 2005, while preparing for the firings, Mr. Gonzales’s now-jettisoned chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, produced a chart rating all 93 United States attorneys nationwide. Mr. Fitzgerald, widely admired as one of the nation’s best prosecutors (most famously of terrorists), was somehow slapped with the designation “not distinguished.” Two others given that same rating were fired. You have to wonder if Mr. Fitzgerald was spared because someone in a high place belatedly calculated the political firestorm that would engulf the White House had this prosecutor been part of a Saturday night massacre in the middle of the Wilson inquiry.


Another canned attorney to track because of her scrutiny of Bush administration national security scandals is Carol Lam. She was fired from her post in San Diego after her successful prosecution of Representative Duke Cunningham, the California Republican who took $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Mr. Rove has publicly suggested that Ms. Lam got the ax because “she would not commit resources to prosecute immigration offenses.” That’s false. Last August an assistant attorney general praised her for doubling her immigration prosecutions; last week USA Today crunched the statistics and found that she ranked seventh among her 93 peers in successful prosecutions for 2006, with immigration violations accounting for the largest single crime category prosecuted during her tenure.


To see what Mr. Rove might be trying to cover up, look instead at what Ms. Lam was up to in May, just as the Justice Department e-mails indicate she was being earmarked for removal. Building on the Cunningham case, she was closing in on Dusty Foggo, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official and the director of its daily operations. Mr. Foggo had been installed in this high intelligence position by Mr. Bush’s handpicked successor to George Tenet as C.I.A. director, Porter Goss.


Ms. Lam’s pursuit sped Mr. Foggo’s abrupt resignation; Mr. Goss was out too after serving less than two years. Nine months later — just as Ms. Lam stepped down from her job in February — Mr. Foggo and a defense contractor who raised more than $100,000 for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign were indicted by a grand jury on 11 counts of conspiracy and money laundering in what The Washington Post called “one of the first criminal cases to reach into the C.I.A.’s clandestine operations in Europe and the Middle East.” Because the allegations include the compromising of classified information that remains classified, we don’t know the full extent of the damage to an agency and a nation at war.


Not yet anyway. “I’m not going to resign,” Mr. Gonzales asserted last week as he played the minority card, rounding up Hispanic supporters to cheer his protestations of innocence. “I’m going to stay focused on protecting our kids.” Actually, he’s going to stay focused on protecting the president. Once he can no longer be useful in that role, it’s a sure thing that like Scooter before him, Fredo will be tossed overboard.




GREAT quote: "PRESIDENT BUSH wants to keep everything that happens in his White House secret, but when it comes to his own emotions, he’s as transparent as a teenager on MySpace."


^o) ^o) When will the partisan postering end and da idiot impeached? It's a fait acompli that Gonzales is a goner. 8-) Geez, the Sunday morning talk shows do what they almost always do: posturing, tap-dancing and other political double-speak.




"Fetchez la vache" (Get the cow and the catapult! - Monty Python),

SL & WTB (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

;)


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/11/01/opinion/02feiffer_pop.jpg



:)

SL & WTB (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:)



By JANE and MICHAEL STERN and JOEL HOLLAND

A state fair is a picnic that everyone' invited to, an opportunity for all citizens to express pride in who they are and what they do and where they fit in the fabric of life.


http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/09/02/opinion/03opart_pop.html



:)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:D



By JAMES STEVENSON

A look back at 1940s burlesque New York through the eyes of dancer Sherry Britton.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2006/11/22/opinion/20061123_stevenson_slideshow_1.html



Carpe Diem,

SL & WTB (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f) (f)



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/14/style/20070315_WRAP_SLIDESHOW_1.html




LONG AND LEAN The silhouette for fall, as fielded by Jil Sander, left, and Marc Jacobs.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/15/fashion/15wrap650.5.jpg





OVERSIZE COATS From left, Proenza Schouler’s high-collared coat; Stella McCartney’s trench; and YSL’s roomy jacket.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/15/fashion/15wrap650.2.jpg




JOLTS OF COLOR Strong hues wake up shoes and tights from Galliano and Prada’s bow bag and sweater. Marc Jacobs used color as an accent, right.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/15/fashion/15wrap650.3.jpg




Generously cut sailors from Givenchy, left, and a slinkier style from Versace.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/15/fashion/15wrap650.4.jpg



(y) (y)


ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f) (f)


Lara Stone isn’t your typical runway android. I asked the photographer Greg Kessler to keep a record of Stone: one girl, one season. Here she is in every show since New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/01/fashion/shows/20070301_MODEL_SLIDESHOW_1.html


(f)


Lara Stone isn’t your typical runway android. She walks like Lurch and you can’t tell from her stunned expression if she’s going to burst into tears or belt you in the chops. But we love her. She’s 23, Dutch, and she has a little gap between her front teeth. “They say in French that it’s good luck,” Stone told me in the Givenchy backstage. She’s had a lucky year. Overlooked until Riccardo Tisci put her in his Givenchy couture shows, Stone has a big Bardot-like spread in this month’s Paris Vogue; she gets the cover (in Chloe) for April. “Sometimes a girl just touches you,” Carine Roitfeld, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, said. As for Stone’s awkward gait, the explanation is almost too dopey for words. She wears a size 7 shoe—and runway shoes are at least a size larger. “They made me my own special shoes,” Stone said at Givenchy. “I’m so happy.”

I asked the photographer Greg Kessler to keep a record of Stone: one girl, one season. Here she is in every show since New York.

Cathy Horyn

DKNY Fall 2007 collection New York, Feb. 4, 2007



http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/shows/lara.dkny.1.jpg




:| Whoa! Same Girl?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/shows/lara.luella.2.jpg




Calvin Klein Fall 2007 collection New York, Feb. 8.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/shows/lara.calvin.5.jpg




:o Spank me!

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/shows/lara.diesel.6.jpg




Proenza Schouler Fall 2007 collection New York, Feb. 7.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/shows/lara.proenza.7.jpg





:) Midwestern-like "Normal"?? Richard Chai Fall 2007 collection New York, Feb. 7.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.chai.8.jpg





:| Talk about a 180 degree turn: Burberry Fall/winter 2007 collection in Milan, Feb. 19.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.burberry.9.jpg

AND

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.dg.10.jpg





Same girl? Gucci Fall 2007 Collection Milan, Feb. 21.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.gucci.11.jpg





Marni Fall 2007 Collection Milan, Feb. 21.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.marni.12.jpg





I Love this 1960s look: Anna Molinari Fall 2007 Collection Milan, Feb. 21.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.molinari.13.jpg





BCBG Fall/winter 2007 collection New York, in February.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/fashion/lara.bcbg.14.jpg





(y) (y) (p) (p) 's, for sure. Amazing young lady whose IQ is surely as astoundingly high as she is beautiful. Not my type or within ten years of anyone within my dating range...;)


:)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (l)



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/06/fashion/20070207_FASHION_SLIDESHOW_1.html




If the collar was softened up, I'd like this alot:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/06/fashion/07fashion_brown.jpg




(y) Classic! A cashmere tunic and cropped trouser.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/06/fashion/07fashion_navy.jpg




(l) Stunning in a royal blue or black:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/06/fashion/07fashion_redcoat.jpg




(f) Gorgeous:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/06/fashion/07fashion_blackribbon.jpg

AND

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/06/fashion/07fashion_dress.jpg





(l) These photos and others in the slide show didn't seem boring to me. Or that the designer was bored either.




Veni, vidi, volo in domum redire,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/09/fashion/20070210_KLEIN_SLIDESHOW_1.html



(f)



Carpe Diem,

Sweetlady & wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (l)


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/09/fashion/20070210_LAUREN_SLIDESHOW_1.html




Deinitely a "professorial" look (but not for me):

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/09/fashion/10lauren.4.jpg




I love dress backs like this:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/09/fashion/FASHION-LAUREN.jpg




Stunning: Liquid Gold:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/09/fashion/FASHION-LAUREN-3.jpg



(l) (l)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l)



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/04/fashion/20070205_FASHION_SLIDESHOW_1.html



The scene at the Baby Phat show on Friday night.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/04/fashion/04fash.slide6.jpg





I love this in black:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/05/fashion/04fashion_pantssuites.jpg



(y) (y)



Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (l)


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/07/fashion/20070208_FASHION_SLIDESHOW_1.html




Nice coat! http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/07/fashion/08rodr.3.jpg




I love this: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/07/fashion/08rodr.7.jpg



(y) Classy, IMHO.




Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (l)


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/08/fashion/20070209_SUI_SLIDESHOW_1.html




I love the blue and purple on the left:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/08/fashion/09sui.02.jpg





It would be lovely to see these delicious colors translated into clothing real folks wear:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/08/fashion/09sui.03.jpg



(l)



Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)


Models made their own fashion statements during New York Fashion Week.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/14/fashion/2007021_MODELS_SLIDESHOW_1.html




(f)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)



Olivier Theyskens presents his first collection for Nina Ricci in Paris.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/05/fashion/shows/20070306_OLIVER_SLIDESHOW_1.html



(f)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)


Looks from some of the fall 2007 Paris shows.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/28/style/20070301_DIARY_SLIDESHOW_1.html




Dutch clogs from the Viktor & Rolf collection.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/style/01fash.2.jpg





A malt-shop look from the ‘Happy Daze’ show of Jeremy Scott in Paris.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/02/28/style/01fash.8.jpg



(f)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:| :| :| :| :|


March 24, 2007

Editorial NYTimes

Legal Convolutions for Gay Couples


One consequence of denying gay couples the right to marry is that it forces people to resort to legal convolutions to protect their family’s financial interests. This problem is currently at the center of an intriguing lawsuit involving Olive Watson, a granddaughter of Thomas Watson Sr., the founder of I.B.M., and Patricia Ann Spado, her former lesbian partner of 14 years.


Sixteen years ago, when she was 43, Ms. Watson adopted Ms. Spado, then 44, under a Maine law that allows one adult to adopt another. The purpose was to allow Ms. Spado to qualify as an heir to Ms. Watson’s estate. It was a legal path used over the years by an untold number of same-sex couples who had been denied a straightforward way to establish inheritance rights through marriage.


Less than a year after the adoption, the pair broke up. Ms. Spado has filed a claim seeking to inherit a share of Mr. Watson’s estate, contending that her adoption technically makes her one of Mr. Watson’s grandchildren.


As Pam Belluck, Alison Leigh Cowan and Ariel Sabar reported in The Times, Watson trust lawyers are pursuing a variety of tactics to defeat Ms. Spado’s claim, including trying to annul the adoption on the grounds that the law was not intended for same-sex partners. Ms. Spado convincingly argues that an annulment would leave other adoptions on shaky ground, and that the “courts cannot unravel longstanding judgments based on third-party aversions to personal lifestyles.”


While the outcome is hard to predict, the lesson is clear: gay people who want to protect their families should not have to resort to adult adoptions. Nor should they be confined to separate and unequal new legal regimes, like civil unions, or rely on a patchwork of contracts, some of dubious enforceability. One benefit that comes with marriage is a universally understood framework for formally dissolving relationships and settling financial matters.


Connecticut’s legislators are about to consider a proposal to upgrade their state’s civil union law to allow full-blown marriage rights for gay couples. For practicality and fairness, it’s the right move.




^o) ^o) What in the world was this person thinking - *adopting* her GF sixteen years ago? With that kind of family money, she should have KNOWN someone would take her to the cleaners. I make nowhere near what she has. And I have been taken advantage of financially big time. I'm sure there are those reading this who have been taken advantage of in the past as well.


:| Reading something like this gives me the willies when I think back on the red flags I missed while in my 20's, 30's and yes, even my early 40s. The wonderful thing about sharing my life with a canine angel? Wyatt loves me unconditionally and would never love me for my financial security. ;) ;)





Veni, vidi, volo in domum redire,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (l) (&) (l) (l)

[sweetlady]

:o :o


March 25, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

The Rush to Vaccinate

By SIGRID FRY-REVERE

Washington


THERE’S nothing wrong with drug makers publicizing their products, but the lure of lucrative government contracts can prompt them to play fast and loose. In lobbying state lawmakers to make its latest vaccine mandatory, Merck has greatly exaggerated both the threat of a disease and the ability of a drug to prevent it. (True, Merck has promised to stop lobbying, but lawmakers and the public are still suffering under misconceptions that the drug company has done nothing to correct.)


The drug in question is Gardasil, a vaccine for four types of human papillomavirus, or HPV, two of which are responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. The Food and Drug Administration approved Gardasil last year for use against HPV in females aged 9 to 26.


Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Democrat whose district includes Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham, Pelham Manor, Scarsdale, Tuckahoe and parts of New Rochelle and White Plains, recently introduced a bill mandating HPV vaccinations for “children born after Jan. 1, 1996.” (For now, this bill only applies to girls. If the Food and Drug Administration approves its use for boys, they will be included in the legislation.)


Such mandates are a boon for Merck, as Gardasil is one of the most expensive vaccines on the market. With a price tag of $360 for a series of three shots, vaccination of nearly two million New York children would bring in almost $700 million.


Gardasil is not all it’s cracked up to be. A recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that among women ages 14 to 24, the rate of all 37 types of sexually transmitted HPV combined is 33.8 percent — much lower than the 50 percent figure cited on Merck’s Web site. More important, the rates for HPV 16 and 18 — the two types responsible for 70 percent of all cervical cancers — are astronomically lower: only 1.5 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively.


And among those cases, American Cancer Society guidelines published last month report that most HPV infections, even carcinogenic ones, resolve without treatment. About 75 percent of infections in adults and 90 percent of those in adolescents disappear on their own.


It’s worth noting that the American Cancer Society sees its fight against cervical cancer as a success story even without Gardasil. When the disease is detected early through Pap testing, the survival rate is more than 90 percent.


In short, even without the vaccine, when early detection methods are used, the number of girls who are actually at risk of dying of cervical cancer from HPV 16 or 18 is extremely low. Most of the time, the body takes care of the virus without any help whatsoever.


Under these circumstances, are we really prepared to spend millions of dollars administering this vaccine for girls, let alone boys? In truth, it may well cause more harm than good.


For instance, what if the vaccine lulls young women into a false sense of security? Gardasil protects only against the viruses responsible for some cervical cancers, and women may not realize they need regular Pap tests even though they’ve been vaccinated. As a result, many precancerous conditions may go undetected until it’s too late.


Merck’s drug trials followed women who received Gardasil for an average of only three years, so we know little of how long the immunity lasts or the long-term risks that may be associated with it.


Earlier this month, The New England Journal of Medicine reported similar problems with the chickenpox vaccine. Not only did the incidence of illness among those vaccinated against chickenpox increase over time, so did the severity of the illness.


And what if the HPV vaccine causes some horrible side effect to materialize later? The possibility isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. In 1976, swine influenza caused only one documented death in the United States, but the vaccine administered by government mandate seriously injured or killed hundreds. It turned out that the vaccine caused Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare paralytic disease similar to polio, with a 5 percent fatality rate and a 10 percent rate of permanent paralysis.


Mandatory Gardasil vaccinations certainly brighten Merck’s future, but it’s not so clear that they’re in the best interest of New Yorkers. In all but the clearest cases, health-risk assessments should be left up to individual families, not only because making such determinations rightly rests with families, but because it’s simply not sensible policy to experiment on such a large portion of our population all at once.


Not only has Merck left lawmakers in the dark about possible downsides to mandatory HPV vaccination, it has actively lobbied and paid large campaign contributions to politicians willing to support it.


According to records from New York’s temporary state commission on lobbying, Merck spent almost $400,000 influencing representatives from 2003 to 2006. Though Assemblywoman Paulin appears to have received only $500 from the company, she met personally with its representatives on several occasions.


This is not to say that Ms. Paulin doesn’t sincerely believe that vaccinations are the right policy. But she and her fellow Assembly members should realize that while mandating HPV vaccinations would reap huge profits for the company, they might well come at the expense of New York’s children.

Sigrid Fry-Revere is the director of bioethics studies at the Cato Institute.





:) :) I am sincerely glad that my siblings are not getting these shots for my nieces - believing as I do - it is WAY too early and not enough testing done. It's the drug companies and their lobbyists who are pushing this so hard. 8o|




Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)


Photos from the last of the Paris shows including Lanvin, Louis Vuitton and Azzedine Alaïa.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/05/fashion/shows/20070306_FASHION_SLIDESHOW_1.html



(f)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)


Reviews of the Christopher Kane, Marios Schwab, Nathan Jenden and Gareth Pugh collections.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/02/19/fashion/20070220_FASHION_SLIDESHOW_1.html


(f)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:)


By designing accessible variations of last season’s creative storms, the Elie Taharis of Fashion Week are a shopper’s — and a merchant’s — best friends.


February 8, 2007

What They Design, Real Women Wear

By RUTH LA FERLA


ELIE TAHARI’S fall fashion presentation in Midtown last Thursday, which drew a respectable turnout of decision makers from the retail and magazine worlds, offered an encyclopedic overview of the season’s directions. Mr. Tahari’s ideas were luxurious, if not daring, sophisticated but never so tricky or ethereal that they would fly over his customers’ heads.


Come fall, his swingy shift dresses, slim tunics and jumpers, cropped jackets and stretch cigarette pants are likely to be among the top sellers at stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue.


So why the glum look?


“I have never been featured in Vogue,” Mr. Tahari said, his dark eyes clouding over. With some bite, he added, “I guess I’m not important enough.”


That editorial omission is a telling one, sending the implicit message that Mr. Tahari is a designer of the second rank, one in a tribe of New York fashion makers — Nicole Miller, BCBG, Ellen Tracy, Jill Stuart and Tommy Hilfiger, to name but a handful — who are somewhat lost in the excitement of Fashion Week, overlooked in favor of editorial darlings considered more adventurous.


By designing accessible variations of last season’s creative storms, the Elie Taharis of Fashion Week are a shopper’s — and a merchant’s — best friends. Not on fashion’s leading edge, their collections nonetheless reinforce the ideas that have staying power. A woman shopping these lines rarely risks being called a fashion victim.


“They are spinning the trends of the moment, giving you a commercialized version of the concepts in the air,” said Michael Fink, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue. He is one of a group of tastemakers who view designers like George Sharp of Ellen Tracy, Max Azria of BCBG and Nicole Miller as reliable bellwethers of trends with legs, those likely to endure beyond a single season.


Their collections, Mr. Fink said, “help move fashion forward after the bigger creative statement has been made.” Their wide play on the runways, he noted, insures that once-difficult concepts like the tent dress or bubble skirt will burrow into the consciousness of American consumers.


“In a lot of ways these are the most important shows,” said Stephanie Solomon, the fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. Not only are they “big business” for Bloomingdale’s, Ms. Solomon said, but also: “We extract direction from these shows. If we see something repeating over and over, that tells us this is a trend we need to get behind.”


On the evidence of collections unveiled this week, designers are injecting a new rigor into their customers’ fall wardrobes, emphasizing shape and construction over romance and embellishment. Yes, there is plenty of traction left in the buoyant dresses and jackets that began drifting onto runways last year, but the newest interpretations are cut closer to the body, and their vaporous outlines are held in check by belts or balanced by fitted tops and form-defining abbreviated jackets.


Details like welt seaming, geometric color inserts and fabrics with substance — wool double knits, duchesse satin, two-ply cashmere — accentuate the cleanly sculptured lines. And patent leather, enthusiastically endorsed last season at Lanvin, Fendi and Balenciaga, lends collections as disparate as those of Ellen Tracy, Jill Stuart and Elie Tahari a hard-edge, lacquered look.


(l) (l) Swing jackets and dresses reminiscent of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s are prevalent in collections of designers like DKNY, BCBG and Diane Von Furstenberg. Many are pared down versions of the frilly tentlike dresses and coats that dominated the runways last year.


“The full-bodied dresses that we first saw at Chloé and Balenciaga two or three seasons ago had us trying to digest a new proportion,” Mr. Fink recalled. Though the latest variations are more streamlined, “the full-bodied dress has entered the mainstream vocabulary as a staple,” he said.


To a point that has some fashion watchers wringing their hands. “I don’t know how many bubble dresses people can wear,” said Stan Herman, the former president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Far too many designers, he added, seem to knock off ideas by rote and without scrutiny.


The poblem, Mr. Hermann suggested, is the velocity at which trends move. “Years ago, before you copied a concept you could take the time to see if it was going to be good. Now the winds are blowing so fast, designers make mistakes. They catch the wind too quickly.”


In a nod to mod, Laura Poretzky, the designer of Abaeté, introduced a streamlined trapeze dress a year ago, about when designers like Stella McCartney and Frida Giannini of Gucci were championing that ’60s-inflected style. At the time, however, “the market wasn’t ready,” Ms. Poretzky said. Few stores bought the dress. “Retailers were afraid of going away from a more girly look.”


No longer. Variations on her frill-free, A-line coats and dresses for fall are being picked up, Ms. Poretsky said, by Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus. “The buyers, you have to give them something that they’re used to.”


That wisdom was not lost on Lubov and Max Azria, the design team credited with a BCBG collection punctuated by knitted fur vests and trapeze dresses in plaid taffeta or smoked chiffon, their volume restrained by snug-fitting cropped jackets and dresses with full pleats cascading from narrow shoulders.


The show reverberated with echoes of top-rank European collections, provoking one fashion watcher to ask, “Was I at Marc Jacobs or Chloé?” But Mr. Azria is for the most part unfazed.


His collections may not break new ground, but as he likes to point out, they sell at several hundred BCBG boutiques in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as at department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks. To call them commercial is no insult, he said. “It’s a fact.”


Still, it can rankle. “I suffer a lot, especially from the media,” Mr. Azria said, arguing that because his line is relatively affordable — his dresses sell for $300 to $400 — editors tend to dismiss them.


He has a point. As distinctions between mid-price and high-price collections continue to erode, sophisticated shoppers rarely think twice about mixing Chaiken with Chanel, Jill Stuart with Jil Sander. Yet in the marketplace, the psychology of price persists.


Julie Chaiken, a designer of Chaiken, a line sold at stores like Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor and Scoop, maintained that retail prices starting at $250 tend to blind hard-core fashion followers to the collection’s real merit. Her partner, Jeff Mahshie, recalled receiving a phone call last year from an influential editor, asking if he could send the magazine a fisherman’s knit the editor was considering including in a fashion feature. “Balenciaga that season had done a fisherman’s sweater, and it didn’t seem to register with her that we’d been doing them all along,” Mr. Mahshie said. “It would have been nice to get the credit for that.”


Somewhat wistfully Ms. Chaiken chimed in: “In our shows, we don’t have those big dramatic high points that say, oh, look at me. And we don’t have that million-dollar marketing budget that customers pay for. If we did, we would have to raise our prices.


“And people wouldn’t ask, ‘Who did it first?’ ”



(y) (y)


(f)



Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(f)


COMPETING IN THE SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL AIR GAMES OVER OLUDENIZ, TURKEY, OCT. 25, 2006 Sander Koyfman, 34, an addiction psychiatrist from Fort Lee, N.J.: “The paraglider becomes an extension of yourself. You envision where you want to go: up, down, left, right, to that mountain, to that river. And you go. To me, it’s an addiction. I’ve been flying now for over seven years, essentially every weekend it doesn’t rain, it doesn’t snow, or the wind is not too strong. The picture catches me landing in a crowd of my closest friends. My fiancée is starting to appreciate how addictive this thing is: a month after getting engaged, I was off to Brazil for a month to feed my habit. Unfortunately, the trip got cut short after I had an accident on landing. Now, three weeks later and almost fully recovered, I struggle to say something deep, something perspective-changing about it, but in reality I simply want to be back in the air.” As told to Seth Kugel


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/19/travel/why-650.jpg




Whole Slide Show:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/03/25/travel/20070325_WHY_slideshow_1.html




(l) (l) (l) (l) (l)



Veni, vidi, volo in domum redire,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (c) (l) (c) (l) (c) (l)



Café Rubro, where the owner says about a thousand customers pass through every day.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/25/travel/rio-600.jpg



March 25, 2007

Day Out | Rio de Janeiro

In a Coffee-Mad City, the Bitter With the Sweet

By GREGORY DICUM


IN Rio de Janeiro, every street corner offers an opportunity for refreshment: juice bars, açaí stands, open-air bars and of course botequins. These neighborhood institutions are part café, part lunch counter and part bistro; the place for a quick salgadinho, one of the salty snacks like fried balls of salt cod, and a cafezinho, the little cup of coffee beloved by Brazilians.


Bright with mirrors, cool tile and loud signs in red and yellow lettering, the botequins have a retro feel. Café Gaúcho, in downtown Rio, is a classic. It opens to a busy street corner, making the most of the city's joyful culture and tropical air. Commuters step off the sidewalk to the cashier, offering a few coins in exchange for a chit, which they then take to the coffee counter.


At Café Gaúcho, the counter is a circular island where patrons stand, a typical arrangement that is said to have been invented here. A man in a crisp white shirt stands in the center, working a stainless steel contraption of pipes and tanks, one tank for coffee and one for milk, kept warm by a bath of hot water. Cups and saucers steep in the water too, and after he takes the chit, the operator opens a steel door and pulls out a set, placing it, wet, on the stone countertop. Then he fills a stainless steel pitcher with dark, steaming coffee from a tap at the base of the tank, and with a fluid motion, splashes it into the tiny cup.


Coffee in Brazil has always been a world unto itself. For more than a century, Brazil has been by far the planet's largest coffee producer. And Brazilians themselves drink coffee enthusiastically: total consumption is second only to the United States. But quantity and quality are different things: nearly all the best coffee is exported.


Like samba and the Portuguese language, coffee is easy to mangle, but that being said the Brazilian coffee culture still has a transcendent quality. Cafezinho is the very soul of the botequim, and the botequim is a direct link to the golden age of Rio. In his classic 1931 samba “Conversa de Botequim,” Noel Rosa, who spent much of his short, dissolute life hanging out at a botequim right around the corner from Café Gaúcho (there's a mural of him there now), describes the sociable scene with swinging wit.


During a recent visit to Café Gaúcho, I chose to have my cafezinho black; other options include Carioca (“Rio-style” with added water), media (with milk) and pintado (just a few drops of milk). Sugar goes without saying in Brazil. I leaned on the cool stone, listening to the clatter all around me, watching the whiteness of the sugar vanish into the black coffee. After a quick stir with the doll-sized spoon, I raised the cafezinho to my lips.


It was terrible.


EVEN if the beans at Café Gaúcho had been the best available, botequins often manhandle the brew, heating it for hours and driving off any flavor. Cariocas (people who live in Rio) told me over and over that to get a good cafezinho at a botequim, it is essential to get there first thing in the morning. Given Rio's unparalleled nightlife, that turned out to be impossible, even for coffee enthusiasts like my wife, Nina, and me, co-authors of a book about the addictive bean.


But at its best, Brazilian coffee has a full, mellow flavor. Unlike the brightly acidic Central American and Colombian coffees that are popular at trendy cafes in North America, Brazilian “naturals” have a round taste that evokes a time when coffee was a simpler matter. Think vintage 1970s Chock Full o'Nuts. “Brazilian Arabica naturals are good all-day coffees,” said Manoel Corrêa do Lago, a Rio coffee trader who works with huge international buyers.


When coffee first came to Brazil in the 19th century, the steep hillsides all around Rio were planted with the dark bushes. They quickly depleted the soil, and the hot climate affected the taste (a “Rio-y” flavor is still considered a defect), so production moved to the highlands in the state of São Paulo. Nonetheless, Rio became the cultural capital of Brazil, with a distinctly European sensibility: when the Portuguese royal family fled Napoleon by moving to Rio in 1808, the city became the only New World seat of a European monarchy.


So it's no surprise the city also developed a sophisticated café culture reminiscent of Paris or Vienna. Confeitaria Colombo, downtown, is the grandest example. The huge, elegant space opens up to a canopy of stained glass that washes filtered light onto huge mirrors. Their dark, carved frames are of the same ornate style as the opulent wood-and-glass cabinets towering above the counters. Marble tables and heavy cane-seated chairs are spaced generously around the tile floor, and orange-aproned waiters roam the noisy space carrying cakes and luxurious drinks on gleaming silver trays.


We had sublimely fresh pineapple juice spiked with green flecks of mint, a garlicky empada (a pastry filled with minced hearts of palm and salt cod), a fudgy brownie and assertive espresso. Nina pronounced it “quite good.”


This was not our first espresso in Rio. Espresso from Illy and Lavazza has already replaced the cafezinhos long served to visitors at many of the city's shops, as well as at many cafés and restaurants. In November, Brazil's first Starbucks opened in São Paulo. Though the beans in virtually all of these blends are Brazilian, they have been transformed into a globalized product.


Cafezinhos are traditionally complimentary at the end of a meal. But espresso is never free. Mr. Corrêa do Lago, whose gaze turns dreamy when he thinks of the perfect cafezinho — “I love them,” he says — is also an economist. Because it's not usually free, he says, espresso in Rio is more reliable. So far, there's no sign of a gourmet cafezinho.


Rio's espresso scene is most developed in fashionable enclaves like Leblon and Ipanema, as well as more bohemian districts like Santa Teresa, a hilltop neighborhood of majestically shabby old houses, art galleries and restaurants served by a rickety yellow tram from downtown. There, we sat under leafy mango trees on the terrace at Largo das Letras, a small cafe in a big, old mansion that also houses a bookstore and a dance studio. Looking out over Rio's chaotic expanse, we enjoyed an ineptly but enthusiastically pulled Lavazza.


Later, near the other end of the tram, in Rio's old center, we found one of the best shots of espresso in the city. “Here you drink better quality than we send to Finland,” said the owner, Oswaldo Aranha Netto, referring to one of the most demanding coffee markets in the world. Mr. Aranha, a lifelong coffee trader, opened Café Rubro on the ground floor of a building occupied by some of the country's most venerable coffee traders (including Mr. Corrêa do Lago's). Though the small, sparse espresso bar is hard to find, Mr. Aranha says a thousand people make their way there every day. As we spoke, we each polished off a large mug filled with rich black espresso made with beans from the Sur de Minas region, north of Rio.


Fat tropical raindrops began to fall in the fading evening light outside, and Mr. Aranha, a true coffee lover deep in the caffeine thrall, leaned in close to us. “Brazil is different from the rest of the world,” he said, his English tinged with Brooklynese from his days living in one of the world's other great coffee ports. “It's the only country that can produce anything you want.”


VISITOR INFORMATION

Café Gaúcho, at Rua São José, 86, in Rio's Centro (21-2533-9285), is a classic botequim. Get a cafezinho because you must (0.80 reais, or about 40 cents at 2.1 reais to the U.S. dollar), but be sure to sample the classic sandwiches like pernil (marinated roast pork) and rib roast (4.50 reais). Or for a lighter snack, get the classic combination of media (cafezinho with milk) with pão na chapa com manteiga (grilled buttered bread) for under 3 reais.


Confeitaria Cavé, at Rua 7 de Setembro, 137, Centro (21-2221-0533; www.confeitariacave.com.br), is the oldest in Rio. The interior is a little cramped, and the fluorescent lights dispatch any remaining charm, but the cakes are delicious. Try the signature ratinho, a playful mouse-shaped pastry flavored with marzipan, or the succulent, eggy rabanada.


Also in Centro, at Rua Gonçalves Dias, 32, Confeitaria Colombo (21-2232-2300; www.confeitariacolombo.com.br) has been on every visitor's itinerary since it was founded in 1894. In the magnificent space, it's not hard to discern the echoes of generations enchanted by this city.


Armazém do Café is a local chain with eight locations in Rio. The original opened 10 years ago in Ipanema, at Rua Maria Quitéria, 77 loja G (21-2522-5039; www.armazemdocafe.com.br). Coffee blends reflect the range of beans available from different parts of Brazil, and the place is often hopping.


Largo das Letras, in a big mansion at Rua Almirante Alexandrino, 501 (21-2221-8992; www.largodasletras.com.br), epitomizes Santa Teresa's theatrical decay. Flip through a small but well-chosen collection of books about Brazilian history, art and culture, and sigh before the vista of Rio spread out below.


Some of the best espresso (2.20 reais) in Rio can be found at any of the three locations of Café Rubro. As you sit in the small, gleaming shop at Rua da Quitanda, 191, Centro (21-2516-0610; www.rubrocafe.com.br), coffee blenders are hard at work a few floors above you, in rooms rich with the earthy smell of green coffee from all over Brazil.


Video at: www.nytimes.com and then the Travel Section.



(f) (f)



ANCORA IMPARO,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (S) (l) (S) (l) (S) (l)


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/03/25/travel/prac-600.jpg



March 25, 2007

Practical Traveler | Hotel Trends

The Latest Amenity: A Hypoallergenic Room

By MICHELLE HIGGINS


THE room at the Premier Hotel in Times Square looked like any other. But before I stepped inside, the hotel had gone to extraordinary lengths to purify it. In a seven-step process to cut down on bacteria, pollen, dust, dust mites and other possible irritants, everything in the room, from the curtains to the carpeting to the air-conditioning units, was cleaned and treated with an antimicrobial agent that attacks bacteria.


A cartridge containing tea tree oil, a natural antiseptic and disinfectant, was installed in the heating and cooling unit. The room underwent a four-hour ozone shock treatment to kill any remaining living organisms and zap associated odors. A mist was applied to surfaces to make it difficult for bacteria to grow. Mattresses and pillowcases were covered with dust-mite protectors.


I had entered what Pure Solutions NA, a company hired by the Premier, calls its Pure Room.


This much cleanliness might seem a bit neurotic. But it’s not enough anymore for hotels seeking health-conscious patrons to serve organic cuisine and offer all-natural bath products. As more hotels try to set themselves apart, a new amenity is emerging: the hypoallergenic hotel room.


The concept isn’t aimed just at the allergic, but also at guests who are concerned with what might be called the ick factor. “The whole thing is geared toward ‘What about the guy before me?’ ” said Tom Kammerer, a managing director at Thayer Lodging, a private hotel real estate investment firm in Annapolis, Md. Thayer Lodging, like the Premier, is working with Pure Solutions, based in Cheektowaga, N.Y. Thayer is converting about 10 percent of the rooms at each of its 13 hotels into Pure rooms by the end of this year. “That’s why we have encasements over our pillows and mattresses. The natural human body sheds 150,000 cells a day. After a year or so it gets — you know. We’re trying to cut down on breathing in other people’s stuff.”


From the Fairmont Vancouver Airport hotel to the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, hotels are doing everything from replacing feather duvets to installing air purifiers in guest rooms. Some are ripping out carpets and drapes, which tend to harbor dust and trap odors, and replacing them with smooth surfaces. Others are making less visible changes, outfitting pillows and mattresses with liners that help contain dust mites and swabbing phones, doorknobs and other surfaces with antimicrobial agents.


Hilton and Millennium Hotels, each of which is testing the concept in a few hotels, said they might consider expanding it to more properties depending on demand. NYLO Hotels, a new brand scheduled to open its first hotel in Plano, Tex., in November, plans to offer at least one floor of allergy-friendly rooms at each of its locations.


Hotels say it’s not uncommon to get special requests from guests with allergies. “We get a lot of requests for special blankets, special pillows, no spray in the rooms,” said Maureen O’Brien, director of sales at the Premier, a Millennium Hotel, which spent $30,000 to convert three floors to Pure rooms this year. The hotel is also using a line of natural bath products in those rooms for guests with sensitive skin and noses.


But mostly, hotels see the creation of super-clean rooms as a way to gain an edge now that amenities like plush beds and flat-screen TVs have often become standard.


Thayer Lodging, unlike the Premier, is charging a 5 to 10 percent premium for Pure rooms — at hotels including Marriotts, Hilton Doubletrees and Wyndhams. “If all you’ve got is good service, and ‘Gee, my room was clean’ — well, you kind of expect that today,” Mr. Kammerer said. “We’re looking for things in our hotels that are extraordinary and give you a wow factor.”


I found the Pure room at the Premier hard to distinguish from a regular room until the room division director picked up the couch to reveal a large metal air filtration unit underneath. The room did have a distinctly fresh feeling, but it was difficult to tell whether that was from the air quality or just the result of a room temperature that was cooler than that of the hallway.


Some guests who battle allergies say there is a distinct difference. “I go to hotels all the time, and I’m allergic to everything in the whole room,” said Tim Dagit, a real estate developer from Philadelphia who has special air filters in his home to help manage his allergies. On a typical trip, Mr. Dagit said, he takes medication “to deal with excess dander and dust in the air” and spends about two hours tracking someone down to replace any down pillows and comforters in the room with something that doesn’t provoke his allergies. “It’s a total nightmare,” he said. “Every hotel I go to, be it the Ritz-Carlton or the Motel 6, same problem.”


That’s why Mr. Dagit was surprised when he checked into the Annapolis Marriott Waterfront in Annapolis, Md., last summer and was given a Pure room. “I slept great,” he said. “I had no problems. I was thrilled about it.” The $20 extra he was charged for the room was well worth it, he said. “Frankly,” he added, “I would have paid more.”


HOTELS say the demand is certainly there. In the first two months after the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver introduced a “featherless floor” in 2005, it was 87 percent full, the hotel said, compared with 70 percent occupancy in the hotel overall. The Hilton Chicago O’Hare Airport hotel was so pleased with the demand for two Enviro-Rooms created by Environmental Technology Solutions in Glen Ellyn, Ill., that it opened 11 more earlier this month.


Unlike Pure Solutions, which treats the existing hotel room, Environmental Technology Solutions renovates the space to create its Enviro-Rooms. Rugs are ripped out and replaced with hardwood floors, and curtains with wooden blinds, and the entire room, from the all-cotton linens on the bed to the special porous wallpaper, is designed with allergen-sensitive guests in mind.


There is no standard for what qualifies a room as hypoallergenic. Neither company claims its rooms are allergen-free. Pure Solutions advertises its Pure Room as “allergy-friendly,” while Environmental Technology Solutions says its Enviro-Room “reduces airborne and surface particulates.”


Allergy experts say most of the methods the hotel rooms are using, like the special pillow covers and rug removal, are in line with what might be recommended to parents of an asthmatic child. But some, like removing feather pillows or using tea tree oil, said Robert G. Hamilton, an allergy specialist and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, will have “little impact in addressing the allergen issue.”


More hotels may be creating hypoallergenic hotel rooms in the future. In Connecticut, Representative Claire Janowski introduced a bill in this year’s General Assembly session to require hotels to offer allergy-friendly rooms. It was stalled this year, but she plans to propose it again in 2008.




^o) ^o) All those years of allergies and catching bronchitis while traveling. Hmmm, I'd still want to take my hypoallergenic silk "sleeping bag" and pillow cover to protect my body while sleeping on a hotel mattress. :| It is about time those in the hospitality industry did something about this. (y) (y) Too bad it wasn't when I was traveling every week on business. ;)


(f)




Veni, vidi, volo in domum redire,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

:) :)


Humor is a state of mind. If you have the humor gene, you will find something to laugh at. Whether it is your late arrival at office, or your boss' temperamental behavior, or your teacher's drab lecture... It is important to look at the funny side of things if you want to enjoy life each day. So, here are some humor quotes that will get you smiling. When you think that life is dull, read one of these humor quotes to cheer you up.





“There's no half-singing in the shower, you're either a rock star or an opera diva.”

- Josh Groban





“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”

- Oscar Wilde





“I have met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.”

- Oscar Wilde





(y) (y) “Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film.”





“Friends are like bras: close to your heart and there for support.”




“Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect.”

- Benny Hill





“Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself”."

- Mark Twain




"I love when they say this is a constitutional crisis. Oh, please. We haven't used the Constitution in years." --Jay Leno, on the U.S. attorney firing scandal




"Albert Gore returned to the Capitol for the first time since winning an Oscar for ... his portrayal of Effie, the diva in 'Dreamgirls.' And while he may no longer be vice president, he is clearly many other things [on screen: pols and news anchors calling him various titles, including: 'rock star,' 'a personality,' 'the prophet,' 'the man dubbed The Goracle']. Gore-stradmus. Gore-magnificent. The Gore-monger. Gore-Mary Abraham. I have over a thousand of these." --Jon Stewart




"A bill was debated in the House of Representatives today called the DC Voting Rights Act. It would finally give DC's residents a vote in Congress. I don't know why. They live in Washington. If they want their voices heard, just open a window and yell." --Stephen Colbert




"While testifying, Al Gore was questioned by Hillary Clinton. Kind of like global warming meets global cooling." --Jay Leno




:)




Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (l) (l) (l) (l)


Episode 12 - "Long Time Coming"

In episode 412, Tina returns to lesbian life while Bette seeks her advice on wooing Jodi back; Shane's relationship with single-mom Paige becomes serious; Tasha must return to Iraq; Phyllis pursues a divorce; Jenny may get fired from her own movie.

Directed By: Ilene Chaiken
Written By: Ilene Chaiken


http://www.sho.com/site/lword/season4/images/episodes/127462.jpg



http://www.sho.com/site/lword/episodes.do


(f) There are two videos to watch on this link too.




http://www.sho.com/site/lword/home.do



(l) Absolutely magical! I'm already searching for the Season 4 music. I have two previous season's CDs. The (8) songs in the Season 4 Finale earlier (I watched it twice - it was THAT superb, as always.) were wonderful. Eventually, I'm buying all of the seasons - and I have never done that before. The other show, on HBO, that I'd buy all of the seasons is DEADWOOD.


(y) (y) The L Word has been renewed for a fifth season!


LOS ANGELES (March 8, 2007) -- On the heels of a year highlighted with industry recognition and critical acclaim for its award-winning original programming including WEEDS, DEXTER, and BROTHERHOOD, SHOWTIME has ordered a fifth season of its hit drama series THE L WORD®, it was announced today by Robert Greenblatt, President of Entertainment, SHOWTIME Networks Inc. Twelve new episodes are set to begin production this summer and premiere on SHOWTIME sometime in early 2008. The series was recently nominated for the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series.


"THE L WORD® is a signature franchise for us and one of our most popular series,” says Greenblatt. “This season's guest star Cybill Shepherd and new series regular Marlee Matlin are indicative of the show's great quality. With our launch of OurChart.com (a social networking site that grew directly out of THE L WORD®), and the show's growing popularity in Second Life, this series goes well beyond the boundaries of a mere television show. Since its launch in 2004, the zeitgeist has never been the same."


THE L WORD®, which premiered its fourth season on January 7th, is one of SHOWTIME’s most popular series, generating a large and loyal audience, as well as critical praise for its provocative, sexy storylines, the principal cast and for being a magnet for celebrated directors and guest stars. Premiering Sundays at 10 p.m. PT/ET with several multi-plays during the week and available on the ever-growing SHOWTIME ON DEMAND, the groundbreaking series follows a group of Los Angeles-based friends as they navigate careers, families, friendships, inner-struggles and romantic entanglements. Since its debut in January 2004, THE L WORD® has become part of American popular culture, spawning dedicated fan websites and blogs, along with ancillary products such as THE L WORD®-branded perfume, jewelry and books.


THE L WORD® is executive produced by Ilene Chaiken through her production company Little Chicken Inc. The series was created by Chaiken and Kathy Greenberg & Michele Abbott and is being distributed internationally by MGM International Television Distribution, Inc.


(l) (l)



Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes,

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer (l) (&) (l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (~) (l)


Bobbie's Girl (2002)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com//images/section/movies/amg/video/cov120/drv700/v790/v79009ux19c.jpg


Jeremy Paul Kagan directs this Showtime family drama set in a rural