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

[sweetlady]

8-| (h) 8-| (h) 8-| (h) 8-| (h)



http://gmapsmania.googlepages.com/100thingstodowithgooglemapsmashups



:D:D:D


Numbers 3, 7, 22, 23, 44, 48, 59, 72, and many more.


:D:D:D




(y)(y)




(f)





There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mohandas Gandhi


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

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)(f)(f)(f)(f)(f)






http://www.proflowers.com/flowerguide/rosemeanings/lavenderrose-meanings.aspx




GASP! :o

http://image.orientaltrading.com/otcimg/3_654.jpg





Remember corsages?

http://blossomsflorists.co.uk/images/weddings/lavenderRoseCorsageBIG.jpg


AND


http://florists.ftd.com/pics/products/C55-3901.jpg






http://parisparfait.typepad.com/paris_parfait/images/2007/05/11/lavender_roses.jpg





Now THIS is a conservatory! ;)

http://www.gardensireland.com/images/pictures/killruddery-house.jpg





Exquisite:

http://tashaphotography.com/gallery2/d/472-2/lavender_screwCopying.jpg





I could spend a few days here:

http://www.lavenderbalingup.com.au/images/home.jpg





http://www.hawleysflorist.com/images/lavender-roseslg.jpg





http://www.fromyouflowers.com/images/products/new_large/FYF-2DOZP.jpg





Sweet: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41P28WCQH8L._AA280_.jpg





http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416PJTE0ZHL._AA280_.jpg







Absolutely beautiful and I wish I had one of these (and definitely without the white dress!):

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2052/2078755804_623e354d35.jpg






What gorgeous wallpaper:

http://estore.websitepros.com/stores/1742552/catalog/violarose.jpg






http://flowersbysleeman.com/mcart/images/07m100.jpg





http://www.organicstyle.com/common/product/detail/flowers/Cool-Water-Roses-2dz.jpg






http://www.lynnbullockdesigns.com/images/other/lavendaroseaddressbook.jpg







http://www.floristexpress.net/images/products/small/FYF-W3.jpg





I love flowers cut short and in a bowl:

http://s7d2.scene7.com/is/image/FTD/V855?$medium$




Or with purple anything:

http://www.flowersbyfudgie.com/images/products/simpcharmWEB_250.jpg





http://image.bizrate.com/resize?sq=160&uid=577832610&mid=20





Lavender roses with white daisies on navy. Cotton calico. Fabric!

http://www.modestsewingpatterns.com/fabriclr.jpg

from: www.modestsewingpatterns.com/calicofabric.html





Pretty:

http://www.countryfloralsandgifts.com/shop/images/site_images/Picture%20856.jpg





Painting:

http://www.pegginsbergwatercolors.com/images/gallery/lavender_rose.jpg'

from: www.pegginsbergwatercolors.com/other.html





Stained Glass:

http://stanleylivingstonart.com/db3/00293/stanleylivingstonart.com/_uimages/LAVENDERROSESBUTTERFLIES-75DPI.jpg

from: www.stanleylivingstonart.com/_wsn/page3.html






Wonderful:

http://www.dailypainters.com/images/thumbs/572/lavender_roses.jpg

from a web site with lots of lavender paintings:

www.dailypainters.com/paintings/keyword/lavender





http://www.bellevuecrossroadsflorist.com/images/amyfrankbo-ks.jpg





Fabric again: http://www.thekingsdaughters.com/fabriclic.jpg

from: www.thekingsdaughters.com/fabricchoices.html





http://www.chezbloom.com/Images/Lavendar%20fields2.jpg





Cross stitch:

http://www.crossstitchstuff.com/images/VictoriaSampler-BCSLavenderRoses-Thumb.jpg

from:
www.crossstitchstuff.com/Products.aspx?Category=8





With lavender bear:

http://image.bizrate.com/resize?sq=160&uid=377021830&mid=24





On sneakers anyone? http://www.sassyswirls.com/ROSE3frameds.jpg





Painting:

http://static.zoovy.com/img/creative/W150-H150-Bffffff/greenelavenderroses.jpg

from: www.bigbusybeeart.com/category/.1a.stilllife/





Tea set:

http://www.usedhomeschoolbooks.com/files/pics/Lavender%20Rose%20Patt_website.jpg


from:

www.pumpkinseedpress.net/teatime.asp





Heart Quilt:

http://www.rosepatchwork.com/quilts_by_jg/images/Lavender_roses_small.gif

from: www.rosepatchwork.com/quilts_by_judy_gray.htm





I could SO LIVE HERE:

http://www.greenmanradio.com/images/collage/Unity%20Architecture.jpg

from: www.greenmanradio.com/Landscape%20Course.htm




(f)(f)(f)(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

(l) (f) (l) (f) (l)



The Out Traveler: kd lang on traveling


by Randy B. Hech

From the spring 2008 issue of The Out Traveler

"I Always Like to Go Places I've Never Been"


The finishing touches were being put on to "Watershed," k.d. lang's newest album, scheduled for release in February, when she spoke with Randy B. Hecht -- but she gave a sneak preview of the sound of the CD, which she produced herself.


"It's quite lush-sounding," she said. "It's kind of genre-less to me. It basically sounds like a culmination of all the sounds I've touched on in the last 25 years. So it kind of incorporates my entire past." Following the CD's release, lang will tour Australia, Canada, the United States and probably some U.K. cities. You can also catch her performance Jan. 26 prior to Olivia's Caribbean cruise.


Have you done Olivia cruises before?


Yes, I have. It's really fun; it's actually really cool. I was a bit cynical about it when I was first asked to do it -- I don't know why -- and when I showed up there they were really nice, really organized, and the audience was great, so I had a very good experience. I'm really looking forward to doing something special for them again.


Is it odd to do a concert and then have someone from the audience be in the next cabin?


I don't actually stay on the boat. We have to get on to the next date. We do it where they dock, and I go on the boat and do the show and then leave.


So you're a port of call.


Yes. [Laughs] I've been called that before.


How do you choose music for your own travels, whether you're touring or on vacation?


I don't really listen to a lot of music when I'm working, just because my ears need a break and I need a break from music. When I travel on my leisure, it really depends where I'm traveling. If I'm traveling somewhere pretty exotic, I generally don't listen to music, because I like to listen to the music that travel supplies me with. I go a lot to India, and there's always music blaring on the streets from car radios; there's music everywhere in India, so there's no point in taking music there. So it really depends on what the destination is and why I'm traveling.


How much of an association is there for you between particular songs and places?


Oh, a lot. A song will always transport me to a place. Always -- whether it's a place in time or a geographic place. To me, it's inseparable. It's like smell and memory; it's just intrinsically linked.


Have you found that travel is conducive to your songwriting or to other facets of your creativity?


Oh, most definitely. I love to hear the soundtrack that that particular location or environment conjures. We were in Tahiti about a year ago, and we went to this little island . . . there was a little French restaurant there playing cafe music, and it was very bass- and drum-heavy. It really inspired me, and it was while I was writing my record and working on my record. Things like that always happen. Or if I'm in India and I hear Bollywood strings, I get really excited by the concept of strings.


You've mentioned India twice. Is that your favorite travel destination?


I wouldn't say it's my favorite. It's a place I go every year. Certainly it's a place I love to go. It's kind of a spiritual destination for me. I'm a Buddhist, so we go there to practice. For vacations . . . I always like to go places I've never been, so it's hard for me to say my favorite vacation spot is...actually, it's home. But in terms of when I choose to travel for leisure, I always choose somewhere I've never been.


What destination is at the top of your wish list?


I would have to say Vietnam or Cambodia. Asia's always got the most allure for me. Asia never ends for me. China, Japan, India -- all of those are so fascinating to me.


What new connections to gay culture have you encountered through travel?


[In 2002] I did the Australian Gay Games. I sang at the opening ceremony. It was really overwhelmingly beautiful to see representatives from China and Iraq and Afghanistan walk through that door at a time of turmoil. It was right when the Bush administration was going haywire. It was really an amazing thing to see people come through that door that were supposed to be our arch-enemies, and yet the gay culture was the thing that trumped any political platform.



k.d.'s travel tips:

Five travel essentials:

I travel so light that it's insane. I take one bag no matter where I go, no matter how long I go for. So in that is always my passport; my rosewater spray, which I always have to have; my mala ; my iPhone . . . and . . . I think I only have four things, that's how light a traveler I am.



Japan:

A culture [in Japan] that is dying, unfortunately, is the public baths. I think they are so amazing and such a beautiful part of Japanese tradition. I always seek them out.



Australia:

Australia is my favorite place to eat, bar none. In Sydney [my favorite eatery is] Longrain, which is a Thai restaurant but very cutting-edge. That's a great place to eat.



Santa Barbara, Calif.:

I just finished a tour at Santa Barbara. I was finished at 8:30 p.m. and changed my clothes immediately and rushed to La Super-Rica, which is one of my favorite taco stands. Just an amazing place. I usually go to more ethnic, more low-key hole-in-the-wall places.




(f)(f)(f)(f)(f)






[B]Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

(h) (h) (h) (h)




http://gps.outtraveler.com/



(h) (h) (h) (h)




(f)





Quid est veritas?

What is truth?



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

[sweetlady]

:)


;)



http://dryerasemagic.com/




:o Now I can literally mark up the walls. Brilliant.


;)




(f)





Veni, vidi, vegi.

I came, I saw, I had a salad.


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

[sweetlady]

;);)



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/14/fashion/20080214_DOGSHOW_SLIDESHOW_9.html


OR


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/02/13/fashion/14dog.9.jpg



:)



;)



(f)






"Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of that fact." - George Eliot


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

[sweetlady]

:):)



http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/funny-martin-200802.html?c=y&page=1



Hmmm......Smithsonian magazine.......la-ti-da.

;)




(f)





Chow.

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

[sweetlady]

:o:o





http://www.scholarpoint.com/Community/Connect/archive/2008/01/28/weirdest-wackiest-scholarships-you-ve-never-heard-of.aspx




;);)



(f)





"Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of that fact." - George Eliot


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

[sweetlady]

:):):)



Here's a new factor to consider if you're deciding on a design for a tattoo: No matter how privately it's located, you should probably pick something that you wouldn't be embarrassed to have live on forever in an FBI biometrics database. This week, the bureau is set to award a $1 billion, 10-year contract for a massive expansion of the physical data it stores about the people it comes in contact with. The FBI already has 55 million fingerprints on file, and to that, it wants to add palm prints, iris scans, pictures for facial recognition, and shots of scars and tattoos. In the running for the contract are Lockheed Martin, which currently runs the fingerprint system, Northrop Grumman and IBM. As CNN reports, you don't have to be a criminal or a terrorist to be checked against the database. More than 55 percent of the checks the FBI runs involve criminal background checks for people applying for sensitive jobs in government or jobs working with vulnerable people such as children and the elderly, according to the FBI. Law enforcement agencies are exited; privacy advocates, not so much. "This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project. "Now we're talking about large swaths of the population -- workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it's going to be everybody."



http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_8174512



http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/04/fbi.biometrics/index.html



:o:o

:|:|



(n)(n)




(f)




"Is nothing, including tat location, sacred?"


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

[sweetlady]

:)



Q U O T E D



"A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per second. But a common pigeon flying at 50 miles per hour covers 75.


The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second.


Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G. Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G."


-- University of Michigan researchers explain why aircraft engineers are still bird-watching



http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6312




8-| 8-|





(f)





"Ever been upside down in an open-cockpit bi-plane?"


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

[sweetlady]

:|:|:|:|:|



Maybe while Jack Bauer is waiting around for the next season of "24" to take shape (interesting WSJ story on that here, btw), he could look into what the heck is suddenly happening with undersea communications cables in the vicinity of the Middle East. Last Wednesday, two cables in the Mediterranean responsible for 75 percent of the Internet capacity connecting the Middle East and Europe were severed, disrupting traffic from Egypt to India. OK, this sort of thing happens all the time, and the likely culprit was thought to be a dragging anchor. Then Friday, a third cable was cut, this one off the coast of Dubai. Hmm. Then yesterday, authorities revealed a fourth cable, also off the UAE, had been damaged Friday, and the Egyptian transport ministry said on-shore video cameras showed no ship traffic within 12 hours where the first cuts occurred. Double-hmm.


Industry experts say it's curious, all right, but almost certainly the sort of coincidence that will happen in a complex system over time. But human nature much prefers conspiracy over coincidence, and those so inclined are working hard to figure out a plot in which this would all make sense.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120189888101136151.html




http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_8129418




http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_8137115




http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/01/africa/ME-GEN-Mideast-Internet-Outages.php?loc=interstitialskip




http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153455.htm




http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510232-flag-plays-down-net-blackout-conspiracy-theories?ln=en




http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/04/2153974.htm?section=world





:o:o



^o) ^o) ^o)





"Smile everyone, smiles!"


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

[sweetlady]

8o|8o|




Q U O T E D


"I don't think they're equally flawed -- I think Leopard is a much better system. (But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary."


-- Linus Torvalds auditions for a role in the PC vs. Mac commercials



http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/utter-crap-torvalds-pans-apple/2008/02/05/1202090393959.html




:|:| What does na actor know about enabling technology anyway? ;)



;)



(f)





"Slowly we turn, step by step, inch by inch..." - Three Stooges.


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

[sweetlady]

:s:s:s



February 13, 2008

I Love You, but You Love Meat

By KATE MURPHY


SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was wheat.


“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.


Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.


No-holds-barred carnivores, for example, may share the view of Anthony Bourdain, who wrote in his book “Kitchen Confidential” that “vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”


Returning the compliment, many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea.


Ben Abdalla, 42, a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Fla., said he preferred to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy.


Lisa Romano, 31, a vegan and school psychologist in Belleville, N.Y., said she recently ended a relationship with a man who enjoyed backyard grilling. He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing.


Her disapproval “would have become an issue later even if it wasn’t in the beginning,” Ms. Romano said. “I need someone who is ethically on the same page.”


While some eaters may elevate morality above hedonism, others are suspicious of anyone who does not give in to the pleasure principle.


June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild game and artisanal cheeses. “And I’m talking cheese from a cow, not that awful soy stuff,” she said.


Judging from postings at food Web sites like chowhound.com and slashfood.com, people seem more willing to date those who restrict their diet for health or religion rather than mere dislike.


Typical sentiments included: “Medical and religious issues I can work around as long as the person is sincere and consistent, but flaky, picky cheaters — no way” and “picky eaters are remarkably unsexy.”


Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.


“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I want to be able to share.”


A year ago Ms. Esposito met and married Michael Esposito, 51, who, like her, is an adventurous and omnivorous eater. Now, she said, she could not be happier. “A relationship is about giving and receiving, and he loves what I cook, and I love to cook for him,” she said.


Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.


As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.


Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.


“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant.


“I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices just as he respects mine.”


In deference to his wife, Mr. Gatti has cut back substantially on his meat consumption and no longer eats veal. For her part, Ms. Balcavage cooks more Italian dishes, her husband’s favorite.


In New York City, Yoshie Fruchter and his girlfriend, Leah Koenig, still wrestle with their dietary differences after almost two years together. He is kosher and she is vegetarian. They eat vegetarian meals at her apartment, where he keeps his own set of dishes and utensils. When eating out they mostly go to kosher restaurants, although they “aren’t known for inspired cuisine,” said Ms. Koenig, 25, who works for a nonprofit environmental group.


Though the couple occasionally visit nonkosher restaurants, Mr. Fruchter, 26, a musician, said he has to order carefully to avoid violating kosher rules. “We’re still figuring out how this is going to work,” he said. “We’re both making sacrifices, which is what you do when you’re in love.”


Even couples who have been eating together happily for years can be thrown into disarray when one partner suddenly takes up a new diet. After 19 years of marriage, Steve Benson unsettled his wife, Jean, when he announced three years ago that he would no longer eat meat, for ethical reasons.


“It had been in my head a long time, but I could have done a better job of talking about it,” said Mr. Benson, 46, a math professor at Lesley University, in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Benson, who is also 46, and devises grade school curriculums, said she worried her husband would judge her if she continued to eat meat, “but we talked it out and he is not proselytizing.”


Another concern was whether she would be able to cook vegetarian meals that would meet the nutritional needs of everyone in the family, including their teenage daughter. “I wanted us all to eat the same thing for pragmatic, household economy reasons, but also because that’s part of being a family,” Ms. Benson said.


So, she cooks vegetarian dinners and makes lunches for herself and her daughter that include meat. She and her daughter have “meat parties” when Mr. Benson goes out of town, she said.


“There’s this feeling that if we eat the same thing then we are the same thing, and if we don’t, we’re no longer unified,” Dr. Zerbe said. She and Dr. Jaffe said sharing food is an important ritual that enhances relationships. They advise interdietary couples to find meals they can both enjoy. “Or at least a side dish,” Dr. Zerbe said.


For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006, she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.


“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September.


Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.




:|:|:|



Love me, love what I eat? C'mon.


;)




(f)





"Who's been eating my porridge?"

(l)(&)(l)

[sweetlady]

:|:|:|:|:|



I know we'd rather spend our time talking about search in normal Internet terms, but the times compel me to round up some reports on the more intrusive type of searches:


* The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus have filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to provide details of its stepped screening process at the border, which has included seizing, examining and even copying data from travelers' computers, cell phones and other devices. Confidential company information on that laptop? Too bad. The groups, having gotten some 20 complaints, also want to know if border agents are asking travelers about their political and religious beliefs. "The public has the right to know what the government's standards are for border searches," said EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Laptops, phones, and other gadgets include vast amounts of personal information. When will agents read your email? When do they copy data, where is it stored, and for how long? How will this information follow you throughout your life? The secrecy surrounding border search policies means that DHS has no accountability to America's travelers."



* Speaking of border searches, there's an interesting legal issue cropping up in a Vermont case. In December 2006, agents at the U.S.-Canada border allegedly found child pornography on the laptop of one Sebastien Boucher. Later, after Boucher was arrested, authorities were blocked from accessing the files by a password-protected encryption program. The government wants Boucher to disclose the password, but he's refusing under Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The first ruling in the case favored Boucher's argument; the government is appealing.



* Meanwhile, out of Denmark comes the story of the fellow who was visited by police who were convinced they had him on a stolen credit card rap based on traffic through his wireless connection. His attempt to explain that he runs an unsecured network met confusion (as did certain other technical details), and the officers confiscated his laptop. They also took into custody his roommate's computer -- an original.



http://www.asianlawcaucus.org/altruesite/files/alc_dev/foia%20complaint%20pdf.pdf





http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/06/AR2008020604763.html




http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/02/07




http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_8198399





http://rottenindenmark.vox.com/library/post/somethine-about-cops.html




:o:o:o:o:o







"Keep your mitts offa my stuff."


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

[sweetlady]

(l) (l) (l)




http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Origami-Heart




(l) (l) (l)




:)



(f)





"I have a heart on for you." - Sorority pledge told everyone with whom she came into contact on Valentine's Day. (True story: It was me!) :o


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

[sweetlady]

;)



http://gizmodo.com/351219/private-cloud-is-a-rocking-bed-both-ways




;) Now these are just two-person-in-a-bed accidents just waiting to happen!


:D:D



(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

:):)



http://www.improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/



:)



(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

:o:o:o



February 15, 2008, 1:24 pm

Internists Tell Feds to Lighten Up on Marijuana

Posted by Shirley S. Wang


Ease off on marijuana, a national doctor group is telling the feds.

The American College of Physicians, 124,000 members strong, has issued a 13-page position paper asking the federal government to drop marijuana from its classification as a substance considered to have no medicinal value and a high chance of abuse, reports the Baltimore Sun. (Read this Health Blog post for one doctor’s high opinion of medical marijuana.)


“They’ve said essentially that the federal government has it all wrong,” Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, told the Health Blog. The ACP, which represents internists, is the largest physician group to date to ask for such a classification change, he says.


The Sun reports that the ACP’s declaration could pressure legislators and regulators to consider pushing for the schedule change. The federal government thus far has resisted fully exploring the medical benefits of marijuana, but a dozen states have legalized medical use. The ACP paper makes a broad case for easing restrictions on marijuana research and says that doctors and patients in these states where medical marijuana is legal shouldn’t be penalized under federal law. position paper


But at least some in the government disagree vehemently with the idea of legalizing medical marijuana. “What this would do is drag us back to 14th-century medicine,” Berta Madras, the deputy director for demand reduction at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy told the Sun. “It’s so arcane.”


http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/02/15/internists-tell-feds-to-lighten-up-on-marijuana/?mod=googlenews_wsj



GREAT feedback in the blog including:

"Someone tell Berta Madras that ‘arcane’ means ‘known to a few, esoteric,’ and that the word wanted was ‘archaic,’ which means ‘old or outdated.’ I’d really love it if our policy-makers at least had the vocabulary of a reasonably bright high school senior."






Position paper:

http://www.acponline.org/advocacy/where_we_stand/other_issues/medmarijuana.pdf





(y)(y) Medical uses should be completely legal.






(f)






Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

(S) (S) (S) (S) (S)




http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/13feb_lunareclipse.htm



(S) (S) (S) (S) (S)



(y)(y)(y)



(f)






"Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of that fact." - George Eliot


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

[sweetlady]

:D :D :D



This looks like an ordinary retail display page, but only for a few seconds until the animation starts:


http://producten.hema.nl/




PRICELESS! Remember to turn your sound on..........Keep watching, this animation is really good and hilarious! And who knew how funny the German name of that "portable stereo" would be.........

;);)




(f)







Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

:D


;)



http://failblog.wordpress.com/



(y)(y)



(f)





There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mohandas Gandhi


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

[sweetlady]

:D


(y)(y)



Commentary: A descriptive slideshow by Craig Damrauer showing the equations for the new math of global warming.

July/August 2007 Issue

Mother Jones

Artwork by Craig Damrauer



http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/ps/2007/07/ps.html




(y)(y) Definitely a few favorites in there. I'm glad that I took the time and found the electronic version since in my more recent weeding out of old magazines - I wanted to throw out the original print version that I had.


;)



(f)






"It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing."


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

[sweetlady]

:o:o:o



The science behind a familiar "compelling, brief event that is an integration of cognitive, emotional, somatic, visceral, and neural processes."



http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=21&editionID=157&ArticleID=1303



;);) Don't drink anything while clicking on the above link or you might choke..........




:D:D:D



(f)





"You didn't expect that one, did you?"


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

[sweetlady]

;)

:)




http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-02-11-n78.html





8-|8-|



(f)







Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

:o:o


;)



..........., but don't read too much into that:


Assorted manmade space junk falls out of orbit on a regular basis, but there's a bit more concern than usual over a disabled spy satellite that is gradually headed back toward Earth. Details are classified, but the 10,000-pound spacecraft could well have toxic material aboard in its thruster fuel or framework, some of which could conceivably survive re-entry and pose a threat on the off chance it landed in a playground. But where some might see a threat, the Pentagon sees an opportunity. Seems the Navy has been doing some work on an anti-ballistic missile system, and while testing it as such would be politically touchy, surely no one could take offense if it were employed in the name of world safety. So, during a weeklong window that starts in a few days, the Pentagon will try to blast the satellite into smithereens with a ship-launched missile just before it enters the atmosphere. And should the mission succeed, it would have the added benefit of ensuring that no bit of of the satellite's sensitive technology survives the return trip. Despite the noble intentions, expect some grumbling from China, targeted for harsh criticism from the U.S. last year when it used a defunct weather satellite as a target in a test of a weapon system.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/science/14cnd-satellite.html?_r=2&ex=1360731600&en=c797966c6f91a2ca&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin





http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10698http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10698




;)



(f)






Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes. ;)


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

[sweetlady]

:)



http://www.usmm.net/postertalk2a.html



;)



(f)





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


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

[sweetlady]

:o


:)



http://www.instapaper.com/




"The best newspaper in the universe." ???



:)



(f)






Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


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

[sweetlady]

:o:o


^o)



http://www.poochiq.com/



http://www.poochiq.com/sc1_products_iqkit.php




This speaks volumes about the folks-who-are-buying and their IQs :

"IQ Kits Sold So Far: 6,432"




^o)^o) 6,432 suckers who actually paid at least $49.99. Marketing at its finest.



:)




(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

:):)



http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/multimedia/2008/02/gallery_google_logos



:)



(f)





Venim, vidi, volo in donum redire.

I came, I saw, I want to go home.


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

[sweetlady]

:)




http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/12/really-stunning-desktop-wallpapers/



:|:| GRRR....I HATE "fat" pop-ups that hog bandwidth................


;)




Here is the link for only graphics:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/graphics/





Articles by Topic: Design Showcase

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/showcase/



(f)(f)






" Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt


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

[sweetlady]

:o



http://assets.lego.com/1033/anniversary.htm



Gizmodo has kindly put together a timeline showing the journey from simple building blocks to sophisticated robotics, and the anniversary received the ultimate tech tribute (and product placement jewel) -- Google doodled its logo out of LEGOs.



http://gizmodo.com/349509/lego-brick-timeline-50-years-of-building-frenzy-and-curiosities



http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2008/01/28/the-ultimate-online-ad-own-the-google-logo/



http://searchengineland.com/080128-081721.php




(y) Never played with them, but bought emough of them for others' kids.

;)



(f)







"I Always Like to Go Places I've Never Been" - k.d.Lang


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

[sweetlady]

:|:|:|




http://www.i4u.com/article14324.html



:o





(f)






"It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing."


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

[sweetlady]

;);)



..............know your odds in Texas Hold 'Em and other games.


http://www.pokertips.org/simulator/




:)





(f)




"Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of that fact." - George Eliot


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

[sweetlady]

(p)(p)(p)(p)(p)



Q U O T E D


"There is no substitute for it, and there is no other product out there that is a viable alternative. ... It's easier than having to worry about files and downloading. ... Anyone can pick it up and use it, and walk away with an image in a minute."


-- Michael Phelan, a sales manager at Calumet Photographic, mourns the coming demise of Polaroid instant film.




http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_8258575





(p)(p) Can you imagine a world with Polaroids? - As in the camera OR photos including the time it took for developing? Everyone gathering around to watch the details fill in? The collaborative anticipation accompanying use of Polaroid film is precious. Cell phone cams just do not come close to providing anything experientially close.


:o




(f)(f)





Veni, vidi, vegi.

I came, I saw, I had a salad.


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

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)




Sometimes people are miscast in life. They may appear to be dentists or clerks, but deep down they are actually fierce swordsmen or goddesses with devastating sex appeal. These true selves can emerge in the world of cosplay, the practice of impersonating characters from anime, manga, Japanese video games, and other realms of fiction. When shooting this series of photographs (published in Fandomania: Characters & Cosplay), Elena Dorfman asked her subjects to momentarily stop role-playing and reveal their real-world vulnerability. "They had to come out of character so that I could see a bit of who they were through their costumes," she said.



http://www.motherjones.com/photos/the-anime-within/


OR


Another web site:

http://wildernessfoundationuk.blogspot.com/2007/09/new-math-of-global-warming.html




(f)(f)(f)





Quid est veritas?

What is truth?


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

[sweetlady]

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




http://www.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20080215&t=2&i=3178560&w=


OR


http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/customslideshow?buddyJS=slideshow20080215135227.js&title=Best+of+the+week&size=9#a=8




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



(f)(f)







Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

(8)(8)(8)



http://www.atomicplatters.com/





(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer

[sweetlady]

(~)(~)(~)



Cars (2006)


Prepare to peel out with this revved-up animated adventure featuring classic automobiles, plenty of fender benders, guffaws galore and a Route 66 road trip with a crew that doesn't make pit stops. The star-studded voice cast includes Paul Newman, Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt and Cheech Marin. Nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, Cars won Best Animated Film in the first category of its kind at the 2007 Golden Globes.



Cast: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech Marin, John Ratzenberge, Katherine Helmon, Larry the Cable Guy, Bob Costas,
Ray Magliozzi, Richard Petty.



Reviews:

Cars is what a family movie ought to be; funny, original, smart, often thrilling, touching. It's much more than NASCAR for those of you who don't get into that scene (as we don't). It's a mix of contemporary and nostalgic, modern and classic. This movie is sure to appeal to a wide audience. Kids will love the speed and contemporary humor and Grandpa will remember the good old days. At first, seeing the vehicles in humanized form is a little odd, but the animation is so good and characters so "dead on" that one quickly forgets this unusual form of animated characters. Seeing this movie makes you realize how bad most "family flicks" are these days. A must see movie that deserves to become a huge hit. Thanks, Pixar!




(y)(y)

I watched this on-demand and plan on renting a copy from netflix so that I can pause and review many of the scenes that went by much too fast. Five stars and worth re-watching with someone. Pixar rocks once again.



(f)(f)





Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

:):)



http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/02/robotic_ball_controlled_b.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890



:o


;)










Pleasant dreams and a lovely Friday. (f)


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

[sweetlady]

:o:o:o


(y)




Q U O T E D


"While the capacity of our e-mail inbox is limited only by disc space, our mental 'inbox' of working memory is much more constrained. In fact, several decades of research have indicated that our capacity to hold information 'in mind' for immediate use is limited to a mere three or four items. ...


There are at least two primary explanations for this severe limitation in working memory capacity. First, it could be that working memory capacity is essentially determined by storage space, and that some people have larger 'hard drives' than others do. The alternative explanation is that capacity depends not on the amount of storage space but on how efficiently that space is used. Thus high-capacity individuals might simply be better at keeping irrelevant information out of mind, whereas low capacity individuals may allow more irrelevant information to clutter up the mental inbox. High-capacity individuals may just have better spam filters."


-- Andrew W. McCollough and Edward K. Vogel of the University of Oregon say your spam filter appears to be located in your basal ganglia.



http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Mind-Matters/Working-Memory-Brains-Spam-Filter/300007271




(y)(y)(y)(y)(y)





(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

;)




http://pac-txt.com/



:)




(f)





Pleasant dreams and stay warm. (f)


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

[sweetlady]

8-|8-|



http://www.crealev.com/




Cool video links........


(y)(y)(y)(y)




(f)





Pleasant dreams.


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

[sweetlady]

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





THIS is a view:

http://archtypevolution.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/lincoln-and-mesa-verde-114.jpg




http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/CAW/1409~Cliff-Palace-Mesa-Verde-Posters.jpg



Lots of photos:

www.eg.bucknell.edu/.../Southwest/mesaVerde.html




Cave art: http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/hands/images/mesa-verde.jpg





Canyon de Chelly

http://www.delsjourney.com/images/news/news_01-06-20/1-1989-Canyon-de-Chelly-Visitor-Center.jpg


http://www.astronomynotes.com/nature/shoffner/Canyon-deChelly.jpg


www.astronomynotes.com/nature/pic18i.htm





http://www.dustylens.com/Canyon_De_Chelly-small.jpg


www.dustylens.com/photography.htm





http://www.nationalparklover.com/images/Utah-Az/canyon_de_chelly/canyon_de_chelly_0294.JPG


www.nationalparklover.com/canyon_de_chelly.htm Gold Mine of Photos...........





http://www.expeditionswest.com/adventures/2003/canyon_de_chelly_2003/images/4.jpg


www.expeditionswest.com/.../index.html




At Sunrise: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/images-11/Canyon-de-Chelly-150mm.jpg



www.delsjourney.com/news/news_01-06-20.htm




http://www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/bigmap/outoftown/arizona/navajonation/canyondechelly/03spiderrock.jpg



Another photo Gold Mine: www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com/.../index.htm





Hovenweep:

http://utahoutdoors.com/maps/hovenweep_map.gif



Hovenweep National Monument: Where the Voices of the Ancients Whisper

www.utahoutdoors.com/pages/Hovenweep_golden.htm



(l)(l) Remarkable walk (literally and figuratively) centuries back in time.


http://historyforkids.utah.gov/jump_in/images/hovenweep1.jpg


http://www.jqjacobs.net/southwest/hovenweep.html



:o


What were those towers guarding? Water because it was a severe drought?

:o



(l)(l)(l) All-time favorite: Monument Valley:

http://www.americansouthwest.net/maps/monument-valley-map.gif




(l)(l)(l) My favorite place (one of them.).......

<Sigh....and it is THAT clear out there.....>

http://www.pdphoto.org/jons/pictures2/monument_3_bg_011903.jpg



Big version:

http://www.pdphoto.org/PictureDetail.php?pg=5496&mat=pdef



http://www.americansouthwest.net/utah/monument_valley/map.html




http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/Moonrise%20and%20sunset_Monument%20Valley.jpg




Gorgeous "evanescent light" with lots of breathtaking photos from all over:

www.parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/.../monument_valley.htm




West Mitten:

http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/bigthumbs/screenWest%20Mitten.jpg




I think this is the view from the road south from Mexican Hat in Utah:

http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/forWeb_Apr12_07/bigthumbs/screenIMG_2310_tweak.jpg




Dust storm in Monument Valley:

http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/bigthumbs/screenDust%20storm_Monument%20Valley.jpg




http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/bigthumbs/screenMitten%20and%20red%20log.jpg



http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/bigthumbs/screenMonument%20Valley%20_%20Big%20Sky.jpg





Sunset (gasp):

http://parkerlab.bio.uci.edu/pictures/photography%20pictures/bigthumbs/screenxmas_06_monument%20valley%20sunset.jpg




(l) Gouldings:

www.gouldings.com/english/finding.htm




http://www.marialanger.com/wp-content/images/travels/gouldings.jpg

Lady helicopter pilot's web site:

www.marialanger.com/2007/08/22/the-mittens/




Yes, the tall cliff IS that amazing looking in person:

http://matkalla.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/gouldings.jpg

http://waitabi.hp.infoseek.co.jp/2003grandcircle/gouldings_lodge11.jpg




(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)(y)



:)



http://www.angieslist.com/AngiesList/



(y)(y)



(f)





"Smiles everyone, smiles!"


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

[sweetlady]

:)



http://www.linksoflondon.com/us-en



http://www.linksoflondon.com/us-en/online-shop/women/bracelets




I like:

http://www.linksoflondon.com/us-en/online-shop/women/bracelets/1542-sweetie-18ct-rolled-gold-bracelet





Does anyone like these or is it me? I have one in gold and one platinum-clad:

http://www.linksoflondon.com/us-en/online-shop/women/rings/1996-triple-ring



(l)(l)


(f)





Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

;)



100% Natural Ice: Wild skating on frozen lakes & rivers

http://www.valley.net/~ice/skate/morey.html



(f)


http://www.valley.net/~ice/skate/




A worldwide guide to outdoor skating on natural ice:

http://www.nordicskating.org/



(f)


http://travel.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/travel/escapes/04ADVE.html




http://www.nordicskater.com/calendar.html



http://www.vtsports.com/magazine/content.cfm?storyID=152



(f)






"It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing."


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

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)(f)



http://www.dustylens.com/new_page_1.htm



:)


(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

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



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/22/travel/escapes/20080222_CABINS_SLIDESHOW_index.html




February 22, 2008

Trading the World for a Cabin in the Woods

By BETH GREENFIELD


IT’S my first night in the cabin, and I can’t sleep. The quiet is too loud, as if I were holding a conch shell tight over each ear, and any sounds that do seep through — a wet bulge of snow sliding off a fir tree, the pop of a log in our blazing wood stove — send me tossing and turning, a skittish city mouse in the country.


We are staying atop the modest rise of Mount Mineral in northwestern Massachusetts, my partner and I, tucked into downy sleeping bags spread across a futon in a tiny two-room cabin that has neither plumbing nor electricity. We have come here willingly, to this Quaker-founded retreat named Temenos.


But now it is unnervingly late, and my racing mind settles, albeit briefly, on a scene from just a week before: cocktails at a swank Manhattan hotel bar with friends, who had stupefied reactions to our rustic getaway plan.


“And you’re going there why?” asked one, martini in hand.


I had explained my need to escape — to find some simple peace and quiet in a muffled, snowbound forest that had no chance of cellphone reception.


“That scares me,” admitted another.


I scoffed at the time, but now here I am, awake. What else do I possibly need to relax? And then I notice it: the skylight above our heads has been capped thick with snow since our arrival, but somewhere between my getting into bed and this anxious gazing upward it has cleared, the snow melted off by the warmth of our fire. Now I see stars bright and thick, surrounding a yellow jewel that’s probably Jupiter. The light in the room has changed — from daunting black to a soft-silver glow — and I breathe, falling into my first deep sleep in weeks.


City folk have been finding solace now for more than 25 years at Temenos, a 78-acre forested retreat founded by the late Joe and Teresina Havens. A charismatic Quaker couple with an interest in Buddhism, they purchased the land, which had served as a Civil War-era health resort, and invited groups of friends out to relax and regroup, eventually building four cabins and a lodge, all of which were open to the public.


“Their idea was that being close to nature is healing for the human spirit, and that our lives have removed us from opportunities for doing that,” said Nancy Smith, director of the property.


Though it’s independently run, the property is part of an informal network of simple getaways in the Berkshires called the Western Massachusetts Retreat Association. There are a dozen diverse properties on its Web site, from Stump Sprouts, a lodge and a converted dairy barn that is popular with cross-country skiers, to Woolman Hill, a Quaker-run conference center with three cabins available for private stays.


At Temenos, Ms. Smith, who is a youthful 75, is a constant presence. She said she saw an ad for the job after tiring of a career in international development. “I was hired, and two weeks later I moved in. They were desperate!” she said with a laugh. “It’s been a good match.” She’s lived for eight years now in the large red cabin that once belonged to the Havenses. It’s spare inside, and, like the others, without electricity or running water. But it’s got other luxuries, from floor-to-ceiling shelves of books to a meditation corner that overlooks the forest — places for respite from hard days of loading firewood, pumping well water and other chores.


“People often don’t want to do outright camping, and here you still have that sense of being close to nature and of living simply,” Ms. Smith said. Most guests are from Massachusetts, but some have come from as far as St. Louis, New Orleans and Alexandria, Va. “People all come looking for the same thing,” Ms. Smith said. “They want to get away from their lives.”


I was no exception. But first I had to get there.


The first leg was an easy four-hour drive from Manhattan. The second was more challenging: a hike, about a mile uphill, while lugging plastic sleds, provided at the parking lot, which we’d filled with backpacks of food, clothing, candles, flashlights, sleeping bags, books and Scrabble for the three-day stay. We wore snowshoes rented in nearby Hadley to make the trek easier, as Ms. Smith had warned me in a preparatory phone conversation that there was a good three feet of snow on the ground.


“I haven’t been down the mountain in four days now,” she had said, adding that we should arrive as early as possible, as the cabin would take a couple of hours to heat up and that we’d want it to be warm by dark. Her words loomed large in my mind as we began our journey in, and I began rushing, city-style, to get to the top.


“Slow down,” my partner reminded me. “This is part of the fun.”


I eased up and looked around. And it was wonderful: all the snow I’d felt robbed of during global-warming city winters was right there, crunching under the titanium claws of our snowshoes and weighing down the feathery, nimble branches of fir trees that lined our silent hiking path. I grew nostalgic for walks in the woods of my youth, back when suburbia still had tracts of undeveloped land to explore, and also for wilderness camping trips I’d done in my 20s, from New Hampshire to Oregon. None had ever been in the snow, though, and I marveled at how the stark whiteness threw all of this nature into high relief.


After about 40 minutes we reached our cabin — a squat, wood-shingled box with a nameplate, “Thrush,” and a door frame painted in playful hot pink. The front steps were freshly shoveled, and we stepped inside to find a screened-in porch stacked with firewood; beyond that was a homey, “Little House on the Prairie” meets hippie-camp interior. There were smooth pine floorboards, a table with a single kerosene lamp, wood-panel walls hung with cast-iron frying pans, and shelves with a mix of items from a woven Mexican blanket to a leftover box of Kukicha tea.


A SMALL second room held a futon with three pillows, a mobile of origami cranes and a wonderfully tall window, framing a view of towering trees shrouded in snow. Outside the front door and down a short path was our outhouse — a surprisingly lovely, clean, odor-free little structure perched on the edge of a steep, wooded slope — and, toward Ms. Smith’s house, a well with an old-fashioned hand pump. The water there is rich in iron and manganese, making it murky, rust-colored and tinged with a metallic flavor. But after a day I grew used to it, finding its flavor fresh and sweet.


The star of the weekend, though, was to be a little black box about the size of two milk crates: the wood-burning stove, which awaited us ice-cold and empty in the middle of the kitchen area. “I’d get started on that right away,” warned Ms. Smith, a spry figure in a fleece vest, Muck boots and purple skullcap.


The task proved to be the weekend’s biggest challenge, as the split wood had absorbed moisture and would not catch easily. Even when the fire finally roared to life, we had to huddle around it, gloved palms spread just inches from its hot surface, to feel any of its warmth. Three hours in, darkness had fallen, and I began to worry, lighting the kerosene lamp and all of our candles before crawling into my sleeping bag wearing almost every stitch of clothing I had packed. I watched with growing dread as my breath made thick puffs into the still-frigid air.


Soon, though, our cabin began to feel just as cozy as it looked. Wonderful warmth spread outward in ripples and filled in every corner of space, until we were toasty in T-shirts. We played Scrabble by candlelight and sipped red wine and devoured a supper of canned lentil soup and Annie’s macaroni and cheese that I heated over two propane burners out on the porch. The next day we hiked with snowshoes and trekking poles for three hours on Temenos trails — up steep rises and along ridges and through thickets of oak and birch trees. We rested in the snow and nibbled cashews at the 1,200-foot top of Mount Mineral, and sat again at a ledge that overlooked the valley below, with Mount Greylock and an orange-crush sunset in the distance.


Sleep came easily that night. But leaving, on Day 3, did not. I had become utterly used to the simplicity.


Still, we waved goodbye to our cabin after loading up the sleds like pack mules, taking every bit of trash we’d produced in deference to a colorful, handwritten quote of the Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki that hung on a wall just inside the entrance: “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”


I left only footprints in the snow. But the cabin’s mark on me was indelible.



http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/nytimes/articles/2008/02/22/trading_the_world_for_a_cabin_in_the_woods/





(l)(l) Lived in a cabin in the redwoods for a whole YEAR. The memories of that year have been particularly vivid lately. Perhaps because it has been twenty years ago starting in 2008. <sigh........a good sigh.....> :)

(y)(y)



(f)





"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt


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

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)



http://www.janetleroy.com/



:)



(f)





"Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of that fact." - George Eliot


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

[sweetlady]

:)


(y)



http://www.dustylens.com/test_video.htm





(f)





Quid est veritas?

What is truth?


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

[sweetlady]

(8) (8) (8) (8)


Very cool:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/21/travel/escapes/20080221_MARTIN_GRAPHIC.html




http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/travel/escapes/22guitar.html?ref=travel




http://www.martinguitar.com/



(8) (8) (8) (8)




(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

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



http://www.zippitydodah.com/vog/images/photos/




http://www.zippitydodah.com/vog/





http://www.sedona.biz/valleyofthegodsbandb.htm





I've driven the 17-mile Valley of the Gods road (and it took a toll on my rental cars too). I LOVE what folks around here say:

"And best of all, you’re unlikely to see a single tourist bus here."

No kidding. THIS is a place to re-visit as often as possible.

http://www.viamagazine.com/top_stories/articles/valleyof_gods05.asp



"Dusted with fine red dirt and punctuated with silver-green brush, the valley lies at the base of a 1,200-foot bluff called Cedar Mesa that was formed when a sea invaded from the northwest 250 million years ago. The area’s jagged towers, gravelly washes, and tortured sandstone formations line Valley of the Gods Road, a 17-mile dirt route that links Highways 163 and 261, forming a scenic loop. Each bend in the road reveals a surprise, a slightly different shade of red or a new rock contortion, many of which are described in Navajo legend as ancient warriors frozen in time. There are places to pull over and hike, have a picnic, or, if you’re so inclined, do some bouldering."


<Sigh.>


:) Spring desert flowers will soon be in bloom!!!



(f)(f)(f)







Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


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

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)



http://www.bluffutah.org/





Where? North of Mexican Hat, Utah of course:

http://www.bluffutah.org/maps.htm



Cliffs to the west of Bluff:

http://www.calfcanyon.com/images/p_cliffs.jpg




Road down Cow Canyon into Bluff, Utah:

http://www.calfcanyon.com/images/ph_road.jpg





Desert gardening at its best: Evening primrose by the old Hunt House wall:

http://www.calfcanyon.com/images/p_primrose.jpg




Love desert gardens! Xeriscape with native and other drought tolerant plants:

http://www.calfcanyon.com/images/p_xeriscape.jpg




(l)



(y) Stayed here once:

http://www.desertroseinn.com/




(l)(l)(l)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

:)


(y)



http://www.blandingutah.org/



(l)(l)



(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

:o:o:o


;)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_line



http://www.caverntours.com/Zip_line_video.htm





Scary Video: 1200-Feet High Zip Line the School Bus for Colombian Kids

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/scary-video/1200+feet-high-zip-line-the-school-bus-for-colombian-kids-294523.php


:)


http://www.monteverdeinfo.com/canopy/tour.htm





Moaning Cavern: California's largest public cave chamber


http://www.caverntours.com/MoCavRt.htm





http://www.belizex.com/caves_branch.htm





http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071011/A_ENTERTAIN/710110311





http://www.canopy-tours.com/latest/new-twin-1500-zip-line-in-california.html




(y)(y)



(f)






Veni, vidi, vegi.

I came, I saw, I had a salad.


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

[sweetlady]

(l)


;)



http://www.zanegreypueblohotel.com/




I LOVE it: "In keeping with the serenity of the pueblo, there are no phones, TVs or clocks in the rooms."




A surprise:

"Parents traveling with children are encouraged to seek other accommodations if they feel our effort to maintain a quiet, adult atmosphere will inhibit their family's enjoyment of our facility."


(y)(y)

Definitely my kind of place.


:)



(f)





"It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing."


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

[sweetlady]

;)



(y)



http://astro.wsu.edu/worthey/astro/html/im-indian-heads/indian.html




(f)





Pleasant dreams.


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

[sweetlady]

:)



http://deewebs.homestead.com/ute.html



(y)(y)




(f)





Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

;);)



http://snowflakes.lookandfeel.com/



It's a sad sign of the times that there's a link to
report offensive snowflakes...........still, a cute
web site to send this time of year.


Lots of fun.....



(f)(f)





Pleasant dreams and a lovely Friday. (f)


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

[sweetlady]

(ap) (ap) (ap) (ap)




Left click on mouse and can move the point of view faster and in 360 degree rotation, through 360 degree slices of a sphere.





http://www.gillesvidal.com/blogpano/cockpit1.htm






;) Not a Boeing, but still a fun virtual visit. Notice the gaffers tape in a new airplane - the crew must have tripped over something...........;)



(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


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

[sweetlady]

;)


(y)(y)



March 2, 2008

Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words

By HEATHER TIMMONS


NEW DELHI — The latest bane of office productivity is Scrabulous, a virtual knockoff of the Scrabble board game, with over 700,000 players a day and nearly three million registered users.


Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.


Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.


In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.


Jayant Agarwalla, 21, said they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.


“Our family has been playing the game for 50 years now,” he said, and received a set when the game first came out in India. His mother encouraged him and his 26-year-old brother, Rajat, to play as a learning tool, often with a dictionary by the board.


Scrabulous, which most users play on the Facebook social-networking site, has a board that looks just like Scrabble, and the same number of letter tiles with the same point values. Players can send invitations to others on Facebook or search for strangers to play with by posting messages.


There is no time limit for moves or games. Scrabulous keeps track of player statistics, and it does not allow fake words. It cannot, however, prevent players from cheating. One method is an unaffiliated online “helper” program, which generates a list of possible words based on the letters a user has.


Two game companies, RealNetworks of Seattle and Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., say they have signed deals with Hasbro to create online versions of the company’s games. Both say their versions of Scrabble will be out shortly. But Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated.


The threat of legal action has not gained the companies many admirers. Many Scrabulous fans, some of whom say they bought the board game for the first time after playing the online version on Facebook, call their approach heavy-handed and out of touch.


“The big thing that Hasbro is missing is that this is targeting a young audience that in general is not into board games,” said Venkat Koduru, the 15-year-old founder of the Facebook group “Save Scrabulous.”


Mr. Koduru had three Scrabulous games going as of Wednesday. He has gathered names of more than 1,000 people who have pledged to never buy a Scrabble board if Hasbro and Mattel shut down the online game.


Other groups devoted to saving the game have recently been created on Facebook, including “Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too.” Tens of thousands of fans have joined in, threatening to boycott Hasbro and Mattel products.


Iain Morgan, 34, a music producer in London who goes by the name Iain Easy, is playing 25 games of Scrabulous at the same time. The funny thing is, he said, he was never a fan of the original board game.


Mr. Morgan, who is the host of a Facebook group called “Help, I’m a Scrabulous Addict,” attributes the game’s popularity to “all these people who are bored at work in their office,” and added that the game keeps him in regular contact with his mother.


The legal questions concerning Scrabulous are complicated by the interests of the companies that own the rights to Scrabble.


Harold Zeitz, senior vice president for games at RealNetworks, said Friday that he was working closely with the Agarwalla brothers to bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users.


Hasbro, meanwhile, said in a statement that Electronic Arts was planning to release an online version of Scrabble this spring. And Mattel, which signed a deal with RealNetworks last July, says that settling with the Agarwallas would set a bad precedent.

Neither Hasbro nor Mattel would disclose the number of Scrabble board games they have sold since Scrabulous started becoming popular last year. Hasbro estimates it sells one million to two million Scrabble boards a year in North America.


To some online marketing experts, Scrabulous represents a turning point for the board game industry, which has struggled for years to recreate itself as new generations turned to alternatives like the Xbox and the GameBoy.


“If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”


The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said.


For their part, Mattel and Hasbro are trying to protect their franchise as consumers turn increasingly to the Internet for entertainment. They say they consider Scrabble a crown jewel and are working on marketing campaigns for the game’s 60th anniversary this year. The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.


Scrabble began as Lexico in 1931, the creation of an out-of-work architect, Alfred Mosher Butts. He determined the frequency of each letter in the game and its value by reviewing the front page of The New York Times. His patent was denied, and it was 17 years before he found a manufacturer, which renamed the game Scrabble.


It took many more years before Scrabble became popular, thanks in part to a Macy’s chairman who was a fan, according to the game’s official history.


The Scrabble brand in North America was passed from manufacturer to manufacturer. It landed with Hasbro in 1989. The British game maker J. W. Spear & Sons owned the rights outside North America until the company was bought by Mattel in 1994.


The board game has had a core group of close-knit, intense fans for decades. They attend tournaments, refer to amateurs as “living room players,” and memorize lists of two-letter words.


Until Scrabulous landed on Facebook, no one could have mistaken the game, which had only a few thousand users, for a fast-growing phenomenon.


The Agarwallas introduced their first Scrabble knockoff Web site, bingobinge.com, in August 2005, and renamed it Scrabulous.com a year later. In May 2007, one of the site’s users suggested they adapt the game as a Facebook application, and it took off.


After 25 years with the National Scrabble Association, John D. Williams Jr., the executive director, said he had seen numerous copyright infringements of Scrabble, but the Scrabulous program on Facebook was the most “widespread and intense.”


Dozens of other Web sites offer unauthorized versions of Scrabble, but most force users to play in real time or require clunky downloads to play.


“People believe it to be in the public domain, like chess,” Mr. Williams said. “The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don’t or are unwilling to accept.”


The Agarwalla brothers are avid players themselves — Jayant had 14 Scrabulous games going as of Saturday, and Rajat was playing 19.


Jayant, who is responsible for the game’s player interface and customer support, said, “People rarely find time to sit down anymore with their family and friends, to invite people over, to prepare the tea and biscuits.”


Even though it is easy to cheat at Scrabulous, he says he thinks few players actually do. “You may be doing it for personal glory, but it really takes the fun out of the game,” he said.



:o


:)



(f)




There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mohandas Gandhi


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

[sweetlady]

:o



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/03/arts/20080304_COLOR_SLIDESHOW_5.html



:o


:)



(f)





"It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing."


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

[sweetlady]

;)



In the mid-1950s, short-sleeve coats and capes inspired by Balenciaga were the high-style look. While impractical for winter, the silhouette, with its attendant long gloves, was widely accepted. Now a new generation has discovered it, wind-tunnel sleeves and all. This is a case of vanity triumphing over function.



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/29/fashion/0302-STREET_2.html



Classy:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/29/fashion/0302-STREET_3.html




:)



(f)




Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

:|:|:|:|




UH-HUH:

Ultimately, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price if the federal government continues to prevent the local food movement from expanding.



March 1, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)

By JACK HEDIN

Rushford, Minn.


IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.


But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.


As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.


Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.


All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.


The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.


I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)


In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.


In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.


Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.


That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.


Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.


Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.


Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.


Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets — without the federal government actively discouraging them.


Jack Hedin is a farmer.





(y)(y)(y)(y)



(f)





"Bloom where you are planted."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:|:|


:o



;)



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/28/opinion/20080222_MIGRAINE_SLIDESHOW_index.html





;) Strange stuff.






(S)(S) Pleasant dreams.

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

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)



http://www.onedayu.com/



:)



(f)




"All good things come to an end."


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

[sweetlady]

:D:D:D




http://www.snorgtees.com/



(y)(y)



(f)





"All good things come to an end."


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

[sweetlady]

:):)



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/28/arts/0229-KHALO_4.html



Almost no one in Kahlo’s day knew quite what to do with art like this. It was only in the 1960s and afterward, with the rise of feminism, gay rights and identity politics, that Kahlo began to make sense. And then she made explosive sense, this artist who had been bending genders, blending ethnicities, making the personal political and revolutionizing the concept of “beautiful” generations before.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/28/arts/0229-KHALO_9.html




:|:|


I loved the movie. ;)





"All good things come to an end."


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

[sweetlady]

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



http://www.twinrocks.com/categories/190-Pueblo-Pottery.html




Native American Legends:

http://www.twinrocks.com/legends/



(l)(l)



(f)





"All good things come to an end."


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

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)



http://www.stopping.com/



(f)






"All good things come to an end."


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

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)


;)



Q U O T E D


"As soon as people heard I was writing a book on assholes, they would come up to me and start telling a Steve Jobs story. The degree to which people in Silicon Valley are afraid of Jobs is unbelievable."


-- Stanford management science professor Robert Sutton, author of the 2007 bestseller "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't."



http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/02/news/companies/elkind_jobs.fortune/index.htm






"You know nothing until intuition agrees." - Richard Bach


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

[sweetlady]

:D:D:D:D:D


(8)(8)(8) Definitely need speakers for this one.........




Evolution of Dance


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg





List of of previous all-time most viewed videos:

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2008/03/05/new_vide.shtml





(y)(y) Amazing amount of continuous energy as well as great dancing.


(y)





"Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present." - Thomas Merton


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:)



http://meignorant.com/3-way_chess


(y)(y)








(um)(um) May your smile be your umbrella. (um)(um)

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

[sweetlady]

8-| 8-|




100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year


Interesting list from the BBC


Scan through this list for interesting and unusual facts. Click the "more details" link if you're really intrigued. Samples: Adding milk negates tea's health effects. Denmark is the happiest country in Europe; Italy the unhappiest.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2008/01/100_things_we_didnt_know_last_3.shtml



(y)(y)







"Speaking without thinking is like shooting without taking aim."


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

[sweetlady]

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



http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Camp_fire.jpg/792px-Camp_fire.jpg




http://www.thisfabtrek.com/journey/africa/mauritania/20051205-atar/fire-4.jpg




http://en.arocha.org/images/ukphotos/114l.jpeg




http://www.rustyparts.com/pb/images/20051013203706_campfire.jpg



http://www.hickerphoto.com/data/media/180/camp_fire_sc124.jpg




http://home.flash.net/~cooljazz/fotosite/myfamily/randi/images/10-4-03_Camping-Fire.jpg




http://fishhookweb.com/bg/Camp_Fire.lg.jpg




"Digital campfire"?

http://www.nextexit.com/nextexit/nextimages/campfire.gif

OR

www.nextexit.com/nextexit/campfire2.html





(l)(l)(l)




(f)



"All good things come to an end."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:o



;)




http://www.unicat.net/en/pics/EX70HDQ-MANTGA6x6-2.html



;)





"Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match."


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

[sweetlady]

;)



Cocktail Party Physics


Feel smart, have fun


Jennifer Ouellette, author of the books Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics and The Physics of the Buffyverse, believes physics can be both fun and fascinating. And you'll get some interesting cocktail party fodder too.


Have some Pi

http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/



;)



(f)




Happy St. Paddy's Day!


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:)



Bix: Fun with Contests


Create, enter, or judge one


Want some mindless fun? Why not create, enter, or judge an online contest. Choose from beauty pageants, karaoke, talent contests, and more. There's even cash and prizes in some sponsored events.


Join the fun


http://bix.yahoo.com/



:)



(f)




"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt


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

[sweetlady]

:)



http://www.vrlab.umu.se/research/phun/


"Phun is an educational, entertaining and somewhat (!) addictive piece of software for designing and exploring 2D multi-physics simulations in a cartoony fashion."


;)



(f)





Happy St. Paddy's Day!


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

8-| 8-|



The American Physical Society is marking the 50th year of the publication Physical Review Letters by posting over the course of the year a series of milestone letters that made significant contributions to physics.




http://prl.aps.org/50years/milestones




If you need to bone up on your math a bit before plunging in, here's where to find some free courses online:

http://education-portal.com/articles/Where_to_Find_Free_Math_Courses_Online.html



(y)(y)


;)




(f)




Happy St. Paddy's Day!


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l) (f) (l) (f) (l)



March 23, 2008

Weekend in New York | Manhattan Teahouses

Morning or Afternoon, There’s a Kettle Brewing

By SETH KUGEL


HOW versatile is tea? It can evoke anything from stuffy formality to cozy comfort.


Chinese teenagers slurp it, as do British royals, although they’d probably prefer a more refined description. It goes well with cucumber sandwiches, barbecued pork or vegetarian dumplings. It can be hot, it can be cold, it can be green, it can be black. It doesn’t even have to be made from the tea plant: just about any dried flowers, fruits or leaves will do.


Unlike coffee, which plays a largely functional role in society (in that it gets society to function), tea is mostly about relaxing. In fact, the only reasonable objection people can have to tea, is that they don’t like tea.


If you have any of those suspicious characters traveling with you when you visit New York, drop them off at Starbucks (conveniently situated one block north, south, east and west of your hotel) and sample a few of the dozens of vastly different corners of Manhattan that devote themselves largely if not exclusively to tea.


Any attempt to list the best tea spots in Manhattan is bound to cause a tempest in a you-know-what, so consider this column merely a sampling of the island’s tea extremes; for more options go to shockingly thorough Web sites like www.teamap.com and www.teaguide.net apparently run by people who have way too much teatime on their hands.


Even among places with European-style afternoon tea, there are sharp contrasts. On the cozy end of the spectrum is Tea & Sympathy, a little restaurant tucked in beside its little West Village tea and goodies shop, and fitting only 10 tables. (Scratch that, there are 10 tables, but they don’t really fit.)


Though monarchs past and present stare down at you from the walls, the atmosphere is more warm than regal. The $30 tea service brings a vast selection of teas from English Breakfast to Lapsang souchong to chamomile lavender, along with substantial finger sandwiches, hearty scones and big chunks of cake.


Whereas you couldn’t help but feel at home at Tea & Sympathy, you can’t help but feel a little out of place at the Four Seasons, one of the grand Midtown hotels that serves afternoon tea.


Tea service there will run you $46 a person, which comes pretty close to being preposterous, especially when you see the size of the six savories and sweets you choose from a menu of 10 items. (Apparently, a portion of your $46 goes to sophisticated pastry-miniaturization technology.) But those two-bite chicken salad sandwiches, Meyer lemon and blueberry tarts and the like sure are tasty, and the service is as gracious and understated as it is friendly at Tea & Sympathy.


Smaller spots, like the Amai Tea & Bake House or Sympathy for the Kettle, are good for those who would rather avoid the formalities of tea service and focus on the tea itself, with a sweet or two on the side. At Amai, not far from Union Square, you choose from a fascinating list whose provenance is described in excruciating detail, at which point a staff member pulls the leaves out of an old-fashioned library card catalog cabinet. At Sympathy, a Lilliputian, cozier pink-walled shop in the East Village, the list is as vast — about 150 varieties, from oolong to mate to rooibos — as the shop is tiny.


Amai’s big gimmick is that many of the sweets available with tea, are also made from tea. Why this matters is not entirely clear, since your daily allowance of whatever is good in tea is already in the actual tea. But the cookies (Earl Grey and currant, lemongrass and ginger) and the extremely moist green tea cupcake justify the overkill. Sympathy follows suit with an equally good raspberry-and-green-tea cake.


Asian bubble tea — the drinks with those arrestingly chewy tapioca pearls at the bottom — has made it big in recent years. There are spots all over Chinatown, but no need to explore all the way to the Fujianese-only-speaking periphery: right there in the touristy center on Mott Street, the Green Tea Cafe attracts a young Asian crowd.


The flavored tea choices — served hot or cold — are endless, but tea purists should be wary. While a flavor like honey green tea will be recognizably tea-flavored; the strawberry black tea seems wholly derived from strawberry Nestlé Quik. They also have a full snack menu — but no matter what the server tells you, cold sliced duck gizzard does not go well with bubble tea.


A more upscale Asian tea setting is Franchia, the very Zen vegetarian restaurant in Murray Hill that bills itself as a “tea shrine” and offers a menu with more technical details than the other spots: what temperature it is boiled at, for example. The top green choices are from Mount Jilee in South Korea, where tea grows wild; choose between “first-picked,” “second-picked” or “third-picked” variety (guide: the firster, the better).


You don’t have to actually drink your tea on the spot, of course; there are plenty of shops to buy loose tea, and they range from elegant (like Ito En on Madison Avenue at 69th Street) to tiny and old fashioned (like McNulty’s in Greenwich Village).


Enter McNulty’s, and you face a sea of glass jars in a tiny old tin-plate-roofed space, each filled with something delicious-sounding and -looking, from yerba mate to peach to flowery orange pekoe to chamomile. Do be aware, however, that no matter how long you brew their tea at home, scones and cupcakes will not magically appear at its side.



GREEN, BLACK OR WITH BUBBLES?


Tea & Sympathy, 108 Greenwich Avenue (opposite Jane Street); (212) 989-9735; www.teaandsympathynewyork.com


Four Seasons Hotel, 57 East 57th Street; (212) 758-5700; www.fourseasons.com/newyorkfs


Amai Tea and Bake House, 171 Third Avenue (between 16th and 17th Streets); (212) 863-9630; www.amainyc.com


Sympathy for the Kettle, 109 St. Marks Place; (212) 979-1650; www.sympathyforthekettle.com


Green Tea Cafe, 45 Mott Street (between Bayard and Pell Streets); (212) 693-2888.


Franchia, 12 Park Avenue (between 34th and 35th Streets); (212) 213-1001; www.franchia.com


Ito En, 822 Madison Avenue (between 68th and 69th Streets); (212) 988-7111; www.itoen.com


McNulty’s Tea and Coffee Company, 109 Christopher Street (between Bleecker and Hudson Streets; (212) 242-5351; www.mcnultys.com



(l)(l)(l)



(f)






Happy Easter!


Sweetlady & WTB (l)(&)(l)

[sweetlady]

(l) (l) (l)



http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSSYD30671420080321



(l) (l) (l)



(f)




Happy Easter!

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

[sweetlady]

(8)(8)(8)(8)


(l)



http://www.npr.org/music/



(f)





"All good things come to an end."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

8-|8-|



March 29, 2008

Editorial, NYTimes

Broadening Broadband


The big problem in providing Internet service to rural America is often called “the last mile” — the difficulty in reaching the smallest communities and farthest-flung houses and farms. In cities, that problem might be called “the last block” — the difficulty in reaching every neighborhood, no matter how poor.

For a while, many American cities, caught up in a tide of technological and fiscal optimism, promised to try to make Internet coverage available to all by making it citywide, wireless and low-cost or even free.

That has proved to be harder than it seemed at first. EarthLink, an Internet provider that was partnering with Philadelphia, has pulled out of a much-heralded project there, and other service providers are rethinking similar projects.

EarthLink is calling it a change in strategic direction. What that phrase means, simply, is where’s the profit? It is a reasonable question. But for the people who have been left without Internet service as municipal wireless plans have collapsed, there are no reasonable answers, only an all-too-familiar barrier between them and the information age.

The neighborhoods that most need low-cost, public wireless service now find themselves largely dependent on Internet access through public libraries. This may not sound like a terrible thing, but have you seen what’s happened to the budgets — and the operating hours — of public libraries?

To cities and Internet providers, municipal Wi-Fi looked like an ideal partnership. Philadelphia gave EarthLink free access to utility poles for mounting wireless routers. EarthLink promised to build hot spots, offer low-cost residential service and provide still lower-cost access for the poorest customers.

The costs of building a network turned out to be higher than expected — at a time when prices for private Internet service were dropping. It also hurt, in Philadelphia’s case, that there was a major change at EarthLink, which went from being an advocate of municipal Wi-Fi to a company determined to cut costs.

Broadband service is no longer a luxury. It has become a basic part of the infrastructure of education and democracy. EarthLink should fulfill the commitments it made. Even in these tough economic times, cities should keep pushing municipal Wi-Fi and looking for partners and plans that can make it a reality.



(y)(y)(y)(y)




(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

(y) (y) (y) (y) (y)



Truck drivers at a protest last week at a truck stop in Harrisburg, Pa. Diesel costs are up about 45 percent from a year ago:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/29/business/29truck-span-600.jpg




Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/business/29truck.html?_r=1&oref=slogin



(y) (y) (y) (y) (y)




(f)





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

8-|8-|8-|



http://www.cio.com/special/slideshows/the90s/index#slideshow


(y)(y)



(f)




Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

;);)



How a camera attached to an elephant's trunk captured amazing jungle views:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=543994&in_page_id=1770&ito=newsnow



;)



(f)




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning." - Michelango


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:o:o


:)



http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/24/what-will-life-be-like-in-the-year-2008/



:)



(f)




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning." - Michelango


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

^o) ^o)


http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/how_i_blew_my_interview_with_google


"I knew that if Google were to make me an offer, I would accept it. I mean, hey, it's Google, the Angelina Jolie of tech employers."




^o)^o)^o) I don't think so!



;)



(f)





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning." - Michelango


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:|:|:|


:o



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/opinion/06kristof.html?em&ex=1207627200&en=f7eeccbcf3785e78&ei=5070



and


April 5, 2008, 11:58 pm

Unconscious Attitudes on Race and Gender

By Nicholas D. Kristof

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/


and



The “implicit attitude tests” on-line at Project Implicit at Harvard:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/




(y)(y) Definitely interesting..........



(f)




"It often shows fine command of the language to say nothing."


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

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)



https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html




(y)(y) The one on sexual preference is very enlightening...........





;););)



Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


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

[sweetlady]

:)



A lesson in island life for London teacher on way to remotest school

05 April 2008

The Scotsman

Edinburgh


By FIONA MACLEOD

WHEN Lisa Bracken disembarks from the ferry today, she will be stepping into a completely new way of life.
The deputy headteacher is swapping the bustling streets of inner-city London for Scotland's remotest inhabited island.


Mrs Bracken, 37, has chosen to relocate her young family to Fair Isle after answering a job advert to become headteacher at a tiny Shetland school.


The dramatic change in pace will be a welcome one for the mother of two, who until yesterday was deputy head at an inner-city London primary in the borough of Hammersmith.


She said: "I wanted to go back to my country roots because I came from a rural Hampshire village.


"I wanted something new and this is certainly going to be a very interesting change.


"What appeals is that you cannot buy any property on Fair Isle as it is all owned by the National Trust, so everyone is a working member of the community."


At her new school, Mrs Bracken will have just nine pupils, which will eventually rise when her four-year-old son Oisin and two-year-old daughter, Orla, are old enough to start primary one at Fair Isle Primary.


Until then, husband Declan, 47, who is a qualified nurse, will look after the children.


Mrs Bracken revealed it was her husband who pointed out the advert for the job, knowing she would be attracted to the position.

She said: "I did live in a small community in Lake Victoria in Uganda for several months so I understand island life."

Mrs Bracken visited Africa in a break from teaching to work with the community.

In her new job, she will lead a part-time staff of a music teacher, a computer instructor and two classroom assistants /no spamming of other sites/ one of whom doubles as a lunchtime supervisor /no spamming of other sites/ a secretary, a cook and a cleaner. And she will not miss the high cost of living in the UK's noisy capital city.

She said: "That was one of the major draws of Fair Isle that appealed to us."


Audrey Edwards, quality improvement manager for the schools service at Shetland Islands Council, said the response for the position had been tremendous.


She said: "We had an excellent response, but sometimes you get interesting people who apply for these rural posts.


"We had people who applied for a headteacher's post who don't have a teaching qualification," Ms Edwards said.


"They are very attracted to the idea of going to a far-away island and teaching a couple of children. They don't realise they have to have a teaching qualification and be registered with the General Teaching Council."


Mrs Bracken left Canberra Primary in west London's White City on Friday, and will spend today moving from the south-east of England to the far north of the British Isles.


She starts in the new job a week on Monday and is expected to receive a salary of around £42,000, plus an island allowance of £1,860 and a family home.


The search for a headteacher for Fair Isle and for the primary school on the neighbouring island of Foula sparked a UK wide hunt for suitable applicants.


The vacancy at Foula was filled by the school's existing principal teacher, Christine Else.


Bill McGregor, a spokesman for the Headteachers' Association of Scotland, previously said: "I think it takes a very special person to go and live in a very small community."


Fair Isle /no spamming of other sites/ best known as one of the sea areas mentioned on the BBC's nightly shipping forecast /no spamming of other sites/ has 70 inhabitants, including eight primary school children and one of nursery-school age.


Forty kilometres south-west of Sumburgh Head, the southernmost point on the Shetland mainland, the island, just 5km long and 3km wide, is a two-and-a-half-hour ferry journey from the nearest landfall and has no pub, hotel or restaurant.


Foula is made up of crofting townships on the narrow coastal strip and is famous for Shetland's most spectacular cliffs.



FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

THE contrast in lifestyles for Lisa Bracken will be quite remarkable.


Instead of facing the hassle of a daily commute of a crowded journey on the Tube, the only effort required will be a short walk taking just a matter of minutes.


The opportunity for Mrs Bracken to really get to know her pupils individually will be far greater than in London.


Whereas the average primary school in London has 340 pupils, the total number of pupils in Fair Isle is only nine.


But at the end of the school day when Mrs Bracken could again merge into the population of more than seven million in London, on a small Scottish island it will be a different story.


With only 70 residents, Fair Isle's headteacher is an important part of the community and will be expected to contribute time and effort to local events.


And while police officers in the Met are struggling to deal with increasing levels of crime, the chances of having your home burgled on Fair Isle are virtually nil.


Last year when the search for a new teacher began, Bill McGregor, spokesman for the Headteachers' Association of Scotland, said: "I think it takes a very special person to go and live in a very small community and it is certainly not an escape route.


"While there isn't exactly the need for the hardy pioneering spirit, you have to be able to co-operate, get on and face up to difficulties. What is vital is your ability to fit in and get on. Not only do you have to be part of the community, you also have to be accepted by them."


Finally, while the average house price in London is £350,000, there are no such worries on Fair Isle /no spamming of other sites/ houses are not for sale, as the island is owned by the National Trust for Scotland.



http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/A-lesson-in-island-life.3951212.jp




(y)(y) Job in a remote place AND a home to live in...........nice. Except for the kids, that is.


;)


(f)





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


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

[sweetlady]

:clap::clap::clap:



Here's a little quiz to see how much you remember about some
less-than-important things from a few decades back. It's just for fun, so
scoring isn't important. Even the wrong answers may bring back a memory or
two.

Have Fun (but no peeking!). Then, forward it to friends with your score
in the box.


1. What builds strong bodies 12 ways?
A. Flintstones vitamins
B. The buttmaster
C. Spaghetti
D. Wonder Bread
E. Orange Juice
F. Milk
G. Cod Liver Oil


2. Before he was Muhammed Ali, he was...
A. Sugar Ray Robinson
B. Roy Orbison
C. Gene Autry
D. Rudolph Valentino
E. Fabian
F. Mickey Mantle
G. Cassius Clay


3. Pogo, the comic strip character said, 'We have met
the enemy and...
A. It's you
B. He is us
C. It's the Grinch
D. He wasn't home
E. He's really mean
F. We quit
G. He surrendered


4. Good night, David.
A. Good night, Chet
B. Sleep well
C. Good Night, Irene
D. Good Night, Gracie
E. See you later, alligator
F. Until tomorrow
G. Good night, Steve


5. You'll wonder where the yellow went,
A. When you use Tide
B. When you lose your crayons
C. When you clean your tub
D. If you paint the room blue
E. If you buy a soft water tank
F. When you use Lady Clairol
G. When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent


6. Before he was the Skipper's Little Buddy, Bob Denver
was Dobie's friend,
A. Stuart Whitman
B. Randolph Scott
C. Steve Reeves
D. Maynard G. Krebbs
E. Corky B. Dork
F. Dave the Whale
G. Zippy Zoo


7. Liar, liar...
A. You're a liar
B. Your nose is growing
C. Pants on fire
D. Join the choir
E. Jump up higher
F. On the wire
G. I'm telling Mom


8. Meanwhile, back in Metropolis, Superman fights a
never ending battle for
truth, justice and...
A. Wheaties
B. Lois Lane
C. TV ratings
D. World peace
E. Red tights
F. The American way
G. News headlines


9. Hey, kids, what time is it?
A. It's time for Yogi Bear
B. It's time to do your homework
C. It's Howdy Doody Time
D. It's Time for Romper Room
E. It's bedtime
F. The Mighty Mouse Hour
G. Scooby Doo Time


10. Lions and tigers and bears...
A. Yikes
B. Oh no
C. Gee whiz
D. I'm scared
E. Oh My
F. Help Help
H. Let's run


11. Bob Dylan advised us never to trust anyone
A. Over 40
B. Wearing a uniform
C. Carrying a briefcase
D. Over 30
E. You don't know
F. Who says, 'Trust me'
G. Who eats tofu


12. NFL quarterback who appeared in a television
commercial wearing women's
stockings.
A. Troy Aikman
B. Kenny Stabler
C. Joe Namath
D. Roger Stauback
E. Joe Montana
F. Steve Young
G. John Elway


13. Brylcream...
A. Smear it on
B You'll smell great
C. Tame that cowlick
D. Grease ball heaven
E. It's a dream
F. We're your team
G. A little dab'll do ya


14. I found my thrill...
A. In Blueberry muffins
B. With my man, Bill
C. Down at the mill
D. Over the windowsill
E. With thyme and dill
F. Too late to enjoy
G. On Blueberry Hill


15. Before Robin Williams, Peter Pan was played by
A. Clark Gable
B. Mary Martin
C. Doris Day
D. Errol Flynn
E. Sally Fields
F. Jim Carey
G. Jay Leno


16. Name the Beatles
A. John, Steve, George, Ringo
B. John, Paul, George , Roscoe
C. John, Paul, Stacey, Ringo
D. Jay, Paul, George , Ringo
E. Lewis, Peter, George , Ringo
F. Jason, Betty, Skipper, Hazel
G. John, Paul, George, Ringo


17. I wonder, wonder, wonder, who
A. Who ate the leftovers?
B. Who did the laundry?
C. Was it you?
D. Who wrote the book of love?
E. Who I am?
F. Passed the test?
G. Knocked on the door?


18. I'm strong to the finish
A. Cause I eats my broccoli
B. Cause I eats me spinach
C. Cause I lift weights
D. Cause I'm the hero
E. And don't you forget it
f. Cause Olive Oyl loves me
g. To outlast Bruto


19. When it's least expected, you're elected, you're the
star today...
a. Smile, you're on Candid Camera
b. Smile, you're on Star Search
c. Smile, you won the lottery
d. Smile, we're watching you
e. Smile, the world sees you
f. Smile, you're a hit
g. Smile, you're on TV


20. What do M & M's do?
a. Make your tummy happy
b. Melt in your mouth, not in your pocket
c. Make you fat
d. Melt your heart
e. Make you popular
f. Melt in your mouth, not in your hand
g. Come in colors


Okay, now scroll down for the answers!







Okay, that's it. Here are the right answers.

1 d - Wonder Bread
2 g - Cassius Clay
3 b - He Is Us
4 a - Good night, Chet
5 g - When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent
6 d - Maynard G. Krebbs
7 c - Pants On Fire
8 f - The American Way
9 c - It's Howdy Doody Time
10 e - Oh My
11 d - Over 30
12 c - Joe Namath
13 g - A little dab'll do ya
14 g - On Blueberry Hill
15 b - Mary Martin
16 g - John, Paul, George , Ringo
17 d - Who wrote the book of Love
18 b - Cause I eats me spinach
19 a - Smile, you're on Candid Camera
20 f - Melt In Your Mouth Not In Your Hand



It might help if you are over 60; this is no 'pushover'.





:geek::geek: I got a 19!!



:firefox:



:coffee:





Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


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

[sweetlady]

:seestars::seestars::seestars:



http://www.defensedevices.com/lipstick-stun-gun.html




(bandit)(bandit) Would you use this to protect yoursself? It's a "perfect" size when compared with the "regular" size of a canister of mace.

:eyebat::eyebat:





:peacesign:




"Bloom where you are planted."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:yeahthat::yeahthat::yeahthat:



A contest to support women to make a million in business

9:54 ET, Mon 7 Apr 2008


CHICAGO (Reuters.com) -- Women own nearly half of the businesses in the U.S. but 97 percent of them report less than $1 million in revenue.


They're being held back by factors ranging from culture to childcare and a lack of confidence, says Count Me In for Women's Economic Independence.


"There's this group called the missing middle," says entrepreneur and women's advocate Nell Merlino, citing U.S. Census data. "There are a lot of women who would like to grow their business; we found they weren't sure how to do it."


The need for financing and a support network of like-minded women business owners were the catalysts for Count Me In's Make Mine a Million $ Business initiative, a nationwide contest begun in 2005 by Merlino, who is known for creating Take Our Daughters to Work Day.


The group expects 2008 to be a banner year: Merlino is counting on some 5,000 women to apply for the chance to gain a total package worth up to $85,000, including financing, to jump-start their business at a time when small business loans are becoming more difficult to obtain.


The program aims to help propel one million female entrepreneurs to clear at least $1 million in annual revenue by 2010. Through 2007, some 3,200 applicants had applied for competitions in cities around the country, including San Francisco, New York, Boston, Madison, Wisconsin, and Austin, Texas, among others.


At each event, 20 applicants are chosen to present a three-minute pitch to a panel of judges and audience. Then 10 awardees are selected. To date, some 122 women have won the top awards.


Merlino says the winners gain publicity - the contest has been likened to a corporate version of the reality show American Idol - that helps them become role models for other women in their communities, adding to the overall ranks that will help hit the 2010 target.


Merlino herself hit a wall when her New York-based marketing consultancy reached the $700,000 revenue mark and she was at a loss at how to grow.


"That's one of the things that pushed me to do it," she recalls. "Here I was struggling to expand."


Financing nice, but network gold

Applicants draw from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from those with a wealth of corporate experience and fancy dossiers to others with brilliant ideas but little hands-on business experience. Applicants, who apply by city, must submit an executive summary of their business plan. Typically they have been in business at least two years and are pulling in more than $200,000 in yearly revenue.


"The most important criteria we're looking for is you need to be in a business with the potential to get to a million," Merlino says. "You don't necessarily have to have all the answers but you need to have some vision for it."


Contest winners say the most valuable thing they gain is a growing network that provides advice for everything from distribution to staffing and marketing.


Julie Tucker Legrand, an early "Million" winner and co-owner of San Francisco-based SmartsCo, which produces board games for adults centered on themes such as wine and travel, applied because she and her business partner, Jennifer Elias, needed financing. But the former Silicon Valley techie says she walked away with the confidence to make smart decisions, a sense of healthy competition and accountability to others in the group.


"They're kicking your butt to keep going," she says of her "Million" colleagues. "Everyone has the goal and we're all trying to reach that and they're not letting you stop when they reach it."


Legrand, whose business last year pulled in $600,000 after several years below the $400,000 mark, has partnered with a large distributor and recently launched a consulting arm that helps corporate clients develop games.


"Count Me In came along right at the time I was trying to step up my game," recalls Maureen Borzacchiello, founder of Garden City, New York-based Creative Display Solutions, which builds corporate displays for trade shows.


Borzacchiello, a former top executive at trade show giant Nomadic Display, "bootstrapped" her startup from savings; she applied to the contest because she wanted the mentoring and marketing support.


She appears to have gotten it. A winner in December 2005, Creative Display reached $1.4 million in 2007 sales. The business, which started in her basement, recently made its second move, this time to a 12,000 square foot warehouse facility, doubling its space.



Heavy hitters

Count Me In, which began in 1999 by providing micro-loans to women-owned startups, has shifted its emphasis exclusively to the Make Mine a Million $ Business effort. And Merlino's consultancy has taken a back seat to the contest, which takes up nearly all of her time.


"This is the most exciting thing I've ever done," she says.


This year the "Million" challenge will come to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Arizona, Newark, New Jersey, Seattle, Albuquerque, Columbus, Ohio, Raleigh, North Carolina and Ft. Lauderdale; other cities are being negotiated.


Sponsorship is growing. American Express Co., which provides financing of up to $50,000 to each winner, along with Dell Inc., American International Group Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., JetBlue Airways, and Marriott International, are all backers.


"Basically for us this is strategic," says Ned Cloonan, vice-president of corporate and international affairs for AIG, which has pledged some $4.7 million in support. "We made a decision as a company that globally, both in the United States and in major markets around the world, a major focus is to support women in terms of their entrepreneurship and economic development."




http://features.us.reuters.com/entrepreneur/news/CD67EE2A-04A1-11DD-A3EA-46A7AA7B.html


(3hug)(3hug)






:coffee::coffee:





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gimme::gimme:



http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUST27506220080408



Yikes!






:peacesign:




There is more to life than increasing its speed." - Mohandas Gandhi


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:lovenpeace::lovenpeace::lovenpeace:



I just LOVE these places and have explored Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelley and Hovenweep (which wasn't mentioned).

<HEAVY SIGH>


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/07/science/040808Anasazi_index.html


April 8, 2008

Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery

By GEORGE JOHNSON


Perched on a lonesome bluff above the dusty San Pedro River, about 30 miles east of Tucson, the ancient stone ruin archaeologists call the Davis Ranch Site doesn’t seem to fit in. Staring back from the opposite bank, the tumbled walls of Reeve Ruin are just as surprising.


Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.


“Salado polychrome,” says a visiting archaeologist turning over a shard of broken pottery. Reddish on the outside and patterned black and white on the inside, it stands out from the plainer ware made by the Hohokam, whose territory the wanderers had come to occupy.


These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.


“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.


For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?


Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.


Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They are looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.


“The late 1200s was a time of substantial social, political and religious ferment and experimentation,” said William D. Lipe, an archaeologist at Washington State University.


“You can’t have a situation where it just happens that hundreds of local communities for their own individual, particularistic reasons decide to either die or get up and move,” Dr. Lipe said. “There had to be something general going on.”


When scientists examine the varying width of tree rings, they indeed see a pernicious dry spell gripping the Southwest during the last quarter of the 13th century, around the height of the abandonment. But there had been severe droughts before.


“Over all conditions were pretty darn bad in the 1200s,” said Timothy A. Kohler of Washington State University. “But they were not maybe all that worse than they were in the 900s, and yet some people hung on then.”


Even in the worst of times, major waterways kept flowing. “The Provo River didn’t dry up,” said James Allison, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University. “The San Juan River didn’t dry up.”


“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”


Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they went to Hopi to escape this?”


Hopi was far from an anomaly. “The whole abandonment of the Four Corners, at least in Arizona, is people moving to where it’s even worse,” said Jeffrey Dean, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.


Some archaeologists have proposed that colder weather contributed to the downfall. Measurements of the thickness of pollen layers, accumulating over decades on the bottom of lakes and bogs, suggest that growing seasons were becoming shorter. But even when paired with drought, the combination may have been less than a decisive blow.


Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”


Though the rains returned, the people never did.


“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was very fine.”


In the remains of Sand Canyon Pueblo, in the Mesa Verde region, Kristin A. Kuckelman of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., sees the story of a tragic rise and fall. As crops withered, the inhabitants reverted from farming maize and domesticating turkeys to hunting and gathering. Defensive fortifications were erected to resist raiders.


The effort was futile. Villagers were scalped, dismembered, perhaps even eaten. Families were slain inside their dwellings, and the pueblo was burned and abandoned. Curiously, as was true throughout the region, the victors didn’t stay to occupy the conquered lands.


But violence was not always an obvious factor. Throwing a wrench into the theories were those curious wanderers from Kayenta. They thrived in their pueblos until about 1290 — some 15 years after the Great Drought began. And when they finally departed for the San Pedro Valley and other destinations, the evacuation was orderly.


“I don’t see any evidence of violence, cannibalism or even defensive posturing,” Dr. Dean said. “The abandonment seems to be different. You get lots of evidence that people intended to come back.”


At Kiet Siel, a cliff dwelling now part of Navajo National Monument in northeast Arizona, people sealed the openings of granaries with carefully fitted rock slabs, caulking the edges with a collar of clay. Finally the evacuees blocked the entranceway to the settlement with a large wooden beam.


“It’s pretty clear that these people weren’t freaking out or weren’t in a hurry when they left,” Dr. Dean said.


Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.


By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.


Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.


But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.


Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.


Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.


In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.


Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.


When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.


“You can’t easily peel off a lineage here and a lineage there and have them go their own way,” Dr. Kohler said. “These parts are no longer redundant. They’re part of an integrated whole.” Pull one thread and the whole culture unwinds.


Amid the swirl of competing explanations, one thing is clear: The pueblo people didn’t just dry up and blow away like so much parched corn. They restructured their societies, tried to adapt and when all else failed they moved on.



(y)(y)(y)

:coffee::coffee::coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gimme: (8) :gimme: (8) :gimme: (8)







This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

Retired, Yes, but Never Too Old to Rock

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Published: April 9, 2008


Time revises every taste and closes every gap. To observe the Young@Heart Chorus, a fluctuating group of about two dozen singers whose average age is 80, perform “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees in Stephen Walker’s documentary “Young@Heart” is to be uplifted, if slightly unsettled.

Sung by people approaching the end of their lives, the song is no longer about strutting through the urban jungle with your elbows out; it is a blunt survival anthem. These singers, most of them well-rehearsed amateurs, refuse to go gently into that good night. For them music is oxygen.

When they perform punk classics like “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash or “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones, the notion of a generation gap begins to crumble. Apart from the rebellious attitude behind the songs’ creation, these are elementary meat-and-potatoes tunes: “Sing Along With Mitch” material but with a hip credential.

The Clash song is a lusty group cheer, which, interpreted by people of advanced age, could be taken as a stubborn assertion of choosing life over death. “I Wanna Be Sedated,” an extremely catchy song any way you look at it, comes across as an ironic refusal to follow a doctor’s orders and lie back in a medicated haze. Members who suffer from chronic multiple ailments are shown struggling out of sickbeds to attend rehearsals.

At moments the movie, made for British television, risks being a cloying, rose-colored study of happy old folks at play, and the cheer sounds forced. But the lives of the several members it examines at some depth are too real and complicated to resemble a commercial starring Wilford Brimley as a Norman Rockwell grandpa. The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor.

Since its beginnings as a collective arts project in 1982 at a center for the elderly in Northampton, Mass., the chorus has developed into a popular local ensemble with an international reputation. It has made 12 tours of Australia, Europe and Canada and serenaded Norwegian royalty. Accompanying the singers is a solid core of professional rock musicians who help ground their sometimes wavering voices.

Sandwiched into the movie are several surreal music videos made by the film’s producer, Sally George. The wittiest, created around “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads, depicts singers happily stranded on the side of an American highway.

The movie concentrates on the rigorous two-month preparations for a 2006 concert at the Academy Theater in Northampton. Guided by the chorus’s demanding longtime director, Bob Cilman, the members are learning new material, including “Yes We Can Can,” the Allen Toussaint hit for the Pointer Sisters, whose lyrics repeat “can” 71 times in intricate, staccato patterns; Sonic Youth’s enigmatic, equally demanding “Schizophrenia”; and the Coldplay ballad “Fix You.”

The fact that the chorus’s members are willing to tackle such daunting material attests to the spirit of adventure that is a crucial spur to their shared bonhomie. More than one member admits that his or her favorite music is classical, opera or show tunes. These rock songs are unfamiliar. Instead of comfortable walks around the block, rehearsals (there are three a week) are demanding hikes over hilly terrain. The challenge only makes it more exciting.

Late during the making of “Young@Heart” two members of the chorus, Bob Salvini and Joe Benoit, died within a week. Although neither death was a complete surprise, occurring so close together, they come as shock to a group dedicated to living in the present as fully and exuberantly as possible. The upbeat realism of everyone connected with “Young@Heart” might be summarized in six words: Life goes on until it doesn’t.

“Young@Heart” is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). It includes some strong language.

YOUNG@HEART

Opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Stephen Walker; director of photography, Eddie Marritz; edited by Chris King; produced by Sally George; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.


http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/movies/09youn.html



:clap:


Talk about inspiring! If these folks struggle to get to rehearsals, it makes my own aches and pains seem, well, trivial.




:clap: "For them music is oxygen."




:coffee::coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gimme:



Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.


http://www.thelastlecture.com/


http://www.cmu.edu/uls/journeys/randy-pausch/index.html




:gimme: Beyond inspiring. :gimme:





:coffee:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:coffee::coffee:




"My favorite bookstore (that I've never been to) is The Tattered Cover, in
Denver. It seems like the ideal little bookstore, although it's grown, by
opening several branches. Joyce Meskis, who owns it, is one of thise
people who make me proud to be an American."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattered_Cover




:coffee::coffee:






Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gimme::gimme:



Brijit.com


Quick, smart newsbites


Because you're smart...and busy, Brijit takes great long-form content from top sources and boils it down to 100 words. Or less. Get a summary, review, and rating that makes it easy to choose what to read, listen to and watch.


Get the scoop/no spamming of other sites/fast:

http://www.brijit.com/


:gimme::gimme:








Non scholæ, sed vitæ discimus.

We learn not for school but for life.


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:driving::driving::driving:



Just last week, Microsoft added predictive traffic modeling to the routing abilities of Live Search Maps, hoping to give users a more accurate picture of current conditions along highways and intersecting byways (see "And 880 is jammed after the crash of another driver trying to check traffic on his handheld"). Today, like that aggressive driver in the next lane who insists on playing leap-frog, Google Maps came out with its own new feature -- in addition to seeing current traffic conditions, you can use a menu and slider to show the predicted traffic along a route for a future day and time. Comprehensive data is available for more than 30 major U.S. metropolitan areas, with partial coverage of many other cities.


http://svextra.com/blogs/gmsv/2008/04/and_880_is_jammed_after_the_crash_of_another_drive r_trying_to_check_traffic_on_his_handheld.html




http://maps.google.com/maps




http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-maps-predicts-traffic-conditions.html



:driving::driving::driving:


Elsewhere in the Googleverse, the search sovereign is making it easier than ever to pull quotes out of context, a feature that should be very popular with political candidates. Now, when you search Google News for a person's name, a recent quote, if available, will show up at the top of the results, accompanied by a link to more quotes. Given the sensitivities of the politicians and other public figures who are likely to find their searches so annotated, I wonder if Google will get any blowback based on which quotes the algorithm gives prominence to.


http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/words-matter.html




http://searchengineland.com/080417-091427.php






Hmmm......searchable quotes.......... :clap: :clap:



:coffee:





Nunc aut numquam.

"Now or never."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:rahrah::rahrah:


(ap)(ap)


The Traveler IQ Challenge


Fun, free game


Place names flash on the screen, and you have to click as close to their correct location on a blank world map. Your speed and accuracy help you advance. A world of fun.


Find that city:

http://www.travelpod.com/traveler-iq


(ap)(ap)







Obscuris vera involvens.

"Obscurity envelops truth."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:doh::doh:



Foodbuzz


Find flavor, share taste


This new food & dining community is stocked with passionate foodies. Get recipes, restaurant reviews, blogs, photos & videos.


Surf...and turf:

http://www.foodbuzz.com/


:cheesy::cheesy:









Omnia mea mecum porto.

"All that's mine I carry with me.


Sweetlady & WTB (l)(&)(l)

[sweetlady]

:kissflow::kissflow:



The backlash is slowly building. The public disapproval is getting more vocal. Governments are starting to step in, imposing regulation and segregation. Soon the targeted demographic will be pushed out of public spaces, quarantined in restricted areas with others of their kind who insist on keeping up their disgusting habit. Freedoms taken for granted will be constrained. All this because of the outcry over second-hand conversation.


We need only to look across the pond for fresh evidence that the tide is turning against those who hold their private phone calls in the middle of a crowd, especially a crowd confined on public transportation. France's SNCF rail company now sets aside "zen zones" in select compartments aboard intercity TGV bullet trains, where passengers are asked to turn off their cell phones so everyone can "travel in a totally relaxing environment." Denmark, Germany and Finland offer similar "quiet compartment" sanctuaries on trains. And now the government of Graz, Austria's second-largest city, has ordered public transit commuters to keep their phones in "silent" mode. Texting and Web surfing are fine, but yakking is out. The ban is voluntary for now, so there won't be any dramatic footage of offenders being beaten and dragged away, but city officials are serious about the message. "I know I insulted the cell phone goddess a little," Graz Mayor Siegfried Nagl said. "But people need to know they don't have the right to be on the telephone permanently and constantly. It's just not healthy to never be able to get any peace and quiet."


Reaction followed the expected divide. "I don't really understand what all the fuss is about," said Graz commuter Erich Matthes. "Who or what is so important that you can't stay off your cell phone for half an hour? Must one really be reachable everywhere at all times?" But Josef Kalina, a senior official with Austria's governing Social Democratic Party, dismissed the Graz ban as "a completely anachronistic idea." "You really have to wonder what the politicians will think of next," he said. "How about a total ban on freedom of speech in the public transit system? Using the law to regulate communication between human beings should be rejected as absurd."


This growing confrontation has nowhere to go but up. Voluntary measures are doomed, for the reason cited by a Stockholm transit official in explaining the failure of cell-phone free zones on that city's subways, buses and trains: "It relied on people showing respect, but it didn't really work." But expect the efforts to continue and escalate, especially as this becomes an issue on plane flights. Public gabbers, you've been warned -- they call your wind pariah.



http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_8958970





:peacesign::peacesign:






Optimum medicamentum quies est.

"Peace is the best medicine."


Sweetlady & WTB (l)(&)(l)

[sweetlady]

:whistle::whistle::whistle:



Audacity - Sound Editor

Windows & Mac OS X

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It makes it easy to record live audio, convert tapes & records to digital recordings



http://audacity.sourceforge.net/


(8)(8)




:coffee:





Sol lucet omnibus.

"The sun shines for everyone."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:cube::cube:


LinkedIn


Your online business network


Think of it as MySpace for business professionals & job seekers. Build a free profile about your professional accomplishments and add connections you know. 'Cause it's not always what you know...but who you know.


Get Linked

http://www.linkedin.com/


:cube::cube:



:coffee:





Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

"The times are changed, and we are changed in them."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:seestars::seestars:



Q U O T E D


"Hans' conduct can be interpreted as being guilty. It can also be interpreted as innocence, and a product of his own platypus-ian personality, as we will see. He is odd in every way. Odd in the way he carries himself. Odd in the way he acts. Odd in the way he speaks. Why did he act the way he acts? He does not understand social cues. He shows almost no emotion is because he has no emotion. He is the duck-billed platypus of criminal defendants, the duck-billed platypus amongst some of his peers, the duck-billed platypus amongst normal people. Yet he must get the same consideration under the law. ... My client is an ugly and unlovable platypus who did not kill his wife."


-- Attorney William Du Bois, in closing arguments in the murder trial of programmer Hans Reiser, hammers home the geek defense while showing the jury a stuffed toy platypus. (FWIW, Mr. Reiser and Mr. Du Bois are not getting along well.)




Duck-billed Defense?

http://mockingwords.blogspot.com/2008/04/duck-billed-defense.html




http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_8955532?nclick_check=1





The Geek Defense?

http://svextra.com/blogs/gmsv/2008/03/hans_reiser_and_the_geek_defense.html




http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_8929129







:gimme: Bully for da judge:

"Mr. Reiser, I have about had it with you," Judge Larry Goodman told Hans Reiser outside the presence of jurors. "You are rude. You are arrogant. There's not enough words in the English language to describe the way you are."


:|:|






Ut sementem feceris, ita metes.

"You'll reap what you sow."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:gimme:



http://www.jonassamson.com/




:umbrella:





Vasa vana plurimum sonant.

"Empty pots make the most noise." ;)

Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:cboi:




http://www.printablepaper.net/




:coffee:




Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:stooges:



http://wrongcards.com/





:coffee:


Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:stooges:


http://www.tmobilepictures.com/photos/photo09/0e/9f/167531c2b2b3.jpg?_rh=8hpn91pkyc691z18uh6z28e0k




;)



:coffee:



Sol lucet omnibus.

"The sun shines for everyone."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:rahrah: :rahrah:



The users that Skype has undertaken to delight are those who do a lot of international calling. Returning to what it does best -- undercutting the major telecoms -- Skype added a new flat-rate, unlimited (up to a limit of 10,000 minutes a month) overseas calling package to its pay-as-you-go offering. For $9.95 a month (no long-term contract), users can make unlimited calls to land-line phones in 34 countries -- most of Europe, plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. Calls to domestic land lines and cell phones are included as well, as are calls to cell phones in Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Said Skype VP Stefan Oberg, "Our subscriptions give people an easy, hassle-free choice for how and when they want to catch up with their loved ones. For example if you live in London, for just 2.95 a month, you can call your grandmother in Poland, whenever you like, talk for up to six hours at a time, and not worry about how much it's costing you. Your grandmother doesn't need to understand the Internet. You just use your Skype subscription to make the call and she just picks up the phone." Of course if you're talking to your grandma for six hours a day, you probably have bigger issues than your phone bill, but still, an appealing deal.



http://about.skype.com/2008/04/skype_announces_unlimited_long.html





What a jaw-dropping deal:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_8999638?nclick_check=1





http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/04/21/skype-the-sexier-story-is-growth/




:soccer::soccer:





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning." - Michelango

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:clap:





The 140-character limit of Twitter messages doesn't lend itself to extended discourse, but if you're about to be dropped down the rabbit hole of a foreign and hostile justice system, you don't really need to say a lot. Berkeley graduate journalism student James Buck, for instance, managed to boil down the essentials to just eight characters -- ARRESTED -- and as a result is a free man today. Buck is in Egypt working on his grad project on the country's mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers. While photographing a demonstration last week with his interpreter and friend, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, the two were picked up by police. Buck fired off his tweet to a wide circle of friends in Egypt and the U.S., and almost instantly had a network of people contacting the university, the embassy and news organizations on his behalf. He was out of jail the next day and is now campaigning for the release of Maree, who was taken off to another prison.



http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_8942859



http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/free-mohammed-maree




The story and the accompanying "Twitter Saves Man From God Knows What" commentary has drawn a bit of eye-rolling in the blogosphere, with Peter Kafka noting that Buck's good fortune had more to do with being an American with access to a cell phone than with Twitter per se. And Frank Shaw sees what's going on clearly: "There is always a huge urge to make technology, especially new technology, the center of things. ... Twitter is a cool service. But it didn't get Buck out of jail. Four years ago, the story would've been that his blog got him out of jail. Ten years before that it would've been his cell phone that got him out of jail. Ten years before that it would've been a chain letter of protest sent to the government."


http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/twitter_being_an_american_helps_american_man_in_eg yptian_jail




http://glasshouse.waggeneredstrom.com/blogs/frankshaw/archive/2008/04/16/twitter-saves-the-world.aspx



But, to give the gadget its due, there's still a story in the way that come such an emergency, Twitter allows one to reach and mobilize a much larger group of people much faster than a chain letter, a blog, or even a series of cell phone calls. And as long as it's trendy, we can expect to see more reports of heartwarming responses to tweets like "I've fallen and I can't get up."






:clap::clap: Hmmm.....maybe texting devices (and learning to text quickly) might come in handy for those participating in "community" events including protests. Virtually instantaneous communication "just in case"!! :clap:




:coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning." - Michelango

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gaming:





http://blog.box.net/?p=136




:gaming:







:coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning." - Michelango

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:dunce:



Q U O T E D



"A new women's lifestyle site is looking for an editor in New York City with a broad range of interests, strong writing voice, at least five years of editing experience and an old box of Sassy mags in her mom's attic.



"Topics covered on the site include style (fashion, makeup and home décor), pop culture, food, health, female-focused politics, bargain tips, relationship advice, sex, how-to and humor. (We're looking for someone who doesn't need an extra blue book to tactfully explain why Renee Zellweger is endearing yet freaky, and Amy Sedaris is freaky yet brilliant.) "



-- AOL's classified ad offers an idea of what to expect out of the new site it has in the works, targeted to a younger female demographic than AOL Living or Yahoo's new Shine (see "How nice - a little something for Mrs. Ballmer after the takeover").



http://www.journalismjobs.com/Job_Listing.cfm?JobID=909382



http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=80916&Nid=41686&p=266855




http://living.aol.com/




http://shine.yahoo.com/




http://svextra.com/blogs/gmsv/2008/03/how_nice_--_a_little_something_for_mrs_ballmer_after_the_take over.html





:kissflow:





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:umbrella:




http://www.miniclip.com/games/bloxorz/en/





:coffee:




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:romeojuliet:



http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-10/120823413960940.xml&coll=1






(y) Clever. Digital romance. Hmmm........



:readloveletter:





:coffee:





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:cpix::cpix:




http://colorwar2008.com/submissions/youngnow





:coffee:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

8-|8-|




How to make a flash drive that looks like a torn USB cable:


http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/usbkey



8-|8-|





:coffee:




Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:geek::geek:




http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=head-games-video-controller-brain




:geek::geek:




:coffee:






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:lovenpeace:




http://www.shutdownday.org/





:coffee:





"All good things come to an end."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)



Literally and figuratively:


http://www.simplicity.com/index.cfm?page=jump/homePageRuffleSkirt/HPRSkirtIndex.html




And I thought the miniskirt that I bought in a vintage shop in Venice, CA back in 1991 went out of style............




http://www.simplicity.com/




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicity





"According to Occam's razor, all other things being equal, the simplest theory is the most likely to be true hence the importance of the concept of simplicity in epistemology."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor




:whistle:





Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.


Sweetlady and WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:clap::clap:



http://www.insideindianabusiness.com/newsitem.asp?ID=29153




and its own movie trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVzThRN4QJI




:coffee:




Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:clap:



http://www.tfot.info/news/1168/quickies-intelligent-sticky-notes.html



Way cool.





:coffee:





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;);)



It's never caught on in the movies, it's never caught on online, but something in the striving human spirit continues to drive efforts to attach smells to other forms of communication. And with every other technology going mobile, it was inevitable that inventors would set their sights on turning your cell phone into a smell phone.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-o-vision



http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,23654,00.html



http://digiscents.com/blog/



Last month, Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo conducted a trial of a "Mobile Fragrance Communication" kit -- a phone and an air-freshener-like device for fragrance delivery. The user downloads a scent or scent playlist, which is transmitted by infrared connection to the delivery device, where the scent is emitted from preloaded essence cartridges. But if we really want odor on the go, we're going to need something along the lines of the system recently patented by two German companies. The technology involves a chip currently under development that would hold about 100 prefabricated scents (in what form it's not clear). Parties with phones that include the chip would be able to text those scents to each other -- flowers for Mother's Day, or sea air from a beach vacation, for instance.



http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/08/ntt_fragrance_communication/



http://www.thelocal.de/11619/20080430/


All this still sounds like a neat concept in search of somebody who would actually use it, but if these things do make it to market, the hackers should have a field day. And I'm betting that field will smell like manure.


;)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:firefox:



Q U O T E D



"It's a Microsoft world. I'm just living in it."



-- A "CSI" detective explains to a suspect that all the new Microsoft gadgetry featured prominently in the series is not simple product placement, but a reflection of Redmond's role as the show's "technical adviser."



http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-04-29-microsoft-csi-product-placement_N.htm





:madcomp: Microsoft.....Grrrrrr............. :madcomp:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:kissflow:



http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/your-shot/jigsaw-puzzles



:gimme:







Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog

[sweetlady]

;)




http://www.madewithmolecules.com/pins.html





:coffee:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:coffee:




http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/26/nosplit/boanotherlist126.xml&DCMP=ILC-traffdrv07053100






:sleepy:




(um) May your smile be your umbrella. (um)


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:group-hug:



The fans of microblogging service Twitter, led by head cheerleader Robert Scoble, are all aflutter today with the sense that in speedily passing along word of this morning's earthquake in China, they have participated in a news reporting revolution. Seems Scoble started getting and forwarding tweets from China even as the ground was still shaking, an entire minute or two before the USGS posted preliminary data on location and strength, and more minutes before the bulletins started moving on the news wires. Wrote Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC, "Let's see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences."


http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/12/quake-in-china/



http://searchengineland.com/080512-130254.php



http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/05/twitter_and_the_china_earthqua.html



An important tipping point in news dissemination during a disaster? In timeliness, maybe by increments over phones, blogs, text messages, e-mail, forum posts and the news wires (assuming that you're an active Twitter user and happen to follow the right people). In reliability, certainly not. By any of the aforementioned means, initial information is going to be scattered, anecdotal and often flat-out wrong. And in usefulness, well, what exactly do you gain with those extra few minutes of awareness that a tragedy is unfolding? A heads up to start keeping an eye on more authoritative sources and some more time to yak about how terrible it all is. It always takes about the same amount of time for a full picture to emerge from these situations, and knowing about it minutes earlier doesn't change that.


Not that all the tweeting is without value. For one, it's many-to-many communication, so the information (or misinformation) on that channel may hit a wider audience than a post or e-mail and allow for quick pooling of resources. And if your interest in disasters lies primarily in first-person accounts (or if you're a journalist gathering same for inclusion in a more complete report), the Twitter talk fills the bill (if you can sort through the babble). Charitably, you can think of it as additional copy for history's first draft. But let's not get so excited that we confuse news fodder with news.


http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/05/12/twitter-and-the-chinese-earthquake/



http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/05/12/twitter-the-first-draft-of-history/




:gossip:




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:cool4:



http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=12




https://www.artocracy.org/



Beautiful! http://www.lynxeffect.com.au/




http://www.wired.com/




http://www.howstuffworks.com/




http://www.slate.com/





BEST HOME/WELCOME PAGE


http://www.lafilm.com/flash/index.html



http://www.nationalgeographic.com/



Fun!! http://theadbash.com/



http://www.epicurious.com/





BEST NAVIGATION/STRUCTURE


http://www.ted.com/



http://www.apple.com/



http://www.blenderbox.com/



http://www.schematic.com/#/Home/



http://www.ddawards.com/2008/webby/sony/bravia/navigation/





BEST USE OF ANIMATION OR MOTION GRAPHICS


http://www.coca-cola.com/HF/index.jsp



http://www.zunejourney.net



http://www.awardentryaudi.com/webbys/automotive/a5/index.html



http://simcityds.ea.com/



http://www.wddg.net/Awards/MTVPuberty_website.htm





BEST USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY:


http://ngm.com/yourshot



http://www.dangerousground.org



http://www.nickcobbing.co.uk


http://www.pentaxphotogallery.com


http://www.calendarioperoni.com/





BEST USE OF VIDEO OR MOVING IMAGE:


http://www.apple.com



http://www.halo3.com/believe



http://www.hbovoyeur.com



http://www.nikeacg.com



http://demo.fb.se/e/ikea/calmbedrooms/





Best BLOG - BUSINESS


http://ftalphaville.ft.com/



http://daveibsen.typepad.com



http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/





Futurelab Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog:


http://blog.futurelab.net



http://www.mainstreet.com




Faves from other categories:


http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/


http://www.geogreeting.com/main.html


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news



http://www.guardian.co.uk



http://www.independent.co.uk/



http://thewhalehunt.org/



http://www.ted.com/



http://www.radicalmedia.com/




http://www.nature.com/index.html



http://www.sundancechannel.com/iconoclasts





Internet Radio:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/



http://accutunes.accuradio.com/



http://radio3.cbc.ca/



http://kexp.org/home.asp



http://www.virginradiointernational.com/




:cool4:




:coffee:



Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:happy0188:



Neurotics in the Northeast, agreeable people in the South and Midwest..........


http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/04/where_do_all_the_neurotics_live/



http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/05_04_08_personality_maps/




Where do all the neurotics live?



On the East Coast, of course. A psychological tour of the United States, in five maps.

By Richard Florida

May 4, 2008


WE ARE ALL familiar with the rough geography of the United States - the slash of the Rocky Mountains between two great coastlines, the bulge of Maine, the Florida peninsula, the Great Lakes, set in the heartland.


But what about the country's psychogeography? You know, the great river of extroversion that flows roughly southeast from greater Chicago to southern Florida? Or the vast lakes of agreeableness and conscientiousness that pool together in the Sun Belt, especially around Atlanta? Or the jagged peaks of neuroticism in Boston and New York?


It's time to learn.


Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.


What's more, it turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster. And how they cluster tells us much: What city someone might want to move to, the broader character of regions, and even the creative and economic futures of broad swaths of the nation.


Drawing on a database of hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys compiled by psychologists Jason Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter, my team and I were able to map the distribution of personality types across the United States. The result is a fascinating new way of looking at the country's terrain.


Interestingly, America's psychogeography lines up reasonably well with its economic geography. Greater Chicago is a center for extroverts and also a leading center for sales professionals. The Midwest, long a center for the manufacturing industry, has a prevalence of conscientious types who work well in a structured, rule-driven environment. The South, and particularly the I-75 corridor, where so much Japanese and German car manufacturing is located, is dominated by agreeable and conscientious types who are both dutiful and work well in teams.


The Northeast corridor, including Greater Boston, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin, are home to concentrations of open-to-experience types who are drawn to creative endeavor, innovation, and entrepreneurial start-up companies. While it is hard to identify which came first - was it an initial concentration of personality types that drew industry, or the industry which attracted the personalities? - the overlay is clear.


Understanding regional personality types can add to our understanding of what makes regional development tick. Economists argue that technology (in the form of great universities and high-tech company clusters) and human capital (talented people) drive economic growth. But psychologists would add that in addition to skills, talent, motivation, and resources, there are personality traits and psychological capital that predispose people toward certain talents and proclivities. For example, highly conscientious people have a disposition to be detail oriented, plan ahead, and stay organized. Openness to experience shapes people's ability to be creative, acquire new skills quickly, undertake new discoveries and innovations, and start new companies.


So regions like Silicon Valley or the high-tech Route 128 corridor around Boston succeed not just because they have great universities and highly educated people (some of the greatest high-tech entrepreneurs of our time are college dropouts), but also because they are magnets for highly ambitious, highly curious, and highly open personalities.


While opposites sometimes really do attract, and it is possible to make unusual matches work, our research indicates that people are typically happier in places with higher concentrations of personality types like their own.


But what accounts for such psychogeographical clustering? One potential explanation is that people migrate to places where their psychological needs are easily met: Open people choose to live in places with hustle and bustle to satisfy that craving for new experiences, while conscientious people settle in places where the atmosphere is ordered to meet their need for predictability.


Or perhaps, personality is influenced by our surroundings. More emotionally stable people who live in places where neurotic types form the majority may become irritable and stressed because the people around them are getting to them.


Our research suggests another possibility as well: the link between personality and the willingness to move. Conscientious and agreeable types in particular are less likely to move. Once they find a place, they tend to spread out gradually over time. Extroverts, on the other hand, are much more likely to move over greater distances. Open-to-experience types are drawn to thrills and risk, and moving, after all, is one of life's biggest new experiences.


This fuels a process of selective migration whereby agreeable and conscientious regions are drained of the most driven, most creative, and most mobile - only reinforcing their psychogeographic profiles, while magnifying the innovative edge in places where open-to-experience types concentrate.


Our evolving psychogeography means that our nation, its people, and its regions continue to sort themselves not just by education and skill, but by personality as well.


Richard Florida is the author of "Who's Your City?" and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.


http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/04/where_do_all_the_neurotics_live/




:pile-of-smileys:






"All good things come to an end."


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:piano: :guitarist:



Q U O T E D



"It's the history of a creative process, the development of my music and actually of my life. It's interactive and online, and it will grow."



-- Neil Young announces he's taking his comprehensive archive of music, videos and other material dating back to 1963 out of the black and into the Blu-ray.


http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_9179048?nclick_check=1


:piano: :guitarist:






"All good things come to an end."


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:earth: :earth:



http://benfry.com/allstreets/



http://benfry.com/



:earth: :earth:





Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

"The times are changed, and we are changed in them."


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:eye-bat:



http://images.mirror.co.uk/upl/m3/may2008/1/8/E695966F-00B3-E582-9922021F6E015972.jpg




Steal Carrie Bradshaw's style



Our favourite style icon's back and we have the insider secrets of her new wardrobe. Here's how you can get Sarah Jessica Parker's look for less...

14/5/08


We always knew that Sarah Jessica Parker's outfit would not disappoint us.

She arrived at the world premiere of the new Sex And The City movie in London in a showstopping chiffon frock by Alexander McQueen and extravagant fascinator by London hatmaker Philip Treacy.

Naturally, we're excited about catching up on her love life with Mr Big when the film comes out on May 28 - but it's her wardrobe that we've missed the most.

And thanks to SATC stylist Patricia Field being back on board for the film, the outfits are mind blowing.



This time round, Carrie has given up her column and is working at Vogue, so you can imagine her wardrobe is even hotter than ever.

With a staggering 81 costume changes in the film, prepare to be dazzled by the daring, drop-dead gorgeous and the just plain bonkers!

Here are just a few of the trends from the film to look out for...



Feathers

These creep on to everything in the movie from Carrie's Salvatore Ferragamo clutch bag to a 'Midnight Moth' black corset by Lee Klabin that she wears on a night out. This is one trend that you can start wearing already. Find some Pinko feather and jewel shoes, £60, at www.asos.com and a clutch, £35, from Linea at House of Fraser.



Florals

Carrie wears an amazing selection of big, bold floral print dresses and coats throughout the movie. Already a huge trend this summer, this is one that is easy to copy from the high street.

You'll find floral dresses similar to ones worn by Carrie at:

www.eucalyptusclothing.co.uk



Shoes and tights (or over-the-knee socks!)

You won't be surprised to hear that Carrie's Manolo mania hasn't died down. But this time, she wears them with an array of over-the-knee socks and patterned tights. Don't attempt the knee socks if you're over 30 but the tights are a godsend for anyone with pasty legs. Try www.mytights.com




Logo T-shirts

Carrie wears a long blue T-shirt with "Stay Alive in 85" emblazoned on it in the film. She wears it over a mini-skirt with over-the-knee socks, high heels (of course) and a Chanel handbag. But this is one trend we could all try - but maybe with jeans!



Killer corsages

They made many an on-screen appearance in the series but they get a much bigger show in the film, literally! Carrie wears a killer vintage corsage dress in one scene that takes over the whole set. We suggest you down scale, for safety reasons! We love this corsage dresses, about £38, from Topshop.



Identity necklaces

Sales of identity necklaces went interstellar after Carrie first appeared on our screens wearing her name necklace. And hardened (some might say obsessed) fans will recall how heartbroken Carrie was when she lost hers during a fall in the Dior shop in Paris. But now it's back. So dust yours off and give it a another whirl. If you don't have one, visit www.punkypins.co.uk and snap one up for £20.



Hats off to SJP!

Mirror writer Kate Jackson took inspiration from Sarah Jessica's headgear and created her own hat from the end of a small galia melon and a cork.


Attach a lettuce and some tarragon and chives for the foliage to an elasticated headband. Top with feathers and butterflies cut out from a greeting card and, voila, a truly fabulous - and organic - hat.


Just hope it doesn't wilt in the heat!




http://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/yourlife/fashion/2008/05/14/steal-carrie-bradshaw-s-style-89520-20417381/





:horse-poop:





(l)(l)"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages that you've been." - Madeline L'Engle

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:cube:




http://valleywag.com/387593/techs-top-10-workspaces




My faves:

http://valleywag.com/389657/



http://valleywag.com/389656/




:cube:






(l)(l)"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages that you've been." - Madeline L'Engle



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(ap)(ap)





http://www.xconomy.com/2008/05/08/from-the-runway-to-the-road-terrafugia-redefines-the-flying-car-make-that-drivable-airplane/




(ap)(ap)





:coffee:




(l)(l) "The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages that you've been." - Madeline L'Engle



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:idea:





"Find your cell phone, escape boring meetings, end sucky dates early."



http://www.phonemyphone.com/




:clap:






(l)(l) "The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages that you've been." - Madeline L'Engle


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:beatnik2:




(l)(l) LOVE these!



1. http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/search



2. http://www.literature-map.com/



3. www.goodreads.com



4. www.novelaction.com




:coffee-drink:






Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:dunno2:




http://www.historyworld.net/





:coffee:





Optimum medicamentum quies est.

"Peace is the best medicine."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:espresso:



The means by which one stakes out a personal little corner of the Web has evolved over the past 15 years. First there were simple home pages, where you'd post pictures of your cat. Then came blogs, where your cat could go on at length about her day and respond to comments. There were simplified site-building communities like GeoCities, where your cat could meet a lot of adolescent newbies, and most recently, social sites like Facebook and MySpace, where your cat could post her favorite music and find out what cat food her friends are buying.



But no market is complete until Google jumps in, and that day has arrived. Google Sites, previously restricted to the business users of Google Apps, is now open to all, offering even raw rookies the ability to quickly and easily throw together something more than a simple home or profile -- a feature-filled, wiki-like site built for collaboration among family members, interest groups, project teams or whatever. Without knowing a lick of code, users can equip pages with dashboards, blogs, announcements, calendars, contact lists, documents and photo galleries, with the owner setting access and editing priviledges as desired. You can create as many sites as you want, and each comes with 100 MB of storage. And, as usual with Google, the price is right in the market's sweet spot -- free. Sign up quickly -- your cat's name may not be available for long.



https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.co m%2Fsite%2Fsites%2F&continue1=http%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fs ites%2F&continue2=http%3A%2F%2Fsites.google.com%2Fsite%2Fs ites%2F&service=jotspot&passive=true&ul=1



http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-sites-now-open-to-everyone.html




http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-sites-available-without-google.html




:cowboi:





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:lovenpeace:




Turns out there may be a very down-to-earth reason why people might find comfort in spiritual rituals where the air is ripe with burning frankincense. Biologists have found that a constituent of frankincense (which is resin from the Boswellia plant) is psychoactive. "In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Bosweilla had not been investigated for psychoactivity," said Raphael Mechoulam, one of the research study's co-authors. "We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior. Apparently, most present day worshipers assume that incense burning has only a symbolic meaning."



http://www.thinkgene.com/incense-is-psychoactive-scientists-identify-the-biology-behind-the-ceremony/




:lovenpeace:






"In a godda davida, baby."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gang-for-dinner:




YouTomb from MIT, which keeps track of videos removed from YouTube for alleged copyright violations.




http://youtomb.mit.edu/




:listening-to-music:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


SL & WTB :hotdog:

[sweetlady]

:scuba:



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/science/20walrus.html?_r=1&oref=slogin




:coffee:




Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

"The times are changed, and we are changed in them."


Sweetlady :firefox:

[sweetlady]

:dead-trout:




http://www.americanscientist.org/template/InterviewTypeDetail/assetid/56975




http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-know-better-than-you





:beta1:






Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL :book:

[sweetlady]

:basketball-smiley:



http://logologos.blogspot.com/





:egypt:






"Walk like an Egyptian."


SL :egypt:

[sweetlady]

:earth:



http://m.mikebrittain.com/tr



:earth:





Ut sementem feceris, ita metes.

"You'll reap what you sow."


Sweetlady :pink-lips:

[sweetlady]

:book:



http://www.bookspot.com/



:book:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)




http://www.mentalfloss.com/





:coffee:





Quidquid discis, tibi discis.

Whatever you learn, you learn it for yourself.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:horse: :horse: :horse:




A Horse named Molly



Meet Molly. She's a gray speckled pony who was abandoned by her owners in
the wake of Katrina. She spent weeks on her own before finally being
rescued and taken to a farm where abandoned animals were stockpiled. While
there, she was attacked by a pit bull terrier, and almost died. Her gnawed
right front leg became infected and her vet went to LSU for help. But LSU
was overwhelmed, and this pony was a welfare case. You know how that goes.


But after surgeon Rustin Moore met Molly, he changed his mind. He saw how
the pony was careful to lie down on different sides so she didn't seem to
get sores, and how she allowed people to handle her. She protected her
injured leg. She constantly shifted her weight, and didn't overload her
good leg. She was a smart pony with a serious survival ethic.


Moore agreed to remove her leg below the knee and a temporary artificial
limb was built. Molly walked out of the clinic and her story really begins
there.


"This was the right horse and the right owner," Moore insists. Molly
happened to be a one-in-a-million patient. She's tough as nails, but
sweet, and she was willing to cope with pain. She made it obvious she
understood (that) she was in trouble. The other important factor,
according to Moore , is having a truly committed and compliant owner who
is dedicated to providing the daily care required over the lifetime of the
horse.


Molly's story turns into a parable for life in post-Katrina Louisiana. The
little pony gained weight, her mane felt a comb. A human prosthesis
designer built her a leg. The prosthetic has given Molly a whole new life,
Allison Barca DVM, Molly's regular vet, reports.


And she asks for it! She will put her little limb out, and come to you and
let you know that she wants you to put it on. Sometimes she wants you to
take it off too" And sometimes, Molly gets away from Barca. "It can be
pretty bad when you can't catch a three-legged horse", she laughs.


Most important of all, Molly has a job now. Kay, the rescue farm owner,
started taking Molly to shelters, hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation
centers. Anywhere she thought that people needed hope. Wherever Molly
went, she showed people her pluck. She inspired people. And she had a good
time doing it.


"It's obvious to me that Molly had a bigger role to play in life", Moore
said, "She survived the hurricane, she survived a horrible injury, and now
she is giving hope to others."


"She's not back to normal," Barca concluded, "but she's going to be
better. To me, she could be a symbol for New Orleans itself."


This is Molly's most recent prosthesis. The bottom photo shows the ground
surface that she stands on, which has a smiley face embossed in it.
Wherever Molly goes, she leaves a smiley hoof print behind!




:horse: :horse: :horse:







:coffee:





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:laughing-tv:




http://www.hulu.com/




:laughing-tv:






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:boat:





http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/17-google-maps-mashups-to-waste-away-your-day/




:boat:








:coffee:


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:fishing::fishing:




http://www.monocle.com/


http://www.monocle.com/webprogrammes/25x25/



http://www.vagabondish.com/




:fishing::fishing:






:flowers:


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:kissflow:





http://www.thisonenext.com/search




:flowers:






Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.



SL &WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:hotdog::hotdog:





http://www.cracked.com/article_16340_20-business-cards-they-will-never-ever-forget.html




;);)





:book:

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:likelinux::likelinux:




http://techsupportalert.com/dr/





:earth:






:driving:

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:lightsaber-fight:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eZBevXohCI




:lightsaber-fight:








:cold-smiley: Stay cool in this heat wave! :cold-smiley:

SL& WTB :walkdog:

[HYSterical HERnia]

https://www.mywonderfullife.com/ (https://www.mywonderfullife.com/)[/URL]

Bringing funerals to the do-it-yourself industry

by [URL="http://www.walletpop.com/bloggers/geoff-williams/"]Geoff Williams (https://www.mywonderfullife.com/) Jun 10th 2008 @ 10:00AM
Filed under: Extracurriculars (http://www.walletpop.com/category/extracurriculars/)

At first glance, when I saw the headline for this Orlando Sentinel story (http://www.orlandosentinel.com/technology/orl-ymboom0808jun08,0,6282302.story), I thought, "Oh, brother," but it actually makes a lot of sense, and once you know something about this business, you can't argue for the reasons behind creating it.

While I'm not sure this site is exactly going to put the fun back in funeral, it probably will make life, or death, a little easier for all concerned in the days up to and after the person's time has expired. And I don't know about anyone else, but if I knew my time was short, I'd probably use a site like this. If I was going to soon rest in peace, I'd want a little peace of mind.

[sweetlady]

:hottub:




by Liz Wolgemuth

Thursday, June 5, 2008

U.S.News & World Report


Just because you hit your 60s, it doesn't mean your brain starts to power down. Just the opposite. Your noodle needs more stimulation than ever, and, finally, you have the time to supply the required intellectual input. And picking a place to retire can be key to that process. For retirees who have no desire to stop learning*and that's, like, pretty much everyone*there are plenty of American communities that boast thriving intellectual centers where cultural activities keep residents (and their brains) as busy and interested as they want to be.


What makes the difference? A city with a large local university might offer a colorful slate of arts or educational events nearly every evening. Some suburbs have found a way to create unique learning opportunities for residents, who still have an easy route into the neighboring metropolis.


More from USNews.com:

• Quiz: Test Your Smarts About the Brainiest Places

• Gallery: The 10 Brainiest Places to Retire

• Best Places to Retire


U.S. News consulted our list of more than 1,000 Best Places to Retire and came up with 10 retirement destinations that attract highly educated folks. (And you can use Best Places to Retire to do more than seek out intellectual excitement: A search tool allows you to build your own list of retirement spots based on your personal preferences, including region, climate, healthcare, recreational and cultural activities, and other factors.)


One brainy spot that won't surprise: Berkeley, Calif., where residents might head for a screening of a film on urban organic farming in Cuba at the local Unitarian Universalist congregation, attend a University of California-Berkeley professor's speech on counterinsurgency in Iraq, or get a tour of the UC Botanical Garden. While traditional bingo is on tap at the South Berkeley Senior Center, residents can also learn a less common skill like self-acupressure or take a class on the millinery arts, says director Larry Taylor.


Across the map in Chapel Hill, N.C., residents might spend their evenings paddling out in kayaks to watch the stars with an astronomy educator from the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.


Boulder, Colo., may be best known for its environmental-protection efforts and green savvy, but this city offers its residents a wealth of cultural activities. Albert Boggess, former project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope, and his wife, Nancy, also a former research scientist for NASA, retired to Boulder in 1994, drawn by both the climate and an academic community that included many of their colleagues. "It's a university town, which is important to us, and there are all sorts of activities which come with that automatically," Albert Boggess says. "There's lots of good music here, both classical music and popular music. And that appeals to us."



Upper St. Clair, Pa., is near Pittsburgh and has 29 area colleges, including Carnegie Mellon University, while the quintessential college town of Ann Arbor, Mich., offers an array of intellectual and cultural programs through the University of Michigan's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.


West Lafayette, Ind., is home to Purdue University, which hosts lectures and brings in ballets and plays*"a variety of different programs that you wouldn't necessarily normally get in this size community," says Joann Wade, president of the Lafayette-West Lafayette Convention and Visitors Bureau. The city's nearly 29,000 permanent residents can also get "bigger-city opportunities," Wade says, by driving an hour to Indianapolis or two hours to Chicago.


Hoboken, N.J., and Brookline, Mass., also have the big-city experience close at hand. Hoboken is just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, while many Brookline residents commute the short distance to work in Boston's medical centers and universities.


Some suburbs have a main attraction all their own. Reston, Va., was developed as a planned community or "new town" in the 1960s, and it's only a half-hour drive to Washington, D.C., and its panoply of world-class museums. Out west, Lake Oswego, Ore., hugs the city of Portland but also offers culture and beauty of its own, making the most of its 405-acre lake.


The brainiest places to retire:

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Berkeley, Calif.

Boulder, Colo.

Brookline, Mass.

Chapel Hill, N.C.

Hoboken, N.J.

Lake Oswego, Ore.

Reston, Va.

Upper St. Clair, Pa.

West Lafayette, Ind.




http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/105195/The-10-Brainiest-Places-to-Retire










I am so tired.

Wish I could have a massage - I hurt all over!



Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)(f)(f)




Tulips and Chocolate Rhine Riverboat Cruise aboard Avalon Tapestry

Amsterdam to Basel

April 12-19, 2009

This luxurious riverboat cruise glides from the Dutch metropolis past the city's stately homes to Gothic Cologne and onto Strasbourg and medieval towns in the Black Forest. The two-year-old ship is both gracious and spacious. All staterooms are outside and those on Royal Sapphire Decks have floor to ceiling sliding glass doors. Internet access is available and there's a health center with a hot tub.


www.olivia.com







THIS is my idea of a peaceful respite!!!





:horse: :horse: :horse: :horse:






(k)(k)


SL and WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:cpix::cpix:




Cyd Charisse, the leggy beauty whose balletic grace made her a memorable partner for Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in classic MGM musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Band Wagon” and “Brigadoon,” died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was believed to be 86.


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/18/arts/500-charisse-01.jpg




Remembering Cyd Charisse Slide Show:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/18/arts/dance/0618-CHARISSE_index.html



Singing in the Rain:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/17/arts/18charisse3_600.jpg




Beautiful: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/17/arts/18chariese-600a.jpg




Here in "The Band Wagon" with Astaire. She said her husband, the singer Tony Martin, could always tell with whom she was dancing. "If I was black and blue," she said, "it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn't have a scratch."

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/17/arts/18dance-600a.jpg



I would LOVE to look this good at this age:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/18/arts/dance/0618-CHARISSE_9.html




Her death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was apparently caused by a heart attack, said her agent, Scott Stander.


Ms. Charisse came of age in a sparkling era of Hollywood musicals, and though she had some dramatic film roles, it was in musicals that she achieved her lasting renown. That fame later helped power a successful song-and-dance partnership with her husband, Tony Martin, in nightclubs and on television.


In his 1959 memoir, “Steps in Time,” Astaire called Ms. Charisse “beautiful dynamite.” She was a striking presence on film: slender and graceful with jet black hair. She stood 5 feet 6, but in high heels and full-length stockings * a familiar costume for her * she seemed even taller.


She made her film debut in 1943 under the name Lily Norwood in “Something to Shout About,” with Don Ameche and Janet Blair, and then spent almost a decade performing in small roles and sometimes anonymously before she got her big break. That came with “Singin’ in the Rain,” released in 1952.


Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the film established her as one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and seductive talents.


Set during the dawn of talking pictures, “Singin’ in the Rain” starred Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen. Ms. Charisse appeared in only one of the movie’s many indelible dance sequences, but one was enough. During the “Broadway Melody Ballet,” opposite Kelly, she was both sultry vamp and diaphanous dream girl.


A year later, “The Band Wagon” brought Ms. Charisse her first leading role. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, with a book by Comden and Green and songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, the film starred Astaire, Ms. Charisse, Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray.


Astaire played a fading Hollywood song-and-dance man hoping to make a comeback on Broadway and who finds himself cast in a show opposite a snooty ballerina (Ms. Charisse). The couple do not see eye-to-eye until they take a nighttime carriage ride through a moonlit Central Park and wind up embracing languorously to the strains of ”Dancing in the Dark.” One of the most famous sequences from the film, if not in the history of dance on film, is “The Girl Hunt Ballet,” in which Ms. Charisse plays the vamp to Astaire’s private-eye stage character.


In “Brigadoon” (1954), also directed by Minnelli and adapted from the 1947 Broadway show by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, Kelly and Van Johnson played American tourists who stumble on a mysterious Scottish village that materializes only once every 100 years. Kelly falls hard for a beautiful villager, Fiona (Ms. Charisse). They danced to “The Heather on the Hill.”


Cyd Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Tex. Though some sources say she was born on March 8, 1921, her agent said the year was 1922. She began taking dance lessons as a little girl. Her many name changes began, so the story goes, when her brother had trouble pronouncing “sister” and settled for “Sid.”


While still a teenager, she was sent to California for professional dance training and quickly became a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a touring troupe, adopting the name Felia Sidorova. She was on a European tour when she met Nico Charisse, a handsome young dancer and dance instructor. They married in Paris when she was 18. In 1942, they had a son, Nicky.


By the early 1940s, Ms. Charisse had been spotted by studio scouts and her first film roles * as Lily Norwood * followed. (She also appeared anonymously in 1943 as a ballerina in “Mission to Moscow.”) In 1946, MGM, by then the king of Hollywood musicals, signed her to a contract and gave her minor roles in several films, including “The Harvey Girls,” “Till the Clouds Roll By” and “Ziegfeld Follies,” in which she danced a brief opening sequence with Astaire. When she was chosen to appear in “Ziegfeld Follies,” the producer Arthur Freed preferred the name Charisse to Norwood and changed the spelling of Sid to Cyd.


The next year, Ms. Charisse played a ballerina once again in “The Unfinished Dance,” which featured the child star Margaret O’Brien as a dance student.


Ms. Charisse was reunited with Kelly in the 1955 Comden and Green musical “It’s Always Fair Weather,” and was teamed with Fred Astaire in “Silk Stockings” (1957). In the latter, an update of the Greta Garbo vehicle “Ninotchka,” she played an icy Soviet functionary who is sent to Paris where she meets and is romanced by a Hollywood producer (Astaire). Needless to say, she melts for Fred as they sing and dance to Cole Porter songs like “All of You” and “Fated to Be Mated.” It was the twilight of the Hollywood musical.


Ms. Charisse’s marriage to Nico Charisse ended in divorce in 1947. She married Mr. Martin in 1948. He survives her, along with their son, Tony Jr., and her son, Nicky, by her first marriage.


In November 2006, Ms. Charisse was one of the recipients of the National Medal of Arts presented by President Bush in a White House ceremony.


Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview in The New York Times, Ms. Charisse said that her husband, Mr. Martin, always knew whom she had been dancing with. “If I was black and blue,” she said, “it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”


In a 1992 interview with The Times, she remembered dancing with Astaire to the demanding choreography, by Eugene Loring and Hermes Pan, in “Silk Stockings” and said admiringly, “Fred moved like glass.”


As it turned out, “Silk Stockings” was her last major musical. She appeared in a few more movies, chiefly in dramatic roles in films like “Party Girl” (1958) and “Two Weeks in Another Town” (1962). She and Mr. Martin took their nightclub act to Las Vegas and other cities. Her last film was an Italian drama, “Private Screenings” (1989).


Ms. Charisse made her belated Broadway debut in 1992 in “Grand Hotel,” when she replaced Liliane Montevecchi in the leading role of a famous but aging ballerina in 1920s Berlin. “I think that in all my dancing I play a role,” she told The Times that year. “To me, that’s what dancing is about. It’s not just steps.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:


Correction: June 20, 2008

An obituary on Wednesday about the dancer and actress Cyd Charisse misidentified the choreographer for the 1957 film





:coffee::coffee:





"Dance like there is no tomorrow!" (l)


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gorgeous:




At Length Long dresses, on hiatus last year, are back in full swing. Called day gowns or patio dresses, the latest iterations hover around 60 inches long from shoulder to hem and are not only for cabana parties. They can be worn deskside or poolside, from day to night * just mind the closing doors.



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/22/fashion/0622-PULSE_2.html






:fishing:



NEARLY 500,000 women fly-fish, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.


While that’s only 16 percent of those practicing long, graceful casts on this country’s rivers, lakes and ocean bays, fly-fishing companies now offer women an alternative to wading in bulky, ill-fitting men’s vests.


“We’ve seen a growth in women buying women-specific products in traditionally male-dominated industries,” said Julia Clark Day, of the Leisure Trends Group, a company in Boulder, Colo., that tracks data on sales of recreational retail products like these fly-fishing vests.


This summer’s haul of women’s fly-fishing vests includes lighter, smaller and more fitted forms with multiple loops and pockets for everything from fly boxes to lip gloss.


Going beyond the traditional khaki, colors range from teal to raspberry.


“I liked the approach to women’s style,” said Anne Johansen, 25, who fly-fishes at least two to three times a week.


On a recent spring weekend, she tested five of the vests on a pond near her home in Bozeman, Mont.



http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/04/fashion/0605-PHYS_index.html







:coffee:





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:sunhappy:




http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/06/18/garden/19garden-600.jpg



:sunhappy:




June 19, 2008

In the Garden


The Country Dream

By ANNE RAVER

COPAKE FALLS, N.Y.


MY friend Suzanne and I headed out of the city last week for a leisurely wallow in an upstate garden: Margaret Roach’s personal paradise in the hills of Columbia County.


It was a reunion of sorts. The three of us had worked together at Newsday, the Long Island daily, more than 20 years ago, after Margaret left her job as a copy editor for The New York Times. But Suzanne and I had lost touch with Margaret when she began her meteoric rise from Martha Stewart’s first garden editor, in 1994, to editorial director of Martha Stewart Omnimedia, overseeing books, magazines and Web projects.


Then, early this year, unbeknownst to us, she escaped to the country. I was amazed to come across Margaret’s quirky, long-lost voice this spring on awaytogarden.com her new blog.

Her April 19 entry, titled “kissing a lot of frogs (and loving it),” read: “Four months ago I was wearing Max Mara and living in fluorescent light most of the day. Today at 1 p.m. I was mucking out water gardens in the sun, and refitting plumbing gaskets. The outfit: my pajamas, covered by a pair of work pants I got for 25 cents at a tag sale 19 years ago, and vinyl surgical gloves. Perfect for pulling slime (a k a string algae) and putrid rotted leaves out of the pools, while my boyfriends looked on disinterestedly. All nine of them (all just like this hunk I’m reaching out to grab). Handsome, huh? Heaven, huh??”


I stared at the bullfrog gazing back at me from Margaret’s site. Handsome, no. Heaven, yes: to have left the corporate world for slimy frogs in April; lilacs in May (Wedgewood Blue, Sensation, Agincourt Beauty and six other favorites posted on May 12); and pruning in June (“Prune after, say, July 4th in the north and you risk reducing next year’s bloom,” she wrote on April 2).


This woman was living my dream * and the dream of so many other 50-somethings like us, who long to rekindle the creative fire that is snuffed out in the corporate world. And her garden blog was the best I’d ever seen. Her observations were so palpable I wanted to see the real thing.


So Suzanne and I got in my car one morning at rush hour and drove toward the broad green hills and dairy farms of Columbia County. Two hours later we pulled up to a little 1880s farmhouse perched on a steep slope by the edge of the road.


“A real bomb shelter,” Margaret said, recalling the house when she saw it 20 years ago. Trees were growing through the barn roof, an old white pine with a double trunk towered over the house and the remnants of an apple orchard were visible above a tangle of brambles.


The two-acre property is surrounded by 5,000 acres of parkland, which meant no neighbors to speak of, and the kind of solitude she was seeking. She had taken care of her mother, who had Alzheimer’s, for six years just before she bought the house, and “it really kind of fried me," she said later that day, as we sat on her shady porch and a bullfrog croaked in the pond.


Writers and gardeners are often solitary souls. Close friends, frogs, birds and a black cat named Jack have kept Margaret company here. There was a husband once, long ago, and she had some happy years with a pilot from Great Barrington, Mass., with whom she now runs a charitable foundation. (It was his friendship with a young man in Katmandu that inspired Open Your Hands, which provides aid to a remote Nepalese village; a picture in her living room shows the villagers standing on the edge of a mountain, orange marigolds at their feet spelling out “Margaret.”)


OUR tour of Margaret’s garden started inside her house, looking out.


“I reflect a lot when I’m in the house,” she said, so everything is about the views. She planted a baby copper beech years ago on a hill she looks out on from her writing room upstairs. Across from the kitchen window she planted a magnolia, and a spicebush can be seen from the living room window. Her bedroom looks out on 20 Ilex verticillatas, or winterberries, whose red berries provide food for birds when little else is left.


The apple trees are lovingly pruned and underplanted with hellebores, hostas and other plants that Margaret keeps dividing because they won’t stop multiplying with all this love and compost. “I found three Trillium erectum under the porch when I got here,” she said. “Now I probably have 500.”


The plantings are curving and expansive: not one crabapple, but dozens; not one magnolia, but six or seven. Foliage of many colors, shapes and textures creates a mosaic beneath the trees.


She let her instincts take the lead, putting in a shallow pond near the house 15 years ago, and then a deeper one a few months later, because she likes the sound of water. And the following spring the frogs came, as if out of thin air: “The tree frog, the greens, the leopards, the bulls, the salamanders,” she said.


This garden has been her retreat from corporate life for at least part of every week for 20 years. “I had 115 people in editorial who reported directly to me,” she said, “but when I turned 50, I started to miss the personal creative expression” that came with writing about the garden. So now, at 54, she has pared down her Max Mara days to only two a week, driving down to Manhattan to act as a consultant for the Martha brand.


And in late March, she started her blog, which is her flagship * of what, she’s not sure, but already she has had 18,000 first-time visitors.


I feel tired just thinking about it.


When Suzanne and I talk about retiring, we share visions of lying in a hammock slung across some porch by the sea in Costa Rica, reading novels. When Margaret speaks of retiring, she means re-creation, overseeing the birth of a digital enterprise * albeit one small enough to fit into her 700-square-foot headquarters, a short walk down the wooded road.


She built it a few years ago, as a guest house. “But I never have any guests,” she said, with a laugh. (Not true, really. She tells of friends so cozy reading by the fireplace on a cold day, or on the screened porch in summer, that they don’t have to be entertained.)


Earlier that day, as we sat down to lunch, she reflected on the life she has made for herself here.


It must be nice to write whatever you please, I said, which elicited a fierce response.


“Do I want to hand stories to some magazine and have them rewrite them?” she said. “Forget about it; I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it. Did I say I’m not doing it? You know what? I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s just not a stage in my life I can go to.”


Amen, sister.


The blog has had another, unexpected benefit: A question from a reader in search of roses has led to a correspondence and the beginning of a friendship.


“The World Wide Web doesn’t sound like there are people up the street,” Margaret said. “But guess what? There are.”


There were times this winter, she said, that she got so involved in writing and planning that she didn’t know what day it was. “I would call people at work, and say, ‘Well, I woke up in the clothes I wore yesterday. Do you think that’s a bad sign?’”


Not when you can welcome more than 100 people to your garden every year, as Margaret has done for a decade as part of the Open Days program sponsored by the Garden Conservancy. At this year’s event, last Saturday, she said, 150 showed up in the pouring rain. My guess is that it wasn’t just the blog that drew them. It was Margaret’s garden.



:sunhappy:








Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(~)(~)




The Bucket List (2007)


When corporate mogul Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) and mechanic Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) wind up in the same hospital room, the two terminally ill men bust out of the cancer ward with a plan to experience life to the fullest before they kick the bucket. In a race against the reaper, the new friends hit the tables in Monte Carlo, down obscene amounts of caviar and tear up the road in supercharged cars. Rob Reiner directs this comic caper.




Reviews:


What a gift. Two of the world's greatest actors come together and create movie magic. I savored every frame. Rob Reiner did what he does best, find a great story and script, get the perfect cast, and let us get swept away by the story. You will laugh, out loud, more than a few times. You will feel the power of the message to your core, and yes, you will cry. It is a good cry though,not a manipulated, calculated, date movie, tear-jerking cry. Back to the stars of the film...Morgan Freeman is a treasure. Once again his understated majesty knocked my socks off. I cannot think of another actor who even comes close to conveying what he does on screen. And Jack? Wow. He is pitch perfect. Teamed with Reiner again, this performance rivals A Few Good Men. Different tenor, but right there as one of his finest. A word about Sean Hayes who surprised me completely. I don't know how his name even came up for a role like this, but he was marvelous. Understated (amazing) and right on the mark. Morgan, Jack & Rob, welcome back to the Five Star list...AGAIN.



I was really prepared to dislike this film, based on the trailers, which are just a small part of what this buddy/roadtrip movie is about. It is, as you are probably aware, about a list of things to do before one dies. Oh, it has some predictable moments, but just when it looks like it is about to get too sugary it veers back into its' intended message, thanks to a wonderfully crafted script, gentle direction by Rob Riener, but mostly a couple of really grounded performances by the master, Jack Nicholson, and the ever stately Morgan Freeman. These are what acting is all about and what every actor wishes for in his or her career. The moments of philosophical clarity give this a resonance about a subject, death, that is very hard to deal with honestly on film. Here we have a real surprise of a flick that gives one a ray of hope, laughter, and surprisingly, joy at a time of year that needs it. Don't be afraid of the subject matter. In fact embrace it and please do not not go because of the skydiving and driving sequences. They are a drop in the bucket. Pun intended.



(~)(~)




:kissflow:





Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:cboi::cboi:




http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/20/style/20080621ASCOT_index.html



The Royal Ascot is one of the racing and social highlights of the British summer.




:cowboi:







Happy Summer Solstice..........(one day late.)


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[HYSterical HERnia]

Several times my daughter, Julie, had telephoned to say, "Mom, you must come see the daffodils before they are over." I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive from my place by the beach to her lakeside mountain home. "I will come next Tuesday," I promised, a little reluctantly, on her third call. The next Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. Still, I had promised, and so I got in the car and began the long, tedious drive.


When I finally walked into Julie's house and hugged and greeted my grandchildren, I said, "Forget the daffodils, Julie! The road is invisible in the clouds and fog, and there is nothing in the world except you and the children that I want to see bad enough to drive another inch!"
My daughter smiled calmly, "We drive in this all the time, Mom."
"Well, you won't get me back on the road until it clears and then I'm heading straight for home!" I said, rather emphatically.
"Gee, Mom, I was hoping you'd take me over to the garage to pick up my car," Julie said with a forlorn look in her eyes.
"How far will we have to drive?" Smiling she answered, "Just a few blocks, I'll drive ... I'm used to this."

When I finally walked into Julie's house and hugged and greeted my grandchildren, I said, "Forget the daffodils, Julie! The road is invisible in the clouds and fog, and there is nothing in the world except you and the children that I want to see bad enough to drive another inch!"
My daughter smiled calmly, "We drive in this all the time, Mom."
"Well, you won't get me back on the road until it clears and then I'm heading straight for home!" I said, rather emphatically.
"Gee, Mom, I was hoping you'd take me over to the garage to pick up my car," Julie said with a forlorn look in her eyes.
"How far will we have to drive?" Smiling she answered, "Just a few blocks, I'll drive ... I'm used to this."


After several minutes on the cold, foggy road, I had to ask "Where are we going? This isn't the way to the garage!"
"We're going to the garage the long way," Julie smiled, "by way of the daffodils."
"Julie," I said sternly, "please turn around."
"It's all right, Mom, I promise, you will never forgive yourself if you miss this experience." After about twenty minutes we turned onto a small gravel road and I saw a small church. On the far side of the church I saw a hand-lettered sign ...

We got out of the car and each took a child's hand, and I followed Julie down the path. As we turned a corner of the path, and I looked up and gasped. Before me lay the most glorious sight. It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it down over the mountain peak and slopes. The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns, great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, saffron, and butter yellow. Each different-colored variety was planted as a group so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue.

Five acres of the most beautiful flowers I had ever seen!

"Who planted all these?" I asked Julie.
"It's just one woman," Julie answered, "She lives on the property. That's her home," and she pointed to a well-kept A-frame house that looked small and modest in the midst of all that glory. We walked up to the house and on the little patio we saw a poster


Answers to the Questions
I Know You Are Asking
50,000 bulbs
one at a time
by one woman
2 hands, 2 feet
and very little brain
Began in 1958



There it was ... "The Daffodil Principle"

(f)

[sweetlady]

:indian_brave:



43 Things is the world's most popular on-line goal setting community.



http://www.43things.com/




http://www.43things.com/tour





:book:




May your smile be your umbrella.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:peacesign:




http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/




:flowers:




Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)




Draw a Pig


A personality test?


Draw a pig online...and discover your true self. Or just kill a few minutes. After you draw yours, check out the Top Oinkers Gallery.



Go hog wild...



http://drawapig.desktopcreatures.com/







:coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:laughing-tv:




Smashing Telly

Interesting TV on the Web

Watch classic clips and full-length programs, with a special emphasis on documentaries, nonfiction, and classic dramas. No stupid pet tricks or bloopers.


It's TV time:


http://smashingtelly.com/





:coffee:




Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

"The times are changed, and we are changed in them."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:mad:



Psychopath test:


Read this question carefully. Come up with an answer and then scroll down
to the bottom for the results. This is not a joke or a trick question.
It is as it reads. No one I know has gotten it right. Here it is:



A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a guy whom she did
not know. She thought this guy was amazing. She believed him to be her
dream guy so much, that she fell in love with him right there, but never
asked for his number and could not find him.
A few days later she killed her SISTER.


Question: What was her motive for killing her sister?


[Give this some thought before you answer, then see below]


























Answer:


She was hoping the guy would appear at the funeral again.
If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a
test administered by a famous American Psychologist, used to test if one
has the same mentality as a killer.

Many arrested serial killers took part in the test and answered the
question correctly.


If you didn't answer the question correctly, good for you.


If you got the answer correct, please let me know so I can remove you from
my e-mail list.....



:clown::clown::clown:







Have a relaxing holiday.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:idea: :idea:





http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/






Gay and Facing Prejudice:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/us/09aged.html





:fade::fade: Sure is nice to know I am not a Lone Ranger helping aging parents.







Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:hm:




Psilocybin may help treat patients with cancer, depression, drug abuse, study says

Posted July 2, 2008


WEDNESDAY, July 2 (HealthDay News) -- The spiritual effects of a substance in "sacred mushrooms" can last more than a year, Johns Hopkins researchers claim.


The scientists said their investigations may lead to new ways to help people with conditions such as cancer, depression and drug dependence.


In a previous study, the researchers gave psilocybin to 36 healthy, well-educated volunteers with active spiritual lives. After taking the substance under controlled conditions, 60 percent of the participants reported have a "full mystical experience."


When the researchers checked with the volunteers 14 months later, the same percentage said taking psilocybin increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.


"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," lead investigator Roland Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and neuroscience, said in a prepared statement.


The study was published in the current issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.


"This is truly remarkable finding, "Griffiths said. "Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in the laboratory. This gives credence to claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression, and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence. We're eager to move ahead with that research."


He noted that while some of the volunteers "reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their day-long psilocybin sessions, none reported any lingering harmful effects, and we didn't observe any clinical evidence of harm."


However, if hallucinogens are used in poorly supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors, Griffiths warned.



http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/healthday/2008/07/02/hallucinogen-gives-lasting-spiritual-boost.html



:hm:





:driving: Safe travels.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l) :cowboi: :horse: :cboi: (l)(l)




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/travel/29COMmontana.html?_r=1&ref=travel&oref=slogin




(l)(l) :cowboi: :horse: :cboi: (l)(l)







Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:dinner_date: :dinner_date:


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/01/dining/02mini-600.jpg





An Interactive Picnic Basket:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/02/dining/20080702_PICNIC_GRAPHIC.html





July 2, 2008

The Minimalist


101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics

By MARK BITTMAN


THERE is something both innocent and exciting about a picnic, even if you are only packing a few things at the last minute and heading down the street to the park. It may be nothing fancier than bologna or tuna salad on white bread, but you’re still likely to have a good time, which is probably why many of us remain devoted to the same picnic foods we’ve eaten all our lives.


But at some point, you may get the urge to vary the menu a bit. With that in mind, I’d like to make a few * or, actually, 101 * suggestions, ranging from snacks to dessert. With a little shopping, a little effort, and 20 minutes or less for assembly, you can create the kind of carry-out food that will put the local prepared food shops to shame while saving you a small fortune. No matter how faithful you are to your old favorites, I’ll bet you will find something intriguing here.


1 BEET SALAD Peel beets and grate them (a food processor will keep the juice contained). Add pistachios or hazelnuts; dress with orange zest and juice, and olive oil. Add bits of goat cheese and chopped parsley.


2 PESTO CHICKEN ROLLS Season and grill chicken cutlets. Brush lavash or any other wrap-type bread with pesto; layer with the chicken, sun-dried tomatoes and arugula; roll up and cut on the bias.


3 CURRIED EGG SALAD Make egg salad with hard-cooked eggs, mayo, curry powder, Dijon mustard, fresh lime juice, salt, pepper, cilantro, red onion and, if you like, diced apple.


4 TOMATOES AND PEACHES Toss together sliced seeded tomatoes and peaches, along with thinly sliced red onion and chopped cilantro or rosemary. Dress at the last minute with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.


5 ROAST BEEF AND BLUE Start with whole-grain rolls. Smear blue cheese on one side and prepared horseradish on the other. Add red onion and thin-sliced roast beef, pork or lamb. Pack! lettuce and tomato on the side. Potato chips are mandatory.


6 CORNFLAKE CHICKEN BITES Cut boneless chicken breasts into small pieces. Dip in milk or buttermilk, then dredge in seasoned crushed corn flake crumbs, cornmeal or panko. Pan-fry in oil, drain, cool and eat cold with celery sticks, with ranch or blue cheese dressing for dipping.


7 GRAPES AND CHEESE Mix feta cubes and green grapes (or grape tomatoes or pieces of watermelon). Add mint, salt, pepper and olive oil. A tiny bit of chopped fresh chili is good, too.


8 COLD PEANUT NOODLES Cook Chinese egg noodles or regular spaghetti. Drain and rinse. Toss with sesame oil, peanut butter (or tahini), sugar, soy sauce, ginger, vinegar, black pepper (lots) and chili oil (optional). Pack shredded seeded cucumber, cooked shrimp and chopped scallions separately.


9-19: Raw Vegetables


9 For gazpacho, combine a couple of pounds of ripe tomatoes, one of cucumbers, a slice or two of bread, olive oil, vinegar, garlic, salt and pepper in a blender. Chill and pour into a thermos.


10 Combine tomatoes and cucumber in blender with lemon grass (only the most tender part), cilantro, fish sauce and lime. Voilà: Thai gazpacho.


11 Mix peeled, grated carrots with chopped dates, cumin, minced chili, lemon or lime juice, mint or cilantro.


12 Slice a few bulbs of fennel and some tart apples; dice some jicama. Toss together with freshly chopped tarragon, basil or chervil (if you can find it), olive oil, salt, lots of pepper and lemon juice. Celery is good in this, too, as are oranges and cheeses, especially sheep’s cheeses.


13 Guacasalsa: Mash an avocado (it won’t get brown) into some salsa, even jarred if necessary. Don’t forget chips.


14 Cut day-old crusty bread into one-inch cubes. Just before leaving the house, combine it with chopped tomatoes (seeds are O.K.), chopped cucumber, chopped red onion and fresh basil. Pack dressing separately: olive oil, red wine vinegar, diced anchovies, capers, salt and pepper. Call this panzanella.


15 Toss toasted pita with olives, parsley and mint, salt and pepper, bits of chopped-up lemon (rinds and all; preserved lemon is even better), chopped seeded tomatoes, chopped seeded cucumbers and chopped red pepper. Take olive oil for last-minute dressing.


16 Thinly slice Savoy or Napa cabbage. Toss with thinly sliced red onion, half a diced jalapeño and handfuls of chopped cilantro. Dress with olive oil, lime juice, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper.


17 Halve cherry tomatoes; toss with equal-size pieces of firm smoked or regular tofu and soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, scallions and a pinch of sugar (or mirin if you have it). Add chopped Thai basil and/or cilantro and/or mint just before eating.


18 Toss cooked couscous with oil, chopped parsley, chopped black olives, capers, red onion, salt and pepper. Scoop out medium-size tomatoes and fill with mixture. Pack carefully.


19 Process a cup or two of cashews, a chili or two, some garlic, a splash of soy sauce and enough water to get the food processor going; fold in chopped cilantro or chives. Fill celery sticks and chill. This is the best celery-filler since cream cheese.




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mini.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-001.html







Rest of the list:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-002.html



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-003.html





YUM!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-004.html








(l)SEAFOOD!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-005-002.html





Meat and poultry:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-006.html





Sandwiches:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mlis-007.html




:chef: :chef:





Have a relaxed July 4th (and terrific Friday for everyone else)!

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)




http://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/DSW/EN/Articles/Popup_2nt_City_Cruise_Break_to_Amsterdam?h=840&w=720



http://www.dfdsseaways.co.uk/DSW/EN/Offers/scotsman.htm






(l)(l) I just LOVE this city! Can't wait to visit again.




:kissflow:





Enjoy your fireworks!

Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

8-| 8-|




http://www.particlezoo.net/




8-| 8-|






Optimum medicamentum quies est.

"Peace is the best medicine."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:eyebat:




http://gizmodo.com/5021424/gizmodos-ultimate-water-gun-battlemodo-royale




;)






Optimum medicamentum quies est.

"Peace is the best medicine."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:D:D




The latest survey data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that U.S. home broadband penetration, having now reached 55 percent of adults, is slowing as it runs up against those who still can't get it, those who still can't afford it, those for whom dial-up is plenty fast, thank you, and those who just don't have the interest or the energy to cross the Digital Divide. While broadband growth was strong among people over 50 and in rural and middle-income households, among the 10 percent of Internet users still connecting via dial-up, almost two-thirds had no interest in moving into the fast lane. Some said they might be swayed by lower prices or better availability, but a fifth declared there was nothing that would change their mind. An even larger repository of recalcitrance is found among the one-quarter of Americans who don't use the Internet at all. Only 10 percent of that crowd expressed any desire to get online, their reasons ranging from "not interested" to "too difficult or frustrating" to "waste of time."



http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Broadband_2008.pdf



http://gigaom.com/2008/07/02/pews-state-of-us-broadband-200/



http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080703-us-broadband-market-edging-towards-saturation.html




Internet pioneer Vint Cerf suggests that lack of interest may just reflect a lack of familiarity with the all the possibilities. "Some residential users may not see a need for higher speeds because they don't know about or don't have ability to use high speeds," Cerf said. "My enthusiasm for video conferencing improved dramatically when all family members had MacBook Pros with built-in video cameras, for example." Unfortunately, equipping the family with MacBook Pros is not an option for many in this demographic. Regardless, says John B. Horrigan, the author of the study, the unwired, like the poor, will probably be with us always. "For some of them, it's for economic reasons," he said. "For some of them, it's because they're just kind of technologically cranky, for lack of a better term, and don't really feel the need to have these kinds of communications devices. There's always going be some percentage of people like that."



http://www.siliconvalley.com/latestheadlines/ci_9766200?nclick_check=1



http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/63685.html




:cowboy:





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)




For some people, heaven is a Kobe steak; for others, it’s exquisite sushi like this tuna tataki (the equivalent of tartare) with ikura (salmon roe), wasabi-flavored tobiko (capelin roe) and nori flakes (seaweed).

http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/fish/seafood/images/tuna-tataki-230.jpg






Types Of Sushi & Sashimi:

http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/fish/seafood/sushi-glossary.asp





http://www.sushifaq.com/



http://www.sushifaq.com/sushi.htm#types




http://www.kims-sushi.com/sushitypes.html





http://www.eatsushi.com/




http://www.asianartmall.com/typesofsushi.htm





Cool: Digital Sushi"

http://www.creativeadornments.com/sushi/




Sushi Jewelry?

http://www.creativeadornments.com/sushi.html








Hamachi (yellowtail tuna) sashimi, salmon sushi, unagi (freshwater cooked eel) and spicy scallop roll are just a *few* of my favorites.



http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/4010/img5045pz1.jpg





(l)Exquisite!

http://www.aratarestaurant.com/Sashimi.JPG/Sashimi-full.jpg




http://www.jenius.com.au/images/miyabi_sushi004.jpg




(l) Spicy Scallop Roll:

http://d0.biggestmenu.com/00/00/a3/3325c13dce7fd523_m.jpg


http://www.dineouthere.com/images/sushi-town-02.jpg






GREAT URL:
http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/fish/seafood/sushi-glossary.asp




http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/fish/seafood/images/anago-230.jpg



(l)(l)






Domo Arigato! ;)


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:glamor::glamor:




In 1998 Madeleine Kirsh opened her first store in Palm Beach County, Florida. Madeleine’s reputation as an interior decorator had been built on her love of the unusual. By combining this with her vast knowledge of fashion, she quickly developed a loyal following and the store was an instant success. With business thriving and a growing international clientele, it was inevitable the next step would be a move to Miami.

An amazing 10,000 square foot space was found on Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami Beach.



http://shop.cmadeleines.com/






Classy Dresses:

http://shop.cmadeleines.com/Black-50s-Velvet-And-Lace-Dress-p-16404.html


http://shop.cmadeleines.com/Oscar-De-La-Renta-Black-Velvet-Brown-Satin-p-16592.html



http://shop.cmadeleines.com/Oscar-De-La-Renta-Royal-Velvet-p-16591.html



http://shop.cmadeleines.com/Thierry-Mugler-Sheer-Velvet-p-16757.html




:glamor::glamor:






Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)




http://www.supperclub.com/




Never heard of an optional massage after eating in a restaurant......




Slide show under "Photos".



(y) Great use of Flash software at this web site....






:coffee:





Stay cool in this heat.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:o



July 6, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist


Wall-E for President

By FRANK RICH


SO much for a July Fourth week spent in idyllic celebration of our country’s birthday. This year’s festivities were marked instead by a debate * childish, not constitutional * over who is and isn’t patriotic. The fireworks were sparked by a verbally maladroit retired general, fueled by two increasingly fatuous presidential campaigns, and heated to a boil by a 24/7 news culture that inflates any passing tit for tat into a war of the worlds.


Let oil soar above $140 a barrel. Let layoffs and foreclosures proliferate like California’s fires. Let someone else worry about the stock market’s steepest June drop since the Great Depression. In our political culture, only one question mattered: What was Wesley Clark saying about John McCain and how loudly would every politician and bloviator in the land react?


Unable to take another minute of this din, I did what any sensible person might do and fled to the movies. More specifically, to an animated movie in the middle of a weekday afternoon. What escape could be more complete?


Among its other attributes, this particular G-rated film, “Wall-E,” is a rare economic bright spot. Its enormous box-office gross last weekend swelled a total Hollywood take that was up 20 percent from a year ago. (You know America’s economy is cooked when everyone flocks to the movies.) The “Wall-E” crowds were primed by the track record of its creator, Pixar Animation Studios, and the ecstatic reviews. But if anything, this movie may exceed its audience’s expectations. It did mine.


As it happened, “Wall-E” opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) “Wall-E,” a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.


Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I’d stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex’s walls.


While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at “Wall-E” were in deep contemplation of a world in peril * and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you’ll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?


Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I’ll keep to the minimum. “Wall-E” is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.


The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind * a Rubik’s Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of “Hello, Dolly!,” a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until “time runs out.”


Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though “Wall-E” is laced with visual and musical allusions to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick’s then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as “2001” did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That’s more than upsetting enough.


Humanity is not dead in “Wall-E,” but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk * they float around on motorized Barcaloungers * but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall “coming soon,” not far from that spot where back in the day of “Hello, Dolly!” idealistic Americans once placed a flag.


And yet these rabid consumers, like us, are haunted by what paradise might have been lost. How can they reclaim what matters? How can Earth be recolonized? These questions are rarely spoken in “Wall-E,” but are omnipresent, like half-forgotten dreams. In this movie, a fleeting green memory of the extinct miracle of photosynthesis is as dazzling and elusive as the emerald city of Oz.


One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at “Wall-E” were never restless, despite the movie’s often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what “Wall-E” was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.


You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives “Wall-E” and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.


For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal. It could have been a Pixar sight gag. In fact, it is a gag in “Wall-E,” where, in a flashback, we see that the original do-nothing chief executive of Buy N Large (prone to pronouncements like “stay the course”) boasted his own ersatz presidential podium.


For all the hyperventilation on the left about Mr. Obama’s rush to the center * some warranted, some not * what’s more alarming is how small-bore and defensive his campaign has become. Whether he’s reaffirming his long-held belief in faith-based programs or fudging his core convictions about government snooping, he is drifting away from the leadership he promised and into the focus-group-tested calculation patented by Mark Penn in his disastrous campaign for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama’s Wednesday address calling for renewed public service is unassailable in principle but inadequate to the daunting size of the serious American crisis at hand. The speech could have been * and has been * delivered by any candidate of either party in any election year since 1960.


What Mr. Obama has going for him during this tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.


The Republican’s digital ignorance is not a function of his age but of his intellectual inflexibility and his isolation from his country’s reality. To prove the point last week, he took a superfluous, if picturesque, tour of Colombia and Mexico, with occasional timeouts for him and his surrogates to respond like crybabies to General Clark’s supposed slur on his patriotism.


For connoisseurs of McCainian cluelessness, the high point was his Wednesday morning appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The anchor, Robin Roberts, asked the only important question: Why in heaven’s name was Mr. McCain in Latin America when “the U.S. economy is really at the forefront of voters’ minds”?


“I know Americans are hurting very badly right now,” he explained, channeling the first George Bush’s “Message: I care.” As he spoke, those hurting Americans could feast on the gorgeous flora and fauna of the Cartagena, Colombia, tourist vista serving as his backdrop. “It’s really lovely here,” Mr. McCain said. Since he can’t drop us an e-mail, a video postcard will have to do.


Mr. McCain should be required to see “Wall-E” to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/opinion/06rich.html?hp





(y) One of the most easy-to-read political commentaries/film reviews I have ever read. I wasn't planning to see this film before I read this commentary. I think I'll add it to my queue and watch it sometime.




:book:





Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

"The times are changed, and we are changed in them."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:earth::earth:




http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2008/07/hologram_google_earth.html




:earth::earth:






Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:coffee::coffee:




Hot Chocolate

A group of graduates, well established in their careers, were talking at a reunion and decided to go visit their old university professor, now retired. During their visit, the conversation turned to complaints about stress in their work and lives. Offering his guests hot chocolate, the professor went into the kitchen and returned with a large pot of hot chocolate and an assortment of cups -porcelain, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the Hot Chocolate.
***
When they all had a cup of hot chocolate in hand, the professor said:
Notice that all the nice looking, expensive cups were taken, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. The cup that you're drinking from adds nothing to the quality of the hot chocolate. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was hot chocolate, not the cup; but you consciously went for the best cups...

And then you began eyeing each others cups.


Now consider this: Life is the hot chocolate; your job, money and position in society are the cups.

They are just tools to hold and contain life.

The cup you have does not define, nor change the quality of life you have.
Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the hot chocolate God has provided us.


God makes the hot chocolate, woman chooses the cups.

The happiest people don't have the best of everything.

They just make the best of everything that they have.


Live simply.

Love generously.

Care deeply.

Speak kindly.

And enjoy your hot chocolate




:coffee::coffee:





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.



SL &WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:gorgeous:




http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_9921140




:gorgeous:



(y)(y)






:hot-n-sweat::hot-n-sweat: Stay cool in this merciless heat.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:painting::coolphotos:




This is really neat...try it !

When you click on the link, a series of about 15 pictures will come up. Click on a photo in that category that appeals to you.

Again 15 pictures will come up, click the one for you and move on. Just continue to keep picking.

At the end it will give you a profile of yourself.... It's called a visual DNA.... Your choices dictate your profile. Click on the tabs on the right.



Http://DNA.imagini.net/friends




(y)(y)




:espresso:





Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(&)(l)




http://www.dogster.com/dogs/806741



http://www.dogster.com/




(l)(&)(l)





:kissflow:





"On a clear day, you can see forever."

Sweetlady and WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)



http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/25/us/25aurora_600.jpg



July 25, 2008


Scientists Find Trigger for Northern Lights

By KENNETH CHANG


Scientists say they have discovered what makes the northern lights dance.


Researchers working on a NASA mission to understand the interplay of magnetic fields and charged particles blown outward from the Sun have identified the trigger for the colorful electrical storms in the polar regions. They hope this is a step in developing reliable forecasts of geomagnetic storms that can disrupt satellites in orbit and power grids on the ground.


The findings appeared in an article published Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science.


Scientists have long known that the dancing auroras of color known as the northern and southern lights are generated by charged particles flying from the Sun and interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field, which is then pulled into a windsock shape by the solar wind.


Turbulent storms on the Sun generate extremely bright auroral displays, but even in quieter times, smaller events known as substorms still generate the lights.


“They happen every three or four hours,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a professor of earth and space sciences at University of California, Los Angeles, and principal investigator of a NASA mission called Themis, short for Time, History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms. “The Earth’s environment stores energy. Then all of a sudden it releases it.”


Each substorm generates a current of about one million to two million amps over one to two hours, or a total energy equivalent to a magnitude-5 or magnitude-6 earthquake, Dr. Angelopoulos said.


Scientists knew two events that occur in the tail of the magnetic field during substorms, but did not know which event acted as the trigger for the auroras.


Over the past 30 years, some scientists have believed that a disruption in the current of charged particles * similar to the blowing of an electric fuse, the scientists said * about one-sixth of the distance from the Earth to the Moon’s orbit was responsible. Others believed it was a snapping of magnetic field lines farther out, about one-third of the distance to the Moon.


To answer the question, the Themis mission launched five identical satellites, each about the size of a washing machine, to measure the electric and magnetic fields as well as the particles passing by at different locations around Earth. Coupled with ground observations, scientists were able to deduce the order of events in a substorm in February.


The snapping of magnetic fields occurred first, followed by a burst of auroras. Surprisingly, the disruption in the charged particle current occurred after the aurora. Proponents of that hypothesis had thought that the magnetic snapping caused the change in electric current and that, in turn, led to the auroras.


“This defies our old paradigms,” Dr. Angelopoulos said.


Next, Dr. Angelopoulos said, scientists will try to figure out exactly why the magnetic field lines snap. With a better understanding of substorms, scientists would like to understand what happens during the larger storms. They hope to have better prediction methods working by the time the next peak of solar storms arrives between 2010 and 2012.




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/science/space/25aurora.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss



http://tvnewslies.org/tvnl/index.php/latest-news-at-a-glance/18-science/2982-scientists-find-trigger-for-northern-lights




(l)(l)(l)





:cowboy:





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes. :eye-bat:

Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:hm::hm::hm:



Everything’s Fine! My T-Shirt Says So:


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/fashion/24LIFE.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss






:doh::doh::doh: Seems to me like something's out of whack when you have to make "Life is Good." a registered trademark......








Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:sunhappy:




In a recent survey, people from Detroit have proved to
be the most likely to have had sex in the shower!


In the survey, carried out for the leading toiletries
firm 'Brut', a huge 86% of Detroit residents said that
they have enjoyed sex in the shower.


The other 14% said they had not been to prison .... yet.




:|



(a)





(f)

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)




http://www.nasaimages.org/




Cool: Fantasy Cartography:

http://fantasymaps.wordpress.com/






Are you Internet famous? Wired's Celebrity Meter:

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Celebrity_Meter






Yikes!

Toy rocket inspires variable-speed bullets:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14372-toy-rocket-inspires-variablespeed-bullets.html






Find the least expensive gas around:

http://gaspricewatch.com/new/default_V3.asp




:coffee-drink:






(ip)

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(p)(p)



http://polaroidmanipulation.pixelfuse.com/



:o Whoa!





:coffee:




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:book::book::book:



Q U O T E D


"What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading. I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests."


-- Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts



"Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you're into the 30-second digital mode."

-- Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale



"(Young people) aren't as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn't go in a line. That's a good thing because the world doesn't go in a line, and the world isn't organized into separate compartments or chapters."

-- Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University



From the first in a series of articles from the New York Times looking at the effect of technology on the way people read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html


:book::book::book:





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:kiss-n-flowers:




http://www.victorianweb.org/



(y)




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(~)(~)



A new approach to repurposing movies from Joel Hodgson of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and team.


http://mst3k.com/



(~)(~)





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:s:s:s



Olympic journalists choking on irritants in Beijing's atmosphere


Apparently, China's promise that the 20,000 foreign journalists covering the Olympic Games would have unfettered Internet access is going the same way as its pledge to provide breathable air -- up in smoke. Just two weeks ago, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said, "For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet." Today we learn that some IOC officials had already quietly agreed to the Beijing organizing committee's requirement that Net censorship remain in place during the Games. IOC press chief Kevan Gosper, saying he had just learned of the deal, told Reuters, "I regret that it now appears (the organizing committee) has announced that there will be limitations on website access during Games time. I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related."


http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_10032798?nclick_check=1



http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Olympics/idUSN3039947420080730



Early arrivals at the main press center found themselves unable to access scores of sites on the usual topics the Chinese government prefers to keep quiet -- among them Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers. "It has been our policy to provide the media with convenient and sufficient access to the Internet," said Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing organizing committee. "I believe our policy will not affect reporters' coverage of the Olympic Games." Jonathan Watts, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, begged to differ. "Obviously if reporters can't access all the sites they want to see, they can't do their jobs," he said. "Unfortunately such restrictions are normal for reporters in China but the Olympics were supposed to be different."



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/sports/olympics/31china.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin



Meanwhile, Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., says he has documents indicating that China has forced all the major foreign-owned hotels to install spying equipment that will monitor the Net activities of journalists, athletes' families and guests during the Games and beyond. The Public Security Bureau's order says failure to comply could bring in financial penalties, suspension of Net access, or the loss of a license to operate a hotel in China. "These hotels are justifiably outraged by this order, which puts them in the awkward position of having to craft pop-up messages explaining to their customers that their Web history, communications, searches and key strokes are being spied on by the Chinese government," Brownback said.


http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9111043



http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-olyspy30-2008jul30,0,5823677.story



I'm sure the host country will put on a lovely tribute to the Olympic ideals during the opening ceremonies, but it's going to be awfully hard not to gag a little while watching. +o(


:o




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:driving: :driving: :driving:





http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/travel/03saugatuck.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin




http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/07/31/travel/20080803_GAS_FEATURE.html




Slide Show:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/03/travel/0803-GAS_index.html




:driving: :driving: :driving:





(l)(l) Give me those back country roads anytime!





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)



Q U O T E D


"Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities.


"First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities' histories than all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it -- as they would all the time -- as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I'm absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties.


"Second, expand the conversation with the community in the one place where it's already taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with itself. The paper can't set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it), but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a conversation that is civil and useful."


-- Friend and former colleague Dan Gillmor (and his first point is one some of us argued for from the beginnings of Mercury Center 15 years ago; I still believe had Knight Ridder offered open access to the consolidated archives of its nationwide properties plus those of any partners it could attract, it would have established early critical mass as one of the Web's top reference and news resources, and in time would have generated ad revenue that would have dwarfed the pay-per-article income).


http://citmedia.org/blog/2008/07/30/journalists-and-communities-what-i-told-ajr/


(y)(y)





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:giddy:




http://gizmodo.com/5030810/giz-explains-an-illustrated-guide-to-every-stupid-cable-you-need



(l)(l) Great reference URL though.


:D





Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(&)(l)(&)(l)




http://www.petcentric.com/



Send your friends customized email messages with a talking dog or cat. It's DOGGIEMAIL! (or kittiemail if you are into them.)

There are even several voices to choose from while you are customizing your DOGGIEMAIL........ I sent a bulldog with a "Charles" voice - it sounds like a proper English gentleman!

Tre-cool. (y)







:coffee: Oh yes, Nantucket Blend. Life is good.





Have a delightfully lovely weekend!




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[liviann]

Seasons remain the same

Time has change but seasons remain the same
I'm yearning for certain seasons
When my heart was racing to divulge
When my mind was in over drive ready to take risk
Holding on tight to love
When my heart was at ease

I thought I told myself would never let my heart win
But my mind took over like a storm
And caused a diverse effect
Capture it, like its theres, leaving me on the edge
Time is of essence
I wonder what this season will bring

I'm screaming for solitude
Wanting my heart back where it use to be
But I guess they say love only have moments
And memories stare at you like a theif in the night

liviann

[joyceelizabeth]

I wanted to add my 2 favorite url's so hopefully everyone will see!

joyceelizabeth.etsy.com (http://joyceelizabeth.etsy.com)

butterfliesrfree0000.etsy.com (http://butterfliesrfree0000.etsy.com)

joyceelizabeth is for plus size clothing and the other is for vintage antiques and supplies! come take a look!

[sweetlady]

:curtain::curtain:





http://www.crochetdoilies.com/gallery_name_crochet_doilies.html


http://www.crochetdoilies.com/



:curtain:





:coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)




http://www.decoratingwithlace.com/





http://www.linenstotreasure.com/antiquedoilies.htm





http://www.emsheart.com/merchandise/Doilies%20and%20Runners.htm




(l)(l)





:coffee:






Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

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




3-Meat Chile

1 lb lean ground round or ground sirloin
1/2 lb breakfast sausage - Jimmy Dean's
1 lb (or more) of filet mignon (cut up)
1 large Vidalia onion
two chopped red peppers
2 or 3 cans of nonfat red beans (put in 1/2 hour before everything is "done")
chili powder
1 teaspoon salt substitute
chopped garlic (fresh or from a jar)
2 (6 ounce) cans chopped green chilies
2 or 3 cans chopped tomatoes
2 (15 ounce) cans tomato sauce
cayenne
oregano
garlic powder
cumin
onion powder

How much spices are added depends on which ones you like as well as how hot you prefer. I usually add the pepper and then taste. Cumin I add a good deal since this *is* a key chile ingredient.


Directions

Brown the cut up filet mignon and ground round separately.

Brown onion, garlic, red peppers.

Brown sausage.

As each item is browned, put into extra large crock pot. Put on low heat for six hours.

Add tomato sauce, canned whole tomatoes, chili powder, 3 tablespoons cumin, cayenne, oregano, canned green chilies, salt substitute.


Around 4 to 5 hours - add 2 or 3 cans of red beans to the crock pot. (Adding them before then will make the beans and the chile itself "mushy".)

(l)

Serve with Sargento's Mexican Shredded Four Cheese or shredded cheese of your choice, or nonfat sour creme or my favorite is fresh, chopped vidalia onion and some shredded cheese on top. Of course serve with a tablespoon.




:guitarist::guitarist: Play some acoustic guitar music and enjoy!
:guitarist::guitarist:







(f)

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(ap)(ap)(l)(l)




http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/06/travel/0806-FRUGAL_index.html




http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/going-dutch-in-amsterdam/index.html?ref=travel






(l)(l) I love Amsterdam, have visited here a few times and would LOVE to visit again and again - of course sharing some of my favorite haunts there with friends.




:coffee:






Space-Cakes and coffee all around.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[liviann]

this is my url lol lol

www.myspace.com/jamaicangirlforyou (http://www.myspace.com/jamaicangirlforyou)

i'll greet and meet

[sweetlady]

:kissflow:




Turn an address list into a Google map:

http://mapalist.com/





Snooze button for e-mail:

http://www.hitmelater.com/






Telemegaphones:

http://www.unsworn.org/telemegaphone/






Flat Earth Society:

http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7540427.stm






Sublime and Smoke Art:

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/08/sublime-sensual-smoke-art.html







Typewriter sculptures:

http://jeremymayer.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=18688&Akey=23SVCF6T







Who's Alive and Who's Dead:

http://www.wa-wd.com/






Rooftops of the rich in New York City:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwillys/sets/72157606566769262/detail/






Bubblegum Sequencer:


http://backin.de/gumball/





:coffee:



No digital billboards......in the remote wilderness.


:coffee:





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

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





http://www.embraceyourgrace.com/




“This is one of the things angels do.” That’s the last line of the script of “Do You Love Him?” It describes Earl putting his hand on one of the flag draped coffins in that cavernous airplane hanger. So much of what Earl does on the series comes from us working out our personal fears and needs. Writing is a way to shape the world so it makes more sense and seems at least a little less frightening, and Earl is an incredible agent for doing that. He’s our surrogate in many ways; he does what we can’t do. A lot of people talk about having Earl in their lives. I wonder what they’d do if they could be Earl, even for a little while. "



(l)


http://www.tnt.tv/series/savinggrace/




http://www.tnt.tv/series/savinggrace/quotes/?contentId=38713





(p)(p) Photos:

http://www.afterellen.com/blog/dorothysnarker/saving-grace-mini-cap-dog-days



http://www.afterellen.com/sites/www.afterellen.com/files/images/072208grace1.jpg



http://www.afterellen.com/sites/www.afterellen.com/files/images/072208grace2.jpg




http://www.afterellen.com/sites/www.afterellen.com/files/images/072208grace6.jpg








(l)(l) I STILL love this and get the goose-bumps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxu21fYnKMw






(l)(l)






"Raise your hand if you got the tears when she was crying in Gus' bed."


Sweetlady & WTB

[sweetlady]

The Oddstrument Collection of odd instruments, music and sounds:

http://oddstrument.com/







Photos That Changed the World:

http://photosthatchangedtheworld.com/








The stories behind the recordings of various classic pop singles from 1960 to 1992 as compiled by Mix magazine:


http://mixonline.com/classic-tracks/







A video reminder to hug a developer today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lqxORnQARw






HA, HA, HA: GraphJam:

http://graphjam.com/







The latest rocket racer:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/08/27/1295499.aspx






YIKES!! Anthropomorphic Cannibalism:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agmilmoe/sets/72157594356771968/







What you can learn by reading between the lines of the commemorative patches for classified space missions:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1197/1










Pixifood (defined as "Any food substance that is highly pleasant to the taste as a child and tastes shockingly unpleasant once you become an adult."):

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2008/07/29/pixifoods-part-i/









(u)(u)(u) "I love you dad. Rest in peace, pop, rest in peace."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)




Fall 2008


Do You Have The “Right To Dry” Where You Live?

We've been promoting a new kind of civil disobedience to save energy and help the planet: Set up a clothesline and hang your wash out even if you live in a neighborhood where doing such is prohibited. Is it not the height of snobbery to declare hanging clothes out to dry illegal?


Someone years ago in some rich, exclusive development decided that clotheslines with their hanging sheets and, oh-my-gosh, underwear!*were déclassé and declared them illegal. That was the turning point in America, when we started moving from the small-town feel of inclusion to the gated-community exclusion and buying of status. Such ordinances and association rules fly in the face of efficient energy use and it s time to get rid of them.


It's a beautiful thing to see clothes drying in the sun and wind, letting nature do the job for free, without any energy being used or lint accumulating. Do my tighty-whities hanging on the line really shock and embarrass anyone? If I have a clothesline, do you look down on me? Well, certainly not in Vermont!


This past year in Vermont we attempted to pass a “right to dry” law but it failed. You can be sure we ll bring it back this coming year and hope other states do the same.


We are not trying to shame anyone into getting rid of their dryer but we are trying to gain the right for anyone to put up a clothesline and dry their laundry the old-fashioned way. It's not only frugal but a common sense way to reduce our impact on the planet.


http://www.vermontcountrystore.com/browse/Home/About-Us/Editorial-Archive/D/80000/P/1:300:3000:30040?endecaid=homeFB




(y)(y)







Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)





http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/lavender-000260.htm





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_oil





(Sigh.)

http://www.lavenderfarms.net/hoodriverlavender/index.html




(f)





"I give you this one thought to keep; I am with you still, I do not sleep."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)




http://www.endless.com/




(l)(l)(l)






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:)




That's John Clarke and his sidekick/straight man Brian Dawes. I have been
a fan of theirs since their hilarious TV series "The Games" which was a
comedy about organizing the Sydney Olympics in 2000. That was one of the
funniest shows I ever saw. It was carried here in the States on PBS.


Here's a YouTube clip, on climate change, in which John Clarke plays
Australian Prime Minister John Howard.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhZK2KFV8SU&feature=related






If you can find their skit about "The Front Fell Off", it is side-splittingly hilarious!




(f)





Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.



SL &WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)





http://www.cbs.com/primetime/greatest_american_dog/




http://realityrehash.com/cbs/travis-and-presley-win-greatest-american-dog




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_American_Dog




:D:D







Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.

"The times are changed, and we are changed in them."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)




http://www.foliagenetwork.com/reports/northeast_us/






Nice whole country Map:

http://gorp.away.com/gorp/features/fall/fall.htm






http://travelqa.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/tips-on-seeing-new-englands-fall-foliage/






Farmers' Almanac:

http://www.farmersalmanac.com/weather_chatter/2008/09/10/maps-for-foliage/





Pretty photos: http://www.vtonly.com/foliage.htm





http://www.yankeefoliage.com/peakmap/





Best Fall Foliage and Autumn Color Web Cams for 2008:

http://forestry.about.com/od/fallcolor/a/fall_web_cams.htm






(l)(l)(l)






"When you awake in the morning's rush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars at night.

Do not think of me as gone,
I am with you still
in each new dawn."



Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:|:|:|




I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're" exotic,
different."

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.


If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.
Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well-
grounded.


If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the
first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter
registration drive t hat registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years
as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator
representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of
the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years
in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people
while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs,
Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you
don't have any real leadership experience.


If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city
council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000
people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people,
then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking
executive.


If you have been married to t he same woman for 19 years while
raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're
not a real Christian.


If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your
disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a
Christian.


If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including
the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.


If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no
other option in sex education in your state's school system while your
unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.


If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in
a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city
community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values
don't represent America's.


If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI
conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until
age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession
of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.


OK, much clearer now.




;);)






"On a clear day, you can see forever."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)




http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/the-bosons-that.html




(l)(l)(l)







Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)



September 21, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist



Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet



By MAUREEN DOWD

Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom * not to mention a surreptitious smoke * and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote:

BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study.

BARTLET That was a hell of a convention.

OBAMA Thank you, I was proud of it.

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose *

OBAMA Look *

BARTLET * and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

OBAMA Joke all you want, Mr. President, but it worked.

BARTLET Imagine my surprise. What can I do for you, kid?

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

OBAMA O.K. *

BARTLET And he’s surrounded himself, I think, with the best possible team to get us out of an economic crisis. Why, Sarah Palin just said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” Can you spot the error in that statement?

OBAMA Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t funded by taxpayers.

BARTLET Well, at least they are now. Kind of reminds you of the time Bush said that Social Security wasn’t a government program. He was only off by a little * Social Security is the largest government program.

OBAMA I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.

BARTLET Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.

OBAMA Which was?

BARTLET A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.

OBAMA And?

BARTLET I was.

OBAMA I mean, how did you overcome that?

BARTLET I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.

OBAMA What do you mean?

BARTLET I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA I’m asleep?

BARTLET Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET I mean tons.

OBAMA I understand.

BARTLET I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

OBAMA How did you do it?

BARTLET Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.

OBAMA I don’t mean your marriage, sir. I mean how did you get America on your side?

BARTLET There again, I didn’t have to be president of America, I just had to be president of the people who watched “The West Wing.”

OBAMA That would make it easier.

BARTLET You’d do very well on NBC. Thursday nights in the old “ER” time slot with “30 Rock” as your lead-in, you’d get seven, seven-five in the demo with a 20, 22 share * you’d be selling $450,000 minutes.

OBAMA What the hell does that mean?

BARTLET TV talk. I thought you’d be interested.

OBAMA I’m not. They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m * wait for it * the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

OBAMA You’re saying race doesn’t have anything to do with it?

BARTLET I wouldn’t go that far. Brains made me look arrogant but they make you look uppity. Plus, if you had a black daughter *

OBAMA I have two.

BARTLET * who was 17 and pregnant and unmarried and the father was a teenager hoping to launch a rap career with “Thug Life” inked across his chest, you’d come in fifth behind Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and a ficus.

OBAMA You’re not cheering me up.

BARTLET Is that what you came here for?

OBAMA No, but it wouldn’t kill you.

BARTLET Have you tried doing a two-hour special or a really good Christmas show?

OBAMA Sir *

BARTLET Hang on. Home run. Right here. Is there any chance you could get Michelle pregnant before the fall sweeps?

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps * where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie * the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?

BARTLET Am I keeping you from something?

OBAMA Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know all of that and it took you like 20 minutes to say.

BARTLET I know, I have a problem, but admitting it is the first step.

OBAMA What’s the second step?

BARTLET I don’t care.

OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed * granted, inexplicably * by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

OBAMA Wait, what is it you always used to say? When you hit a bump on the show and your people were down and frustrated? You’d give them a pep talk and then you’d always end it with something. What was it ...?

BARTLET “Break’s over.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21dowd-sorkin.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin



(y)(y)





:coffee:





"You're how tall? I didn't know they piled it that high!"


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)



http://omg.yahoo.com/photos/meg-ryans-return/2308#id=3






http://omg.yahoo.com/photos/meg-ryans-return/2308




http://omg.yahoo.com/photos/meg-ryans-return/2308#id=2







http://omg.yahoo.com/news/meg-ryan-tells-all/13413?nc



(l)(l)




:coffee:




Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)



Many people are concerned, and justifiably so, about the growth in behavioral advertising online, the practice of tracking users in their Web travels in an effort to deliver more relevant ads. But we'd do well to also keep an eye on the kind of high-tech targeting and profiling that's increasingly showing up in the brick-and-mortar retail world.


http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/A-Battle-Is-Brewing-Over-Online-Behavioral-Advertising-Market/



BusinessWeek is reporting on the increasing sophistication of point-of-sale digital ads, citing as an example a system used by Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars. Next to the cash register is a digital display. If you order a coffee in the morning, it may pop up an ad for a croissant. Buy a sandwich at lunch, and the screen may suggest a beverage or dessert. What's more, the suggestions can be tied into inventory management; if croissants are running low, that coffee customer may see a muffin promo instead. In the outlets with the system installed, Aroma says, sales of desserts and beverages featured on the screens have increased as much as 68 percent.



http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/sep2008/gb20080922_109810.htm




Sounds harmless enough -- just an automated version of the sales clerk's usual upselling exercise. It doesn't start to get creepy until the next step. YCD Multimedia, an Israeli company that sells digital display systems, is starting to equip some of its point-of-sale systems with tiny cameras and facial analysis software that can determine a shopper's sex, race and approximate age and choose which ads to display accordingly. :| All of sudden you have software doing something we like to discourage among humans -- making gross assumptions about individuals based on crude observations and generalized data. :| Start extrapolating and you find yourself in the middle of another personalization vs. privacy mess. Wait until the systems are able to observe and analyze more of your characteristics as you stand at the register. At the fast-food outlet, when it sees a person of girth filling its viewfinder, will it suggest super-sizing or a salad? At the coffee shop, will an advanced expression analysis tool see that you are sleepy and recommend a double shot? Sooner or later, retailers are going to want capture facial-recognition information, link it to a purchase history and have their digital display systems greet you by name and pitch you accordingly. Corporate partners start sharing, and the next thing you know, large chunks of your personal information are floating around in another huge database.



http://www.ycdmultimedia.com/



For those who value privacy over personalized pitches, opting out of online behavioral targeting is challenging enough. In the offline world, it may require going shopping while wearing a ski mask. And you can bet the customer analysis systems will know what to do when they see that.




:coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:coffee:



Q U O T E D


"The problem is not simply that IT people are disgruntled. The problem is that geeks in general are one culture and suits are a different culture. They're like oil and water. They have completely different ideas about what should be going on. The whole situation is loaded with lack of respect and lack of trust on both sides. ...


"I don't think techies ever doubted they had the keys to car. Now the suits are starting to realize it. Back in the '90s, I talked to techs who were fully aware of the Y2K problem, but they were content to sit back and wait for it to all go to hell. Watching a suit go down in flames is entertainment for geeks."


-- Author Bill Pfleging, quoted in an InfoWorld article warning that underappreciated, overburdened IT workers with broad network privileges represent a ticking time bomb.



http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/22/39FE-IT-management-chasm_1.html




(y)(y)(y)




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[Aryon]

Hi there!

Just wanted to take the time to invite you all to visit my blog. I hasten to add that its NOT a journal and there are articles and poems there, a little something for everyone. Added to regularly too!

http://christhebutch.wordpress.com/

I'd also like to add my favourite quote. Its from the film "Hitch" starring Will Smith.

"Never lie, steal, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in the arms of the one you love. If you must steal, steal away from bad company. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away."

Aryon

[sweetlady]

Hi there!

Just wanted to take the time to invite you all to visit my blog. I hasten to add that its NOT a journal and there are articles and poems there, a little something for everyone. Added to regularly too!

http://christhebutch.wordpress.com/

I'd also like to add my favourite quote. Its from the film "Hitch" starring Will Smith.

"Never lie, steal, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in the arms of the one you love. If you must steal, steal away from bad company. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away."

Aryon




(l)(l)(l)(l) Absolutely fabulous web site........It is amazing how much we all have in common. Blessings to you and yours.(l)(l)(l)(l)



(f)


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:guitarist: :guitarist:




http://www.postcard.fm/




:guitarist: :guitarist:





:coffee:




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:juggle:




What's the best tool for the job?


http://lifehacker.com/5052582/best-of-the-best-the-hive-five-winners





Vote for the obscure word:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/09/vote-to-save-a.html





Saved from the dictionary pruners:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4799560.ece







(p) Panoramic Photos

Take a wide look back

This Library of Congress collection includes almost 4,000 panoramic photos dating from 1851 to 1991, with most from the heyday of the panorama in the early 1900s. Click "disasters" or "beauty contests" for two very interesting and different looks back at our history.

Open your eyes...wider...

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/panoramic_photo/






TasteSpotting

Food never looked so good

Here's a "highly visual potluck of recipes, references, experiences, stories, articles, products, and anything else that inspires exquisite taste."

http://www.tastespotting.com/






(8)(8) Songza

Listen to any song or band

Any song may be an exaggeration, but this music search lets you find songs and listen to them immediately.

http://songza.com/






:| Weird Web: Bubble Wrap

Yes, you can pop it online

Ahhhh, the simple yet mystifying pleasure of popping bubble wrap. Now yours anytime. All you need is your mouse and a few seconds to kill.

http://www.urban75.com/Mag/bubble.html





:piano:






(um)(um) May Your Smile be Your Umbrella. (um)(um)


:rahrah: Sweetlady and Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[Aryon]

Thank you most kindly, sweetlady. *smiles*

[sweetlady]

:hm::hm::hm:




http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/09/precrime-detector-is-showing-p.html




:hm::hm::hm:





:coffee:






"You are how tall? I did not know they piled it that high."


:piano: SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

Thank you most kindly, sweetlady. *smiles*




Oh, you are most welcome, Aryon. Thank you for giving me a big, timely dose of hope today. I will keep your blog URL and visit it often.


(f)



Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)




http://www.hairfinder.com/celebrityhairstyles/kimberley-stewart.jpg





http://content.nordstrom.com/ImageGallery/store/product/MediumLarge/0/_5709080.jpg




http://content.nordstrom.com/ImageGallery/store/product/MediumLarge/11/_5693151.jpg




http://content.nordstrom.com/ImageGallery/store/product/MediumLarge/2/_5686662.jpg




http://content.nordstrom.com/ImageGallery/store/product/MediumLarge/10/_5706570.jpg




http://content.nordstrom.com/ImageGallery/store/product/MediumLarge/6/_5702546.jpg






http://thebeautybunny.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/hair-style-with-bangs.jpg




(l)(l)(l)




(f)




Ancora Imparo.

I am still learning.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)





Take a walk:

http://www.greetingsu.com/images/autumn_trees-hor_1340002_high_crop.jpg




http://www.britsattheirbest.com/images/f_massachusetts_trees.gif




http://www.rinda.org/files/QuickSiteImages/AutumnTrees.jpg




http://www.cavinguk.co.uk/cycling/trips/05_November_2006/normal/AutumnTrees.jpg




http://pics4.city-data.com/cpicc/cfiles41001.jpg




http://www.crowleyboys.com/images/AutumnTrees.JPG




http://www.advisorsquare.com/advisors/rdthompsoninc/FallTrees.jpg




http://www.treelink.org/woodnotes/vol6/no3/images/fallTree.jpg




http://www.hoyt.com/assets/downloads/wallpaper/Fall_trees_1280x1024.jpg




http://www.jesuscreed.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/fall-trees.jpg






http://www.desktoprating.com/wallpapers/nature-wallpapers-pictures/fall-of-autumn-leaves-wallpaper.jpg




http://www.freefoto.com/images/19/02/19_02_1---Autumn-Leaves_web.jpg




http://www.radekaphotography.com/images/AutumnTreesNlake-L.jpg




http://www.canada-photos.com/data/media/7/autumn-trees_3234.jpg




http://www.canada-photos.com/data/media/11/autumn-trees_361.jpg




http://www.holoframe.com/Bushnix/Autumn-Trees-Andes-NY.jpg




http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/standard/images/giving_thanks/autumn_trees.jpg




http://www.annarborhomesguide.com/img/autumn-trees-in-michigan.jpg



http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2055/1532789365_3784f745e4.jpg







(l) This is my kind of "church":



http://www.alaska-in-pictures.com/data/media/6/fall-picture_10093.jpg



http://www.marketingminders.ca/images/features/fall_trees.jpg



http://pictures.unlimitedpowersource.com/renotahoealbums/carson/Fall_Trees_2.jpg





http://z.about.com/d/pittsburgh/1/0/6/i/fall_cemetery.jpg




http://www.moplants.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/fall%20trees%201.jpg






Very cool:


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1e/Fall_tree.png




(f)






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:curtain::curtain:




http://www.redlightfashionamsterdam.nl/


http://www.redlightfashionamsterdam.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=2






http://www.iamsterdam.com/






Send an eCard:

http://www.iamsterdam.com/service/send_an_e-card






Oh my, "In-room spa treatments":

http://www.717hotel.nl/

http://www.717hotel.nl/en/






http://www.episode.eu/splash.jsp







"High-style lingerie and sex shop with a cool collection of underwear":

http://www.stoutinternational.com/


http://www.stoutinternational.com/winkel.php?rubriek=over






:curtain::curtain:







"Let me entertain you, let me make you smile."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:D




Only Connect

SOMETIMES A PHONE IS JUST A PHONE.

BY ALEX KUCZYNSKI


http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/09/28/style/t/index.html#pageName=28kuczynski





;) Good thing I wasn't drinking coffee - I definitely would have choked.......






"Let me do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks."


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:)




http://www.hulu.com/watch/36608/talkshow-with-spike-feresten-cable-psa#s




:coffee:




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)




http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/04/sarah.palin.women.election



(y)(y)(y)




:coffee:



Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)



October 5, 2008

Homesteads


Up, Up and Away

By WM. FERGUSON

Shara and Scott Di Valerio wanted to build a deck for their hot tub, a place to relax in the woods on their five acres east of Seattle. But at some point, as they found themselves up in a stand of fir trees with a majestic view of Mount Rainier, their perspective shifted. What began as a 12-by-12-foot platform grew into a virtual treehouse complex: hot tub, living room (with phone, cable, Internet), writing alcove, observation platforms. Despite its inviting suspension bridge and 100-foot zipline, this is no kids’ tree fort. A typical evening among the gently swaying firs involves several grown-ups, a dip in the hot tub, Champagne and a few rounds of canasta. ‘‘It’s a way to be in nature,’’ Shara Di Valerio said. She let out a deflating laugh and quickly added: ‘‘Although it’s a luxurious kind of nature. It isn’t camping.’’

The luxury treehouse is a relatively recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a ‘‘master treehouse builder.’’ There is now. Thanks to a confluence of eco-conscious clients looking for sustainable hideaways and recent technological advances that allow elaborate structures to be hung higher and more safely than ever, this may be the golden age of the treehouse. There are now more than 10 dedicated builders of adult tree dwellings in the United States. But if any single person is responsible for the treehouse renaissance, it is Peter Nelson. In 1997, he and a partner founded TreeHouse Workshop, a Seattle firm that built a dozen treehouses last year (including the Di Valerios’). ‘‘I started more as a builder,’’ Nelson said, ‘‘but I’ve come to understand that what I’m really after is a place in nature. To be among the trees is pretty powerful stuff.’’

Nelson’s team can put just about anything into a tree. He has built everything from monkish yurts to multistory retreats, complete with every convenience, even plumbing. Some clients paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their treehouses; most were around $70,000; many cost far less. The most extravagant projects demanded sites with multiple trees * ‘‘You want to be in the trees, not on top of them,’’ Nelson said. But even the most bare-bones of them were hand-built, timber-framed structures, assembled by a small crew of craftsmen dangling in harnesses from tree branches.

One caveat for anyone considering life among the boughs: Treehouses move. A lot. Charley Greenwood, an engineer who supplies specialty parts for treehouses, lives full time in 700 square feet 14 feet up in an Oregon evergreen grove. He likens it to living on ‘‘a moored houseboat.’’ ‘‘You have to be comfortable with a certain amount of horizontal travel’’ is how he puts it. Which is just fine with Shara Di Valerio; not so much with her 12-year-old son. ‘‘When the wind picks up,’’ she says, ‘‘he’s the first to head down.’’




http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/realestate/keymagazine/105hstree-t.html



(l)(l)





"My right leg is Christmas. My left leg is New Year's.
Why don't you come and see me between the holidays?" - Mae West

(k) Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

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




http://www.athenaeumhotel.com/




http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/europe/britain/england/london/hotel-detail.html?vid=1154656894627




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



Stayed here and loved this place as well as the beautiful park across the street and well, it seemed as if just about anything at all was within walking distance.........what an amazing place!




Have a delightful start of your week.

Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)(y)




http://abcnews.go.com/politics/MatchoMatic/fullpage?id=5542139



(y)(y)(y)







"Cold is the medium of purity and lucidity," said Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. As the distraction of fall color subsides into a crystallized snow white, one's awareness is heightened and the world is honed to its essentials.



(f)

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)



http://www.theinsider.com/photos/1250909_Maggie_Gyllenhaal_arrives_at_the_Gen_Art_S OYJOY_Fashion_Show_In_LA




http://www.viewfashion.co.uk/




Galleries:

http://www.viewfashion.co.uk/





http://fashionolic.blogspot.com/2007/10/purple-fashion-purple-is-new-pink.html




http://www.fashion-era.com/trends_2007a/2007_new_trends_purple_clothes_fall_2006.htm





2009 anyone? http://www.trendstop.com/



http://www.designscene.net/2008/08/purple-fashion-fallwinter-200809-kate.html




(l)(l)
Purple lovers? LOVED this!:

http://www.like.com/shoes/purple_shoes?SID=GCN&CID=GCNSHO899404430




http://startwearingpurple.yahoo.com/



(l)(l)(l)




:coffee:




Oh my, look at the Fall foliage: Off to the back roads to meander....


SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

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



http://www.myswitzerland.com/en.cfm/home





Switzerland's largest Webcam Gallery:


http://www.myswitzerland.com/en/swisscams/cam_overview.cfm?CFID=4718236&CFTOKEN=5dfcb1c512d6b805-E75B692A-C7CC-7ADE-3546A2E2CB949D00&jsessionid=4a304de1430de73899d92d61676d56376012





http://www.myswitzerland.com/en.cfm/travel/trips





(l) Was here for a week and I LOVE this town!

http://www.myswitzerland.com/en/infra.cfm/rkey/796


The Old Town of Fribourg (German: Freiburg im Üechtland) is one of the finest examples of medieval architecture in Europe. It has preserved its medieval charms into modern times, with over 200 Gothic facades dating from the 15th century. There has always been a lively crossover of cultures in this bilingual town.


(l)(l)(l)


http://images.gadmin.ch/26758/images/detailsm/fribourg_185x196.jpg





http://www.myswitzerland.com/en/event_calendar/event_results.cfm?strubrik=1468





http://www.myswitzerland.com/en.cfm/interests/timetravel/offer-Travel_Timetravel-Hotels-list-all.html




http://abcnews.go.com/images/Travel/ht_Weggis_081002_main.jpg




http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=5957526&page=1





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



(f)






Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)



http://www.magazinecafeny.com/



(l)





:earth::earth: Get up and go somewhere....there's all kinds of places to discover. :earth::earth:

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:coffee-drink::coffee-drink:




An account of the Roman business panic of 33 A.D:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Influence_of_Wealth_in_Imperial_Rome/The_Business_Panic_of_33_A.D.






FDR's 1933 fireside chat on the banking crisis (select track No. 2 in this archive):


http://www.archive.org/details/fdrfiresidechat







22 of the World's Most Creative Alphabets:

http://reubenmiller.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/09/21-unexpected-a.html






The First Bullet-Proof Gentlemen’s Pocket Square:

http://www.srulirecht.com/index.php/projects/DAMDUR-THE-DAMNED.html







Word Magazine's map showing where iconic album-cover photographs were taken:

http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/album_atlas/FullListing.php







London artist Harriet Russell's playful tests of the Royal Mail's ability to decipher addresses:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/return-to-sender-artist-puts-royal-mail-to-the-test-955499.html







"The Unspeakable Odyssey of the Motionless Boy," on the technological efforts to help Erik Ramsey, fully conscious inside a paralyzed body, become the first person to have his thoughts translated directly into speech:

http://www.esquire.com/features/unspeakable-odyssey-motionless-boy-1008






Roadable aircraft:

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2008-10/flying-car-gets-real







A couple of tests of your estimating abilities:

http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/


http://www.zefrank.com/everysecond/index.html







The vacation photos of tourist Michael Hughes, featuring a novel use of cheap souvenirs:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1069772/The-amazing-photographs-worlds-famous-landmarks-replaced-cheap-souvenirs.html







Holographic TVs:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/06/holographic.television/







Print paper slipcovers for your CDs and DVDs using PaperCase:

http://liquidmongoose.com/paperCase.php






Flute 'n' Veg?

http://people.smartchat.net.au/~flutenveg/construction.html







Submersible airplanes:


http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33648






(y)(y) Geeky Cakes!


http://weburbanist.com/2008/09/24/20-creative-artistic-and-geeky-cake-designs/






Print what you like:


http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/







Printable vintage poison labels for your Halloween entertaining:

http://www.spookshows.com/poison/poison.htm






A big page of impressive concert posters:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/28/60-inspiring-concert-posters-from-10-amazing-artists/






http://www.studsterkel.org/htimes.php





http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003617






(f)




Major e longinquo reverentia.

Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.


Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

;)




If you read through enough Zen koans, you're quickly struck, as it were, by the number of those oblique lessons that end with a student getting slapped. It may be delivered by hand, stick, sandal or goat bite, but the slap, painful as it might be, is an act of compassion, a wordless reminder of the things we know but can never seem to remember or practice for very long -- things like the importance of living in the moment, or making sure loved ones know they're loved, or acceptance of our ultimate powerlessness. It's a stinging call to attention.


http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ZenSlap



Life doles these slaps out in regular and indiscriminate fashion, sometimes on an individual basis, sometimes on a much larger scale. And that's what's happening now, on Wall Street, on Main Street, and even on Sand Hill Road in prideful Silicon Valley, where tech companies working under the illusion that they were above the the economic storm are getting a humbling reminder that they're not. Some venture capitalists and angel investors, moved by crisis, are making news by urging their companies to retreat into the sound, common-sense, thrifty practices that they should have been following all along -- keep the burn rate down, the cash flow positive, the head count reasonable, the priorities pared and focused. (The irony of this advice coming from those who have enabled and encouraged more than their share of illusions has not gone unnoticed.)



http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10062194-93.html



http://gigaom.com/2008/10/08/sequoia-rings-the-alarm-bell-silicon-valley-in-trouble/



http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/angel-investor-ron-conway-adresses-his-portfolio-companies-over-financial-meltdown/



http://gigaom.com/2008/10/09/what-startups-can-learn-from-sequoias-doomsday-warning/



http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081009/irony-alert-bubble-making-venture-capitalists-start-popping-them/




Despite all evidence to the contrary, we know this stuff, somewhere down deep. Heck, we ought to. The last slap was only eight years ago, when the dotcom bubble popped and people suddenly remembered the importance of things like revenue and quality. But the valley's short memory -- in many ways an advantage when it comes to innovating and moving past failures -- does not serve it well in these matters. Now, painful as it is, we've been granted another shot at enlightenment. Maybe this time we'll take it. But don't bet on it.





:coffee::coffee:




"In the midst of Winter I learned there was in me an invincible Summer." - Camus

Sweetlady

[sweetlady]

:D





Free tours of Central Park's Belvedere Castle:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/10/12/travel/1012-FRUGAL_4.html






Other free experiences:


http://freenyc.net/


http://clubfreetime.com/new_york.asp





(f)



Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.

SL & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(f)(f)




http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061349591/Hollywood_Pinups/index.aspx





Yes, it is Susan Sarandon:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31oYCn2UYlL._SS400_.jpg





http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31AXYcG5DcL._SS400_.jpg





Book Review:

In the 1980s, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original Varga Girl's first appearance in "Esquire", the magazine commissioned Timothy White to create a contemporary version of the perennially popular pinup. Simultaneously paying homage to Vargas yet completely reinventing the form, White created a series of pin-up portraits of the hottest actresses and models at the time. White's portraits were comparable to Vargas' in their poses, attitude, and playfulness, but were over the top in their creative approach, imagination, and use of digital technology. White began by shooting most of the models completely nude (Vargas, by the way, drew his images as nudes, too, but was forced to draw on their clothes at "Esquire's" insistence!), save for high-heeled shoes and embellishments such as dozens of real diamonds used as gloves and pasties!Through a digital process, White then created clothes for his models - and the ultimate effect was unbelievable.Imagine supermodel Vendela looking back over her shoulder in translucent lingerie; Cindy Crawford, nude save for a leopard bra and cuffs; Christie Brinkley in black combat boots and racy camouflage; Tyra Banks floating in a sea of bubbles, nude except for white pantyhose and heels. These gorgeous portraits, which also included Bridget Hall, Stephanie Seymour, Elle McPherson, Rachel Williams, Naomi Campbell, Elizabeth Berkley, and Angie Everhart, appeared one at a time over a period of over a year as a regular feature in the magazine. "Esquire" then went on to use the images in a major advertising campaign. Models and starlets participated because it was great - and very tasteful - publicity.

http://www.play.com/Books/Books/-/135/192/-/5826936/Hollywood-Pinups/Product.html?searchtype=genre




(f)





Ancora Imparo.

"I am still learning."


Sweetlady & WTB :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(l)(l)(l)





http://www.royalscotsman.com/web/rs/rs_a2a_home.jsp?c=ppc&p=central&cr=trs&gclid=CIzVjIDRrJYCFQOaFQoduw88zQ






Wow - lots of "Luxury Train" links along the top on this web site:

http://www.royalscotsman.com/web/rs/rs_a2a_home.jsp?c=ppc&p=central&cr=trs&gclid=CIzVjIDRrJYCFQOaFQoduw88zQ






5 of 11 cars are kitchen cars! Do passengers eat their way across the countryside? ;)

http://www.luxury-trains.co.uk/british-pullman.htm



(f)






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

:piano: :piano:




Meetways, to assure driving-distance equity when meeting halfway:

http://www.meetways.com/






Can't remember the song but some of the lyrics? For scratching that itch:

http://ws.lyricfind.com/demosearch.do







A collection of 21st century Texas tintypes:

http://www.revealing-character.com/index.htm







Techcult's 150 best online Flash games:

http://www.techcult.com/the-150-best-online-flash-games/







Kongregate's series of "shootorials" to walk you through building one of your own:

http://www.kongregate.com/labs







Time Warp interactive video gallery:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/time-warp/video/interactive/interactive.html







http://www.paoweb.com/gfmember.htm






For composing and scoring in your browser:

http://www.noteflight.com/info/learn_more






Church tanks?

http://www.kuksi.com/?q=node/634







Calculate fuel expenses for a trip based on current gas prices and the model of your car:

http://www.costtodrive.com/






:curtain::curtain:






Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.

How well you live makes a difference, not how long.



Sweetlady & Wyatt the Boxer :walkdog:

[sweetlady]

(y)(y)



"Most of us, and nearly all of my generation, are route learners in cyberspace, managing to find our way through layers of folders, network connections, URLs and social graphs by recalling links and connections. " - Bill Thompson



How to lose yourself in cyberspace


When it comes to getting around cyberspace Bill Thompson sometimes feels like a stranger in a very strange land.

I have just deleted 15 gigabytes of data from my laptop.

Gone are the unwanted video clips, the duplicated photos, the filed columns and the unlistened-to music, all consigned to the great Trashcan in the sky.

Yet it weighs the same as it always did, just over two kilos to carry around with me from meeting to cafe to home every day.

And it's still 2.75cm thick even though it now contains significantly less debris.

When I clear out my paper files the recycling box rapidly fills up as my shelves are emptied of unwanted reports, old drafts of completed work and the rest of the detritus that accumulates around any freelance journalist.

And once I'm done the folders are thinner and lighter, offering me clear evidence of a job well done and rewarding me by the change in their physical aspect.


There are no such rewards for the assiduous hard drive cleaner, which is perhaps one of the reasons why it is so easy to live with a bulging mail inbox - it doesn't actually bulge.

Perhaps the covers of our computers should change colour to indicate just how cluttered they are, so the social embarrassment of pulling out a pulsating red laptop at a meeting would be the equivalent of having your briefcase spill open on the escalator to reveal half-eaten sandwiches and unread papers.

Or we could develop the data equivalent of the diving tanks on submarines, taking on extra water as the number of unopened 10MB files on your hard drive increases.

Somehow, I don't think this will catch on.


Lost and found

Part of the problem is that new technologies have entered our lives so rapidly that we have not yet developed the appropriate psychological mechanisms needed to cope with them.

Anyone over the age of 30 can probably remember the first time they used a computer, never mind their first mobile phone.

Mine was halfway through my student years when I used an Acorn Atom, the precursor of the BBC Micro, to run an experiment I was doing as part of my psychology degree.

That means that many of the assumptions we make when dealing with computers are actually based on our childhood experiences with physical objects such as books.

So we should not be surprised if the strategies we adopt do not always work properly.

It bears some resemblance to the different ways people find their way around the physical world, something I also learned while studying psychology at university.

Route learners remember the specific instructions needed to get from A to B, recalling whether to turn left or right, which waymarks to look out for and so on.

This can be very efficient, but if you stray from the path then you can be in real trouble, as anyone who has tried to follow a garbled set of directions from the pub to a party will tell you.

It's also tricky when you try to get back to where you started from, as routes tend not to be easily reversible.

The alternative is to build maps in your head, constructing an internal model of the space on which you then "draw" the route, making links between the instructions you have been given and a larger representation.

With a good enough map you can get back on track if you take a wrong turn, and it's relatively straightforward to turn around and retrace your steps because you aren't relying in looking out for a church spire that is actually behind you.


Spaces and places

Something similar seems to happen when it comes to navigating the world of data stored on our computers, the world that SF writer William Gibson named "cyberspace".

Most of us, and nearly all of my generation, are route learners in cyberspace, managing to find our way through layers of folders, network connections, URLs and social graphs by recalling links and connections.

But soon we will have a generation capable of dealing with the complexity by building maps and managing internal models of the information spaces we all spend so much time interacting with.

My son has spent his entire life surrounded by computers and is a keen and enthusiastic gamer. When he plays Oblivion or Halo or Star Wars Lego he immerses himself in the virtual world shown on the screen in a way that I find simply impossible, no matter how hard I try.

I am always conscious of the controller in my hand and the flickering pixels on the screen in front of me as I wander through the game world. He is inside it, projecting his awareness into the point of view of the character he is playing and aware of the game environment surrounding him.

He knows I don't have this skill, and every now and then when we're playing a co-operative level on Halo he will turn and shoot me, just to make the point clear.

The question is whether this ability to perceive the on-screen world as an informational ecosystem will be carried over to the relatively dull context of files, folders and hyperlinks that we see on our laptops and desktop PCs.

If it happens it will mark a significant development in our relationship with computers, as we will no longer need the real-world indicators that have worked for us so far, like the weight of a report or the number of pages left to read in a book.


Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7667198.stm



:coffee:




Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes.


SL & WTB :walkdog: