Fashion: The Italians Make Me Want To Cry

I was invited to the Bulgari 125th, but had to be in Omaha instead. Such a jet set lifestyle....

Fashion: Ready For Fall???

Thanks to Mr. Sartorialist

Supreme Court - Can You Really Take Yourself Out Of You?

Unless you have been under a rock for the last several days, you have been introduced to the latest nominee for the supreme court - Sonya Sotomayer.

Most likely she will be confirmed, but I have been very interested in the debate surrounding her candidacy. In essense, it is thought that she will be a judicial activist because she is a woman, is hispanic, and in a few of her talks have mentioned that who she is has formed what she has done as a person. Her record seems pretty mainstream, and there generally is no correlation between what is expected of a nominee and their actual record over time (liberal or conservative)

What I question, is that is is humanly possible to really practice judicial restaint (strict adherace to consititution)? While it is theorhetically possible, I really wonder what all the hullabaloo is about. I do not think it is possible for anyone to totally take themselves out of themselves and pay only attention to the law.

Everyone spends the day looking at the world through their unique lense and interpretation - interpretation of words, situations, emotions. They are story making machines that come directly from that person's experiences.

Maybe it is just refreshing for someone to be honest about that? I think so.

Bravo To President Obama

My opinion is that Obama's stance on fighting terror and how to engage internationally is dead on.

In the spirit of full disclosure so you can decide for yourself - here is his speech and the rebuttal by Cheney today (why do I wish he would just go away - kind of like old Inuit people?) .

While I am on the topic, am I the only one who thinks it is totally hypocritical of the democratic congress to both want to think about persecuting some from the previous administration, yet not be willing to allocate the funds to close Guantanamo?

And a note to Nancy Pelosi: there are three options - you were either not paying attention during your briefings, or you are lying to make it seem like you did not know about the advanced techniques, or the CIA did really lie to you. Any of those options is appalling, and if you are accusing them of something you need to back it up with facts. My guess is the CIA records are not in your favor. While I do not like what the administration did, nor agree with their reasoning, they truly believed it would make us safer. It is time to let it go.

Economics 101 - Why I Am Not A Fascist - A Defensive Tirade

My mother and I have been having a very harmless back and forth about if I actually did live on 17,000$ a year.

So let me be clear, at any level of my earning - I have never had to want for anything, I have never had to fear that if there was a real problem that I would not have sources of cash, I have never had to "pick myself up by the bootstraps". And when I lived at $17,000 my parents were very generous with presents including helping with my wardrobe, and my Hanuka present was a gym membership. They were also very generous with my friends as well, providing a place to stay and more meals than I can count.

But, I have also paid off all my bills on time, declined a lot of credit offered to me, and I bought a reasonable apartment that I could afford - erring on the side of a safe neighborhood and less than I was told I could afford (with a 30 year fixed). I also rented until I was 35 because that was what I could afford and was a better solution. In addition, by most standards, I have "performed" like the show pony I was raised to be (without a husband or grand kids, but I can't control everything!).

Enough of my very personal tirade - my point is that if the government needs to help people who cannot afford to live without food, shelter and medical care - they should not make the credit card industry pay for that - especially when that industry is very clear about the ramifications of late payment. They should provide a subsidy. That would be, and is the least distortive to whole economy. In fact, if my interest rates go up as a result, I would rather have the appropriate taxes levied on me to help the people who actually need help. I recognize that someone has to help and someone has to pay, and that I, as a very very lucky person may have to help subsidize that.

I am happy to help pay for what people need, not what they want, and in the form of a less distortive mechanism. And that, I learned with all that fancy education my parents helped me get so graciously.

Once last thing - this does not take away from the culpability of the very greedy people who helped get us into this mess. Life is more nuanced than that, as we all know......

Come To Mama, My Pretty Pretties...

I hope to look this good when I get several years older. This man is so cool with that coat over his suit - yummy! What a great couple, style and smiles!

I need to go buy some baggy men's pants. It was a look I used to wear alot in the early 80's and I love to see it coming back....
Toooooo pretty!!!! This synthesizes everything feminine.
I would wear this with olive harem pants and a white ribbed tank top. In ecstasy, just thinking about it.

Rated R: Mary Roach on TED

This is a deliciously naughty talk about..... shhhhh..... SEX and the orgasm. We can all learn a little something - huh?

Am I The Only One Who Believes In Personal Responsibility?

Ok, so I may be that anal girl who pays off my credit card every month. Indeed, when I made $17,000 a year, I lived within my means and now that I make a lot more, I do the same.

I am a little incensed about the fact that I may how have higher credit card bills (fees and less benefits) even though I have perfect credit. See this article from yesterday's NYTimes about limitations on credit card companies and how they will have limits on the interest rates they can charge.

I know that this will make me sound like a fascist, but seriously where is the personal responsibility? When you get a credit card, they are very clear (if you take the time to read the documents), about the terms. If you don't like the terms, then don't get the credit.

I recognize that not everyone is as fortunate as I am (in fact 99% of the world is not), but the idea that people barrow to buy loads of crap that is not necessary (otherwise known as TV's, Cable, Video games, clothes etc...) and then I have to suffer is really frustrating.

Are Reason and Faith Mutually Exclusive?

The NYTimes opinion page had an amazing analysis about using the need for proof as the key piece undermining faith as a concept.

What I personally think is food for thought is that perhaps the complexity of the universe (s) is proof of god. And indeed perhaps god can be separated from organized religion.

Just something to think about when you have a moment.

60 Minutes: Anna Wintour

All I have to say after 7 years in fashion is that The Devil Wears Prada was not an exaggeration.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Katy Towell - A Sad Little Tale Of A Little Girl

I am finally back from Seattle. What an amazing visit. My friend Corvi turned me onto Katy Towell.
Check out this haunting short - she is an amazing illustrator.

Goodbye Hans - Please Don't Haunt Anyone

This is from the Economist - This guy had a cool job!

AS FAR as Hans Holzer was concerned, his Uncle Henry had started it. Uncle Henry, despite his humdrum life as a Viennese shop assistant, was a very strange man, who could feel “imprints” from the past in his 18th-century bed, and who taught his young nephew to say good morning to the fairies in the trees. After he had passed over he did his damnedest, via a British medium, to keep in touch with Hans, who had emigrated to New York. This ran up a fortune in transatlantic telephone bills. “Tell him the dog’s name was Rigo,” cried Uncle Henry, faintly and through static from the Other Side, when he thought his bona fides were doubted.

At four, Hans found himself pretending to read ghost stories in nursery class to a circle of terrified small friends. At 43, with a doctorate in parapsychology (so he said) and dozens of investigations under his belt, he produced “Ghost Hunter”, the first of around 140 books on haunted houses, “beings of light”, extrasensory perception and hair-raising subjects generally. American television snapped him up. His calm, intense look, his deliberate walk and his soft Austrian accent were somehow both scary and reassuring, just right for footage of night windows banging and curtains inexplicably blowing.

Mr Holzer was keen to tell Americans that ghosts were nothing to be frightened of. Though proud to be the country’s premier ghost hunter, a term he had coined himself, he preferred to be called “Doctor” or, better still, “Professor”, and thought of as a scientist. He dealt only in facts, he said, elicited from witnesses whom he interviewed repeatedly to be sure they were not crazy. It was not a matter of belief or disbelief, but of hard evidence, even if it had a shimmery and ectoplasmic look.

Burying Aunt Minnie

Ghosts, he explained, were perfectly natural. They were simply human beings who were not aware they were dead. They had shed their outer bodies but not their more sensitive inner ones, in which they walked about much as before. They were either in emotional turmoil, trapped between the worlds of “here” and “there” and throwing vases to get attention, or they were placid “stay-behinds”, who had died so peacefully that they never bothered to leave the place they knew. That explained, said Mr Holzer, how a grieving family could bury Aunt Minnie at midday, and find her still sitting in her chair at three o’clock.

He seldom saw ghosts himself, though in his 40s he felt his shining, nightgowned mother push his head back on the pillow to save him from a migraine. But he found that a high-speed Polaroid camera could catch them, and that skilled mediums, sometimes young women trained by himself on his own “doctor’s” couch (for ghosts were not all he chased), could channel their conversations. This was the only equipment he took to haunted houses. There, making himself comfortable, he would ask the ghost to explain his or her problems and then encourage it to leave for the spirit world. “She’s free to go,” he instructed his medium to tell Margaret Hatton, a young woman from 1843 still trapped in a house in Port Clyde, Maine, where she was worrying about tallow for the lamps and the empty root cellar. “To Kennebunk?” came the ghost’s eager response.

His most famous investigation was not his most successful. In January 1977, in company with Ethel Johnson Meyers, he went round 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island. The house, cold, empty and boarded up, was a wooden Dutch Colonial at the edge of the water. Three years before a young man had murdered his parents and siblings, one by one, in their beds. Since then, sounds of doors slamming and bands playing had been heard there. Swarms of flies infested the place. Green slime oozed from the hall walls, crucifixes rotated and a child with red glowing eyes was seen at the top of the stairs. Mr Holzer, ever the scientist, dismissed most of that. The solution to the “Amityville Horror”, as Hollywood soon called it, was simple demonic possession by an Indian chief, who was channelled by Ms Meyers. Hollywood, with whom Mr Holzer had rather tense relations, promptly made a sequel, “Amityville II: The Possession”. The Amityville Historical Society, however, could not find any link between the house and Indians, annoyed or otherwise.

Mr Holzer never knew whether his attempts to nudge ghosts to the Other Side (another of his coinings) were successful, or not. He did not make it sound particularly enticing. No angels, he said confidently, and no “fellows in red underwear with pitchforks” either. Disappointingly, the whole place was much like here, but with no sense of time and with everything “strung out further” in the thinner atmosphere. Even more disappointingly, it was run by a giant and orderly bureaucracy, in which spirits had to ask permission and list their motives if they wished to contact mediums and had to stand in line, waiting for a clerk to find suitable parents, in order to be born again. “They” used the word “clerk”, he said. And “they” had also instructed him to tell the world the truth about ghosts. They would be irritated if he failed, and would put him down for further education.

No funeral arrangements were announced for Mr Holzer. He did not intend, however, to stick around.

Whoa Black Betty

This is one of the most rockin' songs ever. And this is one darn entertaining video - got to love slightly slimy early 80's rednecks.

Word Of The Week: Malarkey

Imagine a world where you can call someone on their bullsh*t, by saying something witty like - "Enough of this malarkey!"

Main Entry: ma·lar·key
Variant(s): also ma·lar·ky \mə-ˈlär-kē\
Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1929
1. insincere or foolish talk

Fishies!