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For fans of electronic music, this should be a triumphant moment. Eight years on from electroclash, that psychic rift in the club-music continuum, its aesthetic and ideology finally seem to have crossed over. Little Boots is jamming on her Tenori-on with Bill Turnbull on BBC Breakfast, while La Roux hovers, stubbornly, in the upper reaches of the charts. DIY electro is coming home. Rule Brit-ronica!
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it occured to me, as I was standing in line waiting for my sinfully boring small (a.k.a. tall) drip coffee, that there's a bunch of reasons why Starbucks is every( where, not the least of which is that they cater to any increasingly engagist society. We've all heard about how Starbucks broke the mold on the location of their stores -- they decided to put themselves smack dab in the middle of where people were al( ready buying coffee. Not so radical, but then they'd put two or three or four stores in that same area within blocks of each other. The conventional wisdom is that the stores should have burned each other out. But they didn't. They ALL thrived. We've heard, too, of the fact that Starbucks works hard on its brand and image -- wherever you go in the world, you know when you're in a Starbucks. A triple caramel macchiato looks and tastes the same whether you're in DC or New Zealand (I know, I've checked).
While it seems like there is a Starbucks on just about every corner in America today, that was not always the case. There was a time when they were just another neighborhood coffee shop that was trying to stay alive. The company was pretty much made up of a few coffee shops in Seattle for about 10 years before a revelation occurred that would change this company and how people thought about coffee for many years to come. While on vacation, Howard Schultz started to take particular note of how the cafÊs were run in Italy. He fell in love with the concept and set ups and brought new and old ideas alike back to Seattle with him. Old in that they were from Italy and new in that nobody was making use of these ideas in the United States. It is unlikely that he ever dreamed how successful these ideas would make his company. Over the next decade, Starbucks continued to grow as more and more people fell in love with the different twists that Starbucks was introducing people to and the various blends that they served. It almost seemed as though every person that went to Seattle told a story to everyone once they got back home about this incredible cup of coffee that they had or some new and interesting coffee drink that they had just tried. This buzz made it quite obvious that the next prudent move was to start opening up Starbucks across the United States. The last 20 or so years have been quite a ride as Starbucks has gone from a local coffee shop to a publicly traded company. For most people, there are two choices of coffee in the morning if they are not making it themselves: Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks. Starbucks has taken coffee to a totally different level and turns traditional noncoffee lovers into addicts with some of its other creations such as the Frappuccino. While some may consider Starbucks a Yuppie style shop, there is little doubt that they do coffee right. Forget all of the fancy variations, their regular blends always offer you a great and fresh cup of coffee at any time of the day. Starbucks is here to stay and coffee will never be the same.
You can’t make someone love you, even on Valentine’s Day, no matter what Hallmark, Godiva and FTD may say. But how much do we really know about how love works? What is it that attracts a particular man to a particular woman and (with any luck) vice versa? To see what light science could shed on the subject, I called Professor Martha McClintock at the University of Chicago. McClintock is an expert on odor and behavior who published a famous study in the early 1970s that showed that the menstrual cycles of college women living in dorms became synchronized through exposure to one another’s pheromones, those faint chemical signals released from the skin that control the mating rituals of much of the animal kingdom. McClintock has a new study, published in the February issue of Nature Genetics, that makes an even more provocative link between sex and odor--specifically, the odor of a T shirt worn by a man on two consecutive days. The experiment was simple. The T shirts were carefully prepared (no cologne, no cigarettes, no sex) and then placed in boxes where they could be smelled but not seen. Forty-nine unmarried women were asked to sniff the boxes and choose which box they would prefer “if they had to smell it all the time.”
Read more: http://www. time.com/ time/ magazine/ arti-
The results would have made Sigmund Freud proud. The women were attracted to the smell of a man who was genetically similar--but not too similar--to their dads. McClintock thinks there’s an evolutionary explanation. “Mating with someone too similar might lead to inbreeding,” she says. Mating with someone too different “leads to the loss of desirable gene combinations.” McClintock isn’t suggesting you can attract a mate by smell alone, but that hasn’t discouraged companies like Erox from bottling pheromones and stopping just short of calling them aphrodisiacs. Marketing websites feature links to scientific papers on the power of pheromones. I spoke to Dr. David Berliner, CEO of Pherin Pharmaceuticals, who did some of the initial research. While working at the University of Utah with natural compounds produced by human skin, he noticed a surprising change in the behavior of his male and female colleagues. “They developed an increased level of camaraderie that was hard to explain,” he says. There were smiles, eye contact and increased approachability until the skin extracts were removed, at which point the group reverted to normal behavior. But even Berliner balks at categorizing pheromones as aphrodisiacs. “I’ve been looking for an aphrodisiac for 11 years, and I’m convinced that there is no such thing,” he says. The Food and
Platform shoes could be the eighth architectural wonder. They are remarkable examples of design but, like most of the seven fabled monuments of the ancient world, surely these extravagant pillars of footwear cannot last. However exhilarating the shoe’s concept, those wearers who equate height with power must finally acknowledge the obvious: Platform defies function. At the recent Paris fashion shows, towering soles topped out at 18cm, with designers such as Christian Lacroix and John Galliano showing all manner of sparkles, tassels and lacings up top. At such heights, the
There are only a few things in life that are sure. Some would say death and taxes, but those who are immersed in the fashion world would say that trends are even more dependable. No matter which era of fashion you identify with the most, all you have to do is wait around long enough and you are almost guaranteed to see elements of that trend emerge in current fashion once again. Bell bottoms are one example, and another is platform heels. If you are seeking a way to bring a little funk back into your wardrobe and your life, there can be no quicker way that scooping up a pair of platform boots. If you’ve never heard of platform shoes before, you should know that they first emerged toward the end of the 1960’s and the beginning of the 1970’s. They were simply shoes that have very thick soles, usually under the toe, but sometimes also under the heel. These thick soles are the feature that eventually gave them their name, platform shoes, because it was almost as if you were walking around on your own personal platform. Once the platform trend caught on by 1975, it was considered essential that they would have at least two inch thick soles and five inch high heels in order to be considered hip at all. Something that may surprise you about platform shoes is that women were not the only ones wearing them. Men that identified with the fast paced, sexy disco scene were also known to be spotted wearing platforms, however, there’s usually didn’t feature the five inch high heels. If you weren’t alive in the 1970’s you should know that it was most certainly a time of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Those who had escaped the era of the hippie were looking for a shoe with a little more edge to it, and platform shoes were what they discovered. Soon the genres of fashion and popular art began to merge and swirl together. The result was platforms that became so ostentatious that they were pieces of art in themselves. Psychedelic colors and patterns were the norm for those that wore the most fashionable platform shoes. Women wearing platform shoes were seen in many different kinds of popular art, like magazines, photography, fashion shows and even paintings. People all over the world were wearing platform shoes and loving the way it elevated their fashion.
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I’d seen the movie DIRTY PRETTY THINGS listed on The Independent Film Channel a number of times but I always passed it up. When it was shown again recently I made time to sit down and watch it simply because I wanted to see if Chiwetel Ejiofor would be as good in movie as he was in “Serenity”. And you know what, he sure as hell was.
Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is an illegal Nigerian immigrant living in London. By day he drives cab and at night he works at a really nice hotel where he supervises the Russian doorman Ivan (Zlatko Buric) and the cleaning staff, including the maids. One of them is the Turkish immigrant girl Senay (Audrey Tatou) who has fled an arraigned marriage that would have been just as good as slavery. She and Okwe have a working friendship: he cleans and cooks for her and she lets him sleep on her couch. Okwe’s boss Mr. Juan (Sergi Lopez) is kinda on the sleazy side but Okwe has no idea how really bad the man is until one night when Okwe goes up to one of the rooms to fix an overflowing toilet and finds a human heart in it. Okwe takes the heart to Mr. Juan, suggesting that somebody should call the police. Mr. Juan, knowing Okwe’s situation quite well, dials the police and holds out the receiver, daring him to report the heart. It turns out that Mr. Juan is running a lucrative black market organ operation out of the hotel. Give up one of your kidneys and he’ll give you a passport. For the immigrant subculture of London, a passport is The Holy Grail, The Ark of The Covenant and The Sword In The Stone all in one. It means that you can escape a life of drudgery and servitude, the poverty of working a below minimum wage job and go somewhere else, like New York or Los Angeles and start a new life. Senay has a cousin who lives in New York and she desperately wants to go there. Preferably with Okwe, with whom she has fallen in love with.
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So should you see DIRTY PRETTY THINGS? I’d say aby yes. But don’t go into it expecting spense thriller even though it’s got eleat genre. It’s an absorbing and wonderful a subculture of the society that exists in evy major city in the world and one that we may not want to admit exists or acknowledge. But the people who inhabit that world are ones we see every day of our lives and whether we want to admit it or not, they’re human just like us and have dreams and hopes and aspirations of a better life just
AND THEN THERE WERE FLOWERS
floral frenzy which has dominated the Paris prêt-à-porter season, took an exotic turn on the Kenzo catwalk. The Sardininan designer, Antonio Marras, who is the creative director of the label, was inspired by the Amazon and Werner Herzog’s cult film, “Fitzcarraldo”. Birdsong screeched and chirped from the loudspeakers and footage of jungle birds and animals were displayed on small tv screens nestling in the foliage. It was the perfect backdrop for Marras’s exotic fantasy of flora and fauna which characterised his spring/summer 2008 Kenzo collection. Short smocks and long, maxi-dresses came in hibiscus and orchid-printed silk, lacquered to give the effect of having been showered with water. Jacquard, kimono-tunics were knitted in the same parrot-bright patterns and embellished with silver studs, while long, multi-coloured, striped cardigans were worn with bra-tops and long skirts featuring a mélange of floral and geometric prints, all accessorized with matching shoes and bags. Jackets in rainbow stripes of sequins were paired with full skirts, emblazoned with flowers of every hue, or ‘zoave’ trousers, caught at the ankles with beaded cuffs. Marras also showed “bird-woman” dresses, finished with elaborate plumage at the neck, and trapeze-line cocktail gowns, hand-stitched entirely from hand-painted feathers. Bold, bright colour was also the key feature of the collection by the Lebanese designer, Elie Saab, who is renowned for his “red carpet” gowns and has an international clientele which includes Queen Rania of Jordan, Beyoncé and the actresses Dame Helen Mirren, Diane Kruger and Halle Berry. Saab showed a jewel-bright evening gowns, cut on the bias in swathes of silk, satin and chiffon to undulate around the body. In ruby-red, emerald, topaz and lapis, they featured shimmering crystal
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