Good Vibrations

by Hilary Howard

TOOTHPASTE? Check. Tampons? Check. Vibrator? Check!

For years, vibrators were bought quietly in sex shops, and later online, arriving in discreet unmarked packages. They were rarely discussed, other than perhaps during a late-night girl-talk session fueled by many glasses of pinot grigio. But now you can find them advertised on MTV and boldly displayed at Duane Reade, Walgreens and other mainstream drugstores, mere steps from the Bengay and Dr. Scholl’s.

The newest model on the shelves is the Tri-Phoria ($39.99), created by the condom company Trojan after a study the company conducted in 2008 in partnership with the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University revealed that over half of American women had used vibrators, and of that group, nearly 80 percent had shared them with their partners. James Daniels, vice president for marketing at Trojan, said: “The idea really came from consumers. They kept telling us vibrators, vibrators. And we just laughed. And then we realized they were serious.”

The Tri-Phoria joins the A:Muse Personal Pleasure Massager by LifeStyles, which arrived in stores in January, and the Allure, by Durex, which made its over-the-counter debut in 2008; both models are $19.99. Alan Cheung, senior brand manager for Durex, said that sales of the company’s vibrating products are up 60 percent over the last six months, compared with the same period last year. “Consumers are definitely not shy about this kind of purchase in the retail environment,” he said.

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The Golf Swing Explained

[ed.  Two approaches to the golf swing.  I'm more a student of the second.]

Exit Strategy

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Card Shark

You bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel and rented the car. But have you packed the right credit card?

by  Michelle Higgins

As credit card companies vie for a favored position in customers’ wallets, they’re pitching new travel enticements, from waiving foreign transaction fees that can add up to 3 percent to your purchases abroad to picking up fees for checked baggage. Earlier this month, for example, American Express did away with the 2.7 percent foreign transaction fees on international purchases for Platinum Card holders, and added two new travel benefits — Priority Pass Select airport lounge access in more than 300 cities worldwide and free membership to Global Entry, which offers expedited security clearance for pre-approved travelers entering the United States.

British Airways and Chase brought back a promotion they had used two years ago — an impressive sign-on bonus of 100,000 miles (equivalent to two round-trip coach tickets from North America to London) to those who sign up for the British Airways Visa Signature Card, which has a $95 annual fee, by May 6 and spend $2,500 within the first three months. And Citigroup dropped foreign transaction fees on two of its new ThankYou Rewards cards that were introduced at the start of the year and allow users to redeem points for flights, hotels, cars, travel packages and activities.

But travelers should pay close attention to the fine print when comparing card offers to be sure the benefits outweigh the costs. For example, the American Express Platinum card comes with a hefty $450 annual fee. The range of perks that go along with it include $200 a year for airline fees like checked bags or in-flight meals, access to Priority Pass Select airport lounges (normally $249 for 10 visits), and zero foreign transaction fees. If you’re a road warrior who spends more time in airports and on planes than in your own home, it may be worth it. But it’s probably not the best card for the occasional flier. “If you’re getting it just for the currency conversion waiver, you will probably give them more than that back when you pay the annual fee,” said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com, a financial research site.

To make the annual fees worthwhile, “look for a card with additional travel insurance like luggage replacement, emergency funds (in case the card is lost or stolen), car rental insurance and trip cancellation insurance,” said Carmen Wong Ulrich, author of “The Real Cost of Living,” who speaks from experience. After dinging a rental car while driving along St. John’s rough and hilly roads, “all we had to do was spend 10 minutes on the phone with AmEx, fill out a little paperwork and we never saw a bill for repairs,” she said. “Well worth the $125 annual fee” for the Gold card.

Also consider what kinds of perks are most valuable to you, and how much you need to spend to make rewards programs pay off. “The most important part of choosing the best credit card is finding one that best suits your personal needs and lifestyle,” said Amber Stubbs, managing editor at CardRatings.com, noting that she likes Capital One’s Venture Rewards card, which was introduced last year and lets users earn and redeem miles for any travel purchase regardless of the airline, hotel or cruise company. “However, for someone that frequents a particular airline,” she added, “it’s not a bad idea to get a card specific to that airline.”

To help you decide what to put in your wallet, here’s a list of some of the best cards for travelers, none of which are linked to a specific airline.

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Lester Bang's Basement

What it means to have all music instantly available.

by Bill Wyman

Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it. That's a fantasy shared by many music fans—and, mutatis mutandis, film buffs as well. We all know the Internet has made available a lot of things that were previously hard to get. Recently, though, there are indications of something even more enticing, almost paradisiacal, something that might have made Bangs put down the cough syrup and sit up straight: that almost everything is available.

Music and movie fans of a certain age and a certain bent have strong visceral responses to this issue of availability. We grew up in an age of excited, roiling change in the music and film worlds, but the vicissitudes of the technologies and industries involved made the logistics of merely keeping up—much less being an expert—a time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes impossible chore. I won't bore you with the details, but let me tell you—it was a drag.

Actually, I will bore you with the details. The music you wanted to hear wasn't played on the radio and you couldn't find the records you wanted to buy. You couldn't even find the magazines that told you what records you should want to buy. It was almost impossible to see filmed footage of the artists you wanted to see. And movie fans? We scurried like rats after what could be, for all we knew, once-in-a-lifetime viewing opportunities to see this or that film at movie theaters or in unexpected showings on television.

Fast forward a few decades, and we're approaching a singularity of sorts—one in which the digital convergence, in a gradual warm flash, is nearly complete. If you were born to this it's an unshakeable, seemingly permanent feature of the world. The rest of us marvel that a significant part of everything out there that should be digitized and made available has. And once it's out there, getting your hands on it is a fairly simple process. The concept of "rarity" has become obsolete. A previously "rare" CD or movie, once it's in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that's a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don't have a CD in stock.)

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it's no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there's very little out there you might want that you can't find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

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Oh, No...

Children of the King

by Kelly Anderson

Most adolescents know what it’s like to be embarrassed by their parents when friends come over. Sometimes the shame involves lame jokes and stories, and, if you’re particularly unlucky, the naked baby pictures come out. But visual artist and director Stephanie Comilang had the edge on this one—her father is an Elvis impersonator.

Comilang recalls enduring embarrassment when her father, Steve, would burst into “Love Me Tender” and the like in front of her friends when she was growing up in Toronto. To deal with the shame, Comilang would hide behind the couch. But as she got older, she started feeling differently: Her friends loved it when her dad hammed it up in front of them, and Comilang started to feel, well, a kind of pride.

About 10 years ago, when she was 18, Comilang decided that in order to deal with her conflicting feelings she’d create a sort of improvised support group via a zine to be titled Children of the King.

“There are equal parts love and ‘Oh, Dad,’ and it’s always been like that,” she says. “I had these feelings of complete embarrassment, especially when I was younger. The zine was this really cheap way of reaching out to other people.”

Children of the King was made up of photocopied pictures of Comilang with her dad dressed in Elvis-style jumpsuits and short reports of her experiences as a child of an Elvis impersonator. One anecdote in the short-lived zine (there were only two issues) read: “For Christmas last year I bought Daddy a gorgeous pair of shiny silver Elvis glasses. I thought his gold ones were getting played out.”
She tried to get her zine into sympathetic hands by taking copies to sell at her dad’s gigs and at film festivals. But her target audience—the children of other Elvis impersonators—proved to be elusive.

Fast-forward 10 years. Having directed music videos for Canadian musicians Final Fantasy and Junior Boys, Comilang has returned to the idea behind Children of the King: She is working on a documentary of the same name, looking once again for the audience that she tried to find years ago.

“The zine was trying to reach out to other children of Elvis impersonators, to try to create this support group, and I wanted to see it through [with the film] and actually do it. Meet these people and make it more substantial by jumping into more layered issues,” she says.

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Cheesy Rider

End of Empire

Sleepwalking Into The Imperial Dark

by Tom Engelhardt

This can't end well.

But then, how often do empires end well, really? They live vampirically by feeding off others until, sooner or later, they begin to feed on themselves, to suck their own blood, to hollow themselves out. Sooner or later, they find themselves, as in our case, economically stressed and militarily extended in wars they can't afford to win or lose.

Historians have certainly written about the dangers of overextended empires and of endless war as a way of life, but there's something distant and abstract about the patterns of history. It's quite another thing to take it in when you're part of it; when, as they used to say in the overheated 1960s, you're in the belly of the beast.

I don't know what it felt like to be inside the Roman Empire in the long decades, even centuries, before it collapsed, or to experience the waning years of the Spanish empire, or the twilight of the Qing dynasty, or of Imperial Britain as the sun first began to set, or even of the Soviet Empire before the troops came slinking home from Afghanistan, but at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this -- truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.

The United States is, of course, an imperial power, however much we might prefer not to utter the word. We still have our globe-spanning array of semi-client states; our military continues to garrison much of the planet; and we are waging war abroad more continuously than at any time in memory. Yet who doesn't sense that the sun is now setting on us?

Not so many years ago, we were proud enough of our global strength to regularly refer to ourselves as the Earth's "sole superpower." In those years, our president and his top officials dreamed of establishing a worldwide Pax Americana, while making speeches and issuing official documents proclaiming that the United States would be militarily "beyond challenge" by any and all powers for eons to come. So little time has passed and yet who speaks like that today? Who could?

A Country in Need of Prozac
Have you noticed, by the way, how repetitiously our president, various presidential candidates, and others now insist that we are "the greatest nation on Earth" (as they speak of the U.S. military being "the finest fighting force in the history of the world")? And yet, doesn't that phrase leave ash in your mouth? Look at this country and its frustrations today and tell me: Does anyone honestly believe that anymore?

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Ten Years After - Insecure Security

[ed. I was subjected to one of these freeze drills in Portland, Oregon a couple years ago -- a very disorienting and eerily oppressive experience]

by Patrick Smith

At the Bangkok airport they took my scissors. This was the second time they took my scissors in Bangkok. I should have learned my lesson.

They were safety scissors, the kind you'd give to a child, about two-and-a-half inches long with rounded tips. (The photo at the top of this column shows an identical pair that I bought as a replacement.) Highly dangerous -- at least as the BKK security staff saw it. My airline pilot credentials meant nothing to them.

It's funny, but not really, when you stop to consider how easy it would be to fashion a sharp object -- certainly one deadlier than a pair of rounded-end scissors -- after boarding an airplane, from almost anything within your reach: a wine bottle, a first-class juice glass, a piece of plastic molding, and so on and so forth. Heck, if you're seated in first or business class, they give you a metal knife and fork.

But more to the point, pun intended, why do we still care so much about pointy objects?

When it came right down to it, the success of the Sept. 11 attacks had nothing -- nothing -- to do with box cutters. The hijackers could have used anything. They were not exploiting a weakness in luggage screening, but rather a weakness in our mind-set -- our understanding and expectations of what a hijacking was and how it would unfold. The hijackers weren't relying on weapons, they were relying on the element of surprise.

All of that is different now. For several reasons, from passenger awareness to armored cockpit doors, the in-flight takeover scheme has long been off the table as a viable M.O. for an attack. It was off the table before the first of the twin towers had crumbled to the ground. Why don't we see this? Although a certain anxious fixation would have been excusable in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks, here it is a decade later and we're still pawing through people's bags in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items.

There in Bangkok it hit me, in a moment of gloomy clarity: These rules are never going to change, are they?

How depressing is that, to be stuck with this nonsense permanently? Not only the obsession with sharps, but the liquids and gels confiscations, the shoe removals, etc.
These policies aren't just annoying, they're potentially self-destructive. Self-destructive because they draw our security resources away from more useful pursuits. Imagine if, instead of a tiny pair of scissors, I'd had a half-pound of explosives in my luggage, shaped into some innocuous-looking item. Would the Bangkok screeners have caught it, or are they too busy hunting for pointy things and contraband shampoo? And what of passengers' checked luggage? Are the bags down below undergoing adequate scrutiny for explosives -- a far more potent threat than somebody's hobby knife?

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School Lunches From Around The World

Ever wonder what children are eating for lunch across the world? Take a look at these 22 very different school lunches and learn some fascinating insights into kids’ school lives across the globe.

USA










Burger and chips! There is a group of retired military officers stating that today’s school lunches are making the kids so fat that many are unable to meet the military’s physical fitness standards.

The good news is that the Improving Nutrition for American’s Children Act was recently passed, whose aim is to make school lunches more nutritional, encourage partnerships with local farms, raise the reimbursement rate for schools and force schools to set standards for vending machine food.

How Your Cursor Really Works

 

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The Great American Sell-Off

It's 8:55 a.m. on a crisp Thursday morning in the exclusive New Jersey suburb of Bernards Township, and at 34 Emily Rd., more than 60 people are lined up impatiently outside the front door. Inside, owners Mark and Mary Tuller, who were up most of the night and feel like "zombies," are girding themselves for the onslaught: a three-day crush of strangers pouring into their home, pawing through their family's stuff. Attic to basement, nearly everything is tagged with a price, from the mahogany dining room breakfront ($5,000) to the half-used

Mark, a 62-year-old former general counsel for Verizon Wireless, and Mary, a retired math teacher, say they couldn't be more excited about their imminent move to a smaller, Mediterranean-style place on the California coast. But with moving trucks arriving in exactly one week, they're more than a little anxious about whether this estate sale will be successful in unloading nearly three decades' worth of accumulated belongings—especially prized pieces like their antique, hand-knotted Persian rugs (the one in the living room originally cost $20,000). "We wanted to sell these expensive items in a way that brought closure," says Mark, "and didn't want them to just walk out the door for almost nothing."

Indeed, to help facilitate the sale, they've chosen a company called The Grand Bazaar to run it; unlike some other mom-and-pop businesses they interviewed, it actually takes credit cards. But from the moment the doors open and salegoers storm the 5,000-square-foot home like pirates rushing a ship, virtually no one bothers with plastic. Not the man with the white ponytail happily scoring a $1 jug of deer repellent or the woman in chunky diamonds and fur-tipped pumps snapping up old garden hose nozzles. Some bargainers cart off books or clothes in bulk, but most arrive at the checkout table with small items: Christmas decorations, souvenir Parisian drink coasters, a board game from the downstairs toy closet. In fact, when the doors close on the Tuller family sale (final take: on the plus side of $30,000), there's still quite a bit of furniture left, most of which is destined for donation or—cue Mary's nostalgic sighs—the Dumpster. And those expensive rugs? At least $30,000 worth of fancy floor coverings are headed into storage. "The sale was a huge success if you were in the market for unopened soap," says Mark.

Call it the great American sell-off . For years now Americans have been gathering and collecting at an amazing pace, filling homes that over the past half-century have more than doubled in size, to an average of nearly 2,500 square feet. And even that hasn't been enough to contain our nation's overflow of stuff. These days nearly one in 10 U.S. households maintains at least one self-storage unit, 65 percent more than did so in 1995. Filling these spaces, of course, comes naturally to baby boomers. Born into the giddy postwar climate of conspicuous consumption and weaned on decades of easy credit, they're a generation accustomed to regularly leaving offerings at the altar of retail.

That is, until they hit the empty-nest, time-to-start-downsizing phase—and begin wondering what to do with their mountains of accumulated stuff. With some 8,000 Americans turning 65 every day, on average, and the senior population expected to double by 2050, millions are facing a massive, multifaceted purge that's turning out to be much tougher than they thought it would be. And millions more find themselves in similar quandaries as they deal with the truckloads they've inherited from packrat relatives. Indeed, whether they're leaving an heirloom china set at the local consignment store or packing a stately grandfather clock off to Sotheby's, many are discovering that the resale market is glutted with household goods. And oriental rugs are only the beginning. Got a home full of middle-market, traditional-style furniture to sell? Dealers say that stuff's plunged 50 to 75 percent in value. Elaborate silver tea sets are worth more melted than as decorative objects. And huge heavy items like dining-room breakfronts and banker-style desks are often the toughest to unload. "I once sold a piano for $11," says David Rago, a Lambertville, N.J., auctioneer.

by Missy Sullivan, Market Watch |  Read more:
Image: cleverswine

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything

by Linda Holmes, NPR 

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore. (Don't forget books not written in English! Don't forget to learn all the other languages!)

Oh, and heaven help your kid, who will either have to throw out maybe 30 years of what you deemed most critical or be even more selective than you had to be.

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television – you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.

Gotcha!

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The Goon Squad

Fiction Pulitzer Sneaks Music Writing In Through The Back Door

by Ann Powers, NPR

A huge congrats to Jennifer Egan, whose outstanding rock and roll novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, took the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction yesterday. I love that book, not only for its empathetic and wry view of the bohemians and weirdo entrepreneurs who create and sustain the popular arts, but also because Egan somehow embeds the basic elements of post-punk music within the novel's complicated narrative: its interlocking tales share characters and a slowly coalescing narrative, bouncing off each other and merging like the tracks a DJ selects to make for a great night on the dance floor. Though it's hardly gonzo, this is a rock and roll novel in its very structure. And I'm extra pleased that Egan's feminist take on the rock scene now enters history as the exemplary work from a generation of writers for whom pop music serves as both subject matter and key inspiration.

Unfolding like a playlist based on the themes of time and loss, Goon Squad's interlocking narratives run on rhythms that shift from the aggro mood of punk to the decentered energy of a rave to the fragmented confessions of indie rock. Egan should have won the Pulitzer for the PowerPoint chapter alone – an amazing essay on the importance of pauses within songs that's also a heartbreaking tale of the way autism has shattered the unity of one small family.

Egan, who has said she wasn't a huge music fan before writing this novel, has done what great pop music makers do: she's made a story that runs through multiple channels, hooking you with highly engaging characters, working the groove of an engrossing narrative, layering riffs and samples from contemporary literature within her experimental prose style. I'd nominate her for a Grammy if I could.

Rx

by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic

These are the best-selling prescription drugs in America, according to the research firm, IMS Health. They form the shadow of our nation's ailments. Among pharmaceutical industry watchers, the big news is that the top 10 drugs are generics, i.e. the ones Big Pharma makes little money on. For the casual observer, what stands out is that five drugs treat high blood pressure and by far the best-selling drug in this country is Vicodin.

People are stressed out and hurting, apparently.

The top 15 highest-grossing drugs treat a similar but not identical set of conditions, according to IMS. Three drugs treat heart disease and cholesterol. Three more treat depression and bipolar disorder. Arthritis and asthma each have two drugs in the top 15. Acid reflux, diabetes, anemia, cancer and pain round out the list.

All of the medicines with the exception of Oxycontin are for chronic conditions.

Comparing the two lists, the most striking contrast is the revenue potential of mental health drugs, which don't get prescribed that often, but rank way up on the sales list. Lipitor is the only medication that makes both lists.

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Yo-Yo Ma and Lil Buck Perform "The Swan"

In an explosion of hipness that also happens to be a genuinely beautiful artistic collaboration, director Spike Jonze films (with his phone?) Yo-Yo Ma and L.A. dancer Lil Buck performing "The Swan" by Camille Saint-Saëns, and then posts it to the blog of super-cool boutique empire Opening Ceremony. This is definitely a case of substance over style: Ma and Buck make an amazing combination.

 

On YouTube, Jonze writes:

The other day, I was lucky enough to be at an event to bring the arts back into schools and got to see an amazing collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and a young dancer in LA, Lil Buck. Someone who knows Yo-Yo Ma had seen Lil Buck on YouTube and put them together. The dancing is Lil Buck's own creation and unlike anything I've seen. Hope you enjoy. -- Spike Jonze.

Penguin Hors d'oeuvres

Penguins are adorable and classy (all tuxedo all the time), and these little appetizers provided me two of my favorite things: praise for making something adorable and cream cheese. I encourage you to make them, too, because they're ridiculously easy, and because they'll get you lots of points at your next social gathering. My ex and I made these to take to a friend’s going-away party (the friend was leaving for Antarctica, so they were particularly fitting), and to be honest they were probably the cutest things there. I don’t know who originally came up with the idea, and I can't remember where we originally saw them, but I do know they should be replicated. Often. Also they're tasty!

What you need: black olives, cream cheese, a large carrot, a sharp knife, toothpicks.

How long this will take you: 15 minutes

Annnd we’re off.

First, open a can of olives and pour them on to a paper towel so you can sort out the larger ones from the smaller ones. The large olives are better for the bodies, the smaller ones for the heads. (Unless you want disproportionate penguins, which probably you don’t because that sort of disproportion is not cute in the same way that little puppies with huge paws are disproportionately cute.) Take the larger ones and cut a thin strip out from top to bottom:

(Don’t discard the strips you cut out, because you might choose to use them later.) Once you have as many hollow olive bodies as you want, take a knife and pack them with cream cheese. (This part's easier if the cream cheese has been out of the fridge for a little while, so it's softer and more malleable.) Take a toothpick and poke it through a smaller olive and then through the back of one of the bodies you just made. Peel the large carrot and thinly cut rounds from it, then slice a little V out of each one:

Don’t discard the V-shaped cutouts, because you’re going to use them as beaks in a moment. Stand each penguin up on a carrot round, and poke the toothpick through it to keep them in place. There will be some extra toothpick poking through the top of each penguin’s head, which is handy for when you take them to parties and people use the top portion of the toothpick to pick them up off the party tray and hold them in the air while praising your creativity. I mean, to pick them up and eat them.

To make your penguin's face, poke two holes for eyes, and then smear cream cheese in them. Cut a little cross below the eyes, and push one of the V-shaped cutouts into them to serve as a beak.

Ta-da, you’re done, hooray, all that! You can take those slices of the olives that you cut out in the first step, and press them into place to serve as flippers (wings?) on some of the penguins. One penguin should probably get a top hat, which you can carve out of excess carrot if you’re feeling super fancy (you are). The top hat could be even more snazzed up if accompanied by … a monocle? I don’t know. Go have a cocktail!

by Laura Rodriquez, The Hairpin |  Read more:
Images: uncredited

Life Is A Blur

Philip Barlow was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 1968. He started travelling Europe starting from the 90s while developing his talent. He has produced approximately 500 portraits in pastel and charcoal, painted 8 murals and completed around 200 watercolour/ pen and ink drawings. Philip Barlow has also created murals and done ceiling paintings in various homes and corporate spaces.