Here are some of my all-time favourites

1930s icon - Bette Davis

1940s Movie Legends, Laurel and Hardy
<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/2NnyXWLN9Ac&hl=en” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”355″>

1950s Icon - Marilyn Monroe

1960s The Cigarette TV Commercial - the good effects

197
0s Dean Martin and Lena Horne

The following websites offer free daily horoscope readings. Simply click on the link

Also here’s my favourite link

check it out  and see how you fare today.

Why it’s alright to be a fashion victim

Style icon: Kate Moss

Being into clothes doesn’t mean you are shallow or self-obsessed, according to a new book, The Meaning of Sunglasses

So that’s it then. Just when we finally figure out how to ‘work’ our winter wardrobes, the sun decides to hang around for a few extra minutes each day and renders our winter collections suddenly redundant. It’s time to ditch the woollies in favour of – what? What exactly should we be wearing this spring?

How much should we spend?

Who should we turn to for guidance? And more importantly, does our interest in fashion mean we’re shallow and self-obsessed? If anyone can answer these questions, it’s Hadley Freeman; deputy fashion editor of the Guardian and a contributing editor to Vogue.

Her new book, The Meaning of Sunglasses, has just hit the shelves and it’s the perfect cure for fashioninduced stress. It’s full of sense; fashion sense, common sense; and, best of all, Freeman’s sense of humour.

It tackles all those thorny fashion questions including how Kate Moss ruined your wardrobe, the point of lowslung belts, the pitfalls of patterns and, naturally, the meaning of sunglasses.

But should we be reading a book on fashion at all? Does an interest in fashion suggest we’re superficial and narcissistic? Not at all, according to Freeman.

“It’s never been clear why fashion is denigrated as shallow when similarly aesthetically-based industries like, say, cinema, art or theatre are lauded as spiritually enriching. All three involve huge amounts of money, attract appallingly egotistical people and tend to exclude anyone below the middle classes. Yet if you spend an evening watching some poncey folk ponce about on a poncey stage you are lauded for cultural pursuits, whereas if you while away a harmless afternoon admiring some pretty dresses in a shop you are irredeemably selfindulgent.”

Or irredeemably masochistic. Some women may flick through fashion magazines to indulge their feelings of self-loathing but most of us just flick because we enjoy it.

“Sometimes its nice to read something that is just for us.

Not about our kids, our boyfriends, our jobs, worthwhile cultural pursuits or political causes,” says Freeman. “It’s about escapism, not masochism.”

Not that magazines are the bastions of taste and objectivity they’d have us believe. Much of their content is dictated by advertising executives and the ulterior motives of editors.

Best-dressed lists, in particular, have more to do with the editor’s personal agenda than the clothes they feature.

“It’s an easy way to suck up to someone the editor would like to interview one day or justify next month’s cover star,” says Freeman. “It is also a good way to slag off anyone who has had the gumption to turn down an interview for the magazine.”

If you’re one of the rare few who actually reads the text between the pictures in fashion magazines, then be prepared to decode the ‘fashion speak’.

‘Homage,’ for example, may sound complimentary, but as Freeman explains, it’s a “conveniently trussed up word for blatant copy and can be used without the niggling fear of litigation”.

‘Experimentation is key,’ is another favourite employed by journalists who either haven’t a clue or are hedging their bets: “This season’s de rigueur shade of bright mandarin looks just great against most complexions but experimentation is key.”

Kate Moss may be a perennial fixture in most fashion magazines, but women have yet to benefit from any of the trends she foisted on us. Moss is, after all, responsible for the painful rash of pirate boots, hot pants, skinny and highwasted jeans.

“All harbingers of more aesthetic harm to the female populace than hair crimpers,” says Freeman.

Happily, while Moss may have the edge in most things fashionable, we’re all equal in the world of accessories.

Accessories are the great leveller of the fashion world; they don’t make us feel fat and, more importantly, they don’t necessarily suit Kate Moss any better than the rest of us. Score one for the average woman.

And the good news just keeps coming; the vast improvement in both the quality and variety of clothes in chain stores means we no longer have to overspend to sparkle. But occasionally we’ll stray into the designer section and find ourselves tempted by something ‘whose price makes our knees crumple in agony.’ The best way to resolve this ‘should I buy it or leave it’ dilemma, according to Freeman, is to ask yourself : ‘Will you actually be excited when you wake up tomorrow and see it in your wardrobe or will it be like the morning after a particularly misguided one-night-stand… without the mitigating factor of being able to get it out of your flat before breakfast?”

If you’re buying an outfit with a view to seducing the object of your desire, then steer clear of that species of clothes that Freeman refers to as ‘fashion-that-boys-don’tget’.

Carrie in Sex and the City was a true champion of this style. ‘The fact is that most of the time Carrie looked really, really silly. To boys, that is – the girls loved her,’ says Freeman.

Patterns are a prime example of fashion-that-boysdon’t- get: “She sees a patterned dress and thinks, ‘Golly, isn’t that summer dress with an old liberty print rather fabulously kitsch’. He thinks, ‘I never noticed before how much she resembles my grandmother’s sofa’,” explains Freeman.

The appeal of wedges also lies in the gender of the beholder. Women may see them as ‘cool in a 1950s pin-up kind of way’, whereas men see nothing but orthopedic shoes.

But if that patterned dress keeps calling to you - just grab it and repeat your new Freeman-inspired mantra as you make your way to the check-out: ‘You’re not eating small children, you’re not flogging arms, you’re just buying a damn dress’.

Alright, so we’re a little behind on announcing this feature as well. It’s been live for weeks and is a real time-saver for everyone involved: the new, self-service Feed Transfer capability. As more and more people build blogs and burn feeds, changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. In ye goode olde days, someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to us, and then a staffer in our own Central Planning and Command-Line Voodoo department would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.

Away with workaday drudgery! If you own a feed, you may now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link, which is listed on your feed’s details page.

Just provide the email address of the person you wish to transfer this feed to and FeedBurner will send them a transfer request email. The recipient clicks a link in the email and then creates or signs into a FeedBurner account and accepts the transfer on-the-spot. The transfer itself will be completed immediately, moving the feed from your account to theirs. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)

We hope this update makes the process of moving feeds around much simpler for all of you. Thanks for letting us know just how popular (and necessary) this feature is!

On the Finding of Help and the Getting of Answers

As we recently posted, FeedBurner’s integration into Google is moving along. We’ve got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner’s integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, “new” as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn’t strictly tied to FeedBurner charts ‘n graphs ‘n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like “What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?”, and “Is there a feed file size limit?” in just one place. (We’ve still got nothing for you on “How can I avoid jury duty selection?”) The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We’ve provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way

Question:

Hints

Answer

View this link for more

Try the archive for some more tests.

Recently on a trip to the Science Museum I saw the “best thing ever” (since the last best thing ever) - finger puppets of famous philosophers and scientists like Darwin, Marie Curie, and… believe it or not the patron saint of museum studies Michel Foucault himself! Of course I had to buy a Foucault - he is now proudly on my desk at work and is joined by Marie Curie and her test tube of toxic liquid (really). Fortunately they have magnets on their heads so you can stick them to the fridge and prevent them from getting lost in drawers.

I would not have the right to call myself a researcher if I did not look up the people who make these wonderful puppets - the link is below and in the absence of a picture I really think you need to look at these to believe them (look under ‘magnetic personalities’ for the full range). So far I have only seen them in the Science Museum gift shop but if I see any retail outlets closer to home I will post them.

On a Septic Tank Truck sign: “We’re No. 1 in the No. 2 business”.

Sign over a gynaecologist’s office: “Dr. Jones, at your cervix.”

At a proctologist’s door: “To expedite your visit please back in.”

On a Plumbers truck: “We repair what your husband fixed.”

On a Plumbers truck: “Don’t sleep with a drip. Call your plumber.”

At a towing company: “We don’t charge an arm and a leg. We want tows.”

On an electrician’s truck: “Let us remove your shorts.”

On a maternity room door: “Push. Push. Push.”

At an optometrist’s office: “If you don’t see what you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.”

On a fence: “Salesmen welcome! Dog food is expensive.”

In a restaurant window: “Don’t stand there and be hungry? Come on in and get fed up.”

In the front yard of a funeral home: “Drive carefully. We’ll wait.”

Welcome to the Silly Stuff. I hope you’ll find something of interest and add a comment.