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Could you imagine getting your kids up one morning, setting their breakfast in front of them and turning on the TV only to find the worst television catastrophe since 1969–the Public Broadcasting System or PBS had been dismantled.
Aries
Aries likes activity and competition. Ideal activities appeal to the Aries sense of fun and excitement. Even older Aries can thoroughly enjoy some thrill rides at an amusement park. The risk involved in gambling can also appeal to Aries. Visiting a casino or inviting friends over for a game of cards would be fun. Ram-born sports fans enjoy both watching and playing any game that gets you hot and sweaty. Try a pickup game of hoops in the park!
Taurus
Taurus enjoys those things that are beautiful and familiar and that appeal to the senses. Treating oneself to a massage followed by a nice meal could be the best sort of escape for a down-to-earth Bull. Nature-loving Taureans will enjoy sharing a walk and picnic in a public park with someone special. Others may bring home inspiring projects after a visit to the local garden center or farmer’s market.
Gemini
Gemini loves to explore the world. If you are lucky enough to live in an area with good public transportation, an entire day can be spent visiting neighborhoods on the bus or tram. Any busy area full of small shops, bookstores, galleries, and cafes will appeal to the Geminian love of variety. With a friend in tow with whom to share gossip and a sense of wonder and discovery, Gemini can move like a butterfly from spot to spot.
Cancer
Cancer natives are happiest close to home and family. Familiar places and dear friends bring the most joy. A weekend of fun could be as simple as a barbecue in the back yard. If you do choose to get out, spending time in or near water at a lake, park, or public pool can feel like a mini-vacation. Any activity that includes dear ones will be considered the best of all places to be.
Leo
Leo thrives on sun. A day of prudent sunbathing with a favorite book or a trip to a spa can relax and recharge the psychic batteries. Because most Leo natives like to look their best, spending time primping for a romantic date is very appealing. Getting out with friends at a dance club, comedy venue, or karaoke bar will see Leo shine. Indulge in anything that appeals to your sense of fun.
Virgo
Sensible and hard working Virgo needs to mix with others in a relaxing setting more than most other signs. A morning spent wandering through a craft show or swap meet can be great fun for Virgo. They find variety very appealing. Inviting a Virgo to help at a party or other event is their idea of a good time. They will appreciate a chance to dress up and go to a favorite restaurant.
Libra
Any place that is beautiful and where the company is harmonious appeals to Libra. This diplomatic sign is happiest in any social setting. If there are no parties or community events to draw your attention, consider inviting friends over. Bowling, card games, and watching – not playing – sports are also appealing. Inviting friends in for a small potluck dinner full of interesting conversation is also an ideal way to enjoy the weekend.
Scorpio
Scorpio likes drama. Any sort of theater production, musical event, or film that arouses strong feelings will be very attractive. Scorpio also needs good friends close at hand, so any activity around town will be all the more enjoyable if you include a few close friends. Scorpio makes a wonderful host. Consider inviting a few friends over to play any sort of game that offers competition, some teasing, and a fearless interest in telling the truth. Truth or dare, anyone?
Sagittarius
Sagittarius is the adventurer of the Zodiac. Even a day close to home must include some challenges and new horizons. An ideal day could be spent exploring the town by bicycle. Long walks are also favored. Getting a map and setting out to discover everything along a particular path can be enormously satisfying. Never underestimate the Sagittarian love of spending money. A trip to the mall – with preset spending limits – can be enormous fun for these gregarious types.
Capricorn
Capricorn tends to think having fun is overrated. Not so! Getting together to relax and chat with clever friends is one way to recharge. Serious Capricorn natives also enjoy family gatherings, even if they say otherwise. A good day out could include visits to any store where innovative and high-tech gadgets are offered. Visiting local clubs and other venues for a night to enjoy favorite music or comedy is an ideal way to unwind.
Aquarius
Aquarius needs intellectual stimulation like fish need water. Visiting any place where people gather to exchange ideas, such as a public forum or demonstration, is perfect for this independent and opinionated sign. For the Aquarius, variety is the spice of life. An ideal day includes a walk around town with stops in places to sit, chat, and people-watch. There is nothing like a lively chat rich in culture and possibilities for the future to make an Aquarian feel at home.
Pisces
Pisces is a dreamer. An ideal weekend will include time to sleep late, enjoy favorite music, and spend time near water. Gentle and supportive friends will be the best companions. A trip to the movies or local film festival is one attractive possibility. A quiet dinner in a romantic little restaurant is very appealing as well. Also, check your local calendar for any gathering or event with a spiritual theme.
If you’ve opened a magazine or looked at a billboard anytime in the past few months, you’ve heard of Levi’s new Curve ID jeans. This summer, Levi’s launched a new fit system for their denim based on a woman’s body shape, instead of her size.
The company performed body scans of 60,000 women around the world and identified three main body types – “slight curve,” “demi curve,” and “bold curve” – which fit 80 percent of women. Exciting news, right?
Lots of bloggers and feminist activists were un-enthused – some going so far as to call the ad campaign “racist.” The ad campaign’s headline, “All curves are not created equal,” was criticized as seeming to privilege some body types over others.
Furthermore, like most denim companies, Levi’s Curve ID jeans went up to a size 14 – hardly what some people would consider “curvy.” Finally, the main page of the Levi’s Curve ID website featured an image of three light-skinned models (the top image with the yellow background), despite the fact that many black and Latina women struggle to find jeans to fit.
If you kept on clicking through Levi’s Curve ID website, there was a digital gallery with pictures of dozens of real women of all shapes and sizes and ethnicities in different jeans. However, a lot of bloggers were frustrated that the women with the largest curves and the darker-skinned women were not front-and-center in the campaign.
Earlier this week, TheFrisky.com’s Jessica Wakeman spoke with two bigwigs at Levi’s to get the inside scoop. Mary Alderete is the vice president of global women’s marketing for Levi Strauss & Co. and Alexa Rudin is the company’s director of global communications.
Both seemed well-prepared in advance with the positive spin they wanted to put on the Curve ID narrative: buzz words like “authentic,” “honesty” and even “authentic honesty” were dropped often. It was also clear from speaking with Levi’s that they have a corporate mindset. Alderete and Rudin kept referring to the company’s “mission”; they spoke of curves being “aspirational” as if they are a trend; and when discussing things they would have done differently on the Curve ID campaign, they called it “a learning experience.”
Here’s what Alderete, had to say in response to the controversy:
“Ethnic diversity is not a checklist for us. It’s truly part of our value system and our philosophy around women. That’s really important to us as a brand. It’s unfortunate the Curve ID ad campaign came across as being one-dimensional. We actually shot Caucasian women, African-American women and Hispanic women, but what ended up being more visible was what looked like a one-dimensional presentation of women.”
Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for ‘his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China’.
Currently serving an 11-year jail term, the 54-year-old may not even know that he has been given one of the world’s greatest honours.
The award has already enraged China who claimed the Nobel had violated its principles by honouring ‘criminal’ Liu Xiaobo.
Speaking after the announcement, panel chairman Thorbjoern Jagland, said Liu was a symbol of the fight for freedom in his country.
‘China has become a big power in economic terms as well as political terms, and it is normal that big powers should be under criticism,’ he said.
Liu has continually called for sweeping political reforms in China, as well as campaigning for freedom of expression and freedom of religion.
New MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell has issued an apology for a segment earlier this week in which he invoked the imagery of slavery while introducing Michael Steele, the African-American head of the Republican National Committee.
“Michael Steele is dancing as fast as he can,” O’Donnell began his Steele intro, “trying to charm independent voters and Tea Partiers while never losing sight of his real master and paycheck provider, the Republican National Committee.”
He made the remarks before showing a taped interview with Steele, so the interviewee didn’t hear it until viewing the TV show later. Steele called O’Donnell to complain, and O’Donnell played the voice message on Wednesday’s show.
Steele objected to the insinuation he was “a slave to the RNC,” and added: “I’ve had to put up with that crap my entire political life.”
O’Donnell apologized for his indiscretion on Wednesday’s show. [Watch below.] However, some talk-radio hosts, like Larry Elder in Los Angeles, picked up on it.
Elder told his audience Thursday that not only was the “master” part objectionable, but also the bit about “dancing.” In his apology, though, O’Donnell said he’d use the dancing analogy again.
In his voice mail, Steele put this challenge to O’Donnell: “You can imagine if the RNC referred to Barack Obama as, you know, the slave to the Democratic party. Or, more appropriately, as you would put it, that the Democratic party is master to Barack Obama. You would be hitting the roof on air!”
After hearing the voice mail, O’Donnell said he called Steele to apologize for using the word “master” and Steele accepted the apology, and said he’d like to be a guest on the show again.
“Mr. Chairman, I sincerely apologize,” O’Donnell said on his Wednesday show
Oprah Winfrey is now admitting that she was once afraid her OWN network would never live up to the success of her daytime TV show.
“All the bells went off. This is why I lived in fear about this network. I kept thinking I have to repeat the 25-year phenomenon of the ‘Oprah’ show. I don’t want to be Michael Jackson,” she tells Fortune magazine, referring to the pop singer once saying he’d never be able to top 1983?s “Thriller.”
But now?
“My fear about, ‘Will the people really follow me?’– I’m past that,” Winfrey says.
Still, getting the network, which is due to launch early next year, off the ground was a challenge.
Winfrey admits she was indecisive about the show lineup, causing backer Discovery Communications to invest an extra $89 million on top of its $100 million launch money, as previously reported. OWN CEO Christina Norman, who joined the network after leaving MTV as chief, was unable to greenlight any series without Winfrey’s input.
“This is part of the reason OWN was stagnant,” Winfrey says. “I was the holdup.”
Also nagging Winfrey: Rosie O’Donnell having her own show after polarizing viewers on “The View.” She brought Tom Freston, Norman and OWN chief creative officer Lisa Erspamer to O’Donnell’s suburban New York home to vet O’Donnell this past June.
Recalls Winfrey, “Rosie said, ‘I know you’re here to assess how crazy I am.’ I said, ‘Basically, yes. I’m doing a crazy check.”
After seeing her kids running around in the back yard, Winfrey says of O’Donnell, “What I found is that she is so generous as a mother.”
But Winfrey banned O’Donnell from airing any grievances on her blog or radio show, as she did with Barbara Walters: “If you have an issue that’s causing a problem, speak to me, woman to woman, so that it doesn’t become a worldwide issue.”
Winfrey downplays that she’s concerned about O’Donnell’s potentially abrasive effect on viewers. “No, it doesn’t worry me,” she insists to Fortune. When asked if she thinks about it, she replies crisply, “Of course.”
She’s also not too worried if the network is not an immediate success. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think it will be.
“No — technically, I don’t think in terms of being in the top 10. But do I think we will be? Yes,” Winfrey says.
According to analysts Fortune cites, OWN could be worth $3 billion or more within a few years — and she owns half of it. Winfrey is worth $3 billion currently.
Now….I’ve tried to be understanding. And let different folks advertise on my site through
your comments. “FOR FREE”. From now on you will be charge every time I see an ad on
a blog comment post. You are taking my kindness for weakness and it is not appreciated.
I believe in not judging and giving folks a chance, but now it has gone to far. So unless
your are making a comment of relevance to the topic at hand. I will be charging you for
using my site advertising your said products.
Thank you, Lennis
There are a number of holy books or sacred texts in the world. They constitute the core of some of the world’s major religions. It is generally thought to be, at the very least, simple good manners for people who have a strong belief in one of these holy books not to derogate, at least publicly, the holy book reverenced by another group. And most certainly it is thought to be but plain decency not to deliberately and ostentatiously set out to abuse, mock, defile or destroy the holy book of another group. For example, by burning a pile of them publicly after alerting the world to your deliberately disrespectful intent.
This is, indeed, what one cunning or dim-witted, rabid or naive, publicity genius or blundering innocent, self-proclaimed Christian pastor, Terry Jones, declared he was going to do with some 200 copies of the Koran Saturday, being the ninth anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. That announcement set in motion an extraordinary story and one which opens troubling questions about the war on terror and the current engagement of Western military in Afghanistan and Iraq.
First, the story tells us that in some rather difficult-to-articulate sense, this war has taken on aspects that are fundamentally not serious. When extraneous, or circumstantial, or ancillary matters occupy centre stage, it is a clear sign, by definition, that the main business has been sidelined.
And what or who is more extraneous or ancillary, more truly irrelevant, than Pastor Jones? How could a genuine world issue, of cardinal depth and significance, be hostage to such a trivial player, to a pathetic and obvious publicity ploy by a man the world had never heard of?
Why is anyone paying attention to this guy? He’s not a new version of Billy Graham or even Jerry Falwell. He has no earned iconic standing. He’s a non-entity of a splinter church with a piddling 30 or 50 followers. What he does or intended to do is of no social, symbolic or geopolitical consequence whatsoever.
But what was really odd was how the great and powerful of the world reacted. All week, he was being beseech-ed by the mighty of the Earth to stop what he and his little band of true believers were proposing to do. There was the Vatican, there was Tony Blair. In Canada, Stephen Harper, Peter McKay and Michael Ignatieff weighed in. And General David Petraeus, the overlord of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, astonishingly proclaimed that Terry Jones’ stunt would undermine the “total effort” of the war in Afghanistan.
This sideline preacher’s gruesome little barbecue would jeopardize, in other words, the main front in the war on terror. In fact, Barack Obama himself has been publicly pleading with Jones to put off the event. And most tellingly, Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, undoubtedly under orders from the White House, went into direct personal discussion and negotiation with the Florida-based pastor to get him to change his plans.
What a spectacle. How did a publicity stunt in Florida become a fulcrum for success or failure in the war on terror?
There is something profoundly unserious here, undignified and immensely off base. The first General of the United States, and the Secretary of Defense of the greatest war machine in the history of the world are both deferring to some fringe evangelist for fear that he might … what? Might lose the war for them? If this is the splinter the war on terror is hanging on to then it is, I fear, a house of cards in both theatres.
Nor is it irrelevant that by Friday another, better known exhibitionist, Donald Trump, had inserted himself into this story. “Unreality” doesn’t come in single doses. So now (the cast was assembling), it was the Imam, the Pastor and the Donald. It’s like a parody apocalypse.
Nine years out from the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, there will be people marking this day with all the solemnity that grief and memory can bring to it. There will be military families ruminating on their sacrifices. I’m not sure how the weird, absurd and — I think — irrational events out of Florida fit with these observances. The whole saga has usurped the great messages of determination and purpose that filled the months and days after 9/11.
by Rex Murphy