Lifestyle
Power Networking Hair Salon
The Wall Street Journal has been pressing its nose up against the windows of ladies’ hair salons to find the most popular salon amongst the power women of NYC. The winner is the Louis Licari salon on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Loyal clients, who go for a week-lasting blow dry include Harper’s Bazaar publisher Valerie Salembier, […]
Shopping With Your Hotel’s Chef
Adding a culinary twist to personal service the Hotel Vitale in San Francsisco offers guests the opportunity to accompany chef Kory Stewart across the road to the local farmers’ market to choose food for their evening meal. The guests can then prepare the food themselves or Stewart will do it for them (you’d hope so, […]
Chaos Cooking
Chaos Cooking is a NYC-based event that adds a new twist to the Come Dine With Me concept. It’s described as “a continuing social experiment where up to 50 people cook 50 recipes in 1 kitchen, 4 burners, 1 oven. All recipes must be finished in a 3 hours while everyone is drinking wine, socializing […]
Cross-Cultural Wedding Planning
A new type of wedding planner is emerging – one who is able to blend the wedding traditions of two different cultures into one ceremony that pleases the bride and doesn’t upset the relatives. Iconoculture reports that a Chinese American / Indian American couple had a wedding that involved five changes of costume, two ceremonies, […]
Employee Tracking
DirectLife has a personal fitness programme that monitors your daily activity via a monitor and uploads the information to a personal web page where you can track your goals and results. You can also sign up for the services of a fitness coach who will provide advice and encouragement. But what sets this apart from […]
The World’s 50 Best Design Blogs
The Times published a list of the best – and most beautiful – fashion/interior design blogs. The list features: Brooklyn Limestone – the story of the renovation of a traditional townhouse; Pillar Box Post – Observations on beautiful London things by an expat American; Oh So Beautiful Paper – pretty paper things such as wedding […]
Getting Rid of the Man Boobs
Breast reduction surgery is booming – at least for British men. According to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons there’s been an 80% increase in moobectomies (that’s not an official technical term, in case you were wondering) in the last year. Experts blame the increase on too many pies and not enough exercise. Read […]
Peep Show
When the grittily picturesque Highline park on the elevated train tracks in NYC’s meatpacking district opened in 2009, visitors strolling along the walkway were distracted from the view of the Hudson River by guests at the Standard Hotel, which stradles the park. Guests of the hotel took to standing in the windows of the hotel […]
Ten Trends of 20-Somethings
Marian Salzman has published a list of behaviour ten trends of 20-somethings in the Huffington Post. This is the generation that wants it now, wants it local and wants it for free, whilst worrying about the state of the world and struggling with the me vs. we dilemma. Read the full list in the HuffPo.
RenoKings On the Buses!
RenoKings property developers in Brisbane, Australia have a novel way of running property investment seminars: On the Buses! Instead of showing a PowerPoint in a stuffy room, veteran renovators Geoff Doidge and Paul Eslick, take aspiring property developers on a bus and take them on a tour of 25 of the properties they’ve bought and […]
Models Without Makeup
Claudia Schiffer, Scarlett Johansson, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen are just some of the models who’ve dared to bare all in the last couple of years – appearing without makeup and or the enhancing effects of Photoshop. Take a look here.
Reva Health
Need a cosmetic makeover? RevaHealth is aUK online database of 110,000 worldwide dental and plastic surgery clinics (covering 99 countries), including clinics that specialize in hair loss, fertility, laser eye treatment and massage. It provides contact information and reviews to help prospective clients choose the best clinic. Perfect for that, ahem, rejevenating holiday abroad. Hat […]
Stolen Recipes
The Stolen Supper Club is a London catering company that uses recipes from famous restaurants, such as Nobu, E&O, the Ivy and Marcus Waering. Every Monday, fifteen guests converge on Notting Hill, BYOB in hand, to sample the Stolen menu in return for a donation (approx. £30 depending on menu). Read a review in The […]
Camping in Kind
Elderly American retirees have taken to the road and are volunteering in parks and wildlife preserves in return for free accommodation or camping. The motivations are a mix of escape, adventure and necessity as they try to eke out their money. As maintenance budgets are cut, it works for the park staff too and they […]
Zero Baggage
Zero Baggage is a new service that aims to take the lug out of luggage. They offer a range of options, all designed to make it possible for you to travel with just hand baggage by allowing you to rent new, or almost new clothes and other goods that you need for a trip abroad. […]
Why Men Go For Younger Women – And Are Missing Out.
If you like graphs you’ll like this: an article that argues that men on online dating sites are looking in the wrong direction for their mate. Instead of chasing 18-yr-old women they should be setting their sights on women in their 30s and 40s.
The Stir
US-based social networking site CafeMom, has launched a new section – The Stir – where moms can kick back and gossip about celebrities, swap stories about their kids and discuss current events, it also features blogs posts from a team of well-known bloggers on subjects ranging from whether Kate Gosselin looks mad to whether potato […]
Dulux’s Let’s Colour Project
Dulux has a global project – Let’s Colour – that aims to “transform grey spaces with colourful paint”, and so far they have painted Jodhpur pink, London orange and Rio rainbow. Local communities can sign up to have some colour added to their drab surroundings.
Fallen Stars
With recent death of yet another troubled celebrity, and in the light of research that suggests teens aspire to be famous above anything else, is there a Blood, Sweat, and… -style deconstruction of the cost of celebrity show to be done?
Rework Your Resume…and Your Face To Land That Job
It’s reported that people in Chicago have been resorting to desperate measures to land themselves a job – including getting a nose job, and other plastic surgery. Dr Steven Dayan says that pre-interview Botox is the most popular treatment, and he says that the resulting increased self esteem can help both job seekers and those […]
Human Limits
Mozy has produced a striking poster that details “impressive [human] feats and records”. For example, we learn that the longest sword swallowed by a woman was 27.5 inches long and the record for piercings comes in at 6005+ and weighs in at 6.5 lb.
Modern Bunkers
If you’ve already upgraded your kitchen and bathroom and added a conservatory to your house, what do you do next to outdo the Joneses? You could get yourself an underground bunker to help you survive the “next earth devastating catastrophe, terrorist or nuclear attack”. Vivos is a company building a network of 20 such shelters […]
Granny Cottage
MedCottage is a temporary home designed by N2Care, which enables elderly relatives to move close to their family (ie. their back yard) without having to move in with them. But this is no ordinary mobile home: incorporates robotic features and internet monitoring of security, telemetry and medications. There are different configurations depending on a relative’s […]
The Blog of Death
The Blog of Death is a collection of fascinating obituraries that celebrate the lives of some extraordinary people, such as Betty Matas who, at the age of 74, decided to go on a 2,500 mile road trip with her husband and two cats. As she couldn’t drive, she hired a NYC yellow cab at the […]
Dogs in Identity Crisis
According to John Homans, dogs are suffering a crisis of identity and becoming dumber because of their increasingly intimate relationships with humans (often even sharing the same bed). Whereas dogs used to be able to work out problems for themselvses, today they increasingly depend on their owners to sort problems out for them. The problem […]
Days Out in The Bronx
The Bronx isn’t the most obvious go-to destination for a day out, but it is home to some hidden gems, such as: The New York Botanical Garden Canoeing in Pelham Bay Park The Bronx Independent Film Festival Find out what else there is to do in the outer boroughs in Off Manhattan.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Yoga
The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love is the story of how yoga was popularized in America by Pierre Bernard. It’s a rollicking tale of sex, money, midgets and elephants. Read a review in the Wall Street Journal.
Take Me Out – Chinese Style
You either love or loathe Fremantle’s dating format Take Me Out, but it’s going down a storm in China, where parents are desperate to marry off their children and an audience who love the “confrontation, nerves and suspense” of a new generation of dating shows. Parents who now regret advising their daughters to concentrate on […]
Hot Guys Reading Books
So we’ve had property porn and weather porn – here comes new something to fuel your acquisitive aspirations and and put you in awe of the beauty of nature: Hot Guys Reading Books. It is one of those ideas that is so simple and so obvious that it is complete genius (and it’s a blog […]
Vampire Names for Babies
In the latest US social security list of most popular baby names, it turns out that babies in 2009 were born under the shadow of the vampire. Some of most popular trending names – Cullen, Isabella, Jacob and Edward – are to be found in the vampire novels (and Twilight films) of Stephanie Meyer. Read […]
American Able
Canadian Jes Sachse is disabled. She’s also “your average genderqueer, slutty-lovin, maoschistic poet type, with an affinity for emulating drag divas”, who features in a piss-take of the American Apparel ads – American Able – which always feature beautiful, young and nubile ‘ordinary’women. Check out the photos here. Via Three Billion
Pumped Cyclists
Velo: Bicycle Culture and Design is a new book dedicated to all things cycling: design, production, tribes and culture. One of the most fascinating (and disturbing) features is a double-page spread of photos of cyclists with freakishly pumped thighs… (it’s actually an ad campaign for a bike, but as more and more of us take […]
50 Best Restaurants in the World 2010
Time to update your address book with the details of the S. Pelligrino 50 World’s Best Restaurants 2010. The top ten: Noma, Denmark El Bulli, Spain The Fat Duck, UK El Celler de Can Roca, Spain Mugaritz, Spain Osteria Francescana, Italy Alinea, USA Daniel, USA Arzak, Spain Per Se, USA See them all at: The […]
Volcano Tourism
USA Today observes that one man’s volcano is a holiday nightmare, while another man’s volcano IS the holiday. Recent eruptions have been a reminder that the natural world offers some of the greatest shows on Earth. Read the full article.
Gay Power List
Out has published its 4th Annual Power 50 List of the USA’s most influential gay men and women. Top five are (in reverse order): Adam Lambert, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Barney Frank and, at number one, Ellen Degeneres. Visit Out for the full list.
Tokyo Baby Cafe
If you are fed up with having your tall-skinny-choco-soy-latte experience destroyed by screaming toddlers and aggressive stroller action in your local cafe, you’d better hope that this latest Japanese invention heads over to your ‘hood soon. Tokyo Babe Cafe is specially designed for parents to hang out with their babies and other parents with babys […]
Spoon Fed
In Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life Kim Severson, explores her relationship with the cookery writers who gave her valuable insights into her own life just when she needed them most.
Family Coaching
While the last couple of decades were all about ‘me’, it looks like the next few years might be about ‘we’, at least in life coaching terms. More and more families are calling a coach to help them improve their uncommunicative or toxic relationships, particularly between grown up children and their parents. A quick glance […]
Huge Ambition
Donna Simpson, a 42-yr-old New Jersey woman, weighs 602lbs (43 stone), but she’s busy eating 12,000 calories a day as she has a big ambition: to weight 1,000lbs (71 stone). The mom of a three-yr-old makes a living posing in a bikini on a website. Read the full story on Fox News.
Kidnap Me
French company Ultime Réalité offers to kidnap you without warning (after payment of EUR900). You’ll be dragged off the street, tied up and gagged for up to ten hours. Other options include a manhunt or waking up in a morgue. Customers include high-level executives who want an extreme immersive experience. Read more on Springwise
Real Good Experiment
Blu Dot’s Real Good Experiment aims to track what happens to unwanted furniture when it is left in the street. They left 25 GPS tagged chairs on the sidewalk in NYC and sat back and waited to see what would happen. Watch the video to see what did happen.
The Most Dangerous Job in Vegas
Norm Clarke is a gossip columnist for the Las Vegas-Review journal. He cuts an interesting figure, part silver fox, part pirate, with a black eye-patch over his right eye. He covered Britney Spear’s quickie wedding and divorce and has been threatened by stars who’d rather he didn’t write about them. After all, what happens in […]
Multigenerational Housing
Economic constraints mean that more families are having to live in multi-generational homes, according to Reuters. This most often involves elderly parents moving into a granny flat or graduates returning home after college. Does this mean real estate developers will start factoring this into their new-builds?
Making Over Carlisle Train Station
Carlisle’s railway station platform was turned into a lounge and garden area for filming for a TV ad for DIY store homebase. Commuters enjoyed the sofas and garden landscaping that they started a Facebook page to try to keep the newly made over station as it was. The number of fans has reached 8,000+ but […]
Jamie Oliver does TED
Jamie Oliver has just won the 2010 TED prize, which comes with $100K and a ‘Wish to Change the World’, which, unsurprisingly, he’s dedicating to trying to educate people about food in order to try to reduce the amount of obesity in the USA, and he calls for government and corporations to take responsibilty: Read […]
Gothic Kittens
Pennsylvania woman Holly Crawford is being prosecuted for selling kittens that have had their ears and necks pierced with metal jewelery to make them look ‘neat’. Read the full article in the Daily Mail.
Angry People Photos
I’ve often thought that the photos of wronged people in newspapers is a genre of its own, and it seems I’m not alone. Angry People in Local Newspapers ‘celebrates excellence in the field of local newspaper photography”, or in other words shows lots of people posing in improbable positions wearing pained expressions. The BBC website […]
Biometric Monitor
The WIN Human Recorder is a Japanese biometric device that is designed to be worn on the skin on a day to day basis as it measures heart rate, brainwaves, skin temperature, velocity and respiration. It wirelessly transmits data to a mobile phone or computer where the data can be managed. Read the full article […]
Bravo’s Launch My Line
Bravo in the USA has launched an online tool to enable fans to enter their Launch My Line T-shirt design competition to tie in with Bravo’s latest fashion focused competition reality show in which ten entrepreneurs from a range of backgrounds are each paired with an established fashion designer who will help them design a […]
Interactive Wedding ‘Ring’
GeekPhysical specialize in inventing interactive technological events, experiences and installations. Their latest invention is called Cold Feet and tracks the emotions of the bride and groom throughout the big day via a bouquet that contains blue and white fibre optic lights. The bride slips a bio-feedback ring on her finger which monitors whether she’s feeling […]
