Yeap, that’s the first official royal portrait of Kate Middleton. Critics worldwide are panning it. She does appear rather older than her age (31) with dark rings under her eyes, e.t.c. This is not the usual glamourous kate people see in photos.

Why are they in a hurry to age this girl beyond her years –so fast? Since she joined “The Firm” she’s always looking so matronly and “eager” to please during official visits, forced to say how thrilled she was about the portrait when she really isn’t. That must be one hell of a fish bowl to be in, no pressure there.

I don’t know any woman that would like this painting of herself, no one should be made to look older in a portrait unless in character for a movie role in Hollywood.

Beyonce barely covers GQ magazine. I have to say I almost didn’t recognize her. I thought she was more of a Vogue magazine cover girl, conservative, etc. I didn’t see this one coming. I suppose she’s trying to remind her fans that she’s still got it after becoming a mother to Blue Ivy. In the fast paced world of music & Hollywood where younger singers (and up & coming actresses) like Rihanna and Taylor Swift are dominating the market, she’s has to reinvent herself or risk becoming irrelevant. That is show business for you!

What can I say, you only live life once and young once in life.

Get that money Bey! 🙂

I remember as a little girl my mom using her little red typewriter to write her newspaper columns. I used to enjoy playing with it when she’s not home. I still remember the ink ribbon of red and black very well. I stumbled into an old style typing pool set up at a tradeshow in New York yesterday and could not resist engaging my muscle memory with fingers in place ready to strike the metal anchored keys “A, S, D, F, ;, L, K, J.” These are now what we see on fancy keyboards used on computers today. Thanks to that typewriter I can now type pretty fast on a computer keyboard without even looking at the keys!

3 months pregnant Kim Kardashian celebrated New Year’ Eve in Vegas with Kanye West in a sheer sheath dress. You can probably expect more where that came from as Kim establishes her mom-to-be style. If you want to learn some tricks and tips while being pregnant then check out CheckPregnancy.com.

The last time I found myself counting down New Year’s Eve was in 97 going 1998 with my sister. I still can’t believe I did that.  Times Square was nothing like it is now with stages and commercialization surrounding it today. No singing or big/small name stars to entertain us while we waited for hours to watch the ball drop. I don’t even recall the ball itself being so glittery and shiny. Now it’s 2012 going 2013. I spent the night partying at 48 Lounge while I double timed to Times Square for press work. Wearing 2 hats in one night was no easy matter but I managed. It was actually fun running around in high heel boots, got some good work out to burn the holiday fat.

Big name singers were paid big dollars to make appearances and sometimes sing, while advertisers like Nivea covered the sea of people with blue hats and balloons. It was raining advertising $$$ for the city among many other things.  Mayor Bloomberg honored the crowd with his presence as well as old timer MC Hammer who suddenly came back into the spotlight thanks to Gangnam style singer Psy who “borrowed” some of his classic hit dance numbers from yesteryears hit for his own music video (least that’s what I’m told) which now has over 1 billion hits on Youtube. Yeah, times are good. This is the new era and every one is happy.

The atmosphere was very festive and safe. There were a couple of marriage proposals in the crowd, a classic thing to see nowadays at the square during the countdown. Despite seeing it many times before on TV, it was still romantic to see it in person. Everyone had a good time, I know I did, besides losing my vintage diamond brooch while running up and down. I suppose I have myself to blame for wearing such a timeless piece to Times Square. Nevertheless, I am grateful to see another new year.

Happy safe and lovely New Year everyone 🙂

What better way to take advantage of all the after Christmas sales? I gave my brand new Plenty coat by Tracy Reese a “test drive” today, matched with fushia pink tights and fox fur ear muffs. It’s the holidays, a great time to feel bright, cheerful and warm! 🙂

Want more? Click here to see other styling options.

Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter on the right side of the site. You never know what might come through your email. Follow me on Facebook!

 

It’s no secret how much I love shoes. I have written songs about it and made a whole business around it but I had to stop for a minute when I visited a departmental store today and spotted a pair of boots costing almost $8000 by Manolo Blahnik and another by Christian Louboutin at about $6500. These shoes had me sweating and blinking at a fast pace than normal. Granted shoes are art forms and should be treated as such but are these really worth the mortgage size price tags?

…and now recovering. My whole body aches from the long stretch of 6 hours dancing nonstop –and I would like to do it all over again! WOW! I had no idea academia world could party this much! I underestimated the event. Before turning up at the Shoeholics magazine sponsored event, I contemplated on showing up in a skirt suit, a more demure look but thank goodness that I settled for a pair of nice wet look leggings and Brian Atwood boots that enabled me to move as much as I could while dancing. These boots might look mighty high to you but believe me, they are super comfortable! Dancing is one of my favorite past times, an excellent form of work out! The party was packed with academia fashion mavens. Who would have thought? I had a FABULOUS time and have my good friend Lisa, and Nate to thank for the invitation as well. Keep it up guys!

See guests photos and coverage at Shoeholics website

😆

Psy and his Korean dancing buddies in his hit music video now have a stiff competition. Africans in Ivory Coast just raised the bar on the hit dance “Gangnam Style” by adding a lot of their traditional and cultural dance numbers to the song. Play the video footage below, watch and see. You actually might learn a few things. AWESOME!

 

 

Had to take this from Katie J.M. Baker at Jezebel.com. Too good to pass up.

When anyone who isn’t a white and relatively well-off man strides into a public place and guns down innocent civilians, we attack his race and/or religious beliefs before we bury his victims in the ground. But when yet another privileged white guy storms into a school or movie theater and kills dozens of people, we assume there’s something wrong with his brain instead of wondering whether his murderous rage has anything to do with good ol’ American macho entitlement. Are we ready to talk about it yet? Let’s.

This is hardly the first time we’ve questioned what makes white middle-class dudes more prone to shooting up public spaces; last summer, after the Aurora movie theater massacre, Hugo Schwyzer wrote that “the fact that these white male mass murderers felt so confident choosing public spaces to commit their crimes reflects a powerful truth about the culture in which they were raised.”

Huh, how about that? We wondered, briefly, and then we moved on with our lives. Gun sales spiked, as they always do after highly publicized mass shootings. The NRA — White Men Central — stayed silent via social media, but doubled its followers even though it shut down one of its Twitter accounts. Some more white dudes shot a bunch of people at temples and shopping malls. Now, twenty little kids are dead because another privileged white guy literally shot his way into an elementary school with a gun made by a company that tries to convince people to buy their killing weapons by telling them they’re crybabies if they’re not packing heat.

When Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, pundits instantly declared that his Korean upbringing had something to do with it. When Maj. Nidal Hasan went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood shootings, we heard more about his Muslim faith than anything else. Yet, when David Sirota suggested on the Sunday morning edition of “Up” with Chris Hayes that the same conservative politicians and commentators who support racial profiling when black people or Muslims are the ones being profiled would rather sacrifice a few of their semi-automatic weapons than think critically about white men, the right-wing media freaked the fuck out.

“Leave it to the shamelessly craven NBC News cable outlet MSNBC to find a race-baiting angle on the Connecticut school massacre tragedy,” Breitbart crowed. “It is a basic tenet of progressive, left-wing ideology that all things boil down to race, gender or class.” (Oh, cool, it’s opposite day again and Breitbart‘s Shirley Sherrod scandal never happened!) The Blaze called it a “curious outburst” — you know, totally apropos of nothing. Fox News said Sirota “injected” race into the discussion.

Sirota didn’t actually recommend we start racially profiling middle-class white men; he just pointed out that that’s what would be happening if we were talking about any other demographic group. Over at Salon, he made the excellent point that the only reason we’re considering more complex issues like mental health and Hollywood gun-worship is because the mass murderer in question was, as per usual, well-off and white:

Let’s review: any honest observer should be able to admit that if the gunmen in these mass shootings mostly had, say, Muslim names or were mostly, say, African American men, the country right now wouldn’t be confused about the causes of the violence, and wouldn’t be asking broad questions. There would probably be few queries or calls for reflection, and mostly definitive declarations blaming the bloodshed squarely on Islamic fundamentalism or black nationalism, respectively. Additionally, we would almost certainly hear demands that the government intensify the extant profiling systems already aimed at those groups.

Yet, because the the perpetrators in question in these shootings are white men and not ethnic or religious minorities, nobody is talking about demographic profiling them as a group. The discussion, instead, revolves around everything from gun control, to mental health services, to violence in entertainment – everything, that is, except trying to understanding why the composite of these killers is so similar across so many different massacres. This, even though there are plenty of reasons for that topic to be at least a part of the conversation.

He’s right. In many cases, we don’t know much about the killer’s psyche, although they are usually described as “lonely” or “troubled” or “seemed autistic, now that I think about it.” (This is a good time to note that the mentally ill are more often the victims of violence than the perpetrators.) Of course mental health should be a factor, but we should focus more on what we do know about these murderers: that there’s obviously a direct link between growing up privileged and entitled and snapping when the world doesn’t give you what you’ve been conditioned to feel you deserve: money, happiness, love, whatever. As Hugo pointed out, white men aren’t more violent — rates of domestic violence are roughly the same across all ethnic groups — but “the less privileged you are, the less likely you are to take your violence outside of your family and your community.”

This morning, Jessica Valenti tweeted a photo of an ad for the gun Adam Lanza used to murder 26 people. As you can see, it reads “Consider your man card reissued.” The man-tastic fun doesn’t stop there; check out Bushmaster Firearms’ “Man Card” campaign. Apparently, some men are pussies who deserve to have their “man cards” revoked unless they buy guns to make themselves feel like their dicks are bigger.

Americans have fetishized the power and agency guns provide ever since the Revolutionary War; guns are such a pervasive part of our national consciousness that millions of people, mostly male, spend their downtime fantasizing about them via movies and video games. Even an unabashed gun-hater such as myself knows that most people who buy guns do so because they think it’s the best way to protect their family if danger arises. But since we know civilian gun-owners don’t actually stop mass murderers from gunning down innocent people, we no longer have the luxury of prioritizing macho daydreams over the mass murder of elementary school students — or allowing MRA-types to feel victimized because they can’t do whatever they want whenever they want to do it.

That’s not hyperbole; it’s just the truth, and why we have to “inject” race into the discussion right now. Will we go there?