Bad Monkey!

It's kind of cute, but kind of sad too. What I want to know is who's helping the monkey light up.

Snakes, Kids and Sadism! Oh My!

Thank Jess for sharing this article with me. It's the perfect combination of things I enjoy most - Scaring tiny children, animals, and sadism.

Snake eats family dog as kids watch



BRISBANE, Australia (AP) -- A 16-foot python stalked a family dog for days before swallowing the pet whole in front of horrified children in the Australian tropics, animal experts said Wednesday.

The boy and girl, aged 5 and 7, watched as the scrub python devoured their silky terrier-Chihuahua crossbreed Monday at their home near Kuranda in Queensland state.

Stuart Douglas, owner of the Australian Venom Zoo in Kuranda, said scrub pythons typically eat wild animals such as wallabies, a smaller relative of the kangaroo, but sometimes turn to pets in urban areas.

"It actively stalked the dog for a number of days," Douglas said.

"The family that owned the dog had actually seen it in the dog's bed, which was a sign it was out to get it," he added.

"They should have called me then, but (the snake) got away and three or four days later, I was called and went around and removed it" after the dog had been killed, Douglas said.

By the time Douglas arrived, all that could be seen of the dog was its hind legs and tail.

The zoo manager, Todd Rose, said pythons squeeze their prey to death before swallowing it whole. The 5-year-old dog would have been suffocated within minutes. VideoWatch snake handler show off dog-eating python »

"The lady who was there threw some plastic chairs at the snake, but you've got to remember that this is about 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of aggressive muscle," Rose said.

Removing the half-swallowed dog could have harmed or even killed the python, Rose said, because dogs have sharp teeth and claws that could do the snake internal damage if it were wrenched out.

The snake was still digesting the dog at the zoo Wednesday. It will soon be moved to the bush, Douglas said.

Quote of the day

Today's quote comes from my friend Darren during our game of Settlers of Catan (yes, we're nerds).

Darren: "Toss in some ore and a hand job and we've got ourselves a deal."

My Moon My Man

My schedule tonight revolves around two cycles: the lunar cycle and the premiere of America's Next Top Model Cycle 10.

Tonight's lunar schedule (Pacific Time)
Penumbral Eclipse Begins: 4:35 pm
Partial Eclipse Begins: 5:43 pm
Moon Completely Eclipsed: 7:01 pm
Romantic kiss with my boyfriend: 7:02 pm
Full Moon: 7:30 pm
Total Eclipse Ends: 7:52 pm
Partial Eclipse Ends: 9:09 pm
Penumbral Eclipse Ends: 10:17 pm

Top Model Premiere schedule (Pacific Time)
Fierce Beauty: 8:00 pm
Fabulous Strut: 8:14 pm
Fresh Personality: 8:30 pm
Wanna be on top?: 8.51 pm
Cry, Betches, Cry!: 8:55 pm

Can't wait!

Dirty Dirty Birds

Today, my coworker Peter (the one with the wig fetish) and I went for a stroll during our lunch break to take advantage of the sunny weather. We were having a lovely time until we reached the aquarium and found two of the dirtiest pigeons ever. They weren't hygienically dirtier than other birds I've seen (although I'm pretty sure they were still riddled with disease). These pigeons were more sleazy-dirty.

The pigeons were all over each other and shamelessly making out with their tiny beaks, in public! The nerve. There was a little pecking, a bit of cuddling and a whole lotta neck bobbing action. My coworker and I shook our heads in disgust as we watched this, and I'm confident the lovebirds (pun intended) noticed our disapproval because they quickly turned to look at us with their beady little eyes, stopped their dirty business, and guiltily stepped away from one another.

And that is how I shared the gift of Shame today.

Happy Presidents Day, Betches

To all of you who have the day off - I'm SO over you.

I've decided to try scaring a few select coworkers this week by acting like a prissy little diva when I'm around them, and gaying it up about 15%. I'm getting my inspiration from Christian from Project Runway.

Lines I plan on using include "Ughhh...don't get bitchy" and "It BETTER be fierce".



Better watch out!!

Man Crush

Anthony Bourdain is a sexy man.

Happy Valentine's!

My coworker just gave me a packet of Fun Dip and a Valentine's Day card with Orlando Bloom (That's a lot of sugar, and I don't mean the candy!). I'm enjoying both while listening to Missy Elliott's new song Ching-a-Ling. SO into it right now. It's gonna be a good day!



HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!

It's working!

The marriage of my "eat what I want whenever I want" diet with my workout of pushups, situps, and model strutting is working! I reached 137 pounds yesterday morning - naked! And my fat percentage is still only 9.6%. I've successfully gained 2 pounds in under a week. I feel happier already.

In other news, my blog has gone international (my prior Canadian visitors didn't count)! This past week, I had visitors from Netherland and Brazil. What a treat.

my body is a wonderland

I'm not happy right now - at least according to Karen I'm not. Based on a math equation she found, my 135 pound body is just a little below happy.

Happy ideal weight =
Height (in inches) squared x 0.031 x 0.95(if you have a small frame)

My Happy weight =
69^(2) x 0.031 x 0.95 = 140.21

I don't know, but I've been feeling pretty good about myself lately. I'm living in a great place on Capital hill with my sister, I have a good social life, my boyfriend is amazing, and work is going well. What more could I want? Well, I guess I'm a little curious to see what life would be like being perfectly happy. So lets give it a try. My goal for the end of February is to reach 140 pounds. That's 5 pounds heavier than I am now. And I also want to do this while maintaining a body fat percentage of under 10% (I currently range from 8.6-10.1) according to my sister's fancy high-tech scale. Reaching this goal shouldn't be too difficult. I'll switch from eating 5 meals a day to 6. And, I'll make little changes to my diet, like switching from drinking green tea in the morning to drinking melted butter.

And in related news (it's your lucky day, a long post!), I found an interesting article today in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times about the trend of skinny male models. Hey! I fit the profile of "chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished." Maybe I should try out to be America's Next Top Skinny Male Model after I gain 5-10 pounds. Someone give Tyra a call cause it's gonna be a hit.

Here's the article: The Vanishing Point

CREDIT Hedi Slimane or blame him. The type of men Mr. Slimane promoted when he first came aboard at Dior Homme some years back (he has since left) were thin to the point of resembling stick figures; the clothes he designed were correspondingly lean. The effects of his designs on the men’s wear industry were radical and surprisingly persuasive. Within a couple of seasons, the sleekness of Dior Homme suits made everyone else’s designs look boxy and passé, and so designers everywhere started reducing their silhouettes.

Then a funny thing happened. The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.

Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York

Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.

The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy’s top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.

“Designers like the skinny guy,” he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. “It looks good in the clothes and that’s the main thing. That’s just the way it is now.”

Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce & Gabbana’s look-book for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored — industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou, who have movie star looks and porn star physiques — but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym.

“The look is different from when I started in the business eight years ago,” Mr. Ballou said last week during a photo shoot at the Milk Studios in lower Manhattan. In many of the model castings, which tend to be dominated by a handful of people, the body style that now dominates is the one Charles Atlas made a career out of trying to improve.

“The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym,” the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.

“The eye has changed,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows.”

What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.

“There are designers that lead the way,” said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. “Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada for the standard the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they’d never get cast.”

For starters, they knew that they would never fit into designers’ samples. “When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50,” said Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, referring to a size equivalent to a snug 40-regular.

“That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male,” Mr. Nguyen said. Yet just six years later — coincidentally at about the time Mr. Slimane left his job as the men’s wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme — the typical sample size had dwindled to 48. Now it is 46.

“At that point you might as well save money and just go over to the boy’s department,” Mr. Nguyen said from his seat in the front row of the Benjamin Cho show, which was jammed as usual with a selection of reedy boys in Buffalo plaid jackets and stovepipe jeans, the same types that fill Brooklyn clubs like Sugarland. “I’m not really sure if designers are making clothes smaller or if people are smaller now,” Mr Nguyen said.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are taller and much heavier today than 40 years ago. The report, released in 2002, showed that the average height of adult American men has increased to 5-9 ½ in 2002 from just over 5-8 in 1960. The average weight of the same adult man had risen dramatically, to 191 pounds from 166.3.

Nowadays a model that weighed in at 191 pounds, no matter how handsome, would be turned away from most agencies or else sent to a fat farm.

Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.

“I personally think that it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. “No one wants a beautiful women or a beautiful man anymore.”

In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone said.

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”

Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. “It’s client driven,” he added. “That’s just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want.”

For Patrik Ervell’s show on Saturday, the casting brief called for new faces and men whose bodies were suited to a scarecrow silhouette. “We had to measure their thighs,” Mr. Brown said.

For models like Demián Tkach, a 26-year-old Argentine who was recently discovered by the photographer Bruce Weber, the tightening tape measure may cut off a career.

Mr. Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: “My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They’re looking for some kind of androgyne.”