How to open a banana like a monkey

Thank you A CUP OF JO Via designverb

Donae’o – Party Hard

Amerie feat. Lil Wayne – Heard Em All (Remix)

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Omolara Ayodele – Be Like Yours

Island Routes

A mud bath in St. Lucia, a Reggae on the Water cruise in Jamaica, a sail around Antigua’s 365 beaches or a pit stop at a conch-and-beer shack in the Bahamas are not the norm for most tour excursions in the Caribbean.

Island Routes Luxury Adventure Tours, a Jamaica-based company that set up shop in June, is all about raising the bar on guest experiences with tours and excursions that spotlight the history, people and attractions of each island where the firm operates.

With more than 80 excursions in its Jamaica inventory, Island Routes will roll out its offerings in Antigua and St. Lucia on Nov. 1, followed by the Turks and Caicos in late December and the Bahamas in early 2010.

Island Routes, a division of Sandals Resorts International, “was the natural evolution for our company, which has been headquartered in Montego Bay for more than 25 years,” said Sandals CEO Adam Stewart.

Through its Certified Partners Program, Island Routes handpicks local companies to guide excursions “that are the best of the best and capture the essence and allure of each island,” said Dominique Peterkin, general manager.

Tour desks at participating resorts in Jamaica — which, for now, include the 12 Sandals, Beaches, Royal Planation and Grand Pineapple properties — are manned by Island Routes specialists who guide guests through the tour selection process.

The average price for Island Routes’ popular river-tubing programs in Jamaica “runs about $70 per person, but swimming with the dolphins at Dolphin Cove can be $200 per person,” Peterkin said.

Adventure, culture and romance are the three categories of tour offerings. Sample excursions include the Mystic Mountain water park in Ocho Rios; the Bellefield Great House in Montego Bay to view a re-enactment of plantation life; bike tours through the Blue Mountains; a reggae cruise; deep-sea fishing trips; river kayaking; and evening catamaran sails to Laughing Waters waterfalls and beach near Ocho Rios.

Island Routes partnered with Unique Vacations Inc. as UVI’s first official tour provider. UVI serves as the worldwide sales and marketing representative for Sandals, Beaches, Royal Planation and Grand Pineapple Beach Resorts.

Visit www.islandroutes.com.

Source: Travel Weekly, Gay Nagle Myers

Molly Angelheart – That psychotic bit…

Dry to the last drop

Image via Yanko Design

Saving water and energy during laundry day is important, and we typically think of water-wise washers and hang-dryin as the best options. But even when we hang-dry our laundry, there’s a smidgen of water wasted by what drips off the clothes. We could put our potted plants under the clothesline and call it a day for using a resource to its fullest. Or, designer Tian Lingrui has another idea.

Yanko Design shows off this interesting idea for hanging a tube to the bottom of your garment to catch dripping water. You can then recycle the water easily. It’s a pretty great idea since I often see a small pool of wasted water on the floor underneath sweaters hung up to dry, even when I’ve done my best to get all the excess water out.

from TreeHugger by Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California

It seems both practical, and resource-thoughtful…so would you use it?

Crazy?…I’ll show you Crazy :)

from Notes on A Scandalvia tupsyturvy via sarcasticbitch via yoitsvanessa

Black Hair, Still Tangled in Politics – NY Times Article

Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

HER CALL Michelle Obama and 11-year-old Malia, who wore her hair in twists this summer.

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

SILKY straight hair has long been considered by many black women to be their crowning glory. So what if getting that look meant enduring the itchy burning that’s a hallmark of many chemical straighteners. Or a pricey dependence on “creamy crack,” as relaxers are sometimes jokingly called.

Getting “good hair” often means transforming one’s tightly coiled roots; but it is also more freighted, for many African-American women and some men, than simply a choice about grooming. Straightening hair has been perceived as a way to be more acceptable to certain relatives, as well as to the white establishment.

“If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed,” the comedian Paul Mooney, sporting an Afro, says in the documentary “Good Hair,” which won a jury prize at the Sundance film festival and comes out in October. “If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.”

The movie, made by Chris Rock, explores the lengths black women go to get long, straightened locks, from a $1,000 weave on a teacher’s salary to schoolgirls having their hair chemically relaxed.

In the face of cultural pressure, the thinking goes, conformists relax their hair, and rebels have the courage not to. In some corners, relaxing one’s hair is even seen as wishing to be white.

“For black women, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” said Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of black studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “If you’ve got straight hair, you’re pegged as selling out. If you don’t straighten your hair,” she said, “you’re seen as not practicing appropriate grooming practices.”

Anyone who thought such preconceptions were outdated would have been reminded otherwise by some negative reactions to the president’s 11-year-old daughter, Malia Obama, who wore her hair in twists while in Rome this summer. Commenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked her as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened.

Although legions of black women in America straighten their hair (including Michelle Obama), hair salons specializing in natural styles have proliferated, and more black women are working with their virgin hair. Many wear their twists, locks or teenie-weenie Afros (known as TWAs) with an attitude — proud to have not given in to the pressure to straighten hair. In “Good Hair,” Nia Long, the actress, describes the conventional wisdom that straightened hair is more desirable: “There’s always a sort of pressure within the black community, like ‘Oh, if you have good hair, you’re prettier or better than the brown-skinned girl that wears an Afro or the dreads or the natural hairstyle.’ ”

For some, the battle lines are drawn.

But in recent interviews, a number of people of color expressed a weariness with the debate. They asked, essentially: Why can’t hair just be hair? Must an Afro peg a woman as the political heir to Angela Davis? Is a fashionista who replicates the first lady’s clean-cut bob really being untrue to herself?

“I am who I am regardless of how I wear my hair,” said Tywana Smith, an owner of Treasured Locks, a Web site devoted to upkeep for relaxed and natural hair. “I want my kids to be seen for who they are, not for how they wear their hair,” she added. “Whether they walk down the street with twists or braids, they aren’t making any other statement other than ‘Today I felt like twists.’ ”

Assumptions about the motives for straightening or wearing hair natural aren’t as easy to make as they once were. During the last presidential campaign, Noliwe M. Rooks, the associate director of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, had many conversations about what it meant when the hair of Sasha and Malia Obama was pressed straight. “Unlike earlier times,” the conclusion wasn’t “clearly she had sold out, or she’s saying straight hair is better,” Professor Rooks said. “There’s a complexity to who we are now. There wasn’t an easy answer to why.”

Afua Adusei-Gontarz, 30, of Brooklyn, wore her hair natural for five years in a French braid, two-strand twists or a puffy ponytail. But she doesn’t think those looks made her more authentically black. “If you have natural hair, you’re considered more real, or in touch with your African-ness,” said Ms. Adusei-Gontarz, an assistant editor at Columbia University Press.

She rejects that thinking: In Ghana, her older relatives relax their hair — as she does now but for convenience — and “it’s more the newer generations who have natural hair.”

Last year, sales of home relaxers totaled $45.6 million (excluding Wal-Mart), according to Mintel, a market research firm, a figure that has held steady in recent years. So many African-American women use relaxers or a hot comb to get a straight look temporarily that not doing so can require courage. Online where black women discuss hair, commenters may support the natural look for strangers but don’t adopt it, said Professor Rooks, the author of “Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women.” I’m not brave enough, they write — it’s so wonderful that you can accept yourself as you are.

The “good hair” issue has almost always skewed toward women. Black men with highly textured hair have long had a convenient, socially acceptable option: a close trim. Many black women get into the habit of relaxing hair as girls — when the choice is made by their mother or another relative — so changing the status quo as an adult can be difficult.

For many people no matter their race or hair texture, accepting yourself “as you are” is a high bar. The history of beauty is one of dissatisfaction and transformation: brunettes become blondes; white women get their curly hair Japanese-straightened. To go from short to shoulder-length and back again, celebrities from Britney Spears to Queen Latifah use weaves, which require a stylist to sew or to glue someone else’s hair into tracks on the scalp.

So why, asks Brian Smith, who runs TreasuredLocks.com with his wife, Tywana, is a hairstyle a “political or social statement” primarily among African-Americans? He has had customers implore him to stop giving hair-care advice to people who use relaxers because “you’re helping these women sell out.” But he and his wife, who now twists her hair herself after years of relaxing it, don’t take sides.

The term “natural” is itself problematic, said Professor Banks, the author of “Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness.” She recently spent 14 months in black-centric salons in five cities researching a future book. Natural hair salons don’t offer chemical straightening or weaves. But she found “a great deal of coloring in natural hairstyling, thereby challenging the ‘chemically free’ label.”

Oddly, Patricia Gaines, the founder of Nappturality.com, a pro-natural Web site, points out that dyeing one’s Afro puffs or double-strand twists blond isn’t viewed as conforming to a Euro-centric look. “It’s never been about color with black women,” she said, referring to the tint of one’s hair. “If it’s blond hair and it’s nappy, it’s still nappy.” (A term she uses proudly, though some use it as a slur.)

For Professor Banks, making a choice is crucial, not the resulting hairstyle. “If a black woman makes a choice to relax her hair, or to cut all her hair off, or just do nothing to it, it’s empowering to make that choice,” she said, noting that black women on plantations didn’t have that luxury.

Shayna Y. Rudd, of Washington, wore a past-her-shoulders weave to have a better shot at the Miss America title. She said an adviser gave her two choices: imitate Beyoncé’s long luscious look or Jada Pinkett Smith’s flowing mane. “I couldn’t be who God wanted me to be,” Ms. Rudd, 24, said ruefully. “I didn’t win. My spirit was crushed.”

She has since sworn off relaxers and extensions; instead, she occasionally presses her tight-curled hair and slicks it into a bun, which is what she did earlier this month when she won the title Miss Black USA. (She bested 28 other contestants, only 3 of whom wore their hair natural.) “Don’t buy into anyone else’s standard, set your own,” Ms. Rudd said.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Star Island – Bahamian EcoDestination

A 35-acre cay off the island of Eleuthera is preparing to become private, completely eco-friendly digs to be called S.T.A.R., as in Sustainable Terrain and Resources.

The developers claim commitment “to making Star Island sustainable and earth-friendly at every level.” All energy to power the bungalows, residences, and the hotel will be harnessed from wind, sun, and water.

photo from NYT

All waste will be recycled, composted, and used as fertilizer; rain water will be harvested and heated via solar power; mini wind turbines will harness energy; geothermal heat pumps will produce heating and cooling capabilities “by tapping into the stability of underground temperatures that average between 65 to 70 degrees”; and lots more. Read about the island’s green technology here.

Source: Save EcoDestinations