The Daily News just released its list of the 50 most powerful people in fashion. Do you agree with their choices? Do you think they missed anyone?
Here at Nemo, we swear by Wordpress, a state-of-the-art blogging platform that encompasses thousands of free themes and plugins to customize your experience. Wordpress was founded in 2003 and since then, it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging device in the world.
If you decide to use Wordrpess, you’re in great company. Well-known users of the platform include The New York Times, Ford, People Magazine, Delta Airlines, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, BoingBoing and Xerox.
Some benefits of the Wordpress platform:
1. The install is fairly quick and painless. Simply download the newest version of the platform here and follow the detailed install guide.
2. There are over 2,000 free plugins available from the Wordpress site that allow you to customize your experience down to spam filters and comment formats.
3. The admin panel in Wordpress is web-based; as long as you have an internet connection, it’s possible to update from anywhere in the world.
The beauty of Wordpress is that it’s an open source project; hundreds of people around the world are constantly working to make it more efficient and it’s totally free to use. Nearly 200 themes can be viewed directly on the Wordpress site. Additionally, some of the best, most professinal looking themes out there include:
1. Modicus Theme:
2. Futurosity Theme:
4. Overstand Theme:
5. Fontella Theme:
6. Modicus Remix Theme:
Are you a WordPress user? What are some of benefits that you’ve gained from using this platform?
Have you ever secretly wondered what the bold and beautiful people inhabiting this planet really live like? Thanks to New York photographer Todd Selby, you can finally find out. Here’s your chance to be a peeping Tom with absolutely no guilt. This is a truly fascinating and introspective encounter that lacks the glossy facade of house and decor magazines.
Sports, technology, iconic brands and social networking all wrapped up in one package - Nike+ there are only winners here. The Nike+ Sports Kit has allowed athletes to share their data with friends and others who then compete online. This coming together of computer and running shoe technology between Apple, who’s iPod is a way to gather and upload the runner’s data (speed, distance, steps etc) and Nike who’s shoes include the Piezoelectric accelerometer for measuring the data.
And now a campaign to register runners globally to run a 10k and have every mile tracked whether they run, walk or jog and Nike will count those miles towards a charity of its choice. Time to get away from the monitor.
Over the last few weeks, many Beijing residents, tourists and athletes have been flocking to tattoo parlors across the city to get reminders of the Olympics imprinted onto their skin.
The growing popularity of tattoos is a recent phenomenon in Beijing. As recently as 10 years ago, it was very rare to come across a parlor and since there is almost no regulation by the government, most tattoo artists in China are self-taught.
In Chinese history, tattoos were considered improper and avoided at all costs. Criminal’s faces were tattooed before they were thrown in jail and even into the 1940s, tattoos were usually only seen marking members of crime rings.
There are now hundreds of parlors scattered across the city and the China Association of Tattoo Artists is pushing for increased regulation through a yearly convention. It’s only a matter of time now before the stigmas held by older generations evaporate and tattoos become the norm in China.
Click image to play ‘Because of’
I found a YouTube video of a song from one of America’s greatest living song writers, a video of a song in which he delivers an ode to passion, old age and inevitable decline. A look back at what was, has been and perhaps now will no longer be.
In this recent song, ‘Because of,’ Leonard Cohen revisits his youth, a time of prodigous output when he wrote great songs such as Suzanne and Famous Blue Raincoat and one of my favourites, Chelsea Hotel #2 in which Cohen captures the freewheeling essence of Manhattan in the 60’s - “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet, giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street. Those were the reasons and that was New York, we were running for the money and the flesh.” There were always women surrounding Cohen and the threads of those relationships wove their way into his songs. As his Wikipedia entry says his work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation and sexuality.
The POV of the video for ‘Because of’ is via a porthole, or perhaps a lens intended to focus on the subject matter - women dancing half-naked on a bed. And Cohen, in that famous gravelly voice, intones rather than sings the lyrics of his lament.
“Because of a few songs wherein I spoke of their mystery, women have been exceptionally kind……and they say, “look at me Leonard, look at me one last time…”
The song brings to mind another talented artist in Cohen’s peer group, the writer and novelist Philip Roth; they were born within a year of each other, Roth in 1933 and Cohen in 1934. In 2007 Roth delivered Exit Ghost, a novel of immense power, in which the novel’s central character Zuckerman struggles with his past [there are references to The Ghost Writer a previous Roth novel] and his incontinence and impotence due to an operation to combat his prostate cancer. Roth/Zuckerman sums up his helplessness when he writes “I gave up swimming regularly down at the college pool for the bulk of the year (with bloomers under my (swim) suit) and continued to confine myself to sporadically yellowing the waters of my own pond during the Berkshires’ few months of warm weather, when, rain or shine, I do my laps for half an hour everyday.”
The difference in these end game soliloquies from each man’s perspective is that Cohen seems more hopeful, as if there is more beyond the life he now lives, yet Zuckerman/Roth sees only despair, decline and finality. Clearly, even to the end, true passion not only consumes us but also never dies.
