Posted by admin on March 9th, 2009 — Posted in Accouterment
1. Wearing the Wrong Colors
To look your best wear clothing colors that will complement your skin. Wearing the wrong colors will make your skin appear sallow and lines and wrinkles will be more evident. The right colors will make you look more vibrant and healthy.
2. Wearing too much makeup
Too much makeup will make lines appear deeper and will create a harsh look. Keep makeup light for day and a little darker for evening. See a professional if you are unsure of makeup application techniques.
3. Wearing Clothes that are too small
Wearing clothes that fit too tightly will make you appear larger. Wearing clothes that do not suit your body type will make you appear larger. Buy clothes that suit your body type - not someone else’s.
4. Chipped nail polish
The idea of nail polish is to make your nails appear nicer. Chipped polish just brings attention to poor grooming.
5. An old-fashioned hairstyle or messy hair
Your hairstyle creates a first impression. From your hairstyle people will assume your education level, status, age etc. This doesn’t mean the judgments are correct - they happen instinctively. Make sure it doesn’t happen to you. Visit your hairstylist regularly.
6. Messy Shoes or wrong shoes for your outfit
Take care of your shoes they complete your look. Also pay attention that your complement your outfit.
7. Roots that show
If you colour your hair make sure you keep it maintained regularly.
8. Bras and bra straps that show
When wearing sleeveless tops make sure you wear a racer back bra. Don’t wear bras that fit too tightly or don’t have good support.
9. Mismatched hose
Match your hose with your shoes or with your pants or skirt.
10. Wearing inappropriate clothes
When in a working environment make sure that your clothes are not flashy (unless you are in a creative field) do not wear short skirts, (more than 3 inches above the knee) sleeveless tops, plunging necklines, stilettos, too much jewelry, leather pants or skirts, or anything that shimmers.
Copyright 2004 Sheila Dicks
Sheila Dicks is a wardrobe and image consultant who teaches women
how to look slimmer by dressing to suit their body type. Visit her at
http://www.sheilasfashionsense.com to download a copy of her e-book Image Makeovers and get How to Build a Wardrobe ebook free.
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Posted by admin on March 9th, 2009 — Posted in Accouterment
The dress shoe may sound boring, but it is anything but. In an age when tennis shoes and sneakers are worn everywhere, mens dress shoes may not be as popular, but they do show the difference between those that are serious and the posers. There are a wide variety of styles, and it depends on what you are looking for. Mens dress shoes range from borderline casual to very fancy, and can adapt to any situation.
Mens dress shoes that many often picture are the boring black shoes with thin laces that we all learned to dread as kids. However, dress shoes have changed a lot since then. The big difference is that the sole has undergone some changes, going away from the wooden and plastic soles to rubber ones, allowing for more comfort, as well as dancing. Also, there are more types available, with wingtips and penny-loafers making a comeback. What styles are popular this summer can be found here: http://www.mensflair.com/news-trends/summer-dress-shoes-trend.php.
The dress shoe has been allowed to dress down, with some shoes being derived from moccasins. However, Italian shoes still continue to reign, with New York and London coming close. Strangely, Los Angeles has also been starting to come into its own. As sneakers become more popular, they have been combined with more conservative mens dress shoes to create hybrids; although looked down, they are becoming popular with trendy models.
Also of note are sandals, which are catching on as more people embrace more holistic lifestyles. Although not a dress shoe by any means, that they are being worn in more formal situations is of note, as well as the controversy that they have created in regards to formal wear, especially as “tribal” fashions come and go in fashion circles, and New Age beliefs continue to take hold. It will be interesting to see if sandals ever crossover from women’s fashion, or will be a truly male footwear.
It is interesting to note that wingtips and penny-loafers are in vogue due to a wave of nostalgia. As more modernistic styles become available, new designers are always trying to update the classics, if for no other reason than to see what modern materials can do to old classics. At the same time, boots are also being taken more seriously than in decades past, possibly due to an interest in western music and Texas’ rise in popularity, as well as having a number of influential politicians from there (not the least of whom is the current president). These “dress boots” are made of a different leather than regular boots, as well as having more obvious needlework.
In short, there is a wide variety of shoes available for dressing up, and it is up to you what kind of shoes you will wear, from the conservative to almost fun.
Bilal Babic, editor of Men’s Fashion Magazine http://www.MensFlair.com
Visit to Claim Your FREE Copy of Report “Dress Better Now!”
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Posted by admin on March 5th, 2009 — Posted in Uncategorized
A good portion of the enjoyment of a pleasant date is in the anticipation. We have a date for Friday night and we think about it throughout the week. We think about what we will wear, where we’ll go, what we’ll eat, what we’ll say and do. We plan on how long it will take to get ready and whether we’ll need to leave work a few minutes early.
When we enter a relationship, we stop dating. We see each other, of course, much more than we did in our dating days. At the onset of living together, we still have that sense of anticipation before seeing that beloved face. We hurry home to the most important person in our little world.
After years together, we become used to the routine. We may enjoy seeing our significant other as much as ever but the exhilarating anticipation has become normalized. We have become habituated to the lives together we have created.
We need to start dating again. We need to create special events that we can look forward to with keen relish. Thinks about when you last took a vacation or a pleasure trip. The days and weeks leading up to it were times of mounting excitement and planning; we saw it in our mind’s eye long before it took place. After it was over, we enjoyed remembering the things we had seen and done, secretly smiling at the fun we’d had and the free feelings we had experienced.
The same spirit-boosting results can be obtained, to a lesser degree but with more frequency, in planning small events with our partner.
A lunch or dinner date at a special place can be something we look forward to for a long happy week. A date to go bowling, or dancing, or golfing, can be set up several days in advance. Plan on when you are going to see that special movie or attend a concert.
An event simply needs to be special, it doesn’t have to be expensive. Plan a visit to the fast food chain where you had your first date. Take visits to local hotels to see which ones have the best free hors d’oevres at happy hour. Meet at a museum or an art gallery for a stroll together.
Send your honey a special invitation by card or e-mail. Advise that no “regrets” will be acceptable. Prepare for the date as carefully as if it was your first meeting and be on your best behavior as you were in that delicious dance of courtship.
When your friends question why you are in such a good mood lately, just smile and tell them that your life is so special that there’s no time left to be grumpy.
Virginia Bola is giving away complimentary copies of “Seven Super Simple Tips: Keep Your Marriage Fresh” from which this article is taken. To obtain your own copy, visit: www.graburl.com/x.php?1cs.
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Posted by admin on March 4th, 2009 — Posted in Uncategorized
The French Revolution constituted for the conscience of the dominant aristocratic class a fall from innocence, and upturning of the natural chain of events that resounded all over Europe; the old regime became, in their imaginary, a paradise lost. This explains why some romantic poets born in the higher classes were keen on seeing themselves as faded aristocrats, expelled from their comfortable milieu by a reverse of fortune or a design of destiny. Byron and Shelley are the prime instances of this vital pose. In The Giaour he writes on a vampiric character: “The common crowd but see the gloom/ Of wayward deeds and fitting doom;/ The close observer can espy/A noble soul, and lineage high.”
Byron departed from England leaving a trail of scandal over his marital conduct and since then saw himself as an exiled expatriate. Shelley was expelled from Oxford and he fell in disgrace by marrying an in-keeper’s daughter; he always struggled to reconcile his origin with his political ideas: “Shelley could find no way of resolving his own contradictory opinions” (Cronin, 2000).
This icon of the fallen aristocrat is rooted on another character revered by romantic poets: the fallen angel. As Mario Praz proves, miltonic Satan became the rebel figure of choice among romantic poets. Milton reversed the medieval idea of a hideous Satan and wrapped its figure with the epic grandeur of an angel fallen in disgrace. Many of the byronic heros share with Milton’s Satan this fallen-from-grace condition, such as Lara: “There was in him a vital scorn of all:/
As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,/ stood a stranger in this breathing world,/An erring spirit from another hurl’d” ( Lara XVIII 315-16)
There is another social factor that is behind the formation of the romantic myth of the vampire. In the early nineteen century, the foundations of what would later become a mass society were laid; the expansion of the press and of the reading public produced an increased diffusion for literary works and fostered movements such as the gothic and the sensation novel. Byron himself experienced the event of being turned into a proto-bestseller. The unification of literary taste and preferences that was a correlate to this social changes could not be more alien to the romantic notion of individual gusto and original sensibility. In order to combat this unifying forces, romantic poets revered the individual who stands outside society and is free from common concerns. Many of Byron’s heros look down on the masses from above, even though they walk among them and do not lean towards wordsworthian escapades into nature; they achieve to remain untainted by the masses in a sort of exile within the world akin to that of a ghost or a dammed spirit. This self-definition of Manfred is revelatory:
From my youth upwards
My spirit walk’d not with the souls of men,
Nor look’d upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh, (Manfred II, ii, 50-58)
Not only Byron’s works contrived to produce the modern image of the vampire in relation to the Male Seducer archetype, but also some odd events in his life and the life of those surrounding him exercised a decisive influence. A critical study bundled with an anthology of vampire tales (Conde de Siruela, 2001) attributes to the short story The Vampire (1819) by John William Polidori the fixation of the “classical images of the literary vampire as a villanious, cold and enigmatic aristocrat; but, above all, perverse and fascinating for women”. Mario Praz, in the same line, also states that Byron was “largely responsible for the vogue of vampirism”. Polidori was the unfortunate doctor and personal assistant of Lord Byron who died half-crazy at 25. The idea for the tale published in 1819 came from the famous meetings at Villa Diodati on June 1816 between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Polidori, in what was probably the most influential gathering for fantastic fiction in the history of modern literature. In order to pass the stormy and ether-fuelled nights, they agreed to write each one a ghost story. Mary Shelley (who was then 17 years old) got during these nights the idea of what later became Frankenstein and Polidori wrote the tale The Vampire that he would publish three years later. The story appeared in the New Monthly Magazine falsely attributed by the editor to Lord Byron (taking advantages of the aura of Satanism that surrounded the poet in the popular view to promote the sales of the magazine). A misguided Goethe hailed the story as the best that Lord Byron had ever written. The tale was, actually, a covert portrait of Lord Byron disguised as the vampire Lord Ruthven, a cruel gambler and killer of innocent girls. Polidori had introduced in the story fragments from an autobiographical and revengeful novel called Glenarvon written by Caroline Lamb, an ex-lover of Byron. The Lord’s reaction was a threat to the editor and the denouncing of a commercial imposture with his name. Eventually Stoker’s Dracula (1897) blended, according to Siruela (2001), this tradition derived from Polidori’s Lord Ruthven with some old romano-hungarian tales of wandering dead and enchanted castles, fixating thus the modern images of the vampire.
The vampire is closely linked to another romantic archetype: the dissatisfied lover. Rafael Argullol summarizes its traits: “el enamorado romntico reconoce en la consumacin amorosa el punto de inflexin a partir del cual la pasin muestra su faz desposedora y exterminadora.”. The romantic lover begins to feel a sense of dissatisfaction, caducity and mortality at the very moment when his passion is fulfilled. This feeling prompts him to embark in a sentimental rollercoaster where each peak of satisfaction is followed by a valley of despair and the impulse to seek satisfaction in a new object of love in order to renew the faded passion (the extreme of this attitude is the character of Don Juan). The vampire goes one step further than the seducer: for him the loved one stands as an image of his own dissatisfaction and it must be destroyed at the very moment when the longing for her disappears; at the instant of consummation. Again Byron in Manfred expresses this transference, which Argullol opportunely labels as romantic self-mirroring: “I loved her, and destroy’d her! (211)”. Keats conveys in his Ode on Melancholy the feeling of mortality that is hidden in the moment of pleasure for the romantic: “Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:/ Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,/ Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine”. La belle dame sans merci is according to Argullol also a poem where “vida y muerte se vivifican y complementan mutuamente […] se hallan en total simbiosis”. But there is a crucial difference between Byron and Keats in their approach to the fatal lover: Byron’s characters are fatal males, epitomized in the vampire, while Keats’ characters are femmes fatales. This difference underlines a different attitude to gender issues: Byron liked to emanate a dominant masculinity which is imprinted in all his leading characters. Keats, however, had a passive approach to love, his poetic personas like to be seduced even if that means, as we have seen, to be killed. Byron is the male aristocrat who thinks all women are naturally his, they are his possessions and, as such, disposable at will. Keats, who disliked Byron’s Don Juan - in a letter to his brother, he referred to it as “Lord Byron’s last flash poem”, announces a more modern and non-patriarchal approach to love where the woman is free to be the seducer. Nevertheless, as we have seen, they both share the extreme notion of love as creation and destruction at the same time; and their characters, though of different gender, are vampire lovers. This different attitude is not only personal but it mirrors a wider and epochal distinction. Mario Praz has observed how the fatal and cruel lovers of the first half of the nineteenth century are chiefly males, while in the second half of the century the roles are gradually inverted until late century decadentism is dominated by femmes fatales. This literary process mirrors the advancement of social changes throughout the century, and the slow but continuous emancipation of love from patriarchal standards. Gender issues shift focus, but power and domination remain at the core of the portrayals of love even in the fully bourgeoisie society of the late nineteenth century. Goodland (2000) has explored the role of women as a redundant class subject to another classes and the gender/class dialectic found in the vampire.
Not only Byron and Keats were fascinated by the myth of the vampire, but we can find its presence in most romantic poets, even in the proto-romantic early Goethe. A list of authors who use such characters made by Twitchell (1981) comprises: Southey in Thalaba the destroyer, Coleridge in Christabel and Wordsworth in The Leech Gatherer.
As we have seen throughout this paper the figure of the vampire is shaped in the romantic period under the form of an ideological knot where many social forces converge: the French Revolution, an embryonic mass society, the decline of aristocracy and the gradual shifting apart of gender divisions from the patriarchal model. Therefore, it constitutes a myth that may be read as a battleground for the play of discourses of its era, shedding light on other romantic attitudes towards existence. As such it is subject to an analysis that, as new historicisms maintain, is aware of the historicity of a text and the textuality of history.
This article can not be sold commercially or without crediting the source and author
Xavier Zambrano has a degree in English Philology and is the webmaster of the blog A Picture and a Sentence that blends painting and literary quotes. The quotations are updated daily:
Quotes and Painting
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Posted by admin on March 4th, 2009 — Posted in Credit Rating + Cash Flow, Finance Matters
When you use a debt settlement company to help fix your debt, lenders are more likely to get approved for future loans with low interest rates. This can help you if needing a loan for an unexpected incident that may come about. Using a debt settlement company can help you qualify for low interest rate loans within a year of utilizing their service. While in this process you must be smart and responsible with your finances. The debt settlement company expects you to be making your payments on time and to be following the advice they provide you with. If you make a real effort and abide by the rules, you will be debt free in no time.
Employing a debt settlement company to help improve your credit can benifit numerous unique aspects of your life. Most individuals dont see how many things in their lives get affected when fighting with their finances. If you are somebody going through a financial crisis, it is highly recommended that you talk with a debt settlement company as soon as possible. Once on board with a debt settlement company it is important that you remain determined and on track for amending your credit. Debt settlement companies have experience and are prepared to help you.
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Posted by admin on March 2nd, 2009 — Posted in Uncategorized
There is a relatively new phenomenon in North America called ‘voluntary simplicity.’ The term ‘voluntary simplicity’ is used to describe a process whereby people opt out of the harried life of modern day living, and chose to live a life of frugality. Frugality in this sense doesn’t mean poverty rather, it means, enjoying the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy and from everything you have the use of. Frugal is characterised by or reflective of economy in the expenditure of resources.
Simplicity means making time for yourself in a hectic world. You clear out what is superfluous and make room for a life of passion, depth, and joy. As people become more and more stressed out from the pace of modern life and as we become increasingly concerned about the price of our over-consumption of the planet’s resources, the movement to living in a state of ‘mindfulness’ has increasing interest as a chosen life-style. To be mindful means to dwell deeply in the present moment knowing there is only one opportunity and it will never come again.
Voluntary simplicity comes from within. It is a social movement of a more sustainable, gratifying, and spiritually connected existence. Voluntary simplicity is a matter of personal responsibility and conscious awareness of how we live on the planet. It means identifying the difference between our needs and our wants. Needs are those things that are necessary for our survival - food, clothing, and shelter. Wants are all the other things we desire and to a large extent are driven by media advertising. Simplicity as a life-style is the identifiable difference between needs and wants, and the awareness of the cost in terms of our life force energy and our willingness to pay the price.
Pursuing a Life of Simplicity
The Chinese pictograph for ‘busy’ is composed of two characters: heart and killing. When I first read this, I thought of the many people who are ‘too busy’ to make that phone call to someone they love and then one day it is too late; the many children who get gifts and/or money instead of their parents’ time and then one day they leave home and it is too late; the many times we have an opportunity to touch someone’s life with kindness but we are ‘too busy’ and the moment never comes again and it is too late.
As we search for meaning in our lives, we start to become aware of the emptiness and shallowness of a life based on materialism and consumerism. We become aware of the tremendous expenditure of our ‘life force energy’ to just keep up with the daily ‘rat race.’ We start the search for a life of deeper meaning and ask ourselves ‘what gives us joy?’ We realise we don’t know and can’t answer the question but we feel a yearning in our hearts for a sense of connection, a sense of purpose, and the sense that our life matters. The question demands an answer. We discover that all the myths such as: get a job, get married, have children, buy a mortgage with a two-car garage, and you will be happy, makes us wonder what is the matter with us when we feel the increasing futility of it all. The emphasis on externally meeting our needs leaves a ‘hole in our soul’ as we consume more and more and feel less and less satisfied. Consume by definition means to do away with completely; destroy - to spend wastefully; and squander - use up. Is consumed by our meaningless and frenzied consumerism a description that all too closely resembles most our lives?
What we don’t realise is that we are spiritual beings, in a physical body, having a human experience, and when we don’t connect the internal (spiritual) and the external (physical), our lives increasingly lose a sense of balance or harmony. There is literally no distinction between the outer and the inner when our lives are in balance, and as we seek this stability, where do we start? We start by examining our expectations and assumptions including the belief systems that drive us to live our lives ‘zombie-like’ without determining whether or not we want to play this game. We move towards consciously asking the questions about how much of our ‘life force energy’ we are prepared to exchange for the material goods we consume. This expenditure of ‘life force energy’ includes the storing, cleaning, insurance costs, maintaining, etc. all the stuff that clutters our lives.
Practical Steps to Simplifying Your Life
1. Reuse paper bags, envelopes, newspapers, etc. Newspapers and shredded paper make excellent mulch in the garden. The mulch will break down over a period of time and add humus to the soil. (Don’t use coloured flyers.)
2. Have a Buy Nothing Day.
3. Carve some space for ‘mindful living’ so that you have time for ‘beingness’ rather than ‘doingness.’
4. Find friends who know the glass is half-full or in other words, find friends who share the same value system as you do.
5. Grow your own food or buy as much as possible from local growers.
6. Use non-toxic products such as borax, vinegar, baking soda, lemon, and salt in your home, yard, and garden.
7. Before you buy something, write the item down on a note and if you still want it after a month, purchase it then.
8. Decide what is really working in your life and let go of that which no longer serves you.
9. Surround yourself with what you really need and love.
10. Go Organic. Organic gardening is not only about the avoidance of chemicals, but in the
larger picture, it is organic living using Nature’s laws.
Gwen Nyhus Stewart, B.S.W., M.G., H.T., is an educator, freelance writer, garden consultant, and author of the book The Healing Garden: A Place Of Peace - Gardening For The Soil, Gardening For The Soul. She owns the website Gwen’s Healing Garden where you will find lots of free information about gardening for the soil and gardening for the soul. To find out more about the book and subscribe to her free Newsletter visit www.gwenshealinggarden.ca Gwen Nyhus Stewart © 2004 - 2005. All rights reserved.
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Posted by admin on March 1st, 2009 — Posted in Management Resources, Market, Telecommunication Center
Oil rates are soaring and as a result, business cash holdings are pressed thin worse than previously. As the global economy lumbers along slowly and new cash continues to be hard to come by, wise directories know redundant accounts have to be slashed. Business people across the country need to make some important priority judgments to reduce expenses. One of the obvious option to reduce company expenditures is to cut down on unneeded travel expenses, and the solution is Internet conference calling.
Internet conferencing allow you to speak with others virtually in a conference in a distant city, in a far off state or especially in an overseas country. Your every day Internet conferencing calls utilize revolutionary networking services. Because that they are delivered over the net, they only consume existing business overhead. By going to the web, can anyone have a far off conference from almost anywhere that has an Internet connection. Not only is it convenient, it has huge potential to reduce big travel five digits or more in a year.
Advancements in networking technology make web conferencing calls a good choice for businesses to exchange information and presentations at the same time. Web conference attendees feel as though they were really there, despite the fact that on the other side of the planet. The quality of the presentations audio and video is without flaw through the top in streaming video.
Clearly almost any business will save money by utilizing web conferencing calls in place of spending thousands flying out an employee on a long-distance trip. You doesnt have to spend on transportation costs, hotels and meals. Big savings that quickly add up. Any trip not taken becomes higher flexibility for a company. Its commonly known that some firms are choosing web conference calling to slash expenses on low-priority sales trips.
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Posted by admin on March 1st, 2009 — Posted in Uncategorized
You’ve chosen several photos from your online dating service and sent out your personal online profile. Now you are just waiting for the replies. You wait for a few days, and nothing. You start to feel as though you should go back to the bars, at least the rejection there is face to face. What went wrong?
First of all, these people don’t know you, so you can’t realistically take a non answer personally. Very often users of online dating services have a stack of profiles next to their PC and take their time returning emails, so don’t get discouraged.
The worst mistake you can make is contacting people over and over. This can turn them off and give the impression that you are a stalker, some dating services online will cancel your membership or censure you if they receive reports of continuous attempts to contact ( as well they should. Remember, they don’t know your motives any more than you know anyone else’s when online.)
Another online dating tip is to contact as many people that have an interesting profile as possible. If you only contact two or three, and then wait weeks for a reply, of course you’re going to get frustrated, but if you send contact emails to 20 different people, chances are you will receive several replies. Again, do not take it personally! There are over 100 free online dating sites to choose from, and those are just the free ones.
If you are continuously getting rejection emails (I do not mean no replies, but rather actual rejections) maybe the problem is your profile. Recheck it and see what it says about you. Is it honest and sincere? Did you send your best picture? Does it sound too needy or too non committal? Many dating services online provide help with putting together the perfect profile, and this service is usually free, so take advantage of the sites help windows, and keep trying!
All articles are developed by eDatingPlanet.com The ultimate online dating service. Visit www.edatingplanet.com/online_dating_in_canada.ihtml today and search our photo personals for hot Canadian girls, open minded easy Canadian women, someone special, bad girls, cute attractive blonde babes, or search for cool sexy singles.
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