02May 2013

Laughing girl is not bad luck: humor is the best medicine of life

 

Overcoming any obstacle is easier with a laugh or two.

 

Laughter is physically good for you.

 

Seriously, it’s like a super vitamin. It relieves muscle tension, improves your memory, bolsters your immune system and helps prevent heart disease, among other things. It’s worth it to even fake laugh at your co-workers awful joke involving the whatever walking into a bar/church.

 

It calms you down, despite the current vein-bulging, eye-twitch-inducing argument you’re in.

 

When you don’t want to laugh, that’s when your jerk-face brain will make it impossible for you to resist. As soon as someone says “don’t laugh,” you’re immediate inclination is to either snicker or guffaw. Why deny yourself the pleasure? Humor will settle things down before you or your opponent start throwing things at each other’s heads.

 

It relieves the stress of more serious emotions.

 

When your heart breaks, you want to be sad, and you want to give that sadness your attention. We often avoid laughter in order to respect the weight of losing a loved one, a job or a big mistake we’ve made. Those, however, are the times we especially need something to laugh at. Humor makes light of loss to keep it from crushing us.

 

Scary things are less scary when you laugh at them.

 

For example: When that guy in Jurassic Park gets eaten by the T-Rex, it’s terrifying. He’s screaming as the T-rex thrashes him around like a rag-doll. I was five when I saw that and I thought I was going to have a heart attack (thanks, Dad). But when my dad directed my attention to the fact that the man was sitting on a toilet when he got eaten, I laughed — all toddlers love toilet humor (thanks again, Dad). This concept follows us as we grow older. The context changes but the practice still works just the same.

 

It cures boredom.

 

This might be the most important one. You know you’ve got a good friend when you don’t care what you do with her. She asks you if you want to go rock climbing — sure. She wants to check out a new movie — let’s do it. She asks if you want to go to a wine tasting– duh, you’re already there with a glass for you and her. All this because she makes you laugh. You could sit and stare at each other on bench and you’d find a way to entertain yourselves. The friend who makes you laugh most should be doted on almost as much (if not, more), than the person you fall in love with.
19Apr 2013

Thelady who changed the world

ONLY a handful of peace-time politicians can claim to have changed theworld. Margaret Thatcher, who died this morning, was one. She transformed notjust her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Herenthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingnessto stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to theSoviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “ism”.

 

The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet onfreedom—odd, since as a prim control freak, she was in some ways the embodimentof conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individualswere set free. Her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run theirown lives, as free as possible from the micromanagement of the state.
InBritainher battles with the left—especially the miners—gave her a reputation as ablue-rinse Boadicea. But she was just as willing to clobber her own side,sidelining old-fashioned Tory “wets” and unleashing her creed on conservativestrongholds, notably the “big bang” in the City ofLondon. Many of her pithiest putdowns weredirected towards her own side: “U turn if you want to”, she told theConservatives as unemployment passed2m,“The lady’s not for turning

29Mar 2013

WhyGender Equality Stalled

 

 

THIS week is the50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s international best seller,“The Feminine Mystique,” which has been widely credited with igniting thewomen’s movement of the 1960s. Readers who return to this feminist classictoday are often puzzled by the absence of concrete political proposals tochange the status of women. But “The Feminine Mystique” had the impact it didbecause it focused on transforming women’s personal consciousness.

In 1963, mostAmericans did not yet believe that gender equality was possible or evendesirable. Conventional wisdom held that a woman could not pursue a career andstill be a fulfilled wife or successful mother. Normal women, psychiatristsproclaimed, renounced all aspirations outside the home to meet their feminineneed for dependence. In 1962, more than two-thirds of the women surveyed by Universityof Michigan researchers agreed that most important family decisions “should bemade by the man of the house.”

It was in thiscontext that Friedan set out to transform the attitudes of women. Arguing that“the personal is political,” feminists urged women to challenge the assumption,at work and at home, that women should always be the ones who make the coffee,watch over the children, pick up after men and serve the meals.

Over the next 30years this emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well as at workproduced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes. It was notinstant. As late as 1977, two-thirds of Americans believed that it was “muchbetter for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home andthe woman takes care of the home and family.” By 1994, two-thirds of Americansrejected this notion.

22Mar 2013

Venezuela after Chávez

IN THE flesh he seemed indestructible. Hugo Chávez was not especially tall, but he was built like one of the tanks he once commanded. He was possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy. He travelled incessantly, both around his vast country and abroad. Each Sunday he would host live television shows lasting upto 12 hours. He would ring up ministers in the early hours of the morning to harangue them. For 14 years, everything that happened in Venezuela passed through his hands,or so he liked to think.

YetMr Chávez turned out to have been as reckless with his health as with his country’s economy and its democracy. Those late nights were fuelled by dozensof cups of sweet Venezuelan coffee. When in mid-2011 he revealed that he had been operated on for cancer, the lack of detail (“a baseball-sized tumour in the pelvic region”) suggested that the diagnosis had come late. He turned down an offer of care from a Brazilian hospital that has recently cured three Latin American presidents of cancer, preferring treatment in Cuba, where his condition could be kept secret.

Ratherthan stand aside from the presidency, he insisted that he could run his country from his Havana sickbed. After another two operations and chemotherapy, he declared himself cured. Addicted to the drugs of power and popular acclaim, he campaigned for and won yet another six-year term in an election last October.

21Mar 2013

By Zhu Zhe in Beijing and Chen Weihua in Washington (China Daily)

Premier Li Keqiang is congratulated by his predecessor Wen Jiabao after his election, while President Xi Jinping applauds at the fifth plenary meeting of the first session of the 12th National People’s Congress on Friday in Beijing. [Wu Zhiyi / China Daily]

The nomination of Premier Li Keqiang was approved by nearly 3,000 deputies to the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Friday. It is widely expected that Li and newly elected President Xi Jinping can inject fresh momentum into the country’s development, despite a host of challenges ahead. Li, born in July 1955, became the seventh premier since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, replacing Wen Jiabao, who had headed the State Council since 2003.
When the result of the vote was announced, Li stood up and bowed to all the deputies, smiling. He then shook hands with Xi — who was elected president the previous day — in a handshake marking the establishment of a new top leadership.
Li then shook hands with his predecessor Wen, symbolizing the transfer of power and the heavy duty placed on his shoulders.
Wang Junjin, an NPC deputy from Shanghai and president of JuneYao Group, said, “We have big aspirations for the new premier and hope he can carry the reform forward.”

16Mar 2013

Now You Can Find Mini Bridal Flower Girl Dresses in Adorable Styles

If you have ever planned a wedding, or even attended a wedding, before you might have noticed that flower girls dresses often look like Easter or first communion dresses, or that they do not really seem like dresses for young girls. Flower girls have a tendency to look as though they are wearing dresses that were shrunk down to fit them, and accessories that do not fully fit the occasion. Recently, however, newer fashions have been introduced for flower girls that both allow the bride to coordinate her flower girl with the wedding party and also allows the flower girl to wear an elegant but age appropriate dress.

Flower girl dresses are available in all sorts of fun styles, everything from summery dresses for the less formal weddings to what amount to miniature wedding dresses for the more formal weddings. The dresses are available in a range of colors, though of course white is the most prevalent color available. Several of the designs have a white base with color accents, which is a fun way for a bride to either match her flower girl with her bridal party, or add a flair of her wedding colors to the ceremony. Even if the dress itself is pure white, a pop of color can be added with a ribbon around the waist or in the hair!

The dresses are also available in varying lengths; an important consideration during preparations. If your wedding is outside you probably would not want your flower girl in a floor length formal gown just to have it dragging along the ground. Similarly, if you have an extremely formal indoor wedding you would not want your flower girl to wear a knee length summer dress and sandals. Now that there is a wide variety of dress available it will be easier to match your flower girl’s dress both to the level of formality for your wedding and also the setting. Thanks to the wide variety of dresses not only can you match the length of the dress with the formality and location of the wedding, but also with the season in which your wedding occurs.

A wider range of accessories is also available for your flower girl. There are all sorts of veils and tiaras, along with gloves, shoes, and hair accessories. Giving your flower girl these accessories can both dress up their outfit and allow the young girls to have a truly fun experience dressing up for your big day. Each of the accessories are designed to complement the wedding party without making the young girls look as though they are wearing something designed for a bride’s maid.

One of the best things about the styles that are available for brides to choose from for their flower girls is that most of them have a wide variety of colors available, either for the dress itself or for the accent features of the dress. Because of the range of colors available for each style the bride will not have to compromise her ideal design in order to get a color that matches her wedding’s color scheme. The bride will be able to find a dress that matches or compliments her bride’s maids without having to worry about matching colors.

The dresses available, although designed to match or complement the outfits of the wedding party, are not simply miniature adult dresses. These dresses have been designed as fashionable, formal and classy dresses for young girls. They are both occasion appropriate and age appropriate. The shoes, tiaras and other accessories are also designed to be formal but not necessarily adult. The flower girls will not look like a miniature bride’s maid in these gorgeous gowns, they will look like beautiful young girls in amazing dresses.

Flower girl dresses of the past have often compromised either style or their complementary nature simply due to a lack of availability. Flower girls often looked either like young girls playing dress up in clothes that obviously were not designed for them, or they looked as though they were going to Easter service or their first communion. The dresses available today put this practice to rest, allowing the bride to pick fun and beautiful dresses that will look great on the girls and that the flower girls will, hopefully, have fun wearing. The vast range and availability of the dresses allows the brides to fit the flower girl dresses into the overall design of the wedding much easier, and the colors available allow for the bride to bring a touch of color to her ceremony. The dresses available now allow for the flower girls to have a fun time dressing up and taking part in an adult ceremony without losing the fun and girliness of it all.

Tyrell Vincent is a freelance writer who writes about weddings and specific products such as flower girl dresses