Je suis désolée
From
Be sure to check out their other posts, esp the personal ads.
Jailhouse Swish
I think it’s more of a color-discrimination thing.
South Carolina’s prisons director on Tuesday defended a policy of punishing inmates who perform sex acts by dressing them in pink, despite a lawsuit claiming the rule subjects prisoners to ridicule.
Besides, the guy hasn’t even seen himself in pink yet:
Inmate Sherone Nealous, 31, filed the lawsuit in June 2006, claiming the Corrections Department “is placing inmates’ lives and physical well-being in danger.”
“The color ‘pink’ in an all male environment no doubt causes derision and verbal and physical attacks on a person’s manhood. This policy also gives correctional officers an easy avenue to label an inmate,” Nealous, who is serving a 10-year sentence for assault and battery with intent to kill, wrote in his lawsuit. Nealous has never actually donned the pink jumpsuit, according to agency spokesman Josh Gelinas. Nealous is currently separated from the general population, Gelinas said.
It only gets worse
I really thought during my morning news roundup/onceover that the plethora of insanity was enough, but never say never:
HOUSTON - In a confrontation captured on videotape, a hospital security guard to stop a defiant father from taking home his newborn, sending both man and child crashing to the floor.
Now the man says the baby girl suffers from head trauma because she was dropped.
?I?ve got to wonder what kind of moron would Tase an adult holding a baby,? said George Kirkham, a former police officer and criminologist at Florida State University. ?It doesn?t take rocket science to realize the baby is going to fall.?
And one of my favorites - the who blew him away with a shotgun by accident - is out of jail. Remember, he’s the one who forced her to have “unnatural” sex involving white platform shoes and a black wig. I consider white platform shoes unnatural under any circumstances.
Poor Mary!
Fez Dispenser
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) — A mini-car and a dune buggy collided during a Shriner’s parade, sending one of the vehicles into the crowd and injuring eight people, police said Monday. “It was just a freak accident,” said a police spokesman, Rick Mincy. “I don’t think they were careless.” No charges were filed in the accident Saturday. The two vehicles were going in circles around each other when the car ran into the crowd.
Even more
(thanks, Eve)
and in (Illinois, that is) …
BRUSSELS ? A thrown bag of popcorn triggered a weekend melee that involved more than 100 people brawling after the close of the annual St. Mary?s Catholic Church picnic.
Almost as many people were involved in the fight as live in the community of Brussels.
?It ended up being almost mob action,? Calhoun County Sheriff Bill Heffington said, admitting that he and just two deputies ?simply couldn?t contain them.
?We had to call in backup from several other police agencies,? he said.
Meanwhile, makes an odd headline, considering the suicide of China’s Mattel exec: “Mattel Gets the Lead Out.” Um, okay. Maybe they were smoking some of
ROCHELLE, Ga. (AP) — A woman was arrested after she called police to help “get her money back” after she was unhappy with the crack cocaine she purchased.
Juanita Marie Jones, 53, called Rochelle Police late Thursday night after she purchased what she thought was a $20 piece of crack cocaine, according to police reports.
She told officers she broke the rock into three pieces and smoked one, only to discover the drugs were “fake.”
And yeah, is brutal enough, but did they have to illustrate it with a hammer and nails?
Police in Wilkes-Barre are holding a man accused of storming into a beauty salon and bludgeoning four grandmothers with a hammer.
Forty-one-year-old Thomas Leyshon of Mountain Top was arrested after a daylong manhunt Friday. Authorities said he got away with less than $90 from the victims in the Hairem Family Hair and Nail Care.
Family members said the victims, ages 56 to 76, suffered injuries that included a fractured skull. At least one woman required surgery. At least two of the women remained hospitalized Saturday, both in stable condition.
Andy Chopka, whose grandmother, Jeanna Chopka, underwent surgery Friday night, said only a coward would attack old women.
And my friend in NC sends me Cletis and his
Feeling stupid? Don’t, after you read about
An Australian sheep farmer who sought love over the internet was instead kidnapped and held hostage for 12 days after his African “bride” turned out to be machete-wielding gangsters.
Des Gregor, 56, flew to Mali promising a dowry of gold and marriage to “Natacha”, reportedly a Liberian refugee in her 20s, following a whirlwind romance over the web.
But when he stepped off the plane, men claiming to be the woman’s relatives took him to a flat in the capital, Bamako, where he was robbed, bound and threatened with having his limbs hacked off unless he arranged a £42,000 ransom.
But wait, it gets worse:
It was not the first time Mr Gregor, of Hoyleton, South Australia, has fallen in love online. He travelled to Russia three years ago on a similar trip, but failed to come back with a bride.
Here’s another After the woman he tries to rape escapes his apartment and her coworkers follow him, he gets a bright idea:
An hour later, Milan contacted the Sheriff’s Department to report that he had been followed by two suspicious men, authorities said. He agreed to meet deputies at a Starbucks, where they arrested him.
The cops put it better than I can:
“We’re checking across the United States to see if he has similar crimes,” Amormino said. “He did it at his own house. Obviously not a Rhodes scholar.“
“You’ll have fun, Pookie.”
R.I.P., Mrs. Astor. She was so good to the City. The NYT has
Nikki Nash’s “Charm School”
I Saturday night (much to my surprise, it was her first solo exhibit; I had assumed it was about, oh, her zillionth, because her work is brilliant - sharp, satirical, funny, and beautiful … in an Addams-ish kinda way.) Hell, it’s obvious by now that I’m no art critic, but Ms. Nash and I are kindred spirits, as evidenced when we spotted each other’s scarab ringlet tattoos. Anyway, I’ll let the work speak for itself, and party pix to follow.
Nikki: “I went to charm school when I was 15, but I don’t think it worked.”
“Holiday Sperm,” ?
She is my hero!
Weed thru the ad at the beginning.
Some Velvet Obit
Oh, Lee Hazlewood! Rest in peace!
Nancy and Lee: Summer Wine, 1967
Lee Hazlewood, who died on Saturday aged 78, was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century pop; most famous as Svengali to Nancy Sinatra, for whom he wrote These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, he was also an important influence on Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” recording techniques, and his songs have been covered by stars from Elvis Presley and Dusty Springfield to Nick Cave and Courtney Love.
Nancy Sinatra had been signed up to her father’s label, Reprise Records, in the early 1960s, but by 1965 had not had a hit and was on the verge of being dropped.
Jimmy Bowen, a neighbour of Hazlewood’s who worked for Reprise and was dating Nancy, asked the 36-year-old record producer to do for Nancy what nepotism had failed to achieve. Hazlewood was reluctant, but after Sinatra himself lured him to the family home for a drink and thanked him for agreeing to help, he felt it would be unwise to demur.
Hazlewood set about reinventing Nancy as a “tough little broad”, dyeing her brown hair blonde, swapping her ballgowns for Carnaby Street fashions and persuading her to wear boot-polish black eye make-up and frosted lipstick. He also persuaded her to lower her vocal pitch.
In 1966 she had a huge hit in America and Britain with These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, its title inspired by a line in Robert Aldrich’s 1963 western 4 for Texas starring her father and Dean Martin.
Hazlewood told her to sing it “like a 14-year-old girl who screws truck drivers” (”14″ was later sanitised to “16″ and “screws” to “dates”), and it sold five million copies to an audience blissfully unaware that, as Hazlewood put it, “anyone in my part of Texas knows that messin’ [as in “You’ve been messin’ where you shouldn’t have been a messin”] means f*****’.”
Initially, Nancy Sinatra sang alone. But when Reprise suggested she move on to duets, she insisted that only Hazlewood would do. They went on to record several hits together, fusions of country, pop and psychedelia, including the darkly ambiguous Some Velvet Morning, and Sugar Town.
The songs’ scurrilous lyrics, with their thinly-veiled references to drugs and sex (”Some velvet morning when I’m straight/ I’m going to open up your gate”) were part of the attraction.
So too was the implication that theirs was more than a singing partnership, though Hazlewood maintained that they were just good friends and, in any case, Nancy, as a nice Catholic girl, never understood what she was singing about, having sensibly decided not to ask.
Read the rest
R.I.P., Mr. Larry: 24-Hour Beauty God
Right up there with “It’s not beige, it’s fawn!” in obits this year …
From the NY Times:
NY Times, 8/5/07?Larry Mathews, who earned a reputation as New York?s most wide-awake hairdresser by opening what seems to have been the city?s first 24-hour beauty parlor to serve insomniacs, talk-show guests, showgirls and other working women, died on Tuesday in Aventura, Fla. He was 86. His family announced his death.
Mr. Mathews served the nocturnal need of those seeking teasing, frosting, cutting, waxing, eyebrow enhancement, nail coloring, blow-drying and more. Clients ? who he said included Jacqueline Susann, Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn Monroe ? were invited to play backgammon or sip a cocktail as their appearances became more pleasing. The beautification enterprise belonged to an era when, at least in memory, more places seemed to be open much later in New York, if not all night. At 4 a.m., you could down a cheeseburger at the Brasserie in the Seagram Building, take a Turkish bath at Luxor Baths, shoot a game of pool at McGirr?s Billiard Academy. You could buy a coconut at a Ninth Street fruit stand or a potted palm on Lexington Avenue. As Mr. Mathews saw it, his all-hours beauty parlors (he eventually had dozens) fulfilled an urgent demand. ?I?m sort of like a surgeon,? he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1976. ?Not looking good is like a cancer. There?s a lot of pain in not being beautiful.?
At his peak in the early 1970s, Mr. Mathews had expanded his after-hours cosmetology concept across the nation to 131 salons, from Miami to Las Vegas to Hollywood. He sold the chain in 1974. His commitment to convenience was shown by regularly sending a limousine to pick up a woman?s wig in the morning so his staff could set it and comb it, then deliver it in time for an evening engagement. His beauty ventures also included a line of copies of famous French fragrances like Chanel and Joy. The perfume industry sued and lost. By accident, when Mr. Mathews was trying to build a machine that would not burn women during waxing, he developed a cream for painless depilation. Called Hair Off, it became a staple in beauty parlors and later was sold for home use. Mr. Mathews could wax eloquent on the subject of body hair. ?Women shouldn?t shave,? he said to The Times. ?You shave and you?re growing a beard all over your body. You?re making stubble for yourself.? Hair Off, by contrast, left only baby fuzz, he promised.
Mr. Mathews learned some photography in the Army and after his discharge set up shop as a studio photographer, specializing in publicity stills for aspiring starlets. Before he snapped the photographs, he liked to work on their eyes and mouths, which led him into theatrical makeup and cosmetics. His clientele was showgirls at the Copacabana and the Latin Quarter, so a 24-hour beauty salon seemed a logical step. He opened his first in 1953 in the Great Northern Hotel on West 57th Street near Carnegie Hall, enabling him to cater to show-business people. He reasoned that a hotel was a nice location for all-night beauty parlors because there was someone protective in the lobby. All his stylists were men who specialized in the exotic coiffures the Broadway-type customers requested. Free makeup consultations were available on the first visit if women wanted them.
Despite having many well-off customers, Mr. Mathews was provocatively populist when it came to the sacred cows of the beauty business. ?No haircut is worth $50,? he told The Times. ?Every month you have to have it cut again. It?s ridiculous to spend $35 to have your legs waxed. It?s even more ridiculous to spend $100 for an ounce of perfume.? His solution to the perfume question was his line of copies of French fragrances, developed in Switzerland and sold for $10 an ounce. As for hair, he said in an interview with The Times in 1961 that wearing wigs could cut a woman?s beauty bill by 40 percent. He said they remained set for as long as three months. Asked who would buy them, he answered, ?About half the regulars at the Copacabana.? Mr. Mathews is survived by his daughter, B. Ryan, and three grandchildren.
John Leonard, in the 1976 ?About New York? column in which Mr. Mathews was interviewed, summed up his achievement as a beauty magnate. ?In this town, at 2 o?clock in the morning,? he wrote, ?you can?t get into most churches, but electrolysis and pedicures are a cinch.?
it’s never too late - or early - for beauty!
