Posts Tagged ‘beautiful’
Notes on the Decline of the West
Dating and social network site BeautifulPeople.com has axed some 5,000 members following complaints that they had gained weight.
The members were singled out after posting pictures of themselves that reportedly showed they had put on pounds over the holiday period.
The site allows entry to new members only if existing members vote them as sufficiently attractive to warrant it.
The US, the UK, and Canada topped the list of excluded members.
The site has always been unrepentant about its selection process, calling itself “the largest network of attractive people in the world”.
A culture requiring a sense of being elite is one of the best indicators of a failing society.
Calendar promotes French farm-fresh fromage
From last year’s calendar
They are soft, round and all in the best possible taste – the cheeses that is, not the pin-up girls promoting them.
But the “From Girls” are a group of cheese fans prepared to pose in their underwear for a pictorial calendar promoting regional French fromage.
The pin-up calendar was the idea of the Association of traditional French cheesemakers, “Fromage des Terroirs”, who say that far from being a cliche, the calendar smashes the unflattering stereotype of the frumpy French farm wife…
“Barbara Munster”, “Roxane Cantal” and the other From Girls pictured in the calendar aren’t professional models or cheese industry employees either. They just have a passion for one of the bare essentials of French food.
Most of my life, I haven’t differentiated especially between food and sex. Both are special pleasures.
Did get me in trouble a few times, though. Har.
As Unbreakable as … Glass? You betcha!
To truly appreciate how glass can be used structurally, make your way to 233 South Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. More precisely, make your way 1,353 feet above South Wacker, to the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower.
Once there, take a few steps over to the west wall, where the facade has been cut away. Then take one more step, over the edge.
You’ll find yourself on a floor of glass, suspended over the sidewalk a quarter-mile below. If you can’t bear looking straight down past your feet, shift your gaze out or up — the walls are glass, too, as is the ceiling. You’ve stepped into a transparent box, one of four that jut four and a half feet from the tower, hanging from cantilevered steel beams above your head. The glass walls are connected to the beams, and to the glass floor, with stainless-steel bolts. But what’s really saving you from oblivion is the glass itself.
The boxes, which opened last week as part of an extensive renovation of the tower’s observation deck, are among the most recent, and more outlandish, projects that use glass as load-bearing elements. But all glass structures have at least a bit of daring about them, as if they are giving a defiant answer to the question: You can’t do that with glass, can you?
You can. Engineers, architects and fabricators, aided by materials scientists and software designers, are building soaring facades, arching canopies and delicate cubes, footbridges and staircases, almost entirely of glass. They’re laminating glass with polymers to make beams and other components stronger and safer — each of the Sears Tower sheets is a five-layer sandwich — and analyzing every square inch of a design to make sure the stresses are within precise limits. And they are experimenting with new materials and methods that could someday lead to glass structures that are unmarked by metal or other materials.
First monsoon of the season
First monsoon of the season coming in over the Caja del Rio. Moisture from Mexico and from California.
As always, we can use it.
Pic of the Day
Tryouts for the New England Patriots cheerleaders
Is this the best building in the world?
It wasn’t the winner. Click on the photo for the slideshow.
