No, not that kind of commitment. I have committed to only shopping at the Trader Joe's or farmer's market for a month for my grocery shopping.  It's a small step, I agree, but a necessary one.  This is not just because I am but a low-wage grad student and TJs/farmer's market are usually inexpensive, but also because I can find a large variety of high quality foods at these places.  That the same old pasta I have been eating any day, in my book.  I am also going to try to reduce eating out because I know I can't control where restaurants get their food, and I don't know where it is coming from (and also partly because I am a low-wage grad student, truth be told).  Here are a few of the reasons I have made this commitment:

Fresh fruits and vegetables: farmers at the market are literally begging me to try their strawberries. The peas, onions, tomatoes and any other vegetable they have are out of this world good.

A variety of cultural foods: by cultural I mean Asian, Indian, Mexican, Latin American, etc foods that are prepared closer to home for TJ's.  I am an International Studies major, so this appeals to me personally.

An expansion of my food horizon: so, I have been eating like your typical grad student for the past 10 months or so because I have believed that this is what I can afford: pastas, macaroni, cereal and the staple of ramen noodles.  That sounds very healthy, right? No? You're right.  Part of this whole switching to the TJ's/farmer's market is because I can get a variety of foods for a cheaper cost than at conventional grocery stores.

I'm not telling you about the TJ's/farmer's market plan to get onto a high horse of any kind, but because the plan is furthering two reasons why I wanted to start up this blog in the first place: to be more healthy on the cheap.  If you don't have a TJ's then I suggest you lobby for one near your hometown. Short of that, try to take advantage of a local farmer's market, where food is (usually) more flavorful and nutrient-rich than in supermarkets (where often, but not always, food is trucked in from miles and miles away).

As of today, I have gone two weeks with no visit to the supermarket.  As I run out of the usual household supplies, it will probably be more difficult for me to avoid them.  Until then, I will keep trucking along with the plan, update accordingly, and make new recipes to go along with my new habit. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.

Immune cells adjust their function like a radio dial, not an on/off light switch; a discovery that hints at how autoimmune disease may develop late in life.

A St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study shows that T cells, the body's master immune regulators, do not use simple on/off switches to govern the cellular machinery that regulates their development and function. Rather, they possess sophisticated molecular controls that enable them to adjust their function with exquisite precision. Such subtle adjustment enables T cells to modulate their development and function, including avoiding autoimmunity.

In autoimmune disease, rather than attacking invading microbes, the immune system attacks the body's own organs, tissues or cells. Some 80 autoimmune diseases are known, including type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

"Among the many mysteries surrounding autoimmune diseases is why they can sometimes take decades to manifest themselves," said Dario Vignali, Ph.D., associate member in the St. Jude Department of Immunology. "Our findings hint that this delayed onset could be explained by subtle defects in the molecular controls on T cells." Such T cells are white blood cells whose duties include shutting down the immune system when it has done its job and suppressing T cells that can attack the body.

Vignali is the senior author of a report on this work that appears in the advance online publication of the journal "Nature Immunology."

The researchers explored the function of T cell receptors, proteins that span the cell membrane of T cells. These receptors receive outside signals that instruct T cells to develop, proliferate and transmit those signals into the cell. The St. Jude investigators sought to understand why T cell receptors need many copies of switch-like components called immunoreceptor tyrosine-based activation motifs (ITAMS). ITAMs are components of the CD3 adaptor proteins that attach to the T cell receptor and help transmit the control signals from the T cell receptor into the cell.

"The ITAMs we studied are little molecular tags inside the cell by which the T cell receptor communicates to the rest of the cell," Vignali said. "The mystery we wanted to address was why the T cell receptor needs 10 ITAMs to do its job. Why not just have a simple on/off switch?"

To explore the role of multiple ITAMs, Jeff Holst, Ph.D., the paper's first author and a St. Jude postdoctoral scientist, used a technique developed in the Vignali lab to produce mice whose T cells have variations in the number and type of functional ITAMs. The technique involved using a virus as a genetic cargo-carrier to transport genes for different combinations of normal and mutant non-functional ITAMs into the mouse cells.

The researchers found that reducing the number of normal ITAMs caused the mice to develop autoimmune disease. However, the investigators also found that some mice with fewer than normal functional ITAMs did not become sick with autoimmune disease. Vignali said this finding suggests that it is not just the number of ITAMs, but also their type that may influence T cell function.

"We theorized that there were two possibilities why the immune system needs so many ITAMs," he said. "One is that the requirement was purely quantitative, and that the ITAMs were there for signal amplification. The second possibility is that different ITAMs do slightly different things--they do have slightly different structures, so maybe they bind to some signaling molecules better than others; and their positions in the T cell receptor are different. So, while our primary observation is that quantity is more important than ITAM type, we also found that type has some influence."

The researchers' analyses of the immune systems of the altered mice indicated that reducing the number of normal ITAMs crippled a process called "negative selection." In this process, the immune system rids itself of immature T cells that might attack the body's own cells, causing autoimmune disease. Vignali said that these findings might provide insight into how autoimmune diseases start.

"One implication of our findings is that a relatively small defect in the efficiency of signal transduction through the T cell receptor could give rise to a subtle failing in negative selection, which gives rise over a long period of time to a few overly active T cells that might initiate autoimmunity," Vignali said. "Clearly from our studies there is the possibility that you don't really need a very big reduction in T cell receptor signal strength to have a defect in negative selection."

The study also showed that different T cell functions required different numbers of functional ITAMs. "We were surprised to find that many ITAMs were required to make T cells divide and expand, but only one or two was required to make T cells secrete cytokines," Vignali said. Cytokines are soluble proteins used by cells of the immune system to communicate and send messages to one another. Vignali said these basic findings represent only the beginning of more detailed studies of the role of ITAMs in T cell function.

"We believe this idea that T cell signaling acts more like a rheostat than an on/off switch offers significant new insights into how T cell development and function is controlled," Vignali said.

Other authors include Haopeng Wang, Kelly Durick Eder, Creg Workman, Kelli Boyd, Zachary Baquet, Karen Forbes and Richard Smeyne (St. Jude); Harvir Singh, Andrzej Chruscinski and Paul Utz (Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, Calif.); and Nicolai van Oers (The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas).

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, a Cancer Center Support CORE grant and ALSAC.

read more | digg story

Latest medical news at www.medinews.co.uk

The brain of an addicted smoker treats nicotine as if it is essential for survival. Genetic traits may predispose some smokers to stronger addiction. Most smokers try to quit unaided, resulting in a high failure rate. If you smoke, no one needs to tell you how bad it is. So why haven’t you quit? Why hasn’t everyone?

Because smoking feels good. It stimulates and focuses the mind at the same time that it soothes and satisfies. The concentrated dose of nicotine in a drag off a cigarette triggers an immediate flood of dopamine and other neurochemicals that wash over the brain’s pleasure centers. Inhaling tobacco smoke is the quickest, most efficient way to get nicotine to the brain.

“I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to give it up,” said Dr. David Abrams, an addiction researcher at the National Institutes of Health. “It’s more difficult to get off nicotine than heroin or cocaine.”

Smoking “hijacks” the reward systems in the brain that drive you to seek food, water and sex, Dr. Abrams explained, driving you to seek nicotine with the same urgency. “Your brain thinks that this has to do with survival of the species,” he said.

Nicotine isn’t equally addictive for everyone. A lot of people do not smoke because they never liked it to begin with. Then there are “chippers,” who smoke occasionally but never seem to get hooked. But most people who smoke will eventually do it all day, every day.

New discoveries in genetics may explain why certain people take to smoking with such gusto and end up so addicted. Some people, for instance, produce a gene-encoded enzyme that clears nicotine from their bloodstreams rapidly, so they tend to smoke more and develop stronger addictions. Others possess special receptors in the brain that bond extra tightly with nicotine, giving them an especially intense high that makes it harder to quit.

Drug makers are exploiting the science of addiction to create novel treatments to help smokers quit. The newest stop-smoking medication, the first to be approved in 10 years, is called Chantix. Available by prescription, Chantix masquerades as nicotine well enough to occupy the brain’s nicotine receptors, where it may lessen cravings. Real nicotine, when it comes along, cannot find enough free receptors to do its thing.

Chantix seems to have a higher success rate than Zyban, an antidepressant that helps to balance dopamine levels. And recently released federal guidelines to doctors for helping smokers quit reported that the drug, combined with the nicotine replacement patch and use of nicotine nasal spray or gum as needed, produced higher long-term abstinence than the patch alone.

Doctors have written millions of prescriptions for Chantix, though enthusiasm for the drug was tempered by reports of suicide and bizarre behaviors in people taking it. The reports prompted the Food and Drug Administration to issue a safety warning about Chantix early in 2008.

“That’s something that needs to be taken very seriously, but it needs to be put in the context of what happens if you don’t quit smoking,” said Dr. Michael Fiore, a smoking cessation specialist at the University of Wisconsin and chairman of the government panel that issued the new guidelines. Dr. Fiore used to consult for Pfizer, the maker of Chantix, but said he cut those ties in 2005. He still prescribes the drug but now takes care to discuss the safety warning with patients.

Dr. Nancy Rigotti was involved in Chantix studies conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where she directs the Tobacco Research and Treatment Unit. “Those trials mostly enrolled people who were pretty healthy,” she said. “They did not include people with depression or much of a history of depression.”

Dr. Rigotti said it was possible that varenicline, the generic name for Chantix, “might have more psychiatric side effects in certain groups of people.”

Continued research should help to resolve lingering concerns about the safety of Chantix. Meanwhile, experts continue to recommend the old standbys: nicotine replacement gums, patches, nasal sprays, inhalers and lozenges, which have been proved to be safe.

Nicotine by itself does not cause cancer, heart disease or other major health problems linked to smoking; other chemicals in tobacco smoke are to blame. Nicotine replacement can be used alone or with prescription medications or, for best results, combined with counseling. Recent evidence suggests that using two forms simultaneously, like the patch and gum together, works better than either alone.

Although nicotine replacement products do not require a prescription, the F.D.A. limits where and how they are sold. They are also expensive.

“It’s so much easier to go down to the corner store and get a pack of cigarettes than it is to get access to evidence-based treatment,” Dr. Fiore said.

This year, the New York State health commission petitioned the F.D.A. to revise its rules so that nicotine gum, patches and lozenges could be sold anyplace that sells cigarettes, and at prices comparable to a cigarette pack. The agency is currently reviewing the petition.

Still, no treatment works for everyone. And even with the most successful treatments, only about 30 percent of attempts to quit last more than six months. Compared with willpower alone, however, that’s a huge improvement. Fewer than one in 10 smokers who go it alone manages to go six months without a cigarette. Most do not make it past a week.

When longtime smokers finally do quit, they soon realize that not smoking doesn’t necessarily make them nonsmokers. That’s what counseling is for — learning to function without nicotine and to cope with the cues that trigger smoking urges.

Most important, former smokers have to rediscover that it is possible to enjoy life without cigarettes, although the yearning may never die completely.

“I’m an ex-smoker,” Dr. Abrams said, “and I still miss it.” said.

read more | digg story

Also for latest medical news check out www.medinews.co.uk

Have you checked out the prices of fresh fruit and vegetables lately?

Today one plain, everyday lettuce cost me £1.49, a tiny portion of brocoli was 99p and a pack of three peppers was £1.69. The same supermarket was offering me a giant slab of gingerbread [enough to feed ten people] for £1 and I could buy a dozen bags of crisps and get another dozen free. Why not give me free tomatoes or apples?

On a shrinking income[thanks to the chancellor's dodgy tax decisions] there is no incentive for low earners and the elderly on fixed incomes to try to eat healthily. Where I live we have Asda, Tesco, Aldi, Lidl, Morrisons and the Co-op within a two mile zone. This ensures that no independent greengrocers can compete and the public, with restricted incomes, no longer have any alternative but to worship in the retail cathedrals where the option to make bad choices is too easy.

Until these retail giants grow a conscience many people will remain unable to choose to eat their greens. So come on supermarkets lets see " b.o.g.o.f. " offers on fruit and veg too.

Take a look at the grand staircase here and the red velvet room with a chandelier on the 2nd floor. Fabulous indeed!

But a few basics first, which I mean a few basic definitions that will be used throughout my Fantabulous blog! Quoting from the slangish “The Urban Dictionary” ―

Fantabulous - A creamy blend of fantastic and fabulous.

Fabulosity – the noun form of fabulous. A mix of awesomeness, randomness, and individuality, in the very best way. Remember: individuality, uniqueness, self-confidence, awesomeness.

Fabulista - absolutely fabulous, beyond outstanding, amazing

Fabulishous – better shrieked than anything else. “OMG, that is soooo fabulishous!!”

And fabulishous it is!

The First Gay, het gezicht van de nieuwe Sensoa-campagne, maakte vandaag zijn publiek debuut op de Belgian Lesbian and gay Pride 2008. Zo deelde hij postkaarten en condooms uit.

Bekijk hier de foto's. Een videofragment vind je hier.

Ook op Antwerp Pride 2008 zal The First Gay campagnevoeren.

If you were thinking that the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty was the only corporation-initiated campaign promoting healthier notions of beauty and self esteem, think again! Because Seventeen, the world's number one young women's magazine has jumped on the bandwagon and joined in the cause!  

Not only has Seventeen developed a Body Peace Treaty which to date 32,042 young women worldwide have signed, it has also hired Jess Weiner, author and self esteem expert, to address the body image questions and concerns of young women from all over the globe! These questions and concerns are posted together with Jess Weiner's replies on the Seventeen Body Peace blog and other young women worldwide can comment on these posts! What's more, the Body Peace Treaty truly appeals to young women by allowing them to share the treaty on facebook, kaboodle and other "hip" websites and applications!

So, what exactly are the clauses of the Body Peace Treaty?

I vow to:

1. Remember that the sun will still rise tomorrow even if I had one too many slices of pizza or an extra scoop of ice cream tonight.
2. Never blame my body for the bad day I'm having.
3. Stop joining in when my friends compare and trash their own bodies.
4. Never allow a dirty look from someone else to influence how I feel about my appearance.
5. Quit judging a person solely by how his or her body looks — even if it seems harmless — because I'd never want anyone to do that to me.
6. Notice all the amazing things my body is doing for me every moment I walk, talk, think, breathe...
7. Quiet that negative little voice in my head when it starts to say mean things about my body that I'd never tolerate anyone else saying about me.
8. Remind myself that what you see isn't always what you get on TV and in ads — it takes a lot of airbrushing, dieting, money, and work to look like that.
9. Remember that even the girl who I'd swap bodies with in a minute has something about her looks that she hates.
10. Respect my body by feeding it well, working up a sweat when it needs it, and knowing when to give it a break.
11. Realize that the mirror can reflect only what's on the surface of me, not who I am inside.
12. Know that I'm already beautiful just the way I am.

Want to show support for this movement? Sign the Body Peace Treaty today!

Food for thought:

For so many years, as a leading fashion magazine for young women worldwide, Seventeen has played a quintessential role in shaping young women's perceptions of beauty. And personally, I am very glad that Seventeen has joined in the cause because who better to change existing perceptions of beauty than the very people who had set them in the first place? The very fact that an "authority" for beauty issues is speaking out against existing notions of beauty is a powerful statement, indeed!

But, at the same time, in order to continue attracting advertisers, the magazine cannot afford to do away with the glamorous slim models they have always been using. Would this defeat the entire purpose of the campaign and in fact make young women skeptical about such campaigns in future?

Coming up next:

A ground-breaking Spanish study on female body shapes which may revolutionize the way clothes will be made and offered

and

A look into how perceptions of beauty have evolved over the years!

So, if you haven't subscribed to my blog, subscribe today and stay tuned for the updates to come!

Seit dieser Woche ist nun auch die 2. Demo mit 3 weiteren Tracks raus, welche wiedermal sehr professionell aufgenommen wurden. Da wird der erste Auftritt wohl nicht mehr lange auf sich warten lassen. ;)

Die Lieder und weitere Infos zur Band findet ihr unter MySpace.

It’s so satisfying seeing one’s hard work paying off in the garden with healthy plants blooming making a garden look great… however lurking in the undergrowth are some unwelcome garden visitors that are just waiting to munch away and destroy your hard labour.

Number one on the garden pest hit list are slugs and snails. These invaders will quite happily eat through soft young growth on herbaceous plants and vegetables. Nature’s way of controlling these pests is to encourage birds, hedgehogs, frogs and toads into the garden to help eat them up.

Another way is to collect slugs and snails after dark by torchlight on mild evenings, as this is when you’ll more likely to find them feeding. What you then do with the slugs and snails is up to you, but I always prefer a biological approach to eradicating these pests from my garden.

Vine weevil is another pest you need to look out for. The adult vine weevil beetle emerges at night and damages plants by eating around the edges of leaves leaving tell-tale irregular notches. It then lays its eggs mainly in flowerpots and the larvae (which look like maggots) will feed on the roots of the plant and will cause the plant to wilt and quite possibly die. To try and get rid of them you could search for them by torchlight and remove the feeding beetle from the plant.

You can also use a biological control method whereby you water the soil with nematodes, which then in turn will eat into the vine weevil grubs. Remember to use this watering method by watering your flowerpots in late summer while the soil is warm and moist.

You may recall that last year we have a mini-invasion of ants. Although ants cause little direct damage to plants they’re more of a nuisance than a pest. They make nests by heaping small mounds of fine soil on lawns, flowerbeds and pathways. Ants also collect the sugary honeydew that is excreted by sap-feeding aphids and in the process the ants drive off the useful aphid predators. Although we can’t totally eliminate ants from our gardens, we can reduce their numbers by hunting out their nest site and then dealing with the source of the ants.

One rather troublesome sap-feeding aphid is the Woolly aphid, so called because of the fluffy white waxy substance it develops on the bark of trunks and branches of trees and shrubs during the middle to late spring. There are various sprays that can be used but a heavy infestation is difficult to control. If you have the patience, then you can use a soft bush with which you could brush away the fluffy white substance.

Another method I have heard of, but not tried myself, is to paint menthylated spirit onto the affected area. You could also try some companion planting of Nasturtiums around under the infected tree or shrub.

So, if you think that your garden looks nice and that all is well… beware… as there may be hidden dangers lurking… just waiting to eat away at your favourite plants and shrubs.

Most of my news comes from the mass media which I tend to mock, believing there is often another story behind that which has been reported.

A week ago there was a shark attack at a beach on the south coast of Western Australia, A woman swam out to the victim and dragged him to shore, ignoring the shark which was still swimming around. Despite the obvious heroism of that woman, there was nothing in the news which made me think of mentioning the incident here on the archive.

Wandering around the blogipelago tonight I dropped in on one of the blogs on my blogroll I found a report on the incident. A report from a witness to the aftermath. A report with that human touch which is so often lost, even in "human interest stories", as a reporter's work goes through the mill of editorial adjustment.

Reading the report, I felt a wider importance to the story. This was one single shark attack in a remote part of the world. The news reports from the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China neatly sandwiched this story in time.

There is an honesty and a vulnerability in the writing on the shark attack which is not obvious in the news reports of the larger disasters. It is humbling to transfer the trauma and the reactions of the beachgoers in Albany to the millions of human stories which we learn about in the mass yet we are not touched by the individual tragedies in Burma and China.

As JB Priestly said, "I can’t help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from ‘em by calling ‘em the masses and then you accuse ‘em of not having any faces."

Maybe I am thinking too deeply here - so for something from a face within the masses, visit Jon Doust's blog.

Hoofdthema's dit jaar waren de strijd tegen homofobie (in de sport) eninternationa solidariteit .

Every morning I rose at dawn to sit in the parlor. There I watched the sunlight illuminate the, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” movie board in the hearth, and drink a cup of coffee in silence. I felt at home. Those are the most precious moments of the day; the moment of peace before throwing the dice.

I looked out the window to the street, and one morning a handful of eggplant leaves autumnized to a transparent sheen of bronzed gold. The silence following summer descended down over the rooftops of the people that lived on East High Avenue. The sky was seared with streaks of white, and bubblegum pink clouds drifted just above the rising of the sun. The moment was a peaceful stroke to a summer that had been indeterminate, chancy and without design. We went back with the intention to sell the house, and we couldn't let Follies go.  Now, four years later, I'm about to return with the same idea. 

In the moments when SC awakens, I heard his footsteps on the creaking wood floor. I closed the journal and went in the kitchen to make buttermilk pancakes. When we live in San Diego, and now Santa Fe, NM we eat fruit and muffins, usually in short order, between telephone calls, and conversations about things that it's too early to discuss. Those mornings a Follies House, he lingered  on the porch and read the New York Times,  because he had the time.

If my body was willing, I 'd  run down to the stream, and look for the blue heron. Along the way, I'd  pass by the quiet man with the three beagles, and a mother walking with her children to the bus stop. I 'd pass the funeral parlor and look the other way, and when I saw the Federal Express Truck, he'd  wave because he knows I'm the woman that receives mail addressed to Soaring Crow. The front porches I passed are the opening pages to the home stories of people inside. If there are children, the remains of their toys are scattered about. If they are elderly, they will leave their gardening shoes by the back door, and if they are a young couple, they will be in the midst of home repairs, a roof that needs fixing, or a new coat of paint. I'd observed just one campaign poster board in the neighborhood. It seems to have gone out of style to post your politics on your car or in front of your house ( not now). In the front yard of one home, a banner was pitched in the ground that read, “Remember our Troops.” I didn't ask but it is probable they have a son serving in Iraq.

 The hanging flower planters are replaced with mums and corn stalks. Some scatter straw on the lawn. I used to giggle at that September tradition, then I got giddy about arranging my seasonal display in the yard.The run back through town took me by the high school, a brawny brick building that looks like the setting for a chapter from “Catcher in the Rye.” A teacher passed by, dressed in a conservative suit and pumps, and smiled. She looked  wholesome as apple pie, and I wondered if I ever looked like that.

On chilly mornings, the fireplaces may be smoking, sending out puffs of burning wood as sweet as perfume. Our own fireplace was inoperable, which explains why the movie poster was in the fireplace.  By 8:00 a.m. the yellow school buses are chugging up the street and the children, gathered at our corner; bob up and down in innocent bursts of energy.They are  celebrating the beginning of a new day. I arrived  home about this time, and stopped to watch the quaintness of the moment. The habitat of those surroundings striped me bare of my Hollywood movie star Southern California roots. I was nourished by quaint tradition and scenery, and that is one answer to this mystery I call home.

I ate cider donuts when I wanted and instead of working out three or four times a week, I took long walks, past the Sunny Side farms to see the young foals in the corral. I dressed  in style-less shoes and pants, whenever I felt like it, without fashion consciousness. I preferrred to go to bed early and read Carson McCullers novels. If I woke  up in the middle of the night, I sat on the porch and looked at the hands of a storm forming in the sky.

People dropped by my house without notice, and sometimes just walked in and yelled  my name. My favorite Broadway hangout knows who I am, what kind of wine I like, and that we like to sit on the patio. Sometimes I met strangers who had  heard of the Follies House, and I felt a twinge of pride. 

We left Follies behind, and journeyed back through the plains of middle America to Taos, New Mexico, and on to Solana Beach. A few years later we moved to Taos, and then to Santa Fe. I thought the  mystery of that journey was over; that Follies would always feel like home; but it's been a long time.  This summer we'll journey back and find out. 

Fotos von diesem Wochenende findet ihr unter morphex.eu.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/05/16/scientist_smiling_can_hurt_your_health/2772/

Maybe bad jobs do not kill immediately, but workers do suffer adverse stress consequences which carry over into other parts of their lives. So here's news, if you hate your job, quit and find one that is less stressful for you. Your health will improve along with your outlook on life.

1. Face Shape: Oblong
Frames to try: Round or Square.

Frames that are the same length vertically as horizontally will cover a good portion of your face and give the illusion that it's shorter.

2. Face Shape: Square
Frames to try: Oval.

Choosing a frame shape that contrasts with the lines of your face will soften an angular jawline and hairline, creating a more proportioned silhouette.

3. Face Shape: Round
Frames to try: Rectangular.

The angles will downplay your face's roundness and make it appear longer.

4. Face Shape: Heart-Shaped
Frames to try: Rimless or Aviator.

They'll accent your eyes and play down the angles on the lower half of your face. Colored lenses will draw even more attention towards the eye area.

www.realsimple.com

If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person.

Ralph Bunche

What Makes a Quality Trip?

Is it Price, Speed, Comfort, Ease?
What's important to you?

InsideTrip allows YOU to rate your trip according to each of these factors and helps you wade through the hundreds of flight options on the market today. Then you take your choices and go to a flight booking site.

As I commented a few posts ago, the NAACP met on Friday to select a new President and CEO, and at the time I expressed a wish that they would select a younger leader to move them forward. Well they have. Today they are announcing the appointment of 35 year old Benjamin T. Jealous to the post. A lifelong activist, Jealous most recently served as President of the Rosenberg Foundation, a Human Rights organization based in California. This looks like a good move, as he looks to increase their online presence, something I believe will be integral to their renewed growth.

Sexy Semi Platform Heels 009, originally uploaded by babster888.

Looking, feeling and being sexy is a full-time endeavour

and are key to becoming Zinlightened.You must employ all parts of your being. "Think Bold" over at Blogspot has some great tips on how to be sexy. With tips such as smile at everyone you meet, flirt, eat sexy food, check your wardrobe, lay off of surgary drinks, and more.

Send us your tips for maintaining "sexy." I know that it is a full-time job.

~Zin