Carousel: Week Ending 8th January 2010

Juicy CoutureJuicy Couture ad by Tim Walker.

Hooray! Hooray! Let’s get distracted! Alright, big breath… this is the bumper edition Carousel to end all Carousels!

Best gym in the city, for real. & this video shows exactly why.

AFFIRMATION FOR 2010 by Yoko Ono.

Yoko Ono held a Q&A session on Twitter & here are her responses. These are some of my favourites. I love her SO much!

Q: What do you think the biggest obstacle is that non conformist women face in their pursuit of success?
A: Themselves.

Q: Dear Mrs Ono! What is your advice for us for the new year? What will be the most important thing to pay attention for? Thank you.
A: Believe in yourself. Stay healthy. Stay in love with your life. All of what you do is changing our Universe for the better. Every little thing you think and do, effect our world and is making it better. Know that we appreciate that. And keep catching our vibration of love to you. 2010 will be a great year for you.

Q: Why are some people so uncaring and rude to fellow human beings when they themselves are so gifted and could do so much good?
A: We all need love. When it seems that we are not getting love, and somebody else is getting it, we scream murder. We make ourselves the children starving for love. Reach out and give love, share your warmth. You will find it immensely pleasing that you are creating and giving love where there is need.

Q: do you think that 2012 will bring about an age of light/spiritual transformation?
A: Every day is bringing spiritual transformation to all of us.

Q: Hi Yoko. How would you advise the average person to inject art into their daily lives, to mesh it with a normal day?
A: Be creative in your what you call your normal day, to make yourself proud to yourself.

Q: Recently i found my inner peace through my own type of therapy. If you will can you describe the moment you found your inner peace.
A: I try to be loving and peaceful, only because I know that it is such a drag to clean up after I splash anger! it’s better for your health to stay peaceful as much as you can. The way to do it is actually very simple. Count your blessings. And ask yourself why you are so angry at something that might be a blessing in disguise. It’s such fun to find out that it actually was.

Q: Year after year, i can’t stand long airplane trips. How do you manage to make it comfortable? Do you have any special method??
A: I don’t have any special method. I just know that it is a previledge to be up in the sky where you are surrounded with unworldly vibrations sometimes. You get inspired with many creative ideas, too. In other words, I think of it as a blessing to be flying. Maybe that helps.

How To Manifest More Sex from Good Vibe blog. Yay!

The 1000 Awesome Things book — The Book Of Awesome — is available for pre-order! & you should DEFINITELY pre-order it. Why? 1. It was written by my friend Neil who is hilarious & rad. 2. It’s like a little dose of happiness that you can keep on your shelf. 3. I said so. Ha! Go on, then! Order one for your best friend too. They’ll loooooove it.

The Hood Internet’s Mixtape Volume Four is wonderful. All the other tracks under their name are too.

3 Simple Tips to Help You Have a More Healthful, Fit, and Fulfilled 2010 — easy health tips.

Twelve Tips to Create a Happier (& More Productive) Workplace from The Happiness Project.

You can read a handsome portion of All we are saying: the last major interview with John Lennon & Yoko Ono but the whole thing is here & free!

GUESTBREAKER: You Ruined Christmas.

Champagne in popular culture. Some history & trivia about les bubbles!

“Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne!” — Winston Churchill

I just discovered her future, which is an online mentorship programme for women. & it costs nothin’! From what I can see, it’s run by Gabrielle Bernstein, whose book, Add More ~Ing To Your Life: A Hip Guide To Happiness just came out (& which I am reading!). We actually share a bunch of friends, like the incredible Kris Carr. Anyway, mentoring! How excellent is that? I have been thinking about mentoring a lot recently & I really think everyone should have a good mentor. Okay, go check it out!

If you don’t click on anything else in this Carousel, you should click on this: The Eight Irresistible Principles Of Fun should be essential viewing. Thank you so much Ilyra! Additionally, the company which put it together has a blog full of excellent interviews with people who do GREAT WORK.

OhChloe now has Domesticate Yourself. & I love it because I love everything she does without reservation. I think you will too.

7 Awesome Super Powers (Ruined by Science) via Cracked. & Abjekt.

I discovered Xteener the other day — she has a Youtube channel full of make-up tutorials, it’s so great! She is really sweet, explains every step & is super-likable. I think you’ll like her too!

Danielle LaPorte is rad. I just found her website & got all swoony. So nice to find a website full of juicy content! I recommend stop doing list: part 2 whereby i dictate what to stop; where to find God: down, not up; for rage-babes, flakes and tyrants: get over it; what is your relationship to… life?; 11 slightly scary ways to become a better you; entrepreneurial time management: how i rock it (brill!); love sucks, but you can’t beat it (“bliss requires sweat”); talkin’ sweet about love: what the shrinks need to hear (“open your heart… stand tall… & pour some real sugar on it”); inspiration + spirituality quotes; how to kiss up to your muse; we know you’re busy. now shut up about it; 3 keys to un-branding… & why I changed my twitter name; in praise of women: magnificent, spacious, fiery witnesses (yesssssssssssss); love local: an extra-special message for anyone trying to save the world, how to make the most of being toast: embracing burnout & idiots, cultivating openness.

SEE?! Brilliance squared. LOVE HERRRR.

Is checking voice mail, text, and e-mail messages outside of work hours cluttering your life? from Unclutterer.

Portable communication devices are extremely convenient, but using them shouldn’t be cluttering up the remarkable life you desire or interfering with what matters most to you.

Incomplete Manifesto For Growth from Bruce Mau Design.

Alaskan Couple Turns Yurt Into A Shelter In The Wild ahhhh yes pleeeeease. Okay, not so much the Alaskan thing, & not the roughing it thing, & dear god they have way too much stuff for such a small space, but living in a yurt, YES! Actually what I would really like is to live in a penthouse Manhattan apartment which is a sequence of yurt rooms all joined together. Mmmmmmm. One day. One day. Anyway blah blah, it is an interesting article.

The remote town has no access to other parts of the state by road. Residents have to travel by boat or airplane. A recent passenger on Homer Air, the local airline, was a poodle on its way to the vet…

6 Things They Mean When They Say They Have No Money by Naomi Dunford. Good reading for any artist!

The Entrepreneurial Time System. Yes please!

In a crisis, a hero finds his moment from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Steve Nobel interviews amazing people & then posts the MP3s for free! The selection of topics & speakers is amazing. I downloaded so many of these!

January. Relationships. Hold On (Maybe).

Another Trip to Kadikchan, an abandoned city in Russia where nature has taken over.

7 More Abandoned Cities & Towns Of America. I can’t get enough of this stuff. It is so weird & sad & mysterious.

Earlier bedtimes may help protect adolescents against depression and suicidal thoughts. Wow.

The authors reported that there are a number of potential mechanisms by which chronic partial sleep deprivation could contribute to depression and suicidal ideation. A lack of sleep may affect the modulation of emotional brain responses to aversive stimuli; produce moodiness that hinders the ability to cope with daily stresses and impairs relationships with peers and adults; and affect judgment, concentration and impulse control.

Banish Up to 350 Extra Calories a Day with a Tap of Your Foot!!! I constantly fidget, tap my feet or fingers, wriggle my legs, etc. It’s nice to have an excuse for doing it, HA! “Oh yeah it’s my exercise regime…”

6 Ways to Start the New Year Doing Instead of Dreaming from Dumb Little Man.

The Daily Grind is about how New Yorkers are transforming coffee shops into personalised work spaces… It’s kinda cute & interesting actually.

In New York City, where the unemployment rate remains at 10.3 percent, the jobless have started leaning hard on coffee shops and bookstores to get out of their tiny one-bedrooms and away from their annoying roommates. In these harsh, career-vanishing times, the members of this laptop brigade do everything they can to re-create the office environment they no longer have to complain about.

100 Awesome Open Courses for Bibliophiles !!!

Good night’s sleep is life’s ‘greatest pleasure’ as voted by 3,000 Brits. There’s a list of the top 50 greatest pleasures too.

If you’re on the job-hunt, you should definitely read this: How to Answer the 10 Most Common Interview Questions. The comments are useful too.

Secret to long life lies in your name ?!

The Art Of Living Mindfully, BEST THING I HAVE READ IN AGES.

Take another scientific given: that to lose weight you must exercise more or eat less. In a recent study, Langer and Alia J. Crum, now a doctoral student at Yale University, got hotel housekeepers who reported doing little or no exercise to recognize the physical nature of their jobs: telling half of a group of 84 that their days spent bending, stretching, and lifting were similar to workouts at a gym. Four weeks later, those 42 chambermaids had lost an average of two pounds each, reduced their percentage of body fat, and lowered their blood pressure—all while reporting no changes in eating habits, even less physical activity during their off hours, and (according to their bosses) the same level of work.

As in the men’s retreat and the eyesight study, it seemed that people’s states of mind were changing their bodies. “The main idea for all these studies is very simple,” Langer says. “We take the mind and the body and we put them back together, so that wherever we’re putting the mind, we’re necessarily putting the body.”

In a series of studies, she, Langer, and Jaewoo Chung, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that women who think they look younger after having their hair colored or cut show a decrease in blood pressure and are rated younger in photos, even when the pictures do not show their hair; that people who wear work uniforms (rather than clothes that might indicate their age) are healthier than people in the same income bracket who don’t wear uniforms; that being married to someone younger tends to lengthen life, and being married to someone older tends to shorten it; and that prematurely bald men see themselves as older and therefore age faster. All this adds up to evidence, the researchers assert, that the body may age partly in reaction to “younger” or “older” cues in the environment.

“Studies show that people form evaluations based on their own needs,” Langer writes, “but we tend to accept other people’s evaluations as though they were objective.”

She draws an analogy to Pascal’s wager, substituting “control” for “God”: If you believe you have no control and you truly don’t, “no big deal.” If you believe you have control and it turns out you do, “that’s the big win.” And if you don’t have control but you believe you do, you are actively engaged in something, feeling alive and effective—and you may just be successful someday. “You can’t prove that something is uncontrollable,” Langer says, “All you can show is that things are indeterminate.” The best gamble, then, is to act as if you have control.

Steve Pavlina wrote this article called Domination & Submission. He is getting into it in 2010! Two-thousand-&-dom-’em, hee! But even if you’re not interested in BDSM at all, his article’s a really good look at relationships in general, I think.

Okay, so, the FBI has released a list of 17,000 people who “are likely” to have FBI files (read: important in some way), & who are now deceased. You can download it here. The list includes a bunch of celebrities, communists, gangsters & scientists. The weirdest bit? You can request copies of their files for nothin’ if the file is less than 100 pages, but a mere 10c/page if it’s 100 pages or more. How do you do this? Check out Get Grandpa’s FBI File or the FBI’s own site. The mind boggles!

Fantastic chandeliers (I like the virus one best) & exploring feelings about fur with dolls & fashion, from If It’s Hip, It’s Here.

Nonpareil Samantha has a friend named Thaxton who has been volunteering in the Amazon rainforest & keeping a blog about it. It’s really interesting but there’s also a lot of poignant stuff about how he felt coming back to America after having been in Ecuador so long. Read it!

Bakerella is awesome. Also: Candyland. The perfect accompaniment to Thaxton’s thoughts on coming back to America, non?

Professional models barred from German magazineBrigitte recruits ordinary women to star in its fashion shoots.

Simon Doonan rocks my world.

…You have unwittingly provided me with a searing insight into the pathetic and disastrous state of our comment-obsessed culture. Thanks to you, I see now that there are two kinds of people in the world: In the first group, we have those who “do,” and in the second group, we have those who sit at their computers on their ever-widening asses blogging, platforming and commenting on the not-always-perfect efforts of the first group.

When The Street Meets Fashion Elite was an article in The Dominion Post (the newspaper in Wellington, New Zealand) which mentioned me! You can read it at that link. Nice, thanks Rosie!

Evolution of the Hipster is preeeeeeeetty funny…

Paleolithic diet is so easy, cavemen actually did it. Thanks Sam!

NYC locals: Filament magazine is now available at Bluestockings if you want to save on postage!

Static-Free Authenticity.

“There is SUCH a focus these days on being authentic and being yourself – on expressing your creative truth – in business, in creative pursuits, and in your relationships. If I read another blog post that tells me to just “be myself,” I might have to yank myself bald.”

I know a lot of you enjoyed the video of the Northern Lights I posted the other day! My mother saw it & emailed me, saying, “Hi Darling, I was looking at your web site today, and I saw that you had a clip of The Northern Lights. We were watching an amazing programme on TV last night, a documentary by Joanna Lumley. From the age of seven she had always wanted to go and see them. The doco was about her journey, staying in an ice hotel and seeing the most amazing spectacle. If you can see the programme on your computer you should, it is such a coincidence that you should write about it and we were watching it. Amazing!” So I found an article on it — Joanna Lumley and her absolutely fabulous trip to see the northern lights — & the whole thing can be viewed online. Here’s part one:

& parts two, three, four, five & six.I watched the whole thing on Monday & it made me smile very much.

Man goat!!!

HAHA!

The Runaways is directed by Floria Sigismondi (myfavourite music video director) & is the story of the legendary band(which Joan Jett was in). Read the synopsis here.I’m pretty excited about it. Joan Jett + Floria Sigismondi = good.

Neil Gaiman’s new year’s benediction.Thanks Amanda!

HAHA I love this!(& yes, it is a fakie.)

Have a magnificent weekend, cuteness!