Classic Replica Watches, Swiss Watches for Less, Enjoying Popular Fashion

From the Associated Press, By JOCELYN NOVECK

NEW YORK -- She's had a front row seat to history for a year and a half, meeting heads of state, touring the Kremlin, flying around the world on Air Force One, being serenaded by Paul McCartney and enjoying command performances from the Jonas Brothers.

But there's one thing Malia Obama hasn't done, until now, her dad says, and it's a rite of passage countless kids have experienced: a summer at camp, bunking with a bunch of other girls in a wooden cabin or tent, sharing chores, swatting away mosquitoes and giggling the night away.

It's a wonderful time -- lumpy cots and all -- say advocates of the camp experience, who are thrilled with the presidential decision to let Malia partake in a classic American tradition.

"We're proud, and very pleased for Malia," says Peg Smith, CEO of the American Camp Association. "Education and learning has been something that the president has talked a great deal about, and we see camp as a great learning environment. We're sure she'll have a great experience."

As many parents can tell you, camp is a rite of passage for the parents as much as the camper. "I may shed a tear," the president said in a recent interview on NBC News.

If he hasn't already, he may shed that tear during the first couple weeks, when -- unless there's an exception for the leader of the free world -- parents often cannot speak to their child. In most camps, there are strict rules governing communication with home, designed to help the child adjust.

Parents can write letters, of course, or perhaps send e-mails or faxes to be printed out. As for the campers, they usually can only write letters. And cell phones are almost always forbidden.

"The policies vary, but they all say, give your kids a chance to adjust," says Smith.

But often it's harder for the parents to adjust. So if the Obamas do succumb to what Smith calls "parent-kid sickness" -- the parental form of homesickness -- they should know that many camps have employees on call to reassure them.

"Camps are used to fielding calls from parents," says Smith. "There's been a huge increase in those calls over the last decade. Parents today are so involved in their kids' lives. Their expectations have grown, especially in the digital age."

And what if the camper's homesick? That's extremely common, though only 7 percent of cases are serious enough to require intervention like calling the parents, according to the camp association.

"Counselors and staff are trained to deal with it," says Smith. "They play icebreaker games, and keep the kids busy and involved. The kids come home feeling more resilient, more independent, more self-confident."

That could be especially important for a celebrity camper who necessarily leads a protected life, as hard as her parents try to keep it normal.

"Camps are communities where everyone matters equally," says Catherine Steiner-Adair, a psychologist who regularly works with summer camps, where she has encountered a number of children of celebrities. "It may be a challenge at first for everybody to be calm. But once people get over the initial buzz, it's all about camp."

If famous people often send their kids to camp, many have also attended themselves. A list maintained by the ACA of celebrities who've attended camp in their lifetimes (sleepaway or daytime) includes Hollywood stars like Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, Chevy Chase, Keira Knightley and Natalie Portman; Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill; author J.D. Salinger and musicians like Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond and Gwen Stefani.

There's also Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her retired colleague, Sandra Day O'Connor; former presidents George W. Bush and Gerald Ford; Nancy Reagan, and Prince Albert of Monaco. Even Albert Einstein was once on staff, according to the list -- and so was Michelle Obama (she was a camp counselor.)

The only presidential child on the list is Chelsea Clinton, who attended U.S. Space Camp in Hunstville, Ala., when her dad was in office.

Having a presidential child on hand would seem to provide some interesting logistical challenges, but camp officials say they've seen a lot of it before.

"Camps are quite used to managing whatever unique circumstances a camper might bring," says Smith. "The sign of a good camp is that you don't see those things."

More important, say many who've been through it, is that camp is a unique place where, for a month or two, a young person can reinvent him or herself.

"I know some children of extremely public people, and for them, going to camp is an opportunity to be who THEY are, and not their parents' child," says Steiner-Adair. "There are very straightforward values: Help the other fellow, everyone matters, be a good sport, play for fun. Who you are, what you own, and where you come from is less important."

"I think Malia's parents have chosen very wisely."

 

Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com

MADELINE WEINRIB, the New York textile designer, started her career as a painter. “I did my first rug collection almost as a lark,” she said.

That was in 1998. Ms. Weinrib, who fell in love with the tactile nature of her new medium, now has a boutique on the sixth floor of ABC Carpet & Home, the store founded by her grandfather Max Weinrib. The rugs, fabrics and pillows in bright, eye-catching patterns that cover every available surface are evidence that in textiles, as in art, Ms. Weinrib is attracted to strong graphic statements and vivid colors.

That predilection has expanded to other areas of the home as well. This spring, she designed her first wallpaper, for Studio Printworks: an oversize pattern called Allemande inspired by antique French brocades. In September, she will give new life to classic pieces of modern furniture, including a Vladimir Kagan sofa and a Gio Ponti chair, by upholstering them in her fabric for a show at the Sebastian + Barquet gallery in Chelsea.

It’s no surprise that she likes to use patterns at home as well, especially when she is entertaining. “I love putting together a nice table,” said Ms. Weinrib, who uses tablecloths, runners and napkins to change the feeling of a room. “Summery linens are generally not very expensive, and a fun way to add a little beauty to your life.”

Shopping for summer table accessories, she didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. At Marimekko on the Upper East Side, she unfurled rolls of oilcloth, which she suggested cutting to the desired length and using as a tablecloth. “I just love the flowers,” she said, referring to the company’s well-known Unikko pattern.

At Barneys New York, she again gravitated to the florals, selecting Jessie napkins from Missoni, which she thought had a lively graphic design.

For textiles with a handmade look, Ms. Weinrib picked out Eatkins cotton napkins, made in Brooklyn, which can be purchased from the designer, Leah A. Howe, on Etsy.com. “They really feel very loved,” she said, noting the double-sided design and the rough edges.

To go with the linens she found, she chose round reed placemats with a shell detail at William Wayne & Company in Greenwich Village. She also liked the store’s patterned paper napkins, which were “decorative and beautiful,” she said , and would be good for casual get-togethers.

Having an eclectic collection of linens to mix and match, she said, makes it easier and more fun to set a table. It also adds a sense of playfulness “that can make our lives a little happier.”

 

Driver from www.nytimes.com

Us Weekly reports that Victoria's Secret bombshell Miranda Kerr is pregnant! Kerr, who just got married to actor Orlando Bloom in a secret ceremony last week, fueled rumors about being with child after refusing to comment on the topic. But now, a source close to Kerr told Us, "She's definitely pregnant...Miranda's thrilled," adding, "She's telling all her friends, mostly other models, about it."

Kerr did tell a Sydney newspaper, "I have always been very open about wanting to be a mother one day. And I've always thought Orlando would be a great dad. I've always wanted kids, so someday, eventually, yes, it will happen."

Maybe sooner than later! Kerr and Bloom have yet to make an official announcement.

 

Driver from www.huffingtonpost.com

Bethany Cosentino, the singer and songwriter behind the frizzy L.A. summer-pop band Best Coast, has a tattoo of California with the outline of a bear on her arm. It's fitting — a few spins of her charming, endlessly re-playable debut, full-length "Crazy for You," would make anyone want to move here.

By contrast, if Wavves' Nathan Williams were to get some similarly California-themed body art, it might be a back portrait of a blood-lusting coyote riding a surfboard while ripping hits off a skull-shaped water bong. Wavves' searingly disenchanted new album "King of the Beach" is a giddy perversion of every Golden State stereotype. Imagine Nathaniel West as a skate-punk burnout, or if the recipient of Brian Wilson's teenage symphonies to God told him to set stuff on fire in parking lots.

Not coincidentally, the two are dating. But each have made opposite and near-perfect rock albums that, taken together, might be among the most inviting portraits of being young in Los Angeles in 2010.

Best Coast's scrimmy, treble-heavy guitar pop could have gotten lost in the pack of her twentysomething Spector-revival peers. But the songs are so good they can disarm any skeptics. Try to hear album opener "Boyfriend" without an abiding itch to throw a slumber party, or avoid nodding in solemn agreement to Cosentino's plea on "Goodbye" that "I wish my cat could talk." If the album's a bit monochromatic as a whole, the sheer warmth and craft of the songwriting makes every single feel new again.

Band mate Bobb Bruno and producer Lewis Pesacov add some welcome rhythmic backbone and atmosphere, but the show is Cosentino's, and "Crazy for You" cements an essential new voice in L.A. music.

Wavves made a commercial and critical breakthrough last year with the consonant-addled album, "Wavvves." But only a few songs survived the sonic mangle that made the phrase "it sounds like it was recorded in a trash can" an insult to trash-can fidelity. With producer Dennis Herring and the late Jay Reatard's relentless rhythm section minding the shop on "King of the Beach," Williams is free to write actual tunes, and lo and behold, they're extraordinary.

"Take on the World" has one of the best slacker-laments in recent rock — "To take on the world would be something," Williams mutters over propulsive guitar slosh. But when he says, "I hate my music, it's all the same," he shouldn't worry. "King of the Beach" pulls from Ritchie Valens' pre-Beatles guitar pop ("Convertible Balloon"), The Jesus and Mary Chain's druggy doo-wop ("When Will You Come") and caveman grunge ("Green Eyes").

But the best sound on "King of the Beach" is what isn't there. Williams' trashy defensive pose is out, and in is a kind of acidic sweetness. "I don't want to walk outside without you," he sings on "Baseball Cards," and it's the kind of vulnerable, hopeful sentiment that might make a California girl go crazy for him.

Driver from www.latimes.com

ISLE OF GUERNSEY — As a child, Julia Martin loved visiting the aviary next door to an old barn dating back to the 15th century. At the time she never paid much attention to the neglected building, and certainly never imagined calling it home. But about 25 years later home it became, and not before it was renovated by a local architect.

Together with her husband, Rick Martin, the couple chose the barn, here on the rocky coast of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off of the coast of Normandy, France, as their first family home.

Ms. Martin, 33, who runs her own recruiting business and Mr. Martin, 38, the creative director for a marketing and design company, grew up on opposite sides of the island, but only met 10 years ago through mutual friends. They had spent over 18 months looking for a house. But in 2008, they knew the old barn was perfect the moment they walked in.

“We took about three steps inside and said, ‘Yes, we’ll have it,’ ” Mr. Martin said. Within a few months, they had bought the 3,500-square-foot house for 895,000 pounds, or $1.4 million at $1.53 to the pound, and moved in.

The barn was refurbished by Jamie Falla, an architect in Guernsey, who transformed the granite, dark structure by adding a glass extension to the back, giving almost every room access to the garden. Adding to the lightness of the renovation are resin and recycled glass floors.

In the spirit of recycling, the couple plan to make the house increasingly eco-sustainable. Photovoltaic solar panels will be installed later this year; new insulation was installed to help make the building more energy efficient.

“The recession has meant we’ve had to coordinate a revolving set of works, rather than doing everything at once,” Mr. Martin said.

For furniture, they kept a dining table that the architect had left behind, made of wooden panels. They decorated the open-plan kitchen with plants, a painting from a vacation to South Africa and a framed modern piece they bought from the Tate gallery shop. The shiny Poggenpohl refrigerator, a German kitchen company, is spacious enough for Mr. Martin to cure strips of bacon safely out of the reach of their pet cat, Yoda.

The guest bedroom, which also doubles as an office for Ms. Martin, features an wooden-framed bed designed by Mr. Martin. Here a glass wall opens into the front garden.

The glass theme continues through a transparent passage (with glass walls, floors and ceilings) connecting the extension to the original building.

In the new extension are the bedrooms. The master bedroom is simply decorated, but the glass wall gives it a feeling of suspension as it overlooks the garden. A high fence and leafy expanse shelter the grounds. In the garden is a vegetable patch and trees bearing apples, cherries and figs.

The living room is lit with industrial-style spot lights. White leather sofas face the newly restored fireplace and a flat-screen television, while a library along the far wall offers a quieter form of entertainment.

“One thing we have discovered about the house,” Ms. Martin said, “is that everyone who visits has something to say about it, whether good or bad. We love it.”

Battling cancer is a tough job. Not only does the disease take its toll on an ailing body, but modern treatments often include side-effects that can make healing all the more challenging. And insomnia is among those side effects.

I see many patients who've gone through cancer treatment only to be left with chronic insomnia. In fact, as many as one-third of all cancer patients develop sleep problems during treatment that then can persist for years afterward--even after the cancer has gone into remission. Sadly, the insomnia doesn't go into remission too. Insomnia takes over these patients' lives for many reasons, including stress caused by their illness and changes to regular sleep patterns caused by their treatments.

But there's hope. A new study is underway in a research program based in Alberta, Canada to help such patients gain the control they so desire of their sleep life. It's called I-CAN Sleep (short for Individuals with Insomnia and CANcer), and it's the first Canadian study to assess sleep-improving techniques specifically intended for cancer patients and survivors.

Why is this necessary? Well, consider the following:

• Insomnia very rarely goes away on its own once it becomes chronic.  Some sort of intervention is typically required.
•  Sedatives aren't a viable long-term solution because sleep becomes dependent on the medication. Besides, who wants to rely on sedatives for the rest of their lives?
• Insufficient sleep can negatively impact a person's mood and pain threshold, compounding the difficulty of cancer treatment--and setting up an individual for living with a high risk for other health challenges, such as heart disease, obesity and diabetes.

 

The crux of this study examines two areas related to sleep:

1. how the body can relax the mind; and
2. how the mind can relax the body.

My guess is the study will show that the techniques I've been endorsing for years are helpful. They are, after all, the essence of mind-body sleep medicine. Examples include:

• Establishing an ideal setting for sleep that entails a calm, clutter-free and cool bedroom.
• Taking the time to r-e-l-a-x before bedtime and "power down" so the mind and body prepare for sleep and actually expect sleep to be imminent. This can encompass any number of mind-body practices such as visualization, light yoga, meditation and deep breathing. 
• Avoiding stimulants, from electronics and caffeine to page-turning thrillers and work at night.
• Learning how to engage the mind when your head hits the pillow to sedate the body to sleep naturally. Again, this can involve certain bedtime practices that teach the body to enter a deeply calming and sleep-enhancing state.

 

Note that all of these strategies are non-invasive, drug-free and cost free. Something that typically cannot be said for all those exhausting weeks and months of addressing an illness as scary and severe as cancer with traditional medicine. 

I would also venture to guess that those patients who can successfully get back a restful night will gain back more than sound sleep. They'll capture more health. More vitality and energy. And definitely more life.

New medicines are being developed that are expected to transform the care of patients with hepatitis C, making treatment far more effective and far less grueling.

The new drugs, which could start reaching the market as early as next year, could help subdue a virus that infects roughly four million Americans, most of them baby boomers, and 170 million people worldwide.

“I almost think this will be revolutionary, to be honest,” said Dr. Fred Poordad, chief of hepatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “We are chomping at the bit to try to treat as many patients as we can.”

About two dozen pharmaceutical companies are now pursuing drugs for hepatitis C, which an executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals recently called “one of the largest pharmaceutical opportunities this decade.”

That is because the toll of the disease, which now kills about 12,000 Americans a year, is expected to rise in the coming decade. Although new cases have dropped sharply, hundreds of thousands of people who were infected decades ago are expected to start experiencing the effects of liver damage.

New cases of liver cancer are already rising year by year. And hepatitis C is the leading cause of liver transplants, like the one recently received by the rock musician Gregg Allman.

Hopes for new treatments were buoyed in May by the first results from a late-stage clinical trial of one of the new drugs, telaprevir from Vertex. When added to the existing treatment — a combination of alpha interferon and ribavirin — telaprevir effectively cured 75 percent of patients, compared with 44 percent of those treated with the existing drugs alone. And for many patients, the course of treatment could be halved to 24 weeks.

Freja Beha Erichsen and three bears on an ice floe. This was the arctic scene at Chanel, where giant chunks of bona fide iceberg, specially transported from Scandinavia, formed the frozen landscape around which models solemnly splashed through a sea of 'berg-melt in shaggy snow boots with ice-block heels.

The Karl conceit of the season, no surprises, was an in-every-way extravagant play on Coco in cold weather. Using more fur than he'd even flung at Fendi—the twist being that here the fur was fake—Lagerfeld steered this collection nearer to couture than ready-to-wear than ever. Fur was woven into brown tweeds; formed deep pelmets on the lower half of leather jackets; became almost igloo-shaped capes, bonnets, even—for goodness' sake—furry trousers. Meanwhile, the suit and coat combinations also had a level of lavish elaboration usually reserved for haute eveningwear. Fur-fringed embroideries and ice jewelry conspired to create intensely worked ruffled and beaded silhouettes that glinted with rock-crystal neckpieces and fistfuls of rings. Somewhere in there, a flash of translucent silver seemed to be a clutch in which the quilting of the CC classic bag had been frozen into the likeness of a refrigerator ice cube tray.

It was a lucky stroke that the weather outside had kindly assisted Chanel in whipping subzero winds around the Grand Palais while this display was going on. Since humans are suggestible, it took only the merest suspension of disbelief to imagine this collection hitting the mark next fall, despite the fact that it will start to be delivered in July—and who knows in which century we'll have another winter like this one? Nevertheless, putting global warming and the melting of ice caps both center stage and on the back burner (as it were), this show swept the audience along as they were treated to such amusements as seeing Karl Lagerfeld's favorite, Baptiste Giabiconi, swagger out of an ice cave in a full-length polar bear coat.

It wasn't all played for laughs. Within the context of a season of innovative knitwear, Chanel's was some of the most outstanding. A group of three short angora sweater dresses, tinted iceberg blue in the center, was an amazing follow-up from something Lagerfeld did with dégradé pastel embroidery in couture. One gray and black cardigan coat was knitted in a bubbly grid to mimic a down-filled puffer. And the finale was given to a wedding dress knitted in silk tulle ribbon to resemble Chanel's bouclé tweed, forming a tight-fitting sweater in the body and then sweeping away in flounces in back. The bride—Freja, again—dangled an ice-block purse on a fur-woven Chanel chain.

Driver from: www.style.com

Long or short, when it comes to my hair, things can often get tangled. I never quite understand how it happens, but I seem to unearth unwieldy knots on a weekly basis. Trimming straggler strands would probably help; so too would actually using that tub of deep conditioner rather than just displaying it on my bathroom shelf. But the summertime cure I’ve been turning to of late is Aubrey Organics’ new NuStyle Detangler and Shine Booster. The organic formula, which combines evening primrose oil, quinoa, and aloe extracts, helps to unravel knots in dry hair, adds shine, and can also be used as a lightweight leave-in conditioner. I highly recommend throwing one in your beach tote to help those post-swimming comb-out sessions go a bit more smoothly. Longtime fans of the classic Johnson’s No More Tangles can consider this the grown-up version.

—Fiorella Valdesolo

Driver from: www.style.com

Germany may have just missed a shot at the World Cup finals, but its bargain beauty brand, Essence Cosmetics, which landed on our shores in April, is a winner stateside. While the nine-year-old company typically introduces 18 themed, limited-edition lines per year at home, that number has been whittled down to four to six for the U.S., the latest of which is called Surfer Babe. A wave-riding-inspired array of aquas, lavenders, grays, melons, pinks, and whites, the range includes a six-colored eye palette, three waterproof liquid eyeliners, an eyeliner pen, three lip glosses, and a powder blush. Most exciting, though, are its four spot-on nail varnishes, which pretty much cover every shade of polish we like to dabble in for summer—exclusive of neons, that is. The two pastel shades are the perfect complement to sun-kissed skin while the gray and fuchsia offer slightly darker, transitional options that will serve you well as fall rolls around. Also, they cost $1.99 a piece—$1.99! Pick up all four for under $10 at an Ulta store near you while supplies last.

—Celia Ellenberg

Driver from: www.style.com