JASON Sudeikis has revealed how he stays fit! The actor says having sex with girlfriend Olivia Wilde keeps him in shape. “A lot of it comes from tiny things, like not eating barbecue sauce with my pizza at two in the morning,” he said. “I think it’s all a manifestation of being happy and wanting [...] Reported by Showbiz Spy 23 hours ago.

NEW YORK -- As far as catfights go, this is a doozy.

Barbie, long the reigning queen in the doll world, has suddenly been thrust into the battle of her life.

But Barbie's competitors look nothing like the blue-eyed, blond-haired, long-legged fashion icon. And they don't have the same old standards of beauty as the aging diva either.

Monster High dolls, vampy teens that are patterned after the offspring of monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein, have neon pink and green streaks in their hair. They wear platform heels and mini-skirts with skulls on them. And the dolls that go by names like Draculaura and Ick Abbey Bominable are gaining on Barbie.

In the Maddux household in Portage, Wis., for instance, Olivia, 10, has been playing with Barbie for six or seven years. But she added Monster High dolls to the mix a year ago.

"I look at Olivia and some of her friends and see they're growing out of Barbies," says Olivia's mom, Lisa Maddux, 42, a freelance writer.

That Barbie is losing her edge is no surprise. Since debuting in 1959 as the world's first fashion doll, Barbie has long been a lightning rod for controversy and competitors.

To be sure, Barbie is still No. 1 in the doll market, and the Mattel franchise has an estimated $1.3 billion in annual sales. But Barbie's sales have slipped for four straight quarters, even while the overall doll category is up 6 percent year-to-date, according to the researcher NPD Group.

Meanwhile, Monster High, which is also made by Mattel, has become the No. 2 doll brand in just three years, with more than $500 million in annual sales, says BMO Capital Markets Gerrick Johnson.

In addition to the competition from Monster High, Barbie has had to contend with increasing criticism of her impossibly proportioned body. While the 54-year-old doll has over the years graduated from pin-up girl to a range of characters that include astronauts, engineers and princesses, detractors continue to dismiss the 11.5-inch doll's frame as impossibly top-heavy and tiny-waisted.

Barbie's measurements equate to about a 39-inch bust, 18-inch waist and 33-inch hips on a life-size woman. The average American woman, by comparison, is about a size 14.

Artist Nickolay Lamm on Monday posted pictures of what the doll would look like if it had the average measurements of a 19-year-old, revealing a much more meaty physique. The pictures were featured on Web sites from CNN to Time and renewed controversy over the doll's effect on girls' body image.

Monster High dolls, on the other hand, although still pretty slim, have a punk rock look that's intended to send the message that being different is OK. And they're aimed at slightly older children – adding to their appeal – while Barbie's increasingly young audience is hurting sales. After all, no child wants to play with anything seen as a baby toy.

Barbie marketed to children that are between age 3 and 9, but over the past 15 years or so, the range has shrunk to around 3 to 6, says Timetoplaymage.com toy analyst Jim Silver. This has happened because older children are likely gravitating toward electronic devices or dolls like Monster High, which are aimed at kids 6 to 13, Silver says.

It's a trickle-down effect: The same reason why 5-year-olds who belted out "The Wheels on the Bus," 25 years ago would today be more interested One Direction boy band pop songs, he says.

"Kids are growing up much faster younger," Silver says. "A 6-year-old is looking for something a little edgier. That's the reason why Monster High has had so much success."

Kim Blake's daughter Sarah, 7, used to be a Barbie fan, but she's moved beyond that. She's getting ready to donate her 3-foot tall Barbie dream house and about half of her 20 Barbie dolls to charity.

Now, she's more into playing outside or taking Taekwondo martial arts classes and less into dolls in general. That's a switch from her mother, 35, who played with Barbie dolls until she was 13.

"Her girlfriends don't play with them any more either," says Blake, a store manager in Renton, Wash. "They've actually said the word `babyish' talking about them."

The last time Barbie wasn't feeling the love was about 12 years ago when, after years of little competition, pouty-lipped Bratz dolls became wildly successful. They sent squeaky clean Barbie into a sales spiral.

Bratz dolls were edgy. They wore low-rise jeans, had heavy makeup and exposed navels. And they were sultrier than Barbies. But the Bratz fad faded in 2005, and Barbie slowly regained sales ground.

The same may happen with Monster High dolls. Industry experts say it will take a lot to dethrone the Barbie. "It's still one of the strongest brands in industry," says Needham & Co. toy analyst Sean McGowan.

In a call with investors on Wednesday, Mattel CEO Bryan Stockton admitted that the success of Monster High and its other doll brands might be causing some of Barbie's sales dip. But he points out that Barbie's sales are higher now than when Monster High dolls were launched in 2010. He said the competition is energizing the entire doll sector.

In general, "hot toys" have a cyclical nature, usually with a 5-year time span, says BMO Capital's Johnson. This ensures that no toy stays on top forever. Even evergreen brands that endure for decades, like Barbie, have highs and lows in popularity.

"It happens with everything – name a toy, and it's had its ups and downs," Johnson says. "At some point the day comes when a kid says, `Nah, I'm tired of this.'"

That day isn't completely here for Olivia Maddux yet. Her mom, Lisa, believes her new love affair with the Monster High dolls may have in fact extended the life of Barbie dolls.

"I think the addition of Monster High dolls, aimed at a little different demographic, kept Barbies alive in our place, since she plays with them together," she says.

That may be true. In Olivia's world, the two – Barbie and Monster High – peacefully coexist. Well, sort of.

"The Monster High dolls are like the Barbie's servants," Olivia says. Reported by Huffington Post 22 hours ago.

New York, July 18 : American actor Jason Sudeikis has claimed that having sex with his fiance Olivia Wilde helped him attain his slim physique. Reported by newKerala.com 18 hours ago.

Rating: PG-13 (Drug references, language)Length: 113 minRelease date: March 15, 2012Directed by: Drew DeNicola, Olivia MoriGenre: DocumentaryRating: 3.5 out of 5"Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me" is a 2012 documentary film by directors Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori, which tells...

read more Reported by NowPublic 17 hours ago.

Olivia Laing's first book, To The River, was called both "erudite and wacky", its author acclaimed for the beauty of her prose and compared to WG Sebald and Richard Mabey. It was certainly an idiosyncratic work – a homage to the Sussex Ouse and to Virginia Woolf who walked into it to an untimely death in 1941. Laing is evidently fascinated by rivers, and in The Trip to Echo Spring she is following not one but several - this time rivers of alcohol, hoping to discover their effects on certain writers and their creations. Reported by Independent 16 hours ago.

Filed under: Humor, Entertainment, Video, Masterclash


The time has come to say goodbye. There were robots and nerdy burlesques and everything Star Wars. We gave you A Woman's Perspective and had Drinks With Writers. Olivia Munn pranked our intern. We banned Megan Fox and encouraged women to have Sex ... Read more

 

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments Reported by Asylum 7 hours ago.

Top Boy | American Juggalo | Wheelers, Dealers And Del Boys | This American Life | Run

*TV: Top Boy*

After a long wait, this Ashley Walters-fronted crime drama, which impressed critics and viewers with its taut, granite-flecked depiction of east London gang life on its debut back in 2011, returns for a second series in the very near future. Which means that now is the perfect time to get acquainted with the first series, available in full over on 4oD.

4oD

*TV: American Juggalo*

Director Sean Dunne delves inside the weird, and often messy, world of "juggalos"– AKA hardcore fans of the Insane Clown Posse, who live by the group's devil-may-care attitude and meet up every year at the annual Gathering Of The Juggalos. In this mini-documentary you meet the pierced, wasted and often incoherent juggalos and juggalettes, who talk us through what life as a follower means and how the group has changed their lives. This year's Gathering, meanwhile, kicks off on 7 August at Cave-In-Rock, Illinois.

Online

*TV: Wheelers, Dealers And Del Boys*

Sick of the steroidal hysterics of US auction shows like Storage Hunters? This one-off documentary should provide a charming contrast. Set at a "trash or treasure" event at a south London auction house, it follows the gimlet-eyed auction attendees seeking to make a fast buck through shrewd bidding. As you might imagine, there are some entertaining characters profiled here, and James Dawson's film provides a fascinating insight into the mentality behind auction addiction.

BBC iPlayer

*Podcast: This American Life*

America's foremost factual radio show aired its 500th episode last week and celebrated by airing clips chosen by the show's producers and host Ira Glass as their favourite moments from its 18-year run. Ranging, in typical TAL fashion, from the significant (an account of post-Katrina New Orleans) to the slight (Daily Show contributor John Hodgman's attempts to write a new screenplay for The Phantom Menace), these clips are likely to make you want to go and rediscover the episodes from whence they came. Just as well, then, that the full archive is ready to peruse over on the show's website.

thisamericanlife.org

*TV: Run*

Another of Channel 4's across-the-week dramas, Run came and went in a blur of bleakness last week. Its bitter pill was sugared somewhat by moments of optimism, though, and in the form of Olivia Colman's Carol the series offered up as well-drawn a depiction of single motherhood as you're likely to see this year.

4oD Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 hours ago.

Actress Olivia Munn says she suffers from a hair-pulling disorder called Trichotillomania, which makes her pull out her eyelashes and so she wears false lashes every day. Reported by IndiaVision 4 hours ago.

Does it help writers to drink? Certainly Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald thought so. But, wonders Blake Morrison, are the words on the page there despite and not because of alcohol?

Recent research suggests that Dylan Thomas might not, after all, have drunk himself to death. What his doctor in New York took to be delirium tremens and treated with morphine may have been bronchitis and pneumonia, which morphine injections only made worse – after the third of them, he went into a coma. Still, there's no doubt that Thomas had been drinking heavily in the days leading up to his admission to hospital – indeed for large periods of his life. The previous day he'd opened a bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey and offered a glass to the maid cleaning his hotel room. Then, after more drinks with his lover Elizabeth Reitell, he left his bed at 2am and went to a bar, telling her on his return that he had drunk 18 straight whiskies.

Thomas was prone to exaggeration. He once bragged that he had drunk 40 pints of beer, and a character in his Adventures in the Skin Trade claims to have drunk 49 pints of Guinness straight off. According to the bartender who served him that fateful night, Thomas drank only six or at most eight whiskies, not 18. But American measures are twice the size of British ones. And his health had suffered over the years from alcohol and cigarettes: as well as having gout, emphysema and a fatty liver, he was physically exhausted through insomnia. The diagnosis on his admission to St Vincent's, alcoholic encephalopathy, might have been wrong, and with different treatment he might have recovered. But it wasn't as if he hadn't been warned.

Thomas's death is the stuff of legend, and it's no surprise to hear that a TV film, with a script by Andrew Davies, is being made about it, to coincide with the centenary of the poet's birth next year. Part of the legend, no matter how false, is that American hospitality is what killed him – the innocent from Britain goes on a lecture tour, is tempted to taste the Big Apple, then falls. Behind the Thomas story, though, is an older myth, that poetry and alcohol go together, as complementary means to achieve transcendence: "The excitement of alcohol and the excitement of fantasy are very similar," John Cheever said. You can trace the idea back to ancient Greece, where poems would be recited at drinking parties or symposia (often competitively, in a "capping game", one person following another). The idea is common to other cultures, too, including the Chinese, where in the third century AD the seven sages of the Bamboo Grove retired to the country to drink wine and compose verse: "Once drunk, a cup of wine can bring 100 stanzas," the poet Xiuxi Yin claimed. The drunker the bard, the more the words flowed.

Thomas epitomised this tradition of the roistering rhymer – to the distaste of Kingsley Amis, who wrote a singularly unpleasant epitaph for him:

They call you "drunk with words";
but when we drink
And fetch it up, we sluice it down
the sink.
You should have stuck to spewing
beer, not ink.

Does it help writers to drink? Do they drink any more heavily than any other social group – doctors, lawyers, shop assistants or (see Mad Men) advertising executives? A famous drinker himself, Amis considers this question in his Memoirs, and – comparing writers to actors – suggests "displaced stage fright as a cause of literary alcoholism. A writer's audience is and remains invisible to him, but if he is any good he is acutely and continuously aware of it, and never more so while it waits for him to come on, to begin p.1. Alcohol not only makes you less self-critical, it reduces fear." According to Amis, a large glass can supply "that final burst of energy at the end of the day" but should be avoided any earlier: "The writer who writes his books on, rather than between, whisky is a lousy writer. He is probably American anyway."

Amis had little time for American writers, which explains the prejudice behind that last remark. But it's true that modern American literature is strewn with examples of alcoholic excess: Poe, Hemingway, Faulkner ("I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach"), Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker ("I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"), Ring Lardner, Raymond Chandler, O Henry, Jack London, Delmore Schwartz, F Scott Fitzgerald, ("Too much champagne is just right"), John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Anne Sexton, Patricia Highsmith – the list is long even without including those, such as Hunter S Thompson, more renowned for their experiments with other substances ("I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"). In a new book, The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing looks at six American writer-alcoholics, beginning with the story of how the ageing, critically acclaimed John Cheever and an aspiring young unknown called Raymond Carver became drinking buddies while teaching in Iowa in 1973. "He and I did nothing but drink," Carver later wrote. "I mean, we met our classes in a manner of speaking, but the entire time we were there … I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters."

Laing's is a travel book as well as a series of critical biographies. Her quest takes her to some of the places where her chosen six (Hemingway, Williams, Carver, Cheever, Berryman and Fitzgerald) lived, wrote and drank. It's a journey spanning thousands of miles – New York, Chicago, Port Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta, Key West – but it's the distance from the writing desk to the nearest bottle that preoccupies her. It's also a personal journey, as Laing grew up with alcoholism in her family and wants to make sense of the disease. To her, no romance attaches to it at all.

She takes her title from a line in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where one of the characters says "I'm takin' a little short trip to Echo Spring"– his nickname for the drinks cabinet and the brand of bourbon it contains. It's a resonant phrase, as Laing says, because most of her writers had a deep love for water (as she does too: her previous book, To the River, was about water, English literature and Virginia Woolf). It also suggests both the myth of Narcissus (writers are nothing if not narcissistic) and the time-honoured link between springs (and wells) and poetic inspiration. In classical legend, Hippocrene, the fountain on Mount Helicon created by Pegasus's hoof, is sacred to the Muses and inspires whoever drinks from it. Keats refers to it in his "Ode to a Nightingale", while craving something stronger:

O, for a draught of vintage …
O for a beaker full of the warm
South,
Full of the true, the blushful
Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the
brim,
And purple-stained mouth.
That I might drink and leave the
world unseen …
The lines prompted Bentley's clerihew: "John Keats/Among other notable feats/Drank off a soup-tureen/Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene." They're also among those analysed by Christopher Ricks in his book Keats and Embarrassment. "Blushful" doesn't just evoke the colour of the wine (a red or rosé), but implies its power to make our skin flush or, if drunk to excess, to make us do things we blush to remember afterwards.

Embarrassment is a common consequence of drink. John Updike felt it on Cheever's behalf when he came to take him to a concert one day and met him standing naked outside his flat: "His costume indicated some resistance to attending the symphony but I couldn't imagine what else, and I primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes." Equally blushful is Kingsley Amis's story of his friend Philip Larkin sitting through a school literary evening after a heavy beer-drinking session, finding himself caught short, and trusting that the absorbent qualities of his heavy overcoat would not betray him when he pissed himself – "It turned out that he had miscalculated." The fallout from constant heavy drinking is worse than mere social embarrassment: illness, insomnia, squalor, violence, misery for oneself and others. But a bohemian chic is still associated with boozy writers, especially dead American male novelists. There are websites that give you the recipes for their trademark drinks: Faulkner's mint julep, Hemingway's mojito, Chandler's gimlet, Kerouac's margarita, Fitzgerald's gin rickey.

Literature abounds with paeans to the hard stuff. Sometimes it's a matter of national pride, with ale, stout, vodka, absinthe, chianti or, in Burns's case, the peaty goodness of Scotch whisky being celebrated for their miraculous powers ("O whisky, soul o' plays an' pranks,/Accept a bardie's gratefu' thanks"). More often, as with Byron, the spirit is one of carpe diem – drink now because who knows what tomorrow will bring:

… for the future – (but I write this
reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly today,
So that I seem to stand upon the
ceiling)
I say – the future is a serious matter –
And so – for God's sake – hock and
soda water!
The positive spin put on alcohol in the Bible (with the marriage feast at Cana – "the only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament", as Christopher Hitchens called it) and in classical legend (with Dionysus the god of ecstasy and wine) is something that John Cheever puzzled over. Why is drunkenness not among the deadly sins, he wondered? Why in early religious myths and legends is alcohol presented as one of the gifts of the gods? "The belief that to be drunk is to be blessed is very deep. To die of drink is sometimes thought a graceful and natural death – overlooking wet-brains, convulsions, delirium tremens, hallucinations, hideous automobile accidents and botched suicides … To drink oneself to death was not in any way alarming, I thought, until I found that I was drinking myself to death."

Cheever was in AA when he wrote this, earnestly facing the truth of his addiction. But he's wrong to say that literature and religion are wholly indulgent of indulgence. Dionysus is also Bacchus, a dissolute lord of misrule. And there are many condemnations of heavy drinking in the Bible: "Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine." (Isaiah 5:11). Then there's Homer: "[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool … it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told." Cheever surely knew his Shakespeare, too.

MACDUFF: What three things does
drink especially provoke?
PORTER: Marry, sir, nose-painting,
sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it
provokes, and unprovokes; it
provokes the desire, but it takes away
the performance. Therefore, much
drink may be said to be an
equivocator with lechery: it makes
him, and it mars him; it sets him on,
and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him
stand to, and not stand to; in
conclusion, equivocates him in a
sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves
him.
In Cheever's lifetime, there was also Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), about a man who destroys himself with mescal – a novel that's brilliantly insightful about the lure of alcohol written by an author who would succumb to it 10 years later. There was plenty here to have persuaded Cheever that his drinking had no historical, religious or literary endorsement. But alcoholics are never short of justifications for their addiction. Someone or something else is always to blame:

"Wine was almost a necessity for me to be able to stand her [Zelda's] long monologues about ballet …" (Fitzgerald)

"Modern life … is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief." (Hemingway)

"The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflames his imagination. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by crushing doses of heroin or alcohol." (Cheever)

"I began to drink heavily after I'd realised that the things I'd most wanted in life for myself and my writing, and my wife and children, were simply not going to happen." (Carver)

"Why drink so, two days running? / two months, O seasons, years, two decades running? / I answer (smiles, my question on the cuff). / Man, I been thirsty." (Berryman)

Genes may lie behind a predisposition to alcohol. Childhood trauma, too: suicidal dads (Berryman and Hemingway had fathers who killed themselves with shotguns) and unmaternal mums (Cheever called Gilbey's gin "mother's milk"). But of Laing's six writers, only Tennessee Williams speaks with candour and conviction: "Why does a man drink? There's two reasons, separate or together. 1 He's scared shitless of something. 2. He can't face the truth."

As alcoholics are habitually in denial about their habits, you would think they'd be ill-equipped for the ruthless truth-telling required in autobiography. But recovery memoirs have always been a thriving genre. Of recent contributions, John Sutherland's Last Drink to LA and Rosie Boycott's A Nice Girl Like Me stand out; with most, the titles tell you all you need to know – Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife, Dead Drunk, Mother's Ruin, I'll Stop Tomorrow, Drinking: A Love Story. The narrative arc is redemptive: look-how-low-I-sank-before-I-was-saved. The author comes out of a fug to recognise the error of their way: "Their glasses were taken from them, & they saw," as Berryman puts it ("Dream Song 46"). The only mystery is why no major writer has chipped in with a memoir to rank with De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater or William Styron's chronicle of depression, Darkness Visible.

Fiction is a better route, perhaps: the unspeakable truths can go into the mouths of made-up people. But as Kingsley Amis complained, readers tend to equate authors with their protagonists, and with good reason. In John Berryman's unfinished novel Recovery, the protagonist is called Alan Severance: despite the name, his experience of rehab isn't easily divisible from the author's. As for Fitzgerald, when he was sacked by MGM towards the end of his life, he took to writing stories for Esquire about a small-time alcoholic scriptwriter, as if to ward off the thought that this was what he had become. No one was fooled. "I cannot consider a pint of wine at the day's end as anything but one of the rights of man," he'd once said, but by now it was a pint of gin a day, and his escapades (losing his car licence, getting into fights, being thrown out of clubs, etc) were common knowledge. He reached his nadir when he got drunk with two tramps and brought them home, inviting them to help themselves to his ties, shirts and Brooks Brothers suits.

Fiction may look like the right form for alcoholics, as their dependency teaches them to be good at lying. But holding a novel in your head becomes more difficult when you're holding a glass in your hand as well. "A short story can be written on a bottle," Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins, "but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows." Many poets have written a line or two when pissed, but few of those lines stand up next day. Even poetry readings can be ruined by woozy timing and slurred pronunciation. I learned my lesson early on at a reading at the University of East Anglia with Craig Raine; we'd been treated to a generous lunch on campus by the-then writer-in-residence Paul Bailey, and in an austere seminar room at 5pm the effects were a little too discernible.

Drink is better used as the backdrop to a poem, rather than in the creation or recital of it. In "September 1st 1939" Auden's thoughts about impending war would have less force if expressed in isolation or abstractly. Instead, they're set in a particular place, "one of the dives/On Fifty-Second Street", among commuters who share his anxiety and whose boozing is a desperate effort to show an affirming flame: "Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day: / The lights must never go out, / The music must always play."

Seamus Heaney's poem "Casualty"– an elegy for a fishing acquaintance blown up in a bomb attack on a pub after defying a curfew – is similarly enriched by the portrayal of the man's taciturn independence both in a boat and at the bar: "He would drink by himself/And raise a weathered thumb/Towards the high shelf,/Calling another rum/And blackcurrant, without/Having to raise his voice,/Or order a quick stout/By a lifting of the eyes/And a discreet dumb-show/Of pulling off the top."

Drink also comes in handy as a device for novelists and playwrights. It's not just a prop (like the whisky decanter that's the staple of British middle-class drama from Rattigan to Pinter), but a way to advance plot – "for accelerating the story, making someone throw a pass or insult somebody else sooner, more outrageously, etc, than they might when sober", as Kingsley Amis said. He might have been thinking of the scene in Lucky Jim where the hero, Jim Dixon, makes his escape from a boring madrigals evening, gets drunk at the pub, and then burns a hole in the bedsheets at his boss's house. Less comically, there's Othello, in which Iago usurps Cassio by getting him drunk and into a brawl and thereby dismissed from Othello's affections: "O god, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!"

In Russian literature, the drink that steals away men's brains is vodka. Tolstoy, repenting his youthful follies ("lying, thieving, promiscuity of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder"), founded a temperance society called the Union Against Drunkenness, and designed a label – a skull and crossbones, accompanied by the word "Poison"– to go on all vodka bottles. In the event, the health warning wasn't adopted but Tolstoy's views on vodka seep into his fiction, as do Dostoevsky's in The Devils ("The Russian God has already given up when it comes to cheap booze. The common people are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty"). Chekhov was more ambivalent. As Geoffrey Elborn shows in his new cultural history, The Dedalus Book of Vodka, he was torn between his knowledge as a doctor and his understanding of human nature. Two of his brothers were alcoholic, and he denounced vodka companies as "Satan's blood peddlers". But he sympathised with the Russian peasantry, for whom vodka was nectar. And in his stories and plays, those who drink excessively – like the army doctor Chebutykin in The Three Sisters – are portrayed with humour and compassion.

Attitudes to alcohol are an index of character; the capacity for it too. One of Hemingway's complaints against Fitzgerald was that he got drunk too easily; whereas to him, Hem, downing the hard stuff was healthy and normal and "a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight" (and even helped his shooting), to Fitzgerald it was poison. There's a macho subtext to this: holding one's drink as a proof of manhood. Hemingway and Cheever liked to boast that they could drink anyone else under the table, as though their failure to become intoxicated was a mark of strength rather than part and parcel of addiction.

Alcoholism isn't easily disentangled from mental-health problems. "Madness & booze, madness & booze,/Which'll can tell who preceded whose?" says Berryman in one of his Dream Songs. But altering one's mindset is vital to creativity, and booze can help with that, Bukowski claimed – "it yanks or joggles you out of routine thought and everydayism." Hemingway thought so too: "What else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey?" They have a point. There's a window between the first and second drink, or the second and third, when the unexpected sometimes happens – an idea, an image, a phrase. The problem is getting it down before it's lost; if you're in company, that means disappearing with your notebook, which takes resolve or self-regard. The Amis principle – a glassful to relax with at your desk when most of the writing has been done – is fine for those with will power. But there's the cautionary example of Jack London, who used to reward himself with a drink when he'd done half his daily quota of 1,000 words, then found himself unable to get started without one. The man takes a drink, then the drink takes the man. Liberation becomes stupor. "Write drunk; edit sober" is Hemingway's much-quoted advice. But the rat-arsed aren't capable of writing. After a point, the crutch becomes a cudgel.

Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a short-cut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future. If Olivia Laing's entertaining book fails to come up with a simple answer, that's because there isn't one. To the literary biographer, binges and benders are a godsend – a chance to recount lurid anecdotes under the guise of earnest psychoanalytic enquiry. But for the rest of us, the words on the page are what matter. And most of them get there despite the drinking, not because of it. "Drank like a fish, wrote like an angel," would make a pleasing epitaph. "Drank like a fish, wrote like a fish" is more likely. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.

Good grief, it's Olivia Colman – drop everything and run, you fools! Wonderful actress she may be, but as a harbinger of doom, Colman is right up there with two-headed frogs and yolkless scotch eggs. Her appearance in a serious drama usually means death, mayhem and much rending of garments. So it proved in *Run*, the quartet of linked dramas on Channel 4 last week. Colman, mistress of despair, was only in the first one, playing Carol, downtrodden single mum to two louts. But she made her hour count, misery swirling around her like a turd in a blender. Her boys beat a stranger to death, her ex takes decisive action by punching her in the stomach, and she drinks herself to sleep every night after a bit of quality swearing. Reported by Independent 16 hours ago.

Since it’s debut last summer, Aaron Sorkin‘s HBO drama The Newsroom has left critics with a common complaint: the so-called “women problem,” a term many use to describe what they think is Sorkin’s disparaging writing of the women. But cast member Olivia Munn, who stars as the brilliant-but-beautiful financial whiz Sloan Sabbith, does not see...Read more» Reported by Celebuzz 20 hours ago.

This is Surrey --

THE rolling Surrey Hills provided a welcome stop-off for a pair of genuine American cowgirls on a 1,500-mile horse ride.

Karen Hardy and her daughter Olivia Schwiebert stayed in Abinger Common as they neared the end of a five-month voyage from Italy to Wiltshire.

The duo, who live on a ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico, planned the ride to raise awareness of the bad treatment horses receive in modern society, staying with members of the horse-owning community they met along the way.

Ms Hardy, 45, said Sheila Morgan had made them feel extremely welcome at her Sariah Arabian Homestead in Broadmoor for the night of July 7.

She told the Advertiser: "We started riding in Milan on February 4 with three horses we had bought from the slaughter auction in Lombardia.

"We put them in a truck and drove them over the San Bernardino Pass into Switzerland but other than that and crossing the English Channel on the train they have walked the whole way.

"We get passed from barn to barn and people call ahead to their friends and say 'The cowgirls are coming'.

"We've stayed in 120 or 130 different places with no advance planning – we just hoped people would take us in. We've always found a place to stay, and people have always given us the best they have."

Ms Hardy and her 17-year-old daughter have passed through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and France on their way to the chalk hill figure known as the Uffington White Horse.

She explained: "We're trying to start a conversation about what's going on in the horse world; why we have 200,000 horses in Europe and the same number in the US going to slaughter every year.

"Our society wouldn't be what it is without them, but now they have become disposable. A fashion item.

"The most important thing to us is that we have taken horses that people said were worthless and we've shown the world that these horses have value.

"Hopefully, we have inspired people to think twice about where their horses go."

She added: "Riding across Europe through the coldest winter in recent years has been a big adventure.

"We're nearly at our destination now, which is fantastic."

They were due to complete their journey on Tuesday this week. Money raised through sponsorship and the sale of the three horses will be donated to animal charity the Blue Cross.

To read more about the trek, visit http://journeyeurope.us or www.facebook.com/ JourneyEurope Reported by This is 14 hours ago.

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Last week, most of us in the lower 48 states endured brutal, sweltering 90+ degree weather. Factoring in humidity, the heat index pushed it to 105 degrees in my hometown. I'm relieved that temperatures will drop to a comparatively balmy mid-80's for my walk from Harpers Ferry, W. Va. to the White House this week.

I will be joining a cohort of like-minded elders in a Walk for Our Grandchildren from Monday thru Saturday, July 22-27. Our goal is to take the climate change issue straight to the president's door step. I am prompted to action as a matter of climate justice for my grandchildren, and yours.

In 1991, my daughter-in-law Regan constructed the "SAVE OUR HOME; fight global warming" button shown below when she was a ten-year-old middle school student in Corpus Christi, Texas. She gave it to me several years ago. This button is a simple but powerful statement about the hope of our children and grandchildren, and the failure of us -- their parents and grandparents.

When I was a child, a young researcher named Dave Keeling began documenting high precision, high accuracy concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere. In 1958, the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere was 313 parts per million (ppm). By the time Regan constructed her "fight global warming" button as a child in 1991, CO2 had risen to 355 ppm. Regan's two children, Sam and Zady, now live in world with a global atmospheric CO2 concentration at 398 ppm.



The CO2 concentration in our atmosphere has increased by more than 27 percent from the time I was a child to today. This increase has produced an enhanced greenhouse effect leading to the climate disruption we are now experiencing.

I have 7 grandchildren -- Ally (7), Sam (5), Zady (3), Colton (3), Finn (2), Olivia (1), and Aubrey (1). Grandchild number 8 is due to arrive in November. I am walking for their future.

In 1988, presidential candidate George H. W. Bush stumped, "Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the 'greenhouse gas effect' are forgetting the 'White House effect.' As president, I intend to do something about it." Although Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 (a year after Regan constructed her button), we are no closer to curbing our annual multi-gigaton emissions of CO2. Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama and our elected legislators in the Senate and House have all failed to act.

President Obama gets it. He affirmed his commitment to tackle the issue of climate change in his 2013 State of the Union Address, "If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will." He stated in his climate change speech at Georgetown University, "our children, and our children's children, will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem." At a rally and ceremony on Saturday, July 27th at the White House, we will ask our President to act and "deal with this problem."

It is time for us to expose the environment molesters -- those who prey on the trust and innocence of our grandchildren, consuming their resources and defiling their future home. Our grandchildren and as-yet-unborn generations deserve climate justice today!


Please join me and other grandparent activists who demand action from our policymakers. Walk with me to the White House this week. I will be the guy wearing a green Tully hat with Regan's button pinned to it. Reported by Huffington Post 4 hours ago.

Reserve German Shepherd Puppies for Sale at WustenbergerLand now, German Shepherds breeder at Agua Dulce, Los Angles, California. At WustenbergerLand, three female German shepherd puppies and one large male German shepherd puppy for sale now.


Reserve your desired German Shepherds Puppies for Sale at WustenBergerLand. WustenBerger-Land is delighted to announce about its three female German shepherds puppies and one large male German shepherd puppy for sale at Agua Dulce, CA. As you know this award winning, Californian German Shepherds breeder trains Schutzhund titled German Shepherds, female protection dogs since last 40-years also provides options to buy your much loved German Shepherd Puppies for sale locally or by shipping. German Shepherd Dogs, German Shepherd Puppies are always available with us for Sale. WustenBerger-Land is popular in providing excellent training to German Shepherd Dogs and German Shepherds import Puppies.

Top litters from outstanding all German VA world Sieger Pedigrees.

Sire is Landes Gruppen, Regional Sieger:

V Hugo vom Wustenberger Land, IPO 1, KKl, HD ED Normal (Excellent Hip and Elbow rating)
V1 Kalidas vom Wustenberger-Land IPO 2, kkl1, 2 x USCA sieger
Dam: VA Ximone vom Wustenberger-Land, SchH.3,

KKl1, HD ED Normal (Excellent Hip and Elbow rating).
V Catarina vom Wustenberger-Land SchH.2 kkl1
Top daughter of VA Quartz

Top female German Shepherds puppies are available now with priced on average $5000.00 Dam is VA rated, puppies are absolute top show/work prospects.

Shipping cost, delivery to airport, required health certificate and flight box charges are NOT included in the price of your puppy. All puppies have had required scheduled shots and worming done. All puppies come with a full written hip guarantee.

Email us directly for up to date pictures of our German shepherd puppies.

Visit us on YouTube to see our German Shepherd Puppies for Sale.

German shepherd puppies are breed to the highest possible German SV World standard. They are super healthy, strong Large boned and have been loved and well socialized with other German shepherds, people and children.

Call Michael and Jan at 661-268-1486 if your interested in reserving what is sure to be an outstanding litter.
This will make an outstanding addition to any family show or work, breeding prospect.

Young Dog Sieger Kalidas vom Wustenberger-Land V Catarina vom Wustenberger-Land (IPO 1, kkl, HD fast normal ED Normal) (IPO1, kkl, HD nomral ED normal)

Presenting a litter of outstanding ALL German VA - World sieger West German bloodlines, a quality not normally found in the USA.

Direct lines come over VA1 world siegers, Zamp von Thermados, Parkros d’Ulmental, Ursus von Batu, Xaro d”Ulmental and Bax von der Luisenstrasse.

(Sire, Kalidas vom Wustenberger-Land is the top son of German World young dog sieger and German World vice sieger VA Quattro von der Partnachklum) and Kalidas Dam, is the popular VA2 Jazmin vom Wustenberger-Land (SG19 world show Germany).

Dam to this outstanding large litter is V Catarina vom Wustenberger-Land, (Dam, V Xambia vom Wustenberger-Land, famous mother line producing many VA German Shepherds), (Sire, Multiple VA Quartz vom Wustenberger-Land).

Wustenberger-Land has not had such an outstanding high quality large litter like this since a long time. This litter is nine very large red and black super dark German shepherd puppies. Those include four males and five females German shepherd puppies. Those are ready to go to their new homes in coming months. Early reservations are advised.

First pick German shepherd puppy is still available, price $5000.00. These German shepherd puppies are priced from $3,500.00 at Wustenberger-Land Dog Store with shipping and handling facility.

German shepherd puppies are breed to the highest possible German SV- World standard. They are super healthy, strong Large boned and have been loved and well socialized with other German shepherds, people and children. Up to date with vaccine and worming.

Latest German Shepherd litters at Wustenberger-Land:

Olivia x Kalidas, DOB: May 8, 2013
One very nice super Black and Red Male German shepherd puppy is available.
Kashmira x Hugo, DOB: May 24, 2013
One very nice super Black and Red Male and two Females German shepherd puppies are available.

Repeat Breeding:

Catarina X Kalidas, DOB: June 6, 2013
A very uniform litter, Four Male German Shepherd puppies and Five Female German shepherd puppies for sale.
Wustenberger-Land is very excited to Announce the
Breeding of VA Ximone v. WustenBerger-Land to the German World Vice Sieger, Figo vom Nordteich. Puppies expected mid July.

WustenbergerLand has an Outstanding USCA SIEGER SHOW 2013:

Exi vom Wustenberger-Land VP3
Florio vom Wustenberger-Land VP3
Cosmo vom Wustenberger-Land VP4
V Hugo vom Wustenberger-Land Outstanding in all phases of protection.

Not forget to take part in the outstanding USCA SIEGER SHOW 2013, organized by WustenbergerLand - the leading German shepherd puppies Breeder California, USA.

Company Contact Information
WustenbergerLand.Com
Michael and Jeannette Kempkes
9450 Yucca Hills Rd. Agua Dulce
Los Angeles
91390
+1-661-268-1486

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