Archery Lessons, New Rates and Courses
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I have updated my archery lesson rates and changed how I operate my
lessons. Starting in September 2025 I now do archery courses: Each course
contains 3...
Spring Cycling Fashion in Toronto
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Guest Post by C.M.
Bicycles are the latest fashion accessory to go mainstream... the weird
thing its not normally what people think of when they think "fas...
FASHION - Looking to celebrities to try and determine which will be the bikini trends this Summer 2010? Look no further than Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, Avatar, triangle tops, strapless bikinis, side tie bottoms.
Also don't forget your sarong, the sunglasses, the shoes, the hat, the handbag and some jewelry. Ankle bracelets, stone necklaces, shell jewelry and anything resembling the film Avatar are certainly hot this year.
Meteorlogists are also predicting record-breaking heat this summer so don't forget the sunblock, your hat and carry lots of fluids. I recommend Aloe Juice.
Paris Hilton trying really hard to look cool. Is she yesterday's news yet?
Lady Gaga and her disco ball bikini.
Lady Gaga wearing chains on her bra/bikini. (Obviously not a good idea to actually swim in.)
POLITICS - Bikini Islanders, the indigenous people of the Marshall Islands, who sued the United States government years ago for nuclear tests on the islands during the 1940s and 1950s have lost their suit.
The Bikini Islanders is seeking compensation under the Fifth Amendment for the “many resultant indignities they suffered, from the loss of their homes and livelihoods to the horrific effects of radiation poisoning.”
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, then a U.S. protectorate under the United Nations. The blasts was equal to exploding 1.6 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day for 12 years. The islands most directly affected were Enewetak and Bikini.
The name "Bikini" was later used to represent the shocking and scandalous swimwear we now all love.
In 1986 the U.S. Congress established a $150 million trust fund to help compensate former residents of Enewetak and Bikini. In exchange for the money, the plaintiffs agreed not to bring suits against the federal government. But they never actually PAID them the money, resulting in another trial years later.
In a 2001 settlement, the government agreed to pay the groups far more than that, promising the people of Enewetak $385 million and the people of Bikini $563 million for the loss of their land.
But again they have yet to receive anything more than a token payment, not the full amount.
In 2008 the United States Court of Federal Claims, dismissed the suit saying the Bikinis had missed the 6-year statute of limitations and that they had filed too early because Congress could still act and give them money.
So... they waited too long, but acted too early. Huh?
In other words the United States government is so cheap they're using a legal loophole so they don't have to pay up.
Shocked? I'm not. The U.S. government is a bunch of cheap bastards with no intelligence or honour whatsoever. They took an island paradise and destroyed it.
ENTERTAINMENT - Due to delays in production a new version of the film Red Sonja (featuring a bikini-chainmail clad, sword wielding Rose McGowan) has been delayed until 2011. It was originally supposed to come out in 2009.
While it may look good on Rose McGowan, I don't recommend it as beachwear.
SUPERMODELS - The mystery behind Karolina Kurkova's missing belly button has been revealed. Because I know y'all having been on the edge of your seats just wondering. The Czech supermodel set tongues wagging (again) last week after she appeared on the catwalk at the annual Victoria's Secret fashion show showing off her vanishing belly button. Now her rep has come forward to explain things.
"She had an operation when she was an infant. It's a fact and just thank God she's healthy," the rep said.
"Karolina's body is amazing, but her belly button is unusual," a fashion insider told Page Six magazine. "It disappears in photos, so we keep a collection of belly button shots in different positions, and Photoshop them on to her whenever she's doing a bikini picture."
How clever! Although this, together with those ridiculous fat taunts from earlier this year, means it is definitely time to lay off the poor girl.
FASHION/POLITICS - After months of discussions, Indonesian lawmakers have agreed that bikinis are acceptable attire for beaches in the world's most populous Muslim country. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, with Muslims making up some 86.1 percent of the 235 million population.
"Tourists will be able to wear bikinis in special tourist areas, such as in Bali, so Indonesia's tourism industry won't be hurt by this legislation," Democrat Party lawmaker Husein Abdul Azis told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Friday, October 17.
"We are listening to the protests of stakeholders and people at large," he added, referring to fears the tourism industry would suffer if bikinis were criminalized.
Bikinis were to be criminalized under a new a pornography bill, being debated by the parliament. But politicians and tourism entrepreneurs have warned that the bill would undermine the country's tourism industry.
Indonesia has declared 2008 "Visit Indonesia Year" and hopes to attract seven million visitors, earning 6.7 billion dollars in foreign exchange revenues.
Proposed in 1999, the bill defines porn as sexual material that includes photographs, cartoons, films, poems, vocalization, conversations and body gestures in the media, or in public shows, exhibits or performances.
It calls for criminalizing those who arouse sexual propensity, desires or longings or contravene community ethics, decency or morality. The bill also imposes fines on women who refuse to cover "sensitive" body parts, such as hair, shoulders, midriffs and legs.
It also slaps a seven-year jail term on people caught kissing in public. The porn bill will treat recreational and leisure areas differently.
No word yet on whether Ms Indonesia will also be banned from wearing a bikini.
POLITICS - Socialite and party-girl Paris Hilton has stripped down to a silver stars-and-stripes inspired bikini as part of her mock election campaign for the United States presidency.
The celebrity heiress, who has released two humourous videos and a music video as part of her campaign, has now posed in a US presidential election-inspired photo shoot. It features Hilton's "Secret Service Dudes," and in it she talks about creating a new department for fashion police, being good at sipping a martini and being the best "Commander in Bikini".
Paris For President Lyrics by Paris Hilton
Paris for president, At the Palms chillin’ with the martini.
Paris for president, Your commander in bikini.
When they tell you ’bout my policies To stop the player-hating on the USA, Incentivize nuclear non-proliferation and ratify Kyoto today. You can ride in the motorcade… in the hybrid, pink Escalade!
Paris for president, Not another oldie cliche.
Paris for president, you can get married if you’re straight or if you’re gay.
If you’re gonna put lipstick on a pig, make sure that shit it matches her skin tone. you can trust me with my finger on the button, “Nucular” is a vocabulary don’t. Trading in the cabinet for a walk….in….closet…hey!
Paris for president, America should put me in charge.
Paris for president, look at Bush it cant be that hard
Simon Cowell, he might be a little mean, but when his oldest kicks the bucket I’ll put him on the court supreme Then I’ll paint the white house pink and move Camp David to Maui…
Paris for president, A proponent of clean energy.
Paris for president, The real maverick in D.C.
Water boarding is torture and, global warming is totally not hot. I’ll make a department called the Fashion Police and boost the economy with all of the new jobs. Make over Lady Liberty…in Donna, Tommy, and Calvin Klein.
Paris for president, Get your cute little butt out there and vote.
Paris for president, Dispensing beauty tips and hope.
Paris for president, hey! Paris for president, hey! Paris for president, hey!
The first day of daylight saving brought fine, sunny weather to much of the country yesterday and spurred about 30 hardy souls to carve the slopes of Mt Ruapehu each dressed in a bikini as if they were heading for the beach.
But don't be fooled - while the sun was blazing, a cold front and fresh snow on the mountain saw temperatures plummet to minus 5 degrees celsius, with the wind chill generated by hurtling downhill making it feel more like minus 15C.
The skiers and snowboarders took part in the downhill race at Turoa to raise funds for Breast Cancer Research. About $3000 was raised.
Mt Ruapehu marketing manager Mike Smith said there were plenty of volunteers - mostly blokes - to collect donations and carry jackets to the bottom of the course.
"Those girls are pretty hardy," he said. "It was cold enough being fully clothed, to be honest." Both Turoa and Whakapapa ski-fields have had record-breaking snow bases leading into the school holidays, which run this week and next week.
Yesterday saw the welcome return of the sun after a wet and windy week.
Wellington enjoyed clear skies and 14C temperatures. Napier recorded 15C and New Plymouth hit 17C.
But MetService forecaster Andy Downs said last week's changeable weather would return today, bringing gale-force winds. "That will bring clouds in, and it will rain later in the afternoon or evening."
A cold southerly was expected tomorrow morning, he said.
And with the spring equinox last week, the days will now be longer than the nights.
Though 1980s beach films seem objectifying and anti-feminist, they offer a utopian space where class and gender hierarchies begin to dissolve.
A group of young women dressed in homemade army-print bikinis are stretching in the shallow water on the beach, preparing for a running race.
Todd [through megaphone]: Okay! It's time to get wet! Are you ready?
[Alan rushes up to Todd, distressed]
Alan: Todd! I just read the invoice from that surgical supply house ...
Todd [through megaphone]: On your marks! [Turns to Alan] So?
Alan: The thread... the surgical thread we used to sew the bikinis!
Todd [through megaphone]: Get set! [Turns to Alan] What about it?
Alan: It's full of dissolving stitches, Todd!
Todd: I know!
Todd fires his gun to start the race, and the film cuts to a slow-motion shot of the girls running through the water as their bikinis gradually fall off. Then we see onlookers -- boys, men, women, and one police officer, who all laugh at the spectacle, and a close-up of Todd and Alan, smiling.
No, the above scene is not from a porn movie. It's from the The Bikini Shop (released as The Malibu Bikini Shop in the U.S.), directed by David Wechter, one of a number of low-budget Hollywood beach movies that had a brief resurgence during the 1980s. You may have come across such films as Summer Job, Spring Break, Sizzle Beach USA and Private Resort in a dark corner of your local video store -- not naughty enough to be behind the curtain, but titillating enough to provide pubescent boys with their first taste of adult entertainment. The movies belong to the broader genre of the teen movie, and they necessarily include gratuitous female nudity, as in the scene detailed above.
The movies are, at first glance, basically tit-and-ass comedies that take place on the beach. There is no doubt that the novelty of seeing daggy '80s fashion can make these films fun to watch now, but they have more than mere nostalgia value. The films capture the transition from adolescence to adulthood. But whereas we must reluctantly accept adult responsibilities, '80s bikini movies allow us to indulge the fantasy of rejecting them and return to a world where fun rules.
The basic premise in all these films is the same: a group of young, attractive characters spend their spring break or summer vacation on the beach getting naked (girls) or trying to get laid (guys). This gives ample opportunity for gratuitous nudity and close-up bikini montages, but these same ingredients -- the beach, a vacation and sex -- bestow the movies with unlikely substance.
The Bikini Shop follows college graduate Alan (Michael David Wright) on a trip to California, where he intends to settle his deceased aunt's estate and return to Chicago to be married into high society. But the aunt left half of her estate to Alan's rowdy brother Todd (Bruce Greenwood), who doesn't want to sell her beach house -- he wants to run his aunt's bikini shop with Alan.
So begins Alan's journey. His transformation from an upper-middle-class tire sales executive to a laid-back Californian can be understood as a liminal journey. Film theorist Adrian Martin observes that liminality -- an anthropological term that refers to the transitional period between major life events -- is, more than any other aspect of teen movies, the thread that connects them all. For Martin, liminality manifests in teen movies as "that intense, suspended moment between yesterday and tomorrow, between childhood and adulthood, between being a nobody and a somebody, when everything is in question, and everything is possible." This brief but often life-changing detour between life stages figures in The Bikini Shop: by the end of the film, Alan has dumped his snobby fiancée, fought to keep the modest shop, and shacked up with the shop's salesgirls in the beach house. As Alan goes from wearing full suits to shorts and Hawaiian shirts, his core concerns have gone from money and status to family loyalty and hedonism.
You'd be hard pressed to think of any teen film from any era that doesn't explore liminality. American Pie focuses on a group of boys determined to lose their virginity before they finish high school; the quest to "become a man" by having sex is as explicitly liminal as the classic teen transition between high school and college. Dazed and Confused limits its focus to the last few days of middle school and the rites of initiation teens experience in order to enter senior high's social circle.
At a basic level, liminal journeys can be understood as various rites of passage. But the implications of liminality are more complex than this. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, author of The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, explains that the liminal operates in opposition to structured society, and "secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized". '80s bikini movies explicitly explore this aspect of liminality within the space of the beach, separating the subgenre from other teen movies.
As the strip between the ocean and the land, the beach is itself liminal -- neither land nor sea, but with the characteristics of both, as John Fiske, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner observe in Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Culture. And according to Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, authors of The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth, the space of the beach "sizzles with the erotic voltage of bare-breasted, bare-buttocked beauties and virile stalwarts," providing an escape from "the nagging sense of fealty to cash, work, and responsibility."
At the beach house in The Bikini Shop, there are no limitations: alcohol flows freely, flirting is par for the course and everyone -- even Alan, enjoying a spa with beautiful salesgirl Ronnie (Barbara Horan) -- is shown having a good time. It no longer matters that Alan belongs to a higher class than his fellow partygoers, or that he has a fiancée: as a liminal space, the beach in The Bikini Shop facilitates the breakdown of sexual and class boundaries.
The beach also provides the opportunity for rejuvenation and the blurring of boundaries in Where the Boys Are '84. In the movie, Sandra (Wendy Schaal) reluctantly accompanies her college friends to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for spring break, disappointed to be missing out on the trip she had planned to a more sophisticated vacation spot, Bermuda. Seeing the masses of semi-naked college students spilling out on the beach, her friend Jennie (Lisa Hartman) exclaims, "It's a supermarket of sex!" But Sandra describes the carefree environment as a "zoo" and insists that a girl should only date bankers, lawyers, and doctors. But these prejudices against the nonprofessional classes disappear during her beach vacation, during which she dates a police officer -- a lowly civil servant.
The similarly stereotyped affluent snob Barbara (Chantal) in Summer Job also relaxes her prejudices during her time working at a beach resort. At the beginning of the film, she sourly explains that her "daddy" made her apply for the menial resort job to build her character. Barbara arrives at the resort with a personal assistant and treats all her fellow employees like crap. But by the end of the movie, Barbara has befriended many of the other employees and has even taken to dating the equally stereotypical geek Herman (George O).
Class is not the only social category dissolved at the beach. In Spring Break, Nelson (David Knell) gradually gains the courage to defy his overbearing stepfather during his college vacation, turning the familial hierarchy on its head. Sandra lets her own inhibitions collapse in Where the Boys Are '84 when she allows herself to get drunk and perform a table-top striptease in a bar, literally stripping off her self-imposed restrictions.
The characters in '80s bikini movies often face a significant life change: Alan's impending marriage and career, Sandra's college graduation and entry into upper-class society. Their deviation to the beach is often portrayed as a last escape, the last chance to enjoy the frivolity of youth before entering the real world. Hovering between life stages, the liminal break offers a chance for necessary personal growth.
Typically, the characters return to society having absorbed the necessary lessons, but sometimes, they don't. In The Bikini Shop, Alan chooses to remain in the liminal space of the beach rather than return to his responsibility-filled life with his fiancée. Alan simply refuses to grow up. Here, the beach film positions liminality as a utopia, where one can permanently escape the pressing obligations of adult society. Such a resolution perhaps explains the modest popularity of '80s bikini movies during their heyday. What teenager wouldn't fantasize about never growing up, about spending their life surrounded by near-naked specimens, enjoying endless parties and no-strings-attached sex? Who wouldn't at least dream of rejecting the often-terrifying prospect of maturity and responsibility?
Of course, one could argue that '80s bikini movies are nothing more than sexist drivel. The endless stream of impossibly beautiful women that litter the mise en scéne of these films provide eye candy and little else. In The Bikini Shop there are several overtly sexist set pieces -- the most offensive involving the installation of one-way mirrors in the bikini shop's changing rooms. But to attack the films for negative attitudes toward women would be to take them far more seriously than they ever took themselves. Like the beach in these films, '80s bikini movies themselves are a liminal space inviting us to suspend such judgments and providing us with a foray into irresponsibility, careless fun and good times. In this world, the abundance of naked women is not sexist; it's just refreshingly free of political correctness. The free exchange of sex is not irresponsible; it's just fun. And the idea that we, like Alan, can live out our days on the beach? Well, that's just great.
FASHION - Looking to celebrities to try and determine which will be the bikini trends this Summer 2010? Look no further than Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, Avatar, triangle tops, strapless bikinis, side tie bottoms.
