The Cultured Girl

Sick of your wardrobe? How about spicing things up with a bejeweled cockroach! This isn’t a joke. Jared Gold, Salt Lake City-based designer of Black Chandelier, is taking the term fashion bug to a whole new level. While designing his recent collection Glinka—a Russian-psychedelic-space-witch-themed show—he felt the need to find something that would push it over the top. (I’m not kidding. He didn’t think psychedelic Russian witches were enough) So Gold decided to adorn Madagascar hissing cockroaches with Swarovski crystals, put them on leashes, and attach them to brooches so that these 3-inch long insects could crawl all over the models. As if that weren’t gross enough, it turns out these roaches actually do hiss when startled or bothered—they supposedly sound like snakes.

While Cultured Girl doesn’t endorse wearing live animals as a fashion accessory, this isn’t the first time in history it’s happened. Victorian-era women used wear just about any animal dead or alive they could get their hands on. Society ladies were known to wear stuffed hummingbird earrings and beetle pins; they even put live fireflies in their hair and baby monkeys in their hats.

Still you might wondering: Who would pay $80 for an insect you’d normally squash as quickly as possible? Well, Gold says he’s churning them out just as fast as he can adorn them. He sells 25 fashion bugs a week to everyone from teenagers to school teachers. The roach has even made an appearance on America’s Next Top Model. In case you were wondering, here’s a word from Gold on how to care for his “little friends:”

Read the rest of this entry »

It was big news when Barbaro, the horse that won the Kentucky Derby, broke his leg at the Preakness. Breaking a leg, we all know, is really bad news for horses. But why? It’s one of the countless things about horse racing that I just don’t understand. According to Slate’s current Explainer column, it has to do with the fact that horses won’t stay still long enough for broken bones to heal. Plus, limited blood circulation in their lower legs makes infections common, and treating horses with antibiotics is a dicey proposition. A highly informative—albeit slightly gross—read.

It’s easy to understand why Southwest Airlines has some of the friendliest flight attendants around. According to this highly entertaining story in today’s New York Times, many Southwest veterans have made out with millions of dollars, thanks to the company’s exceptional profit-sharing plan. The original flight attendants were taking a huge risk by signing on at a very unproven airline—all the while wearing orange hot pants and white vinyl go-go boots — but it paid off, both for the loyal employees and their well-paying employer. Kinda makes you want to go work for Southwest.

I could spent hours reading the thousands of “found” shopping lists at grocerylists.org, featured today on Boing-Boing. Maybe that’s because I’m a rather obsessive grocery-list maker who organizes my large-haul lists according to the store floor plan. But the short lists on this site, and their varied bizarre notepapers, are endlessly entertaining for their pure randomness. Consider this list, which calls for liquid plumber, pantyliners, ramen, and “present,” leaving you to wonder just what the lucky recipient was gifted with.

This weekend, fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs was added to the FBI’s top 10 list of most-wanted fugitives, based on charges of sexual conduct with a minor and arranging marriages between teenage girls and older men. Polygamy, it seems, is all over the place these days, from the HBO series Big Love to the most recent episode of America’s Most Wanted featuring Jeffs.

If you haven’t already done so, now would be the perfect time to pick up the Jon Krakauer book, Under the Banner of Heaven, which came out a few years back. Ostensibly the story of a murder in the fundamentalist Mormon community, the book serves as a comprehensive history of the Mormon faith in general and the cult-like polygamist offshoot that is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). The book covers everything from the origins of the Mormon religion (two words: magic eyeglasses) to the Jeffs’s remote and lawless outposts on the border of Arizona-Utah border. To my mind, Heaven was as morbidly fascinating as Krakauer’s higher profile page-turner, Into Thin Air, the kind of book that will have you rattling off “can you believe that?” facts to your friends for weeks.

Most of my peers can’t understand why I read the Wall Street Journal: It’s so conservative, they grouse, while others stigmatize it for being all about money. While the finance-centric paper certainly isn’t liberal, that’s no reason not to read it. In fact, the newspaper boasts some of the best, most compelling newspaper writing around. (Until May 10, you can sample it free of charge, thanks to a 10-day open house at the normally subscription-only site.)

The best part? So-called “a-heds,” the quirky feature stories that occupy the WSJ’s front page middle column every day. Most often, they have nothing to do with business and are most useful as cocktail-party conversation fodder. (I highly recommend the anthology of middle-column articles, entitled Floating Off the Page.) Here’s a sampling of what I’ve learned from Wall Street Journal a-heds:

* The streets of Key West are overrun with wild chickens.

* Jeff “Skunk” Baxter of Doobie Brothers fame is an expert on Homeland Security and a consultant to the U.S. government.

* Olympic figure skaters are being crippled by their skates, because designs essentially haven’t changed in 100 years.

Fun article in the New York Times about the different ways New York is leading the way in legislating politeness. I personally have always felt that New York, despite its bad reputation, is a pretty courteous city, if not big on etiquette-related formalities. But every metropolis (hello, San Francisco!) could use a little help taming those discourtesies that just make life unpleasant, like bringing babies to movie theaters and cell phones to broadway shows, or not giving up subway seats to elderly people, which is just the sort of stuff NYC is addressing.

I always thought it was cool that Disney World has a network of underground tunnels for employees. Little did I know that Paris had the idea first, and its version is far creepier and far cooler. National Geographic Adventure has an incredible story following a writer through the 170-mile long network of tunnels underlying the city. Called “the catacombs,” they began as quarries used to build some of Paris’s most famous structures, including Notre Dame, and are rumored to contain thousands of skulls and bones. It’s been illegal to enter them since 1955, which is what makes this story so damn cool.

Would-be law-abiding explorers can visit the tunnels at the Les Catacombes museum, the only legal way to peek at the underground system.

Here’s a brilliant business idea: A beltway startup called DC Snacks will deliver any convenience-store item — ice cream for late-night munchies, margarita mix for impromptu parties, or condoms for, well, impromptu parties — right to your door, in just 35 minutes. Maybe it’s the endless rain we’re having in San Francisco, but the idea of paying a measly $1.50 fee to have someone magically appear at my desk right now with a bag of Rold Gold Honey Wheat Pretzel Twists sounds like heaven. Believe me, just browsing the DC Snacks site will make you long for such a service, or at least give you some creative ideas for entertaining: Reddi Whip + No-Doz + Porky’s on DVD? Instant party.

I’m sure everyone has flipped through the mostly lame card selection at their local drug store and thought to themselves, “I could sooo do this job,” or “How did all these painfully unfunny cards get here?” Ironically, it just happens that the actual reject cards—left to languish on a “Funny, But No” wall of shame—are pretty darn hilarious. Maybe Hallmark needs to rethink their strategy and put a few more of their “Funny, But No” cards on the market. My “FBN” fav? Front: “Spread some holiday cheer.” Inside: “Or drink alone. Who am I to judge?”