This bath robe was made from 3 beach towels. Oddly, I could only find the beach towel on the back online to be able to share with you. I got it at Zellers in Canada, but they don’t have it online. The other two beach towels I got at Wal-mart in Canada. However, you can find all kinds of other, some better, Spiderman beach towels from which to make a similar garment:
men
Jogging Extends Life Expectancy for Men by 6.2 Years and Women by 5.6 Years?
That’s what the Copenhagen City Heart Study would tell you! And that’s no small fad study, either! It’s been ongoing since 1976, with the first set of data collected between 1976 and 1978, the second from 1981 to 1983, the third from 1991 to 1994, and the fourth from 2001 to 2003. The study followed 20,000 men and women of all different ages, between 20 and 90. Among them were 1,116 male joggers and 762 female joggers. Further, this study has been cited in over 750 scientific papers!
Hosni Mubarak Has More Wealth than Bill Gates, and Enough to Feed Egypt for 1-2 Years!
Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak
The wealth of Hosni Mubarak has been estimated to be somewhere between $40-70 Billion! That’s Billions, not millions. (CBC, via MSNBC)
That’s an unbelievable number! I mean, I knew the guy wasn’t poor, but having that many billions???
Billions is a big of a difficult number to comprehend besides the actual number, so here is some context as to how much wealth that is.
My Video for The Lies of Handsome Men, sung by Margaret Whiting
Jack Wrangler & Margaret Whiting
Jan 2011 update:
Margaret Whiting passed away on Jan 10, 2011. It is sad, of course, but what a legacy she left us with, including the song in the video below written by Francesca Blumenthal in 1986. Rest in peace, Margaret.
At this time in 2009, I started building this blog as part of my year to learn about social media. In 2010, I am learning about multi-media and this is my first video. I should point out that like my study of social media, it’s about knowing its capabilities and potential more than the technical stuff, though a lot can be learned by doing hands-on technical stuff. It’s too bad all too many “boss” types in the world never really learn the details of things they “manage” from doing to appreciate the challenges and power of those things.
I used Windows Movie Maker to make this video, with its rather limited capabilities and features. I know it’s not a great video editing program, but I’ll get around to one soon enough. I created the images from Photoshop actions I made to save a lot of time and repetitive effort.
The idea for this video first came to me in the middle of 2009 when I wanted to social media share the 1986 song The Lies of Handsome Men, written by Francesca Blumenthal, sung by 1940s crooner Margaret Whiting in 1990 when she was 66! Thank you to Francesca for correcting my mistake in a comment below. What a beautiful song this is and I hope you’ve got more such songs in your repertoire, past and future!
In my opinion, Margaret’s version is the definitive version of the song. I haven’t heard anybody else sing it like it, and I love it when I find definitive versions of songs that just blow the rest of the versions away. What made the difference for me, as I later found out through research, was that Margaret had been involved in acting and she used those acting skills to put just a little more intonation and feeling into the song. I listened and I really believed she meant everything she said. Mind you, the way she ended up with a former gay porn star 20 years her junior while in her 50s for 33 years of her life (see notes near the end of the notes before the video), she’s a mighty fine actress to have convinced me she believed those lies when she obviously brushed them aside!
Usually, I can find what I want in music online on YouTube. However, there was no version of this song I could find anywhere to share so I penned it down as an idea for a video in 2010 when I would be focusing on learning multi-media. I thought of it as a simple project, to create a slide show video where the images would be male movie stars and musicians of an era past, in black and white.
Images were mostly from an amazing site of black and white movie portraits called Dr Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. Portraits were so beautiful and noble back in those days! Order of the portrait tied the images to something in the lyrics as much as possible, albeit sometimes rather vague and sometimes without connection because it isn’t easy to have a limited collection to suit any old set of lyrics, you know! Names of subjects are at the bottom of this post.
I wanted to use past celebrities’ B&W portraits because they were more true to the song’s age and feel, as well as avoid all the people today created out of hype with faults yet to be found. The stars in the past have had their good and bad days and have their legacies pretty much written so they are more “timeless” since public opinion won’t likely change much on them any more.
Had I thought of this video in December, I might have gone after the images of the women of Tiger Woods. Hahaha!
But I can still dedicate it to them, can I not?
Alas, they ain’t got nothing on Margaret! On her fourth marriage, Margaret married a gay porn star 20 years her junior in the late Jack Wrangler (neé John Stillman), who eventually also came to do straight porn.
Ooops. Bad pun intended! 😉
According to Jack, this was how they met.
In 1976, Jack Wrangler met celebrated 1940s pop singer and film actress Margaret Whiting when she attended one of his one-man erotic shows in New York. As he later recalled, “I was with my manager when I looked over at Margaret, who was surrounded by five guys at a booth. ‘There she was with the hair, the furs and the big gestures. I thought, ‘Boy, now that’s New York! That’s glamour!’ I had to meet her.” A relationship developed. He was 33; she was 55. When Wrangler confided to Whiting that he was gay, her response was “only around the edges, dear.” The couple has never married. As Whiting told People magazine in 1987, “There’s no point in us getting married. We’re not having kids.”
Remember, Margaret Whiting made her debut as a crooner in the 1940s! Those women of Tiger Woods ain’t got nothin’ on her!
Margaret is still alive so far as I know. Jack passed away in April 2009 from emphysema after 40 years of smoking. Their picture together is the slide in the video.
Seems Margaret didn’t believe in the lies of handsome men if she convinced Jack to be her mate despite his openly gay declaration. 😉
Here is the video below. Please give constructive criticisms if you can afford the time. Thank you.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 7.1
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LYRICS
I believe in star signs
And I believe in film romances
I believe in in fantasy
And I believe with just one glance he’s
Crazy for my eyes
‘Cause I believe the lies
Of handsome men
I believe in witchcraft
And I believe in Cinderella
I believe in gypsies
And I believe I cast a spell that
Sends him to the skies
‘Cause I believe the lies
Of handsome men
Somewhere in a corner of my mind
I’m not a fool, completely blind
But even though he’s hooked me on his line
I find the pleasure has been mine
I believe in love songs,
They seem to know just what I’m feeling
I believe in Prince Charming
I never guess he’s double dealing
How my spirits rise
Believing in the lies
Of handsome men
Sometimes in a dark and quiet place
The truth and I meet face to face
And even if his Highness disappears
I keep some lovely souvenirs
So I believe in heroes
And I expect that happy ending
Wishing on some rainbow
I pretend he’s not pretending
Someday I’ll get wise
But right now I need the lies
Of handsome men
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STARRING
(in order of appearance, group by song verses)
Margaret Whiting
Bing Crosby, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Duke Ellington, Paul Newman, Basil Rathbone, Tony Curtis
Lex Barker, Gene Kelly, Rudolph Valentino, Cary Grant, Louis Armstrong, Robert Young, Elvis Presley
Rock Hudson, Humphrey Bogart, Ray Charles, Henry Fonda, Warner Baxter, John Wayne
Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Rudolph Valentino, Rudolph and wife Natacha Rambova, Clark Gable, John Garrick, Ronald Reagan
Ralph Bellamy, Robert Montgomery, Buster Crabbe
Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Vincent Price, Sidney Poitier, Laurence Olivier, Johnny Mack Brown, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains
Muhammad Ali, Gene Autry, Fred Astaire, Joel McCrea, Vic Damone, Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood
Jack Wrangler and Margaret Whiting
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50% Divorce Rate is a Myth, It’s More Like 33% or One Third
There’s this statistic I often hear about how essentially 1 in every 2 marriages ends in divorce, or the 50% divorce rate. In researching for a future post, I discovered this was a myth in how “divorce rate” was calculated. Or at least I’m going to be kind and call it a myth. Someone either maliciously propagated it for their agenda, or were too stupid to know what they were talking about!
Divorce rate, according to that 50% statistic, is measured as number of divorces filed each year, against number of marriages made each year. The serious problem with this equation is that what’s called the number of divorces is from all the marriages which had taken place in previous years, which only happened to have ended in divorce in a given year. If people stopped getting married for a year, which is only an exaggeration of the increasing trend of common-law living, you could easily end up with more than 100% of marriages ending up in divorce by this calculation. Try this numerical example if you’re not getting what I’m saying.
According to the Centre for Disease Control, which I guess considers marriage and divorce a disease, there were 3.6 divorces for every 7.5 marriages in 2005. Both were measured out of 1,000 people so that base can be eliminated to avoid confusion in presenting the statistic. If you take 3.6 and divide by 7.5, you get 48% and that “50% divorce rate”. Now, if common-law living were to reduce marriages to 3.6 marriages per thousand people next year, you’re looking at a 100% divorce rate… and you can imagine the press would go nuts with the stories!
The correct way to interpret that so-called “divorce rate” statistic would be to say there was one divorce for every two marriages in a year, not one in every two marriages end in divorce. There’s a whole slew of marriages out there they can’t say yet whether or not it would end in divorce so they can’t claim 1 in 2 end in divorce!
So what is the real divorce rate, then?
According to 2004 US Census Data, Table 3 for All Races (click to download Excel file):
75.56 million men ever marry (i.e. married at least once)
22.70 million men ever divorce
30.1% = men who ever marry end up getting divorced
87.32 million women ever marry
26.95 million women ever divorce
30.9% = women who ever marry end up getting divorced
162.88 million men and women ever marry
49.68 million men and women ever divorce
30.5% = men and women, combined, who ever married end up getting divorced
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I know 30.5% isn’t a third as that is 33 and 1/3 percent, but for rough value’s sake, a third will do just fine as what the divorce rate should be quoted as. Subsequent marriages to the first fail at a rate higher than first marriages (Rutgers University web page), bringing up the overall rate from 30.5%. But because there aren’t nearly as many of them as first marriages, they wouldn’t skew the rate up by that much. So for rounding purposes, I’d say one third is a good estimate.
Now, if you don’t think that’s a huge difference to go from one half to one third, try this somber experiment. Next time you’re at a house party with many of your friends, especially if you’re old enough many of them are married, look around and predict which one of every two couples will end up in divorce. This is going to be true lest you believe you and your group of friends are somehow so special you would defy this average… and don’t kid yourself on how special you all are! Yes, these happy times with all these happy couples at this party won’t be like this some years down the road given all the divorces you just predicted. Go get another drink or two!
It’s a bit of a sad and shocking experiment, really. But then try it again with which one of every three couples will end up in divorce. The fact you get to “save” some marriages is probably a relief. That’s the difference between a half and a third, my friend! Every single marriage that you can “save” from ending up in divorce should be a relief, cause even if you think the divorce should happen, divorces just aren’t pretty things in life.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 7.3
Digital Citizen 