[	Tags	|	vodka	]
[	Current Mood	|	awake	]

1. To remove a bandage painlessly, saturate the bandage with vodka. The solvent dissolves adhesive
2. To clean the caulking around bathtubs and showers, fill a trigger-spray bottle with vodka, spray the caulking, let set five minutes and wash clean. The alcohol in the vodka kills mold and mildew.
3. Clean jewelry. Soak the jewelry in vodka for five minutes, then rinse, and dry.
4. Clean lipstick from clothing. Rub the stain with vodka, then throw into your regular wash.
5. Remove the glue left behind by a bumper sticker. Rub the glue with a soft, clean cloth soaked with vodka
6. Prolong the life of razors by filling a cup with vodka and letting your safety razor blade soak in the alcohol after shaving. The vodka disinfects the blade and prevents rusting.
7. Spray vodka on vomit stains, scrub with a brush, then blot dry.
8. Using a cotton ball, apply vodka to your face as an astringent to cleanse the skin and tighten pores.
9. Add a jigger of vodka to a 12-ounce bottle of shampoo. The alcohol cleanses the scalp, removes toxins from hair, and stimulates the growth of healthy hair.
10. Fill a sixteen-ounce trigger-spray bottle and spray bees or wasps to kill them.

[	Tags	|	dior, fragrance, perfume	]
[	Current Mood	|	pleased	]

‘CDior’ has taken a whiff of the quaint ex-French colony – Pondicherry – for its latest perfume and has named it ‘Escale a Pondichery’! No, it’s certainly not the first time an international luxury perfume brand has created a scent that attempts to capture the essence of an Indian city.

They have chosen The Dune Eco Beach Hotel in Puduchery to host the grand launch party and are also bringing in a flight load of international journalists and officials for the event. While no details have been revealed about the scent and its packaging, according to an official communiqué from The Dune, Dior has also organised a three-day celebration of the fragrances of India for its guests at its venue.

[	Tags	|	black swan, economy, saxo bank	]
[	Current Mood	|	indescribable	]

Saxo Bank’s Outrageous Claims for 2009:

1) There will be severe social unrest in Iran as lower oil prices mean that the government will not be able to uphold the supply of basic necessities.
2) Crude will trade at $25 as demand slows due to the worst global economic contraction since the great Depression.
3) S&P will hit 500 in 2009 because of falling earnings, vaporizing housing equity and increased cost of funds in the corporate sector.
4) The EU is likely to crack down on excessive government budget deficits in several member states, and Italy could live up to previous threats and leave the ERM completely.
5) The AUDJPY will drop to 40. The decline in the commodities markets will affect the Australian economy.
6) EURUSD will fall to 0.95 and then go to 1.30 as European bank balances are under tremendous pressure because of exposure to the faltering Eastern European markets and intra-European economic tensions.
7) Chinese GDP growth drops to zero. The export driven sectors in the Chinese economy will be hurt significantly by the free-fall economic activity in the Global Trade and especially of the US.
8) Pre-In's First Out. Several of the Eastern European currencies currently pegged or semi-pegged to the EUR will be under increasing pressure due to capital outflows in 2009.
9) Reuters/ Jefferies CRB Index to drop to 30% to 150. The Commodity bubble is bursting, with speculative excesses so large they have skewed the demand and supply statistics.
10) 2009 will see the first Asian currencies to be pegged to CNY. Asian economies will increasingly look towards China to find new trade partners and scale down their hitherto US-centric agenda.

Danielle by Danielle Steel was like the pile of trash that Danielle Steel stepped over on her way to the creative meeting. For the first four seconds it smelled sort of vaguely like a kind of flower that you get in a gallon of floral-scented laundry detergent, and then for five seconds it reminded you of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Then it evaporated, like the prose in a novel by Danielle Steel evaporated from your memory the moment you read it. It was a perfume that, instead of being made by human beings, was made by a faceless, soulless committee like Elizabeth Arden Internal Creative Team. And at that point there was nothing more to say about it.

India. The House of Hermès had declared it its theme of 2008, and silk scarves are vivid with raw pinks and fleshy mangoes, elephants harnessed to carriages and tigers rampant. The company’s resident ‘‘nose,’’ the man hired in 2003 to juice perfume sales, Monsieur Jean-Claude Ellena, is back in the south, in the state of Kerala — cut with canals, the Venice of the subcontinent, the world’s supermarket for spice — where he has been wrestling for some time with how to bottle the fantasy.

[	Tags	|	cancer, smell	]
[	Current Mood	|	enthralled	]

A common form of skin cancer could be diagnosed by the distinctive chemical "scent" it gives off, say US experts.

Philadelphia's Monell Center sampled the air directly above basal cell carcinomas and found it was different to similar samples from healthy skin.

They told a conference it offered the chance of cheap and painless testing.

Other scientists are trying to spot the "smell" of cancer, with a UK team using dogs to sniff out bladder tumours from urine samples.

Jessica Dunne, 32, spent about $100,000 of her own hard-earned savings over the last three years to develop Ellie, her first perfume. In June, she introduced her second fragrance.

Ms. Dunne, who lives in Chicago with her husband and young daughter, had no connections to the beauty industry when she began her quest in 2005 to create a perfume in honor of her grandmother Eleanor.

But she did have determination and a dream.

She sought out Michel Roudnitska, a perfumer who lives in France, to be her collaborator. Her family in her hometown of Villanova, Pa., served as her focus group. A friend volunteered to tie by hand the grosgrain ribbon bow that decorates each package. Then Ms. Dunne cold-called Claudia Lucas, the perfume buyer at Henri Bendel in Manhattan, and asked whether she could send a sample of the perfume.

“Most manufacturers, including us, have replaced the sandalwood oil base with either liquid paraffin or DOP (dioctyl phthalate, a chemical compound) as there is a huge difference in the input costs of the final product—Rs 90,000 per kg for sandalwood compared to Rs 10,000 per kg for liquid paraffin.”

So, while earlier—about six years ago—the ratio of attars based on sandalwood oil vis-à-vis liquid paraffin/DOP was 80 to 20, today, it is 10 to 90. It’s a different matter that DOP is a known carcinogenic agent, a fact acknowledged by the attar makers themselves, but they have no qualms in using it.

That, however, is not the only dubious business practice followed by the attar makers of Kannauj. Sandalwood is legally available only through auctions and most of it is exported due to better prices in the overseas market. Attar manufacturers admit they do resort to clandestine procurement of the famed wood as the quality and quantity of supply through official channels is poor. According to Kapoor, about 90 per cent of the sandalwood used in Kannauj’s attar manufacturing industry is smuggled.

Of the total attar output, nearly 90 per cent is used as flavouring agents for tobacco products. The remainder is either exported or sold in the domestic market.

LONDON: UB Group of India has developed the technology and been granted the US patent for manufacturing diet whisky and vodka, chairman Vijay Mallya said in what he described as an example of “thinking out of the bottle".

The flamboyant Indian entrepreneur told students at the London Business School that his Vittal Mallya Scientific Research Foundation in Bangalore has developed the technology to convert the active ingredient of an Indian fruit that helps fight obesity into a safe liquid version.

“The plant called Garcenia contains some natural substances that works on your digestive system and actually breaks down your sugar cells and fat cells,” Mallya said on Monday.

“It has been used in the United States health food industry for decades. But making this Garcinia soluble in liquid is a technology that we have developed and patented in the US,” he added.

“So we now have a legitimate diet whisky and a legitimate diet vodka,” which had been successfully tested for calories.

“We sent it to a lab to check the calorific value and we proved it,” Mallya said.

Mallya said manufacturing and marketing was delayed “because of the fighting with the European Union over classification”.

“All of this was developed by us in India. We do think out of the box - no, make that out of the bottle,” he said during a lecture and interaction session with LBS students - an event organised by the UK India Business Council and the business school's India Business Forum.

I landed at nine last night, which makes it 21 hours of operation. Pertinent observations:

1. The entire ground handling operations have been outsourced to a single company called Globe Ground Services. This means airlines no longer have their own stairs, buses, or baggage tractors. Tragically Globe Ground Services either didn't have enough equipment, or enough people,or the people weren't working. So:
1. It took ten minutes for my plane to get a stair set (since it didn't get an overbridge)
2. There was only one stair at the front end (and I of course was in the last row). The airhostess claimed that this was because putting a stair at the rear end would interfere with planes taxi-ing but since she was an Air Sahara Aunty I am not sure this is reliable.
3. Once everyone got off the front end, there were no passenger buses.So we hung around waiting for ten minutes. Finally JetLite sent a small Jet Airways minibus (the sort they use for crew) to go pick us up. The bus then dropped us in front of a terminal gate which was locked.
2. Seven huge, massive, joyously big conveyer belts. People whohave taken the late night Deccan flight from Delhi to Bangalore which always got Belt 3 at the old airport and had to share it with the flights coming in from Hyderabad and one other place at the same time will understand why I'm going orgasmic over this. The only problem is that since the Globe Ground Service incompetence extended to sending tractors to pick up the baggage as well, none of the belts was actually moving. Oh well. Fortunately I was carrying only cabin baggage.
   
3. There were shops and a CCD even in the arrival terminal. I'll get to see what's there in the departure terminal next week.
4. Decided to take the bus back to the city instead of taking a cab. Had to wait until eleven before it left (since I missed the ten p.m. one because I was busy eating). It took fifty five minutes to drop me off to 100 ft.Road. Not bad, even though the roads were completely empty.
5. The road leading up to the airport as well as NH7 are in good condition... so far. The big problem is the speedbreakers which crop up every once in a while. A lot of them are locally dug up ones which will create potholes after the monsoon.

By the way, one other thing - the airport taxi booking (as opposed to rent-a-car booking) is outside the arrival terminal and not inside. I'm not sure what impact this had/ will have on queues, but it does havethe scope to create chaos.

[	Tags	|	vodka	]
[	Current Mood	|	chipper	]

Many people have reported that if they immediately pour vodka over an area that has contacted poison ivy, the alcohol will wash away the culprit urushiol oil, and they won't experience an uncomfortable reaction. Some have said that the vodka needs to be at least 100 proof to work.

[	Tags	|	alternative energy, wind power	]
[	Current Mood	|	optimistic	]

A new report from the Department of Energy claims that wind turbines could generate 300 gigawatts by 2030, which would power about 20percent of the US electrical grid.

The forecasting scenario would require tremendous growth in the wind industry, which currently produces about 17 gigawatts of electricity,or a little over one percent of total capacity.

All by itself, such a change could reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation (think: coal and natural gas plants) by 25 percent and drop water consumption by four trillion gallons. These benefits could be achieved at a cost of about six bucks per person a year, say the report's authors.

[	Tags	|	james howard kunstler, peak oil	]
[	Current Mood	|	scared	]

While a lack of transparency in the individual risk vehicles has been an object of complaint over the past year, the system as whole is transparently absurd. The system is also abstruse enough to prevent most mortals (including many employed in the system) from understanding its operations. But the general public and the news media are virtually helpless to intervene in this last gasp racket, so the probability increases that it will do tremendous damage to whatever remains of the US economy.
     One feature of the risk economy is the Federal Reserve's new willingness to absorb any sort of crap collateral in exchange for massive cheap loans to insolvent companies and institutions. The Fed has, in effect, made itself the world's largest financial shit-magnet.It has already taken in a few hundred billion in securities based on non-performing real estate loans, and has now opened the window to securities based on non-performing credit card debt, car loans, and other miscellaneous IOUs still drifting un-hedged in the banking ether.