Some makeup seems to travel at the speed of light; you put it on and the next thing you notice it’s on your white blouse. Or maybe you’re one who doesn’t care if it’s oil free,hypoallergenic
or free from any perservatives, but for some reason all brands of makeup seem to irritate your sensitive skin. Your problem maybe solved with mineral makeup. Mineral makeup does not contain perfume, talc, chemical dyes and chemical perservatives or even perfume. Since mineral makeup lacks synthetic irritants it is less likely that will irritate your skin and it will last all day. It will also protect skin from natural sunlight. Mineral makeup is effective at blocking both UVA and UVB rays.

Some makeup seems to travel at the speed of light; you put it on and the next thing you notice it’s on your white blouse. Or maybe you’re one who doesn’t care if it’s oil free,hypoallergenic
or free from any perservatives, but for some reason all brands of makeup seem to irritate your sensitive skin. Your problem maybe solved with mineral makeup. Mineral makeup does not contain perfume, talc, chemical dyes and chemical perservatives or even perfume. Since mineral makeup lacks synthetic irritants it is less likely that will irritate your skin and it will last all day. It will also protect skin from natural sunlight. Mineral makeup is effective at blocking both UVA and UVB rays.

When it comes to finding the best cosmetic items, from lipsticks to eye liners to mascara, the modern woman certainly has a great many choices. There are a great many cosmetic manufacturers, and a great many choices within each brand of cosmetic. It is no wonder so many women are confused how to find the perfect cosmetic items for their needs.

The fact is that looking our best goes hand in hand with feeling our best, and looking good is far more than mere vanity. Looking good affects all facets of our lives, from how we carry ourselves to how we are perceived by the world to how the world perceives us. It is no wonder the market for beauty products is such a huge one in the country and the world.

relationship is ripe for ridicule in an industry where infidelity is the norm. Jackie’s behavior is so extreme, says an industry insider, that some folks just call her crazy. “She has the reputation of being obsessive and overbearing,” says one sports broadcaster. ‘And she’s made her husband a bit of a pariah in NBA circles because you know if you trade for Doug Christie, his wife comes along as part of the package.”

The public discovered just how tight the two are during an October 2002 preseason game, when Jackie, wildly swinging her handbag, ran into the middle of an off-court fight involving Doug and Los Angeles Lakers forward Rick Fox. Almost immediately the Christies’ relationship became fodder for sports shows and late-night comedians. But what kept tongues wagging wasn’t simply Jackie’s willingness to brawl for her man, but also the iron-fisted control she seems to exert over him. “I trust Doug,” she insists. “I just don’t trust other women.”
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Six years ago when her husband was playing for the Toronto Raptors (he’s currently a free agent, rehabbing an ankle injury), Jackie, allegedly, was uncomfortable that female employees would enter the locker room after games, so Doug began dressing in an adjacent room. The 6-foot 6-inch swingman is so reluctant to fraternize with the opposite sex that, by his own admission, he rarely makes eye contact with females. Meanwhile, his wife made headlines for screaming at a female fan who asked her husband for a kiss. Their conduct has even landed the couple in court. In 2003, when Doug played for the Sacramento Kings, the Christies were named in a lawsuit filed by the team’s female PR person, Stephanie Shepard, who claimed she was unable to do her job because the couple is adamant about Doug’s limiting his contact with women when Jackie isn’t with him.

For Jackie, who remarries her husband every year in a full-length wedding ceremony with guests and cakes, Committed is an opportunity to show detractors just how great things really are. “We don’t do anything we’re ashamed of,” Jackie adds with a smile. “I’m devoted and dedicated to my family and Doug’s career. I want to be everything to him, for him and about him. I want to be his queen and he’s my icing. And it’s beautiful.”

“They’ve said so much about us,” Doug adds with a shrug, his shoulder pressed tight against his wife’s. “But nothing really bothers me. Being called whipped or soft and henpecked and all of that stuff, it only bothers me when it hurts my wife’s feelings. Ultimately, I’m not afraid for my wife to be a strong Black woman.”

JACKIE CHRISTIE SHARES HER SECRETS TO A HAPPY MARRIAGE

1. Be every woman, “You may not have time for yourself, but try to be everything for your man. I’ll be Doug’s secretary, his assistant, his wife, his friend, his rock or his date.” 2, Don’t let folks bad-mouth your marriage. “That includes family and friends. If you make up your mind to be married, then give it your full commitment.” 3. Expect respect. Don’t settle for less. “I expect to be treated with the utmost respect at all times. Period. There is no middle ground.” 4. Set relationship goals. “By 2008, Doug and I want to tour Europe, You might try setting goals as a family,” 5. Own your marriage, “Know from within that what you share is a gift. from God, and nothing can ruin it except the two of you.

The potential clicked when I caught a whiff of Thanksgiving from down the hall. So I put Tempranillo to the test–with herb-rubbed grilled turkey and herb butter-basted roasted turkey; with roasted garlic in the mashed potatoes, rosemary in the sweet potatoes, and orange zest and mustard on the green beans. It was all wonderful. The characteristic berries in the wine turned to cranberries, and the herbs to sage, in the face of Thanksgiving dinner. And a tangerine-like quality showed up in a match with citrus-laced cranberry sauce.

Tempranillo–especially when grown here–is both earthy and fruity. It can have a lot of plum and berry flavors, but they come along with spices and herbs and a core of bright, food-loving acid, all wrapped in velvet. Even if the wine is “big,” its tannins have no claws–like Pinot Noir without its noir side.

With such stellar qualifications, it’s a little puzzling that we haven’t discovered Tempranillo before now in this country, especially considering that Spain–through those Franciscan fathers planting missions up the West Coast two centuries ago–was the source of wine in California to begin with.

Unite Here/Local 1 in Chicago recently held a prayer breakfast to encourage religious leaders to support hotel workers’ campaign for a new contract. Father Larry Dowling of St. Denis Catholic Church on the South Side gave a rousing call for worker justice in the tradition of Catholic social consciousness. Stephen Greer, pastor of Christian Valley Missionary Baptist Church on the West Side, spoke about the preference for the poor in God’s kingdom. (I learned later that black participation in the unions is the fruit of major conciliatory work; some unions’ former racist stands on membership are not easily forgotten.) Rabbi Victor Mirelman of suburban Temple Har Zion quoted a Talmudic call for giving workers fair pay even if the employer takes a loss. Imam Kifah Mustapha of the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview quoted the Prophet Muhammad’s words on an employer’s responsibility to employees: “Let him feed him from the same food he eats; let him dress him from the same clothes he dresses; do not order what is hard on him.” Cleopatria Kyles, a dishwasher at the Chicago Hilton & Towers, brought the crowd to its feet: “God planted me at the Hilton, and I’m honored that God gave me this blessing, so I can bless others.” All this was enough to make one think that interfaith cooperation for the sake of justice is not a thing of the past.

The modern Republican Party has shown itself to be, once again, the master of the close call. Reversing a double-digit deficit in the generic congressional polls three weeks before the election, facing near certain loss of both the House and Senate, the party strategically abandoned its most vulnerable candidates in order to target a massive wave of negative ads on just enough districts and states to retain a miniscule majority in both houses.It is a truism that U.S. elections are decided on a winner-take-all basis, but the Republicans take that truism quite literally. A narrow victory is as good as a landslide, since the power it confers is the same. They seem to think that it’s actually better to win by a narrow margin, because every vote over 50 percent plus one is, in a sense, wasted. In Congress, every piece of major legislation seems to come down to a late-night flurry over whether wavering Republicans will come back to the fold, and yet come back they always do, to give the bill a one- or two-vote margin. This isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. Whereas legislative leaders in the past wanted big bipartisan victories to ensure a lasting base of support for their policies, the modern Republicans seem to view those extra votes as money left on the table, or as compromises that didn’t need to be made.

Not long ago, the problem of space was central to artistic discourse. Any serious discussion of works by artists ranging from Picasso to Mark Rothko, Yves Klein to Al Held, would require one to address the issue of spatial relationships and the means to convey them in artistic terms. While the art world’s focus may have shifted away from this area, overcoming the limitations of human perception of space remains a central preoccupation for some artists, as it does for many scientists and mathematicians. Direct observation and conventional mathematical and scientific analysis suggest that the world we take for granted is composed of three-dimensional space in which objects are defined by height, width and depth. More difficult to define or to prove, though far more accurate in explaining the nature of the universe’s varied spatial phenomena, is the notion of hyperspace. In this theoretical but wholly credible realm of four or more dimensions inserted into three-dimensional space, data may be gauged by means of a geometry that is seemingly in perpetual flux. How can one describe the four-dimensional space that we all experience as forms in motion but lack the capability to illustrate convincingly and in a consistent manner? Since the mid 19th century, mathematicians have attempted to illuminate the principles of hyperspace by means of elaborate equations. But visualizing this multidimensional domain and making it intelligible in a two-dimensional illustration require the skills and imagination of an artist. Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism and Modern Thought by New York-based painter and theorist Tony Robbin traces the development of fourth-dimension imagery, from its origins in mathematical diagrams through Cubist painting and recent computer-generated representations.

Robbin, who has been engaged with this topic for over 30 years, is a well-known lecturer on the fourth dimension in art and architecture. One of my more inspiring undergraduate art history professors in the mid-1970s, he discussed the topic at length in class. Robbin pointed out, for example, how Al Held’s hard-edge abstractions from the early 1970s on suggest a four-dimensional space. Robbin does not consider time as the fourth dimension, but here, on perhaps the most rudimentary level, one can recognize that the element of time is intrinsic to Held’s work. The intricacies of the geometric forms cannot be taken in at a single glance, and the time element required to fully grasp the overall design will vary with individual perception. While Held’s compositions are not based on mathematical formulae and the artist discounted the influence of experimental geometry in his work in a conversation I had with him some years ago, the paintings nevertheless served Robbin well as examples of how one might visualize four-dimensional space.

In the 1980s, Robbin became a pioneer in computer visualization of four-dimensional geometry; he holds a number of patents for its application in architecture. He touches upon some of these building concepts in Engineering a New Architecture, a 1996 book focused on an examination of the experimental geometry that inspired key structures by R. Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Emilio Pinero and others.

In his current book, Robbin discusses a number of the best-known visual representations of hyperspace while exploring the field’s fascinating and complex history beginning in the early 1800s. He highlights the resurgence of interest in the topic in the wake of Einstein’s theory of relativity in the early 20th century and Einstein’s subsequent impact on developments in four-dimensional illustration, including recent computer imaging. It is a story filled with intrigues, breakthroughs, setbacks, dead ends and revelations. But readers ought not to expect a nail-biting suspense tale. The text is sprinkled with technical terms and mathematical equations that might put off those of us who are mathematically challenged. A glossary would certainly have helped greatly. In addition, Robbin’s overreliance on numerous sidebars to elaborate upon issues briefly addressed in the main narrative causes the book to seem cumbersome at times. Yet his historical approach and the generous supply of visual information accompanying the text, including rare archival material and numerous reproductions of artworks, help to move the story along.

The author begins by highlighting the two most basic and widely accepted metaphors for four-dimensional space, the Flatland or slicing model and the shadow or projection model. The first, with its grounding in calculus, describes, for instance, a geometric form in motion as a progression of cutaway images, or slices. The projection model, which Robbins believes is the more accurate of the two, also has a firm mathematical foundation. It could be imagined as the shadows cast by the object as the sun moves overhead. While lengths and angles of the shadows might be distorted, the corresponding relationships among the object’s parts remain consistent and thus better preserve the object’s integrity as a whole. As Robbin says later in the book, “A projective model that rids us of the false notion of spaces stacked on spaces puts us on the road to reality

The personal is political. So let’s take personal tour of the American legal system as it’s currently practiced in the great state of Texas, shall we?

Victim #1 on our tour is Jordan Fogal, a middle-aged Republican homemaker who bought a home in Houston four years ago. On the day the Fogals moved in, Jordan’s husband pulled the bathtub plug after he had finished taking a bath and, as Jordan later recalled to Randall Patterson of Mother Jones, “all 100 gallons of that water came down through the dining room ceiling, into the light fixtures, down the columns, onto my dining room table and Oriental rugs. And I just started screaming.”

The Fogals’ builder fixed the drain, but more problems cropped up. And then more. An inspector found serious roofing problems, widespread moisture and rot, and encroaching mold. Jordan called and called but got nowhere. Their inspector estimated repairs at $199,000. The builder eventually offered $5,000. Later, Jordan discovered that other houses in the same neighborhood had reported similar problems, and that her house had displayed water and mold problems even before they had bought it.

So did the Fogals take their builder to court? No. Like many states, Texas requires dissatisfied homeowners to settle disputes out of court in binding arbitration. But that’s not all. The Texas legislature has also abolished “workmanlike construction” standards for homes, done away with punitive damages, and created a builder-controlled commission that determines whether you’re even allowed to file for arbitration in the first place. Of the few who get there, even fewer win in arbitration, and there is no appeal. Jordan Fogal was stuck. Victim #2 is Alvin Berry. Like many Texans, he voted Yes on Proposition 12, a 2003 initiative that limited pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice suits. “I think there are too many frivolous lawsuits,” he told Texas Monthly reporter Mimi Swartz.

But then Berry suffered some malpractice of his own: a doctor who ignored a set of plainly dangerous lab results for months. When the doctor finally ordered a biopsy, he discovered that Berry had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones in 20 places. He gave Berry five years to live.

Unlike Jordan Fogal, Berry had the right to go to court. In theory, anyway. In practice, as his lawyer explained to him, it’s now usually an exercise in futility. Because of the new damage caps, it’s not worth it for lawyers to take anything but the most slam-dunk cases. What’s more, even if you can find a lawyer to represent you, insurance companies have very little incentive to settle since their losses are limited by law. Thus, between court costs, attorneys’ fees, and other expenses, Berry would be lucky to recover $75,000. Maybe not even that much. Given that reality, was he really willing to sign up for two years of litigation? Most people aren’t.

Victim #3 is Juan Martinez, who was killed in 1999 when a reactor exploded at a Phillips Chemical Plant in Pasadena, Texas. Dozens of workers had been killed at the plant in the previous decades, along with hundreds injured, and when his widow’s case went to trial a year later, the evidence of negligence on the part of Phillips was clear and compelling.

Jurors in the case were appalled and socked Phillips with punitive damages equal to a month’s profit for the company–a pointed warning to clean up its operations. But Phillips never paid anywhere near that amount. Thanks to a tort-reform law championed by George W. Bush in 1995, state law reduced the punitive damages by 97 percent. With no prospect of ever losing a significant amount of money for worker injuries or deaths in Texas, a simple cost-benefit analysis suggests that Phillips has little incentive to change a thing. It’s cheaper to let people die than to upgrade their plant.

“Defunding the trial lawyers”

That last example comes from Stephanie Mencimer, author of “False Alarm,” an award-winning 2004 article for The Washington Monthly about the myth of America’s lawsuit crisis. Mencimer has now expanded that article into a book, Blocking the Courthouse Door, that documents the relentless campaign waged over the past two decades by conservative activists and their corporate allies to limit access to the civil court system. It joins Tom Baker’s excellent The Medical Malpractice Myth, published last year, on the (still) very short shelf of books finally fighting back against the tort-reform industry.

And an industry it is. Insurance companies have been dutifully warning the public since the 1950s that “you pay for liability and damage suit verdicts whether you are insured or not.” But for its first three decades, their lawyer-bashing campaigns were both sporadic and desultory, a subject of interest only to a few conservative wonks camped out in little-known D.C.-based think tanks. That all changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a succession of Republican partisans, including Dan Quayle, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Grover Norquist, finally realized just how powerful an issue tort reform could be

Among the most intriguing works recently on view at Korea’s sixth Gwangju Biennale was “A Second History,” an archival installation by Chinese artist Zhang Dali. The piece comprises scores of propaganda photos, as they appeared in doctored form in mid-20th-century Chinese publications such as People’s Pictorial, Liberation Army Journal and China Pictorial, matched in wall displays with their unaltered source images. In every case, something crucial has been changed: a figure from one shot transposed to the background of another, a smiling portrait of Mao added to the exterior wall of a factory school, distasteful sights or politically undesirable individuals deleted from views of the PRC’s Communist utopia.In one particularly memorable example, Mao’s body lies in state before a semicircle of Party dignitaries. In the original photo, the ranks of shoulder-to-shoulder comrades, their heads respectfully bowed, are unbroken. But in the published version, dark gaps appear. Certain no-longer-privileged (or worse) individuals have disappeared, leaving only a smudgy darkness in their place. Almost as chilling as the juxtaposed photos themselves are the texts–sometimes from English or French editions of the Chinese journals–which either knowingly further the deception or fall for it whole-hog. These passages are an implicit reminder of the geopolitical gullibility that once made Maoism a romantic creed among radical leftists in the West and that continues–as the show inadvertently made clear–in a different, subtler, but no less dangerous form today. For the Gwangju Biennale 2006 was a purportedly benign multicultural exhibition that in fact masked elisions and interpolations of disturbing political import.