HB Me

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
TO ME.

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Star Wars V. Star Trek

Pretty legit video. Check it out!

Starwars V Startrek from LICHTFAKTOR on Vimeo.

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Hottie of the Week!

Oops, sorry its a little late!

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The Cast of NYC Prep

This pretty much sums it up. Can you believe this is actually a show?

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RIPMJ

RIP.

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Is Michael Jackson Dead?

Is Michael Jackson Dead?
By Julian Aldana

Technology is so screwed up these days. I’m so connected to everyone, to everything – to my first great love in pictures with his cute boyfriend on a cute vacation; to the news of Heidi Montag’s last turd. You know what, world? I don’t really care. And no matter how many Facebook friends I delete in order to send them to an e-place-where-I-never-have-to-think-about-them-ever-again, Gmail never deletes my emails. And more people from days past come trickling in requesting invites into my world like vampires at the doorstep.

At this moment, I don’t know if Michael Jackson is dead or alive. And everyone is talking about it. I keep hitting refresh on Google, but TMZ is the only source claiming that MJ has horizontally moonwalked on his last six-year-old boy.

And Twitter? Forget about Twitter. I can picture BeyoncĂ© and Perez Hilton and Pope Benedict XVI all feverishly typing away on their iPhones and Blackberries, dying to tell the public what they think about it, or how much he’ll be missed. My best friend was just laid off today, and I can’t share my condolences with him on Twitter because, oh, Twitter has just crashed. Thanks, Perez. Now I’ll have to CALL him.

Usually, when the country isn’t afflicted by a national catastrophe like it is today, I have about five ways to get in touch with my friends without actually making a phone call. Today, there is only one. And as messed up as the world is – as blurry as the lines have become, with everyone having Fakebooks to leer in each other’s faces – there is something satisfying about being that close, yet being so unavailable.

So rather than a question of Michael Jackson being dead or alive, insert “friendship” where the King of Pop’s name should be, and what do you have? A moment of clarity? A realization that, because of the Internet, we have more friends and even more acquaintances than we ever had before, yet we are lonelier and less connected than ever.

The days of calling up a friend just to “chat” have translated to the pop-ups of AIM, and the swinging by a neighbor’s house to see how they’re doing has turned into a status update or a text message. Facebook has stolen our faces. Twitter has tweaked out socialization entirely. We rest the weight of our friendships and relationships on our fingers, and on how heavily and quickly they can hit the buttons on a keyboard.

We are so available that we can never be bothered. And like Mr. Jackson, too much exposure probably drives us all “off the wall.”

The Times has just pronounced MJ dead. RIP. Read more!

MJ

Everyone right now is talking about Michael Jackson being dead right now.

And the only source that says that Michael Jackson is dead is TMZ.

Come on people, pull it together.

I'll probably have to follow this post up with another that says either A) TMZ was correct and/or B) you are all idiots, but please, peeps, check your sources.

Even Wikipedia, which is notorious for being wrong, has not killed the King of Pop off just yet. So hold your horses. I mean, if Wikipedia can, why can't you? Read more!

"Halloween" Costume?

Check it, girl.

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Stripper Update

Tomorrow, I'm having a birthday party.

Everyone is welcome.

I'm not sure if this is because I really want a bunch of strangers in my house, or because I'm worried no one will show up. All I know is that with my friends, we always have a good time, regardless of who comes.

Oh, and I'm getting a keg, so we need lots of people to help us drink that.

Oh, and I have two weeks of school left (after today), so I need people to help me celebrate that.

Oh, and things have been insane, yet great.

I still need to figure out what costume I'm going to wear! Read more!

Real Chance of Love 2: Cast Reveal

I never really got into Real Chance of Love 1, but this one looks good! The more casts I see, the more I realize the dream: I can do this, too. That's it, folks - I'm going to become a professional reality TV star!

Aloha
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Apple
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Baker
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Blonde Baller
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Classy
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Doll
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Flirty
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Freckles
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Hot Wings
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Junk
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Lady
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Mamacita
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Pocahantas
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PS
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Riboon
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Sassy
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Show Me
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Spanish Fly
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Vegas
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Wiggly
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An Interesting Piece From The NY Times On the Restaurant Industry and Staying Sober

Check it out - found this a great read. To go to where this was originally posted, click here. Click the "Read More!" link below if you want to get the rest of the story.

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Mixing Drinks With Work and Staying Sober, Too
by Kim Severson


FOR Del Pedro, a bartender at the Pegu Club in SoHo, Mondays are especially challenging.

That’s when he allows himself careful tastes of new drinks at the bar, where cocktails are designed with precision.

Mr. Pedro, an alcoholic with almost 15 years of sobriety behind him, is part of a quiet brigade of people who are trying to live a sober life in a business that is soaked in alcohol. Although the hospitality industry has itself calmed down and has outgrown many of its hard-partying ways, nondrinkers and restaurant work don’t always mix easily.

Mr. Pedro, 50, learned early on that it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the bartenders and the customers.

“When I first started, a guy I worked with turned to me and said, ‘Look, you better be able to count money when you’re drunk,’ ” he said.

So he did. About seven years later, he looked in a mirror and had what alcoholics in recovery call a moment of clarity. He was miserable, sick of waking up bloated and hung over. A friend took him to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which he attended for about two years.


As he lived a sober life privately, his reputation around New York as a great mixer of both drinks and customers grew. He started in an era of easy-to-blend vodka drinks, where he could rely on recipes and taste memories from his drinking days. For trickier cocktails and wine buying duties at places like Les Halles and Grange Hall, he used a panel of tasters whose opinions he trusted. Sober, he even invented some drinks. One, called the Bedford, has made it into two online compendiums.

People would ask how he could be around all that booze and not drink.

“They just don’t have the experience of having to deal with it,” he said, talking about alcoholism, “and knowing what going back to that would mean.”

Then, in October, a chance to work at the Pegu Club came along.

If Mr. Pedro didn’t taste, he wouldn’t be able to succeed at a bar that is considered the Harvard of mixology.

“When I saw what they were doing, how refined it was, I knew there was no way I could guess anymore,” he said. So he decided to begin controlled tasting. That means spitting, and no recreational drinking. If Mr. Pedro ends up back pulling beers at a neighborhood pub, he will stop tasting.

It hasn’t been easy, and he knows that by Alcoholics Anonymous standards he is not technically sober. And Mr. Pedro likens himself to a vegan friend of his who is a private chef. Sometimes, she has to taste pork.

Of course, he realizes the analogy isn’t perfect.

“People don’t lose everything because they eat too much pork,” he said.

Leaders in the hospitality industry have long acknowledged that alcohol and drug abuse are dangerous byproducts of a stressful business with ready access to both. Food service workers have the highest rate of illicit drug use and the third-highest rate of heavy alcohol use among major occupations, according to the latest data from the United States Department of Health and Human Services. (Construction workers and miners drink the most, and installation and maintenance workers are second.)

“It is one of the downfalls of our business,” said Gale Gand, the executive pastry chef and a partner in Tru in Chicago. The restaurant is part of the Lettuce Entertain You group, which, like many companies, trains managers to help employees with addiction problems.

Ms. Gand and others say that sober waiters, cooks and bartenders are more common than they used to be. They attribute that in part to the growth of an industry that now employs about 13 million people and has become more professional as its profile has grown.

Restaurant culture is shifting, too. Drinks in the kitchen or at the bar at the end of a busy night are still routine, but fewer restaurants pay for them. And imbibing during shifts has become less acceptable.

Some restaurant owners say they have no problem making room for employees who don’t drink (although no one suggested that a sober sommelier would be a great hire). Chefs can ask other cooks to taste dishes with alcohol, bartenders can follow formulas and waiters can gather pairing suggestions from knowledgeable colleagues.

“Service is so much about reading other people and verbal skills and eye-hand coordination,” Ms. Gand said. “We have waiters who are allergic to chocolate and they can still serve chocolate desserts. And certainly, when Beethoven went deaf he could still write music.”

But a stigma exists. Bartenders, waiters and wine experts who are in Alcoholics Anonymous contacted for this story wouldn’t talk publicly — not only because the organization’s traditions suggest they don’t reveal their membership to the media but also because they don’t want to jeopardize their livelihoods.

At the Culinary Institute of America, administrators are examining how to accommodate students who don’t drink. Jeremy Umansky, 26, who has been sober for seven years, is a semester away from graduating with a culinary degree. One thing that stands in his way is an intensive, three-week wine course. He tried to take it last June, but says he found it too stressful.

“I have an unhealthy mental obsession with alcohol,” he said. “Being in a room with that much alcohol is not healthy for me.” Armed with doctors’ notes and his family’s support, he asked for an alternative to the class that never materialized, he said. In March, he filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights.

In keeping with the state’s guidelines, Tim Ryan, the president of the school, said he could not confirm or deny that such a case exists. But he said that students are not required to drink alcohol or even smell it to graduate, whether they are abstaining for religious, health or other reasons. Wine lectures could be taped so students wouldn’t have to be in the same room with alcohol, he said.

Liz Scott, who was once a private chef for Brooke Astor, hasn’t had a drink in 10 years. She recently gave a lecture at the Culinary Institute about her own recovery and how to cook without alcohol.

The idea, she told the students, is to approach it as a challenge in the way they might adapt recipes for diners who are vegan, kosher or allergic. After the lecture, half a dozen students came up to her and said they, too, had quit drinking, she said.

The end of Ms. Scott’s drinking life began when she was working as a private chef for the DuPont family in New York on Fishers Island. After a night at the local bar where the service workers hung out, she crashed the family’s S.U.V. and broke several bones.

When she got sober through a combination of rehabilitation and 12-step meetings, she didn’t want to stop cooking. So she figured out how to work in a kitchen without alcohol, turning her experience into three books, the latest of which is “Zero-Proof Cocktails” (Ten Speed Press, April 2009).

Unlike Mr. Pedro, she believes in complete abstinence. One sip or even a bottle on a counter can trigger intense cravings in some people, she said. And she points to studies that show alcohol never completely burns off in a dish.

So she uses substitutions. For example, strongly brewed blackcurrant-flavored tea mixed with simple syrup and caramel-flavored syrup can approximate Madeira.

Not all recovering alcoholics are as strict as Ms. Scott or as loose as Mr. Pedro. Valerie Hill, a pastry chef at Johnny’s Half Shell in Washington, uses alcohol in some desserts.

She stopped drinking 20 years ago. “I just realized, Wait a minute; this is ruling my life,” she said. “We all know you can’t do anything until you get to that point.”

At first, she felt shaky and ashamed at work. But now her sober palate is a point of pride. “I believe you can taste things better if you don’t deaden all your senses with alcohol and drugs,” she said.

It’s tougher for people in the front of the house. “After work, they just sit there and pound cocktails,” she said. But she doesn’t mind being around her friends who drink.

“I’m not going to be shut out because of that,” she said. “I just get Pellegrino with lemon.”

The trick, say people who navigate the restaurant world sober, is to get support from other people who have also stopped and to never forget what might happen if they pick up another drink.

That’s the religion Michael Quinn, one of England’s original celebrity chefs, preaches. In the 1980s he had a Michelin star and was the first Briton to run the kitchen at the Ritz-Carlton in London. But by the 1990s, he had drunk himself out of a job and literally, he says, into the gutter.

In 1996, he was in a Leeds clinic with a host of medical problems. As a priest was reading him his last rites, he had his moment of clarity. He has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous ever since.

In 2001, he started the Ark Foundation to help other chefs and restaurant workers with alcohol problems. He and volunteers give hundreds of lectures a year at Britain’s cooking schools. Chefs like Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal are supporters.

Mr. Quinn says that once someone gets sober, there is no reason to stay away from restaurant jobs and the culture of drinking that goes along with them. If someone really wants to drink, he will find a way, whether alcohol is easily accessible or not, he said.

“The key is to admit we need help and start that path of recovery,” he said. “Then we can go into any situation and feel protected. We have nothing to fear.”

Being around alcohol doesn’t faze Harry Denton, either. Good thing, because he runs the Starlight Room, a popular nightclub atop the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco.

“I don’t know if it’s God’s blessing or what,” he said. “I don’t want to drink and I’ve had no problem with other people drinking. It just doesn’t bother me at all.”

Although Mr. Denton, 64, still toys with a few other addictions, food among them, he stopped drinking after a stint in a 12-step-based rehabilitation center 14 years ago. He relies on a manager whose opinion he trusts to taste for him.

“I’m a raging alcoholic who sells booze for a living, but it works for me,” he said. “I love the opposites in my life.”
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Buffy Vs. Edward Cullen

So. Freaking. Amazing.

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Bret Michaels' Accident

I know this is a little late, but it's still pretty funny.

Something finally sits on Bret Michaels' face that he can't handle!

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Sweet Sofa

I wish we knew about this before we bought the two from Craigslist!

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Stripper Update

I always feared that when I got out of school, I wouldn't update this thing as much, but I guess its happened sooner than expected. Its not that I don't like blogging anymore, or that it was a silly pastime I'm giving up. Hells no. I've been so busy with school and work that its impossible to fit in anything else, really, much less a birthday party that Nati is pulling together for me.

Chores? Forgeddaboutit. I'm usually the first one to jump on cleaning, but not lately. Eating right? Exercising? Its all going out the window. Usually, around this point in the semester, I've cut out certain readings and homework to maximize the time I could be working on more important assignments, but they're ALL important. Every long day of class, in every class, something major is happening. And not a Posh Spice major, either.

Three more weeks, though, then I can stop being boring.

I want to do buttery nipple shots! Read more!

Megan Wants A Millionaire Cast Reveal

God, this looks really bad. For those of you who do not know, Megan, from Rock of Love 2, I Love Money (season 1), and Charm School with Sharon Osbourne is coming back with her own show, presumably because Mrs. Osbourne physically assaulted, and hey - a TV show cancels out a lawsuit on Vh1. Anyway, check out the beautiful disasters below, and let me know who is your early pick to win it all. Me? My money is on "Sex-Toy Dave." Is he related to the Dildo Model from SATC?

Al
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Alex
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Audl
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Corey
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Garth
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James
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Joe
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Matt
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Mike
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Punisher
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Ryan
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Sex-Toy Dave
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Shaun
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TJ
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The Bartender #1

The Bartender, AKA my new boyfriend. Check it out, and laugh. I'll post one up every couple of days to keep you giggling.

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Hottie of the Week!

Here's your dose of hotness! Enjoy!

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Real World: Cancun

First look at the 8 people in the Cancun house. What do you think? Will you watch? I already have checked out, although I want to see if that gay Latino server is going to steal my thunder when I apply. Haha.

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Gay Hipster

I kind of like this one!

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An Age Old Feud Finally Makes Fashion

What side are you on? Personally, DC squashes both in my opinion, but naturally, I'm biased. I think its funny how people are competitive when it comes to where they live or where they're from. I face this problem on a daily basis - San Francisco, or Washington? Its stupid to scale things that are completely debatable (is air or water better?), but its still fun.

On that note, I'd totally take the MD > VA.

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