Mischa Barton and Her Many Ruffles

Mischa Barton strolled into the premier of M. Night Shyamalan’s newest movie, The Happening, wearing a silver, multi-tiered dress of ruffles and a pair of black one-strap heels.

All I can say about this frightening look is Mischa, please fire your stylist, you will excel in the long run, and while you’re at it, if you did your makeup yourself, stop and if your makeup artist did it, fire them too. As a woman who is usually dressed to impress, you can tell something is terribly wrong when she goes out in public to something she knows will be a photo op to begin with, wearing a dress that she could easily fit two other women into it with her and yes, a lot of ruffles. The dress makes her look as if she is trying to cover her torso up and show off her legs, but it makes her legs look foreign on her body and it definitely makes her look as if she has gained over 50 pounds. This is a big time fail for Mischa Barton, especially since any woman seeing her and thinking she looks good in it, may go out and buy a dress of 300 ruffles.

For more information on the movie The Happening, out in theaters tomorrow, Friday June 13, go to the official movie site where you can also view the trailer.

Season 2 of Army Wives

Season 2 of the Lifetime show Army Wives premiers June 8 at 10pm!

“The critically acclaimed drama series details the lives of five women trying to stay connected to their military husbands while adapting to turbulent life on a strict US Army post”

I don’t watch television personally, but a lot of other people out there do, so what do you think of Army Wives? Have you ever seen it? Are you looking forward to the second season? Leave your thoughts in the comments

Never Lose Another Magazine Article Again

I used to be a big magazine junkie. I used to work at Borders Books & Music and would find myself constantly grabbing magazines, buying the ones that looked interesting through my extensive task of putting all the magazines people took off the racks and left wherever they felt like it at the end of the day and for the entire time I worked there, I just found more and more magazines that I had to read. The only problem with having so many magazines with so many fabulous articles that I just had to read was that I wound up with a stack of magazines and any time that I had thought back to the articles that I wanted to re-read or needed for research for an article, I had to sift through several different issues of several magazines. Another problem I had continuously ran into was the fact that my stack of magazines were starting to fall apart after a while and in some cases, the articles I had been cherishing in those magazines, were also starting to fall apart.

Apparently quite a few other people were running into these same problems when it came to the magazines they love and because of the flimsiness of magazines and the impossible task of keeping them all cataloged and in good shape, Scanalog was born.

Scanalog is a magazine cataloging system that runs on your computer. The process is extremely simple and if you are a magazine lover, you are going to wonder what you did without it. The program is beautiful, first of all, its interface is self-explanatory and so easy that someone who knows very little about computers to begin with will be able to use it hassle-free. By simply scanning your magazine articles and cataloging them using the Scanalog program, you will have every magazine article that you had been saving whole magazines for at your fingertips. You will never find yourself searching through the stack of magazines that are taking over your book shelf or desk or having to say in the middle of a conversation “I remember reading an article about that in a magazine, but I can’t show it to you because I completely forget where I put that magazine.”

The system comes with 11 master categories as well as stickers for each category that you can use to organize your magazine articles before you scan them. Scanalog also supports retrieving your articles from your hard drive or digital camera. At the present moment, Scanalog covers a wide range of women’s interests such as parenting, home decoration, gardening and traveling, but since Scanalog has been so widely accepted, they are currently working on other systems tailor made for those with different interests.

Scanalog is not only a lifesaver when it comes to all the magazines you may have laying around, but it’s a fun project finding all the articles you have saved, scanning and cataloging them. It would also make a great gift for anyone you know who buys and saves magazines or other media sources.

To order your own Scanalog, visit the website or call 1-866-849-SCAN for more information.

Book Review: All About Vee by C. Leigh Purtill

Veronica May is a pretty standard teenager. At eighteen years old, she is bubbly, caring and has a few great friends known as ‘The Vees,’ named simply after the first letter in all of their first names. She is a confident actress, star of her school and city theater in her hometown of Chester, Arizona and she is absolutely gorgeous–All 217 pounds of her.

While Veronica loves her life in Chester, she loves the spotlight even more and craves the success that as a big city actor, she knows she could achieve.

Once her father, a widower librarian, decides to finally marry his girlfriend of ten years and the city theater casting a play in which there are no female lead roles, Veronica feels as if she is being replaced not only in her household, but in her whole city. With her father’s reluctance to talk to Veronica about her deceased mother and provide his child with any closure, she decides to make her dream of being a successful actress a reality after finding some old letters that her mother had written her father in the attic. Veronica learns that her mother was also an aspiring actress who left her life in a little city in pursuit of becoming successful in LA–And that is just where Veronica heads to start her big city life.

Veronica drives to LA and stays with one of her childhood friends and fellow Vee and soon learns that life in LA is nothing like she had imagined and that in order to be a successful actress, you don’t merely have to be good at acting. While learning the ropes of this new city and spending her life savings on head shots and a myriad of acting, yoga and movement classes, Veronica realizes that being confident and talented are the least sought after attributes when it comes to being an actress.

Struggling with sending head shots, waiting for call backs and going on cattle calls and auditions, Veronica starts working as a barista and makes friends with two other fellow actors. She loves her job at the coffee shop and her new friends, but her attraction to the manager is also weighing down hard on her path to stardom.

All About Vee is a must-read book for all young teenage girls, in my opinion, for the simple fact that Purtill illustrates how women who aren’t a size 0 are treated not only in LA and not only because they are striving to become actresses, but all across this country. She gives the weight epidemic that plagues so many young girls a story and luckily, Veronica does not change a thing about her weight throughout the book, which I was impressed with.

Through her time in LA, Veronica learns that those who you think are your friends can change and become people you don’t want to associate yourself with, that people can be brutal and backstabbing and to always remember who the people that love you are because those will be the people who want and help you to succeed in life.

Rating:

This post can also be seen on The Pajama Mommy Community.

All Ready for the Movie!

I have just recently finished my second viewing of the entire series of Sex and the City and all I have to say now is that I cannot wait for that movie to come out!

With just two more days left until the movie is out in theaters, I am bubbling with anticipation and simply giddy. I can’t remember how long it has been since a movie has made me this excited and anxious.

Book Review: A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids by Margot Datz

Margot Datz is a self-taught painter, sculptor, interior designer and prolific writer whose imagery and beautifully crafted metaphors whisk those who read her words away, almost immediately.

As a woman who lives by the sea and spends her life creating genius pieces of art, including a spectacular eighty-five-foot mural and bas-relief installation for the Arkansas Children’s Hospital and illustrations for four children’s books for friend Carly Simon, her talent is apparent and defined in her book, A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids.

Her book, while it may first look like a typical children’s book, is filled with the wisdom a woman learns through years of life experience. She advises that in order to even think about a man in your life, you must first not only accept, but truly love yourself, faults and all. She also goes through the types and behaviors of men and reminds us all that love is a luxury to have in one’s life.

While Datz advises us women on all of life’s little setbacks and luxuries, she also reminds us that it’s important to also focus on the fun stuff, like accessories and sexy lingerie that makes a woman feel her absolute best and it’s always important to be a little naughty.

I really enjoyed reading A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids. It’s a cute and quick read, while also being inspirational and eye-opening for all women who have the pleasure of picking up this book.

Rating:

Book Review: Hex Education by Emily Gould and Zareen Jaffery

I recently read this book on a whim and to tame the inner fifteen year old girl in me with a love for young adult books. I am a firm believer that while you can read any subject of book that interests you, sometimes you just need a little ‘cute;’ and that is exactly what this book brings to the table.

Hex Education is about a young teenage girl, Sophie Stone, who is reluctant (to say the least) to leave her home in LA and move to her father’s home town of Mythic, Massachusetts in order to save the town from odd . Mythic, most likely inspired by Salem, Massachusetts, is a city whose history is based on the occult and witchcraft. She is a shoe in to not fit in, her parents being horror filmmakers and her spending her entire existence trying to be just another normal teenager rid of anything witchcraft-oriented.

While at first Sophie comes off as spoiled and has a personality that would immediately turn people away from wanting to be around her, we see her personality evolve as she comes to terms with being in Mythic and settles in with her new friends. But her friends, who have the power to turn something into anything they please, see a quality in Sophie that she didn’t know she had herself.

Hex Education is a very lightweight read, it’s resolution feels a bit rushed and I would have liked a little more story towards the end, but overall it is very cute and witty and is a must read if you’ve ever been interested in witchcraft of any kind.

Rating:

Book Review: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

I had never heard of Joe Hill, the offspring of Stephen King who wrote this novel under a pen name because he did not want to gain attention to his work for the sole reason that he is Stephen King’s son, until my grandmother, a Stephen King fanatic, told me a little about the book when she was a quarter of the way through it. After she had finished she lent me the book and I wearily took it and began my journey into the life of Judas Coyne, an ex-rocker with a wicked taste for paranormal items and much younger women.

Heart-Shaped Box opens with a run of the mill, usual day of a retired rock star, Judas Coyne, his clerk and annoying friend by business-association and his goth fan-girl girlfriend whom he refers to as Georgia, that being the state in which he picked her up in while on tour with his band. The only thing remotely intriguing about this washed up rocker living in a desolate section of the United States in a farm house is his collection of occult and otherwise eerie knick knacks that fans had sent him over the years.

Judas’ attraction to so-called haunted objects has over the years evolved into an entire room full of random junk that most likely isn’t worth keeping around, but who he had built himself into being over the years on the road with his band is a man in which the goth lifestyle flocked to–And it had obviously stuck with him years after the other members of his band died off and disappeared. When his clerk sees a haunted suit online, Judas doesn’t think twice before telling him to get it. Days later, the suit arrives in a heart-shaped box and the horror, ghost-chasing story unravels.

Heart-Shaped Box is not the great horror story in which people have been claiming; it is however, a horror story that is about the same caliber of a Stephen King novel–And not his early work, which was what had built King to be known as a great horror story teller. This novel, while interesting and captivating at first, begins to drag on by the time you reach the middle of the story. While Hill is describing light, smells, temperature and feelings, you start to think to yourself “Yeah, I get it, now on with it!” This feeling is nothing short of what is felt while reading a recently published King novel.

Hill’s attention to detail is either an attribute beloved by readers or an attribute that can be seen as nothing but a writer wanting to write a novel instead of a novella. While his detailed explanations and back story of the characters is thorough, I found myself more interested in the story of Coyne’s girlfriend, Georgia; or Marybeth as we later begin to refer to her as, while my interest in the main character simply went stale, leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

While I can respect that Hill used a pen name in order to separate himself from his father and publish his novel by himself, this story runs dry way too early in order to be called a great horror story and it can easily be seen that the majority of Hill’s interest in horror stories and writing them came from his father. This novel reads as if Hill simply read Stephen King’s instructional writing book, On Writing, and decided to try on the novelist’s suit for a while.

Rating:

Mary-Kate Olsen, The Hippie

Oh Mary-Kate, you wild and crazy woman always looking to separate yourself from your cute, cuddly kid super celebrity persona. But I must ask, just what exactly were you thinking when you saw this dress and thought “Yeah, I think I’ll wear that!”?

Mary-Kate doesn’t look flattering in the least in this dress; in fact, she looks quite large and the headband is just dreadful.

What do you think?
Leave it in the comments.

Sex and the City in Theatres May 30

I stumbled upon this a few days ago and I immediately got all sorts of excited.

I was a late bloomer when it came to jumping on the Sex and the City bandwagon. I began watching reruns after the show was over and was in syndication and since, watched every episode I could find online. Since then, I have reveled in girly goodness while watching episodes repeatedly and now I cannot wait until the movie comes out.

It’s probably old news to the hardcore Sex and the City fans, but it definitely deserves an announcement of some kind and perhaps I’ll reach those who didn’t already see it. And so I present to you–The the very first trailer that came out! (Although there are others, this is the best and virtually spoiler-free)

Embrace your crazy, unapologetic, over the top girly side!

« Previous Page