The Off Topic Topic

[garbon]

For lunch one day, I went with my friend to her hair appointment and sat sipping champagne while flipping through magazines.  I felt like a cliche on one of those reality shows.

  What reality show?  This Gay Life?

I'm sure one of those real housewives had a sassy gay friend, no?

I even came with quips like, "Does it mean I have a problem if I'm drinking during the day to cope with my job?" to which the equally sassy gay hairdresser said, "No, honey, just fabulous."

[Jacob]

I'm sure one of those real housewives had a sassy gay friend, no?

I even came with quips like, "Does it mean I have a problem if I'm drinking during the day to cope with my job?" to which the equally sassy gay hairdresser said, "No, honey, just fabulous."

By the way, apparently Finland is putting out a couple of stamps with "Tom of Finland" images on them.



http://www.posti.fi/english/current/2014/20140413_stamps.html

[garbon]

Oh my.

[Norgy]

It sure isn't Moomin. Finland, and Finnish people, never cease to amaze me with their marching to their own tune.

[Capetan Mihali]

Awesome.

[Sheilbh]

Disraeli was an Anglican convert (he had to be, to enter politics).

Interestingly, he wrote the very first alt-history book: The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, about a Jew who founds a world-spanning empire in the middle ages (!).

His family converted when he was 12 after his dad got into a huge argument with their synagogue.

It's also interesting how much Disraeli later played up to his Jewish heritage to enhance his own 'exoticness' and 'otherness' which he liked to emphasise in his rather theatrical political persona. For example that line to Victoria or his famous response to anti-semitic goading by Daniel O'Connell that 'yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.'

Having just read a biography of Gladstone I plan to read one of Disraeli. I can't think of anyone else like them. Two extraordinary figures with such totally different characters (with a shared, but different, theatricality) who dominate an entire generation of history and both achieved a great deal.

Love the Tom of Finland stamps

[Sheilbh]

The Mellon Lifestyle as a Brand
The Story Behind the Hanley Mellon Clothing Line
By MARISA MELTZERAPRIL 11, 2014


Nicole Hanley Mellon and her husband, Matthew Mellon. The two decided early on in their relationship that they would collaborate on clothing, adding to their collective history in fashion. Credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

"It's a good story. Do you want me to start, love?" Nicole Hanley Mellon asked her husband, Matthew Mellon, on a recent Friday. The couple were seated in the living room of their apartment in the Pierre hotel, telling how they met in 2006 at a wedding in Palm Beach, Fla.

"My breath was literally taken away," said Mr. Mellon, 50. "I knew instantly. I was rocketed to the fourth dimension. It was a metaphysical overtaking. I called my ex-wife and my mother and said, 'I met my future wife.' " That ex-wife would be Tamara Mellon, the co-founder of Jimmy Choo and a namesake clothing line, with whom Mr. Mellon has a daughter, Araminta Ann Mellon, 12.

It's all very cordial: In the fall, Mr. Mellon and Ms. Hanley Mellon, 36, plan to introduce Hanley Mellon, their own clothing line.

They are not exactly starting from the gutter. Mr. Mellon, who comes from the Mellon and Drexel families of Bank of New York Mellon and Drexel Burnham Lambert, grew up in New York City, Palm Beach and Northeast Harbor, Me., and went to the University of Pennsylvania. The walls of the pad he and Ms. Hanley Mellon share at the Pierre are lined with paintings by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Peter Beard and, Mr. Mellon said, "Taylor Swift."

"You mean Sam Taylor-Wood," Ms. Hanley Mellon said.

Mr. Mellon's initial foray into fashion was as the creative director of Jimmy Choo's collection of men's shoes. After Tamara Mellon, whom he met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in 1997, decided she no longer wanted a men's line ("She wanted to create the best women's shoe," Mr. Mellon said), he founded Harry's of London, named for his grandfather Harry Stokes, selling dress shoes with sneaker soles. (In 2006, a majority stake in the company was sold to the Richemont Group, the Swiss luxury-goods holding company.)

He jokes that Ms. Hanley Mellon, at 14 years his junior, forgets that he has "had a whole other life before we were married." That included working in the music industry in Los Angeles for a decade before meeting Tamara Mellon. Although the two divorced almost a decade ago, they remain close enough that she attended the Hanley-Mellons's wedding in 2010, an elopement of sorts at Diane von Furstenberg's house on Harbour Island in the Bahamas.

Ms. Hanley Mellon grew up in Greenwich, Conn. After studying at Trinity College, she worked at Ralph Lauren and was a buyer at the Intermix chain of boutiques. She had a short-lived clothing line and boutique, both named Hanley.

The two decided early on in their relationship to collaborate on clothing, but "we moved to California for two years, got married and had two kids," Ms. Hanley Mellon said. (Force Hanley Mellon, 3, and Olympia Drexel Mellon, 1, were not in the room during the interview. There is also a teacup Yorkie named Tuleh, named for the clothing label where Ms. Hanley Mellon interned.)

The couple started slowly with hanleymellon.com, a lifestyle website that has fashion articles ("For Nicer Weather Days" features a Balenciaga bag, $1,485, and Mulberry coat, $3,000), posts on the perfect crop top featuring portraits of Ms. Hanley Mellon, and collages of images they find inspiring.

The Hanley Mellon line will have 10 pieces of clothing, including a coat and blouses meant to be wardrobe staples for a jet-set life, priced from $250 to $2,000. Each collection will be inspired by a different place in the world, with New York City being the first.

And then, who knows?

"I've never been to Africa, but I feel like I have this deep affinity for it," Ms. Hanley Mellon said. "I've read every Hemingway, we collect Peter Beard, I've watched 'Out of Africa.' It touches your soul to visit and smell the smells, and you can't recreate the experience without immersing yourself."

Of course, being mobile has many connotations in the age of new media, which Mr. Mellon feels ambivalent about. "In the old days you'd have to travel to India or China for inspiration, and these days you've just got Pinterest boards and you can create looks from home," he said. He does have an Instagram account, asliceofmellon, despite believing that "technology has made us lazy."

But Mr. Mellon is an unabashed fan of embracing new technologies, including Bitcoin, which the company accepts as payment and to which he was introduced by the venture capitalists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.

"Now we just need a hashtag," Ms. Hanley Mellon said.

[mongers]

....

Having just read a biography of Gladstone I plan to read one of Disraeli. I can't think of anyone else like them. Two extraordinary figures with such totally different characters (with a shared, but different, theatricality) who dominate an entire generation of history and both achieved a great deal.

Surely you josh, what with the titans of Cameron and Miliband treading the Westminster stage.

[Valmy]

Having just read a biography of Gladstone I plan to read one of Disraeli. I can't think of anyone else like them. Two extraordinary figures with such totally different characters (with a shared, but different, theatricality) who dominate an entire generation of history and both achieved a great deal.

If only Gladstone had gotten his Home Rule bill through, a lot might have been different.

[Admiral Yi]

I read one time that Tom of Finland is not from Finland.

[Capetan Mihali]

I read one time that Tom of Finland is not from Finland.

I thought that as well, but reading on Wikipedia, he most certainly is, and the appellation came from the American physique magazine that first published his work.

[Ed Anger]

Some Walgreens shareholders want the company to inverse so they can reduce US taxes.

In a note last month, analysts at UBS said Walgreens' tax rate was expected to be 37.5 per cent compared with 20 per cent for Boots, and that an inversion could increase earnings per share by 75 per cent. They added, however, that "Walgreens' management seems more hesitant to pull the trigger near-term due to perceived political risks."

[CountDeMoney]

A Pennsylvania man mistakenly threw $1.25 million worth of winning lottery tickets in the trash.

The tickets were sold at Zhou Grocery in York.

Wendy Hinton works at the store. She tells the York Daily Record that a regular who played the same numbers every day bought 25 tickets, each worth $50,000. She says he misread them and threw them away.

Hinton says he was plenty upset when he learned of his costly mistake.

The Pennsylvania Lottery confirms that 25 winning Quinto tickets were sold at the store on March 13, 2013. The tickets expired last month and the money remains in the Lottery Fund.

Lottery spokeswoman Lauren Bottaro's reaction: "Oh, no. Wow.''

[garbon]

The worst.

[Valmy]

I read one time that Tom of Finland is not from Finland.

I would question why somebody not from Finland would claim to be from Finland but we had that guy who was pretending to be from Iceland.