- When Al Gore invented the Internet, this has to be what he had in mind. The
ol’ World Wide Web is a great place to find travel deals, it’s a great place to
find the new love of your life and now, there’s a place to combine the two.
Thanks to a great American and aspiring entrepreneur, Brandon Wade, Misstravel.com now exists. The
site launched April 9 and according to its founder, the site connects rich
people with good-looking people who want to travel but also happen to be poor,
or at least not in the 1 percent. The theory is that the rich, theoretically
ugly or at least socially stunted, person will pay for the privilege of having
someone (probably) much younger and sexier than them as a travel companion. "We
are a meeting space like a nightclub or a bar for people who are interested in
talking," Wade said. "This isn't an escort service." To make
sure hookers, er, escorts don’t join the site, Wade has posted a very
official-looking "Escorts are not welcome" disclaimer linked on the
site’s main page. Of course, that message is easy to miss when most of the page
is dominated by a massive image of a young woman sitting very-girlishly in a
short skirt, head tilted, on a pink suitcase. Click on a video play button and
a sexy female voice speaks as a cartoon pitches the site to the lonely and/or
poor. "Are you attractive but you don't have the money to travel?"
she asks. "What if you could travel around the world, stay in five-star
resorts, dine at top-rated restaurants and do the fun things travelers do, all
for free?" Cartoon images of doctors, lawyers, bankers, athletes and other
wealthy people appear and the voice teases, "Best of all, they have the
money, and they are willing to spend it on you." Although the site is new
and no one has arranged any trips through it that Wade knows about, he wants to
make sure no one goes looking for travel deals on a site named misstravel.com.
It only provides a platform for people to create profiles and communicate.
Users fall into two categories: "attractive" and "generous."
Supposedly attractive people can register for free, while the “generous” user
pays a minimum of $50 to be able to communicate with 10 attractives and $250 to
communicate with up to 100 attractives. Let the shallowness begin……….
- The heart of the PGA Tour’s season is just over the
horizon and the British Open looms just a couple of months away. As usual, fans
can expect plenty of flat, barren landscapes, few trees and courses that
generally look like places herds of goats have been grazing for weeks on end. However,
those tree-less goat tracks will be significantly more expensive this year
after Royal and Ancient chief
executive Peter Dawson announced that the St. Andrews-based organization has
invested $16 million in toughening and tightening all courses used to host the
Open Championship. That amount includes efforts to lengthen the courses for the
2012 and 2013 editions. According to Dawson, a fund was created to bring the
nine courses used for the Open "into the modern era" and an average
of about $800,000 was spent on each course. “I would say it’s money well
spent,” Dawson said. This year’s venue at Royal Lytham and St. Annes has
undergone significant changes and Dawson announced Wednesday that changes have
already been put in place for the 2013 Open venue at Muirfield. "Everything
has been done at Muirfield and it has been done for a few years now," he
said. "There are quite a few changes, but they are very subtle."
Among the changes at Muirfield are a new back tee at the ninth hole and a shift
of the 10th fairway. With the alterations, the course will play some 200 yards
longer than when the British Open was last held at Muirfield in 2002. Asked
about the new Donald Trump course at Aberdeen, he explained that the bombastic
“Celebrity Apprentice” host would need to make the course commercially viable
to the R&A to take golf's oldest major to the venue. This year’s British
Open tees off on July 19………….
- Kazakhstan has plenty to be angry about. If some jackass
DJ/stadium sound guy at the Arab Shooting Championships in Kuwait isn't disrespecting them by
playing the spoof national anthem from “Borat” when one of their athletes wins
a gold medal, than someone is mispronouncing their nation’s name or btuchering
its spelling. However, none of those causes are the reason President Nursultan Nazarbayev is currently raging
against the machine. No, the president of the oil-rich former Soviet nation has
ripped the West for what he believes as a shameless attempt to impose its
values on the rest of the world. In an interview with Russian state-controlled
channel Rossiya-24, Nazarbayev (or N-squared as his friends call him) lamented
that the use of modern mass media to influence internal political developments
in certain countries creates security risks. The remarks are a bit
contradictory given Kazakhstan’s recent flexible diplomatic position of cultivating
warm ties with the West remaining on good terms with its former Soviet partners
and China. His remarks signal a growing discomfort with the democracy embraced
by Western governments and sync up with the position adopted by neighboring
Russia. Authoritarian regimes are the order of the day in Central Asia and
close proximity to the tumult of the Middle East hasn’t softened the belief
that a strong, authoritarian regime is the way to go. "The varying
mentalities, histories and traditions of different peoples are not being taken
into consideration," Nazarbayev declared. "Western culture, which is
propagandized by the United States, cannot simply be transplanted." Maybe
his comments are simply a knee-jerk reaction to criticism by international
democracy groups and foreign governments. Avoiding a turn toward democracy
would also allow Nazarbayev’s regime to continue its increasingly brutal
crackdown on Alga, the most vocal opposition political group in Kazakhstan. So
on second thought, maybe it is time to cue the “Borat” version of the Kazakh
anthem…………
- The future of movies, aside from an endless onslaught of
unnecessary remakes and sequels, seems to be 3-D. Not only do 3-D movies allow
theaters to charge more for tickets and thus allow studios to make more money, but
3-D has an undeniable cool factor to it. That reality lurks even for cinematic
icons like Ang Lee, who has embraced the 3-D revolution in shooting his forthcoming
film "Life of Pi." Lee admitted that making the leap to three
dimensions was difficult. "I'm dealing with a kid, a tiger and water... so
the learning curve is enormous," Lee said in a speech to theater owners at
CinemaCon on Wednesday as part of a panel discussion with Martin Scorsese. Lee said that he
literally had to teach himself a new way of seeing and thinking because he had become
so used to shooting in two dimensions. Mix in the larger cameras required to
shoot in 3-D and the challegne becomes that much tougher. "It's like
operating a refrigerator," Lee said. Scorsese has already made the jump to
3-D with his 2011 project “Hugo,” and did not seem to struggle with the
transition. In his comments as part of the panel, Scorsese admitted that filming
“Hugo” on a sprawling Parisian set helped when it came to working with the
bulky cameras. He also cited inspiration from 1950s films that used 3D like
"Dial M for Murder" and "House of Wax.” Recalling comments he
made to his crew, he said, , "Let's push it. Let's see what happens. We'll
keep pushing it and when you complain, we'll stop." In one of the panel’s
lighter moments, he joked that the bigger challenge was working with a young
cast that could only be shooting for four hours a day. "The biggest obstacle
was really the child labor laws in England," Scorsese said. As for Lee's
"Life of Pi," it is an adaptation of Yann Martel's best-selling novel
about an Indian boy who is shipwrecked in a boat with a Bengal tiger. It is not
an explosion-filled, action-packed superhero movie of the sort that typically
play well in 3-D form. When “Life of Pi” drops in a few months, the world will
be able to see if an old cinematic dog can indeed learn new tricks……….
- Science continues to amaze. Mind control has always been a
fascinating concept and never more so than an experiment in which a partially-tetraplegic
patient in Switzerland can control a robot 60-plus miles away via a head cap
sensing electrical signals from his brain. The experiment is believed to be the
first time a “mind control” interface has been used by a partially paralyzed
person. Better still, the experiment was done without invasive implants. From
the relative comfort of his hospital ward in the Swiss town of Sion, Mark-Andre
Duc was able to control the robot at Lausanne simply by imagining acts like
lifting his fingers. His skull cap sensed the electrical signals associated
with those movement and transmitted them to the robot and directed it to move left
or right around the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. At Lausanne, a
laptop mounted on a mobile platform received the signals and transmitted them
to the robot. Duc lost the use of his legs and fingers after a fall and said
that on a good day, the robot is easy to control. Fatigue and pain make the process
more difficult. To make controlling the robot less taxing for the patient,
researchers programmed the robot to continue acting on an instruction until
explicitly directed to stop. The same team of researchers in the Institute’s
Center for Neuroprosthetics are also working on an “electric skin” in the hope
that they could create prosthetics that have the mobility and sensitivity of a
human hand. For once, science is working on a project that actually has
a tangible, beneficial use………
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