July 21, 2006
Instead, I took advantage of the new Pennsylvania Ave. location of my office and I decided to walk to the White House to see, with mine own eyes, the Code Pink Vigil/Fast. It's not every day I play tourist; this AM I looked the part: backpack w/ water bottle and camera in hand. Were it not for the long pants and leather shoes I think I would've looked like someone from out of town.
But Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, was practically empty.
Baron von Steuben was there.
As was Andrew Jackson.
But no Code Pink, no Cindy Sheehan. It seems I was mistaken; the vigil in Lafayette Park is scheduled for 10 AM to 7 PM. My bad.
However, William Thomas and his dog were out there, as they have been every day since June of 1981 (working in shifts with Concepcion Picciotto), protesting against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
You have to admire the courage of his convictions: Twenty-five years in one place...now, that's a vigil.
Also there was a newcomer, laptop on lap, protesting about Darfur:
Sadly, I did not chat with him, as I had to get to work. And I still do.
Reporting from Washington, for annika's journal, I'm Victor.
***Lunchtime Update***
I walked over to the park during my 30-minute (by choice) lunch break to take some pix of the anti-war protestors. It took me awhile to find them.
Falun Gong was there, en masse, protesting China's alleged organ harvesting (NOTE: A Canadian report on these allegations can be found here):
:
I'll try to post some video later at home.
Iranian protestors were there, about where the Darfur protestor from this morning was:
Note that was the Iranian flag while under the Shah.
I finally found the anti-war protestors when I turned around, against the White House fence:
I saw no counter-protestors.
Reporting from Washington for annika's journal, I'm Victor.
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05:06 AM
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July 06, 2006
No, not this bikini.
I'm talking about this kind!
So scandalous was the first modern-day bikini that the only female free-spirited enough to pose in one was a stripper. Parisian engineer-turned-designer Louis Reard released the suit at a fashion shoot on July 5, 1946. It was cut high on the hip, but the really stunning feature was that it bared the navel, a part of the body that in modern history had been off-limits for public display.Maybe so, but as the article points out, the bikini wasn't invented in 1946. It was only re-introduced. According to Wikipedia (font of all knowledge) "Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes have been observed on Greek urns and paintings, dated as early as 1400 BC."The tiny two-piece shocker signaled the coming transformation of attitudes toward the body. Still, it would take more than a decade for most American women to get comfortable with wearing the skimpy suit.
The baring of the belly button was the big hurdle.
"I can't think of any situation in the thousand years before the '60s when it was acceptable to show the navel, '' said Kevin Jones, a curator and fashion historian at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles.
Here's a scene from the famous Roman "bikini girls" mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale in Italy, which dates to the early 4th Century A.D.
(The chick on the left demonstrates something the Romans liked to call "nipplae slipae.")
Over the course of this blog, I've done a couple of bikini related posts. Let's take a look back, shall we?
Two years ago, I linked to a swimwear poll, which revealed that 7 out of 10 women own a bikini, and California girls prefer low-rise bottoms, while East coast girls like a mid-rise.
Last winter, I went all out and did a bikini fashion preview. In that post I predicted that polka dots would be "in," and I was right. I saw polka dots all over the place. Speaking of nipus slipus, that was the post where I coined the term ""dunstation."
I'll probably toast the bikini's 60th birthday with a fruity drink and a swim after work. That sounds like a plan. How will you celebrate?
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