PGMA allegedly spent US$20K on Dinner

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Page Six

According to Page Six section of the foreign newspaper New York Post, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo allegedly spent a whopping 20,000 US$ on a dinner at Le Cirque New York City, USA. It happened after her scheduled business meeting with US President Barrack Obama.

Mrs. Arroyo didn’t seem to mind her status – a public head of a country with millions of indigent people – while ordering the lavish meal consisting of:

Appetizers:

lobster salad, wild burgundy escargot and soft shell crab tempura

Main course:

black cod, halibut, Dover sole, saddle of lamb and prime dry-aged strip steak

Additional:

caviar and Krug champagne at $510 a bottle.

Whew! that meal fit the Royal families! Many public figures opposing PGMA cringed upon learning the issue and gave a “bad aftertaste” opinions on the President’s alleged millionaire extravaganza.

On the President’s defense, Press Sec. Cerge Remonde came to the rescue! He said that it was Congressman Martin Romualdez who paid for the tab on the said Restaurant.

On a personal note, after checking the price list of Le Cirque, the food wasn’t that super expensive. Price ranges from 40-120 US$ per person (w/out wine). Unless, she brought a “very” large fleet with her then that would be a different story.

GMA 2

After a couple of days, for sure this issue will fade away. No one will know if this is true or just a hoax overblown to catch media attention. In any case, PGMA should have been extra careful doing such kind of activities especially when all Filipino eyes are on her.

(source:Inquirer)

Corazon Aquino, Ex-Leader of Philippines, Is Dead

By SETH MYDANS
Published: July 31, 2009

Corazon C. Aquino of the Philippines, who was swept into office on a wave of “people power” in 1986 and then faced down half a dozen coup attempts in six years as president, died Saturday in Manila. She was 76.
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Former Philippine President Corazon Aquino at a news conference in Manila on July 8, 2005.
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Times Topics: Corazon C. Aquino

Her son, Senator Benigno S. Aquino III, known as Noynoy, said she died at 3:18 a.m., The Associated Press reported. She learned she had advanced colon cancer last year and had been hospitalized in Manila for more than a month, he said. The cancer had spread to other organs, he added, and she was too weak to continue chemotherapy.

Demure but radiant in her familiar yellow dress, Mrs. Aquino brought hope to the Philippines as a presidential candidate, then led its difficult transition to democracy from 20 years of autocratic rule under her predecessor, Ferdinand E. Marcos.

That initial triumph of popular will —after a fraudulent election in which Mr. Marcos claimed victory, though most people believed Mrs. Aquino had won — was a high point in modern Philippine history, and it offered a model for nonviolent uprisings that has been repeated often in other countries.

But it also set a difficult precedent in the Philippines, where people nostalgic for their shining moment continue to see mass movements as an acceptable, if unconstitutional, answer to the difficulties of a flawed democratic system.

Since Mrs. Aquino left office in 1992, the Philippines has had two electoral transfers of presidential power and two attempts at replicating “people power,” including one that succeeded in removing a democratically elected president, Joseph Estrada, in 2001.

Mrs. Aquino spent the decades after her presidency as the fading conscience of her country, supporting social causes and, in her last years, joining street protests calling for the resignation of the current president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

An observant Roman Catholic who sometimes retreated to convents for contemplation, she attributed much of her success to a divine will. She also said she sought guidance from the spirit of her late husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr., who had been a chief challenger to Mr. Marcos. His assassination in 1983 fueled the opposition against Mr. Marcos and made his widow a popular figure.

“What on earth do I know about being president?” Mrs. Aquino said in an interview in December 1985, after a rally opening her election campaign.

But that was beside the point. For many Filipinos, she embodied a hope of becoming a better nation and a prouder people.

“The only thing I can really offer the Filipino people is my sincerity,” she said in the interview.

It was what they hungered for, and what she delivered as president. Although often criticized as an indecisive and ineffectual leader, Mrs. Aquino combined passivity and stubbornness and an unexpected shrewdness to hold firm against powerful opponents from both the right and the left.

Her survival in office was one of her chief accomplishments. She was succeeded by Fidel V. Ramos, whose challenge to Mr. Marcos had been a catalyst for the uprising in 1986 and whose support as Mrs. Aquino’s military chief was crucial to her in quelling coup attempts.

In the months after she took office, while ambitious people who had wilted under Mr. Marcos’s dominance jockeyed for power, Mrs. Aquino succeeded in restoring a freely elected parliament and an independent judiciary.

She had come to power through what amounted to popular acclaim — she called it “people power” — expressed by huge crowds that gathered in support of her after the disputed election in February 1986.

One year later, in February 1987, an 80 percent popular vote for a new constitution was seen as a vote of confidence in her presidency, and coming after her nonelectoral ascent to power, it confirmed her legitimacy and helped keep her challengers at bay.

But these challenges, including the attempted coups and continuing agitation from pressure groups, limited her options. Lacking political experience, she held back from making the most of her overwhelming mandate.

Born into one of the country’s wealthy land-owning families, the Cojuangcos of Tarlac, Mrs. Aquino did not lead the social revolution that some had hoped for. She failed to institute effective land reform or to address the country’s fundamental structural ailment, the oligarchical control of power and politics.

Under pressure from her restive military, she was forced to abandon one of the most strongly held ideas she brought to her presidency, an amnesty and reconciliation with a Communist insurgency. In one of the most striking retreats of her presidency, addressing the graduating class at the Philippine Military Academy a year after taking power, she said, “The answer to the terrorism of the left and the right is not social and economic reform, but police and military action.”

She turned her military loose, and the war against the Communist New People’s Army resumed. The four-decade conflict continues today, along with widespread extrajudicial killings by the military that are reminiscent of Mr. Marcos’s time.
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Although the economy revived under her leadership, it remains weak, sustained by the remittances of millions of overseas workers. Economic growth is also hampered by an exploding population in a largely Roman Catholic nation in which artificial birth control is rejected by the church.

Maria Corazon Aquino, popularly known as Cory, was born in January 1933, in Tarlac province in central Luzon, the sixth of eight children of José Cojuangco.

Like her future husband, she was the offspring of a wealthy and politically powerful family. The Cojuangcos’ banking and commercial interests, along with their 15,000-acre sugar plantation, made them one of the wealthiest families in the province.

Like the Aquinos, they belonged to the class of oligarchs of Chinese, Spanish and Malay descent who have held the real power in the Philippines since colonial days. She herself attended exclusive schools in Manila before, at 13, she was sent to finish her education at convent schools in the United States, where teachers and students remembered her as a quiet, studious, devoutly Catholic girl.

She studied at Raven Hill Academy in Philadelphia and Notre Dame Convent School in Manhattan, a small institution on West 79th Street (now called Notre Dame School), where she was a member of the class of 1949. In 1953 she graduated from Mount St. Vincent College in the Riverdale section of the Bronx with a major in French and a minor in mathematics.

She enrolled in law school in Manila, where she met her future husband, Benigno Aquino, a promising young journalist with a future in politics clearly ahead of him. She left the law behind and married him in 1954, and the couple had four daughters and a son.

Besides her son, she is survived by her daughters, Maria Elena Aquino-Cruz, Aurora Corazon Aquino-Abellada, Victoria Elisa Aquino-Dee and Kristina Bernadette Aquino-Yap.

Mrs. Aquino played the dutiful wife as her husband’s political star rose. In less than 20 years he became the country’s youngest elected mayor, governor and senator, emerging as one of the chief potential rivals of Mr. Marcos, who was then president.

When Mr. Marcos declared martial law in 1972, extending his presidency beyond its two-term limit, Mr. Aquino was arrested and charged with subversion and illegal possession of firearms. He spent the next seven years behind bars. It was during that time that Mrs. Aquino’s political education began in earnest. As her husband’s only link to the world outside, she memorized his messages and statements and passed them on to the press.

In 1980, Mr. Marcos allowed Mr. Aquino to go to the United States for a triple-bypass heart operation. Mr. Aquino accepted academic posts at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the family settled in Newton, a suburb of Boston, for what Mrs. Aquino later recalled as the happiest three years of her life.

But despite warnings from Mr. Marcos’s powerful and eccentric wife, Imelda, Mr. Aquino pursued a sense of mission and returned to the Philippines on Aug. 21, 1983. He was escorted from his airplane by two soldiers, who gunned him down on a side stairway leading to the tarmac.

Mr. Marcos was widely blamed for the assassination, although no proof has emerged, and Mr. Aquino’s funeral became the occasion for a huge antigovernment protest.

It was at his funeral, dressed in black and standing beside his open coffin, that Mrs. Aquino became a national symbol, showing the dignity and composure that would characterize her most difficult moments as president. Her popularity reached its peak during her presidential campaign against Mr. Marcos in January 1986, when she was surrounded by enthusiastic crowds chanting, “Cory! Cory! Cory!”

The “people power” uprising began with a foiled coup attempt by a clique of junior officers two weeks after the election in which Mr. Marcos was declared the winner by a compliant legislature. Two of Mr. Marcos’s military leaders — Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Mr. Ramos, who was then chief of the national police — broke away and took refuge in a military camp in the capital.

Responding to calls by the Catholic Church and by Mrs. Aquino’s backers, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets around the military camp, blocking the advance of tanks and calling on the soldiers to join them. The tide had clearly turned against Mr. Marcos. President Ronald Reagan, who had supported him throughout, sent him the message that it was time for him to leave.

Four days after the uprising began, Mr. Marcos was flown on an American aircraft to exile in Hawaii, where he died in 1989. Before fleeing, Mr. Marcos had himself sworn in as president in his nearly empty palace. Almost simultaneously Mrs. Aquino was sworn in by her civilian supporters at a social club near the military camp. She was immediately recognized as president by the United States. In an address to the nation, she declared, “Our long national nightmare is over,” and there was a moment of hope.

Penelope Cruz breaks the red carpet's cardinal rule... but only because her bags were stolen Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-

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Most girls wouldn’t carry an entire outfit in their handbag, but then again most girls aren’t Penélope Cruz.

So it’s just as well she had a red trouser suit in her bag, as her luggage was lost on her flight to London from Madrid.

She simply reached for her change of clothes to tread the red carpet at Somerset House last night.
Penelope Cruz

Red-hot: Penelope Cruz looks stunning in her Bottega Veneta suit, which she wore after her luggage went missing after a flight into London

The Bottega Veneta suit wasn’t quite up to her usual glamorous standards, but it did the trick, especially teamed with some show-stopping shoes. It complemented her olive skin and long, brunette hair, even if they were the only thing to stand out.

The actress, 35, came under fire for breaking the cardinal rule of wearing red on the red carpet, but at least we now know she had good reason.

Cruz was in town for the premiere of Broken Embraces, and luckily the heavens didn’t open on her linen number.

She said: 'I looked up at the sky and said, ‘Don’t you rain on me — I’m Penélope Cruz!'

It seemed to do the trick.

Her director, Pedro Almodóvar, had an interesting theory about the lost luggage.

In delightfully broken English, the Spaniard said: 'I think it’s a plot. I think someone take it.

'They a-bring it with him or her to home. I think it was a-stolen for a fetishist.'

Penelope Cruz

Blending in: Penelope Cruz disappears into the red carpet at Somerset House

The film tells the story of a filmmaker who goes blind after an accident and his struggle to re-engage with life.

It was shown earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

Broken Embraces is the fourth collaboration between Cruz and her fellow Spaniard. It is Almodovar's first film since his 2006 hit Volver.

The movie opened this year's open air season at the Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House.

Her Spanish actor Javier Bardem was not at the premiere, but she revealed the two of them had recently stayed with U2's Bono on the French Riviera.

The film is released in cinemas on August 28.

The woman who REALLY invented French dressing: New movie reveals a different side to Coco Chanel

By Lina Das

She gave us trousers for women, black as a fashion statement, fake pearls and the little black dress, but while Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel revolutionised women's fashion with her clean lines and unfettered simplicity, her own life was as messy and complicated as her signature style was uncluttered.

This year has seen a tidal wave of Chanel mania sweep across Europe, from films such as Coco Chanel starring Shirley MacLaine, and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which closed the Cannes Festival in May, as well as a biography due out in the autumn.

And the most anticipated of them all - the film Coco Before Chanel starring Audrey Tautou in the title role - is released today.
Audrey Tautou Coco Before Chanel

Elegant: Audrey Tautou in new film Coco Before Chanel. The actress captured Chanel's birdlike appearance

But the irony of a woman who strove for simplicity in her work, yet whose life was a study in untidy truths, hasn't been lost on those attempting to tell her story.

Much of what she achieved in her 87 years was to be admired, Chanel having transformed herself from an orphanage-raised young girl to someone whom the film's director terms 'the world's first businesswoman'.

But there were also some unpalatable facts, namely her alleged anti-Semitism and her relationship with the truth, which at best could be described as sketchy.

She was taught to embroider by the nuns who ran the orphanage and it was a skill she seemingly put to use when it came to telling the truth. 'She said she invented her life because she didn't like it,' says director Anne Fontaine. 'Parts of her life were too heavy to come to terms with. She lied to be free.'
Coco Chanel

Ground breaking style: Coco Chanel in signature faux pearls and cigarette

Freedom was a big deal for Chanel. For a young girl born in 1883 in a poorhouse (she paid her brothers to disappear lest the truth of her origins became known), it must have seemed a commodity that was unattainable.

Her father Albert was an itinerant salesman and when her mother Jeanne died when Gabrielle was 12, she and her two sisters were placed in the orphanage of the Aubazine monastery, where Gabrielle was to remain for six years.

Taught to sew by the nuns (whose habits inspired her lifelong love affair with black minimalism), at 18 she moved to a convent to work as a seamstress.
ALESSANDRO NIVOLA & AUDREY TAUTOU

The man of Chanel's life Arthur 'Boy' Capel, played by Alessandro Nivola (left) tragically died in a motoring accident in 1919

'Most people don't know Chanel came from such humble beginnings,' says Fontaine, 'and that without any intellectual or artistic education, she managed to fashion herself and shape her own destiny. It shows what a strong personality she had.'

In Audrey Tautou, known for her role in Amelie, Fontaine found someone who captured Chanel's birdlike elegance. 'It was imperative to have an actress with similar proportions to Chanel,' says the director, who shot the entire film in French - there are subtitles.


More...

* LIZ JONES: Coco Before Chanel made me fall in love with fashion again
* The sexiest shop on Earth: The uproarious story of Biba, the store that defined the Sixties
* How to be a Coco clone: Steal the style of the design legend

Chanel's formative adult years saw her trying to make it as a music hall singer in the French city of Moulins. (One song, Coco, provided her nickname.) This gave her access to the wealthier sets and it was here that she was to meet the first of two men who would help her achieve the fame, fortune and, ironically, the independence she so richly craved.
Couturiere Gabrielle
Audrey Tautou as Coco Chanel

Homage: Coco seen here on the mirrored staircase of her couture house. £1.3million was spent on more than 200 costumes and 700 hats for the movie

Etienne Balsan (played in the film by Benoit Poelvoorde) was a wealthy breeder of horses who took Chanel on as his second mistress. 'Essentially, she was a courtesan, which is a bit of a contradiction to the image we have of Chanel as an independent woman,' says Fontaine.

'She was very thin, anorexic almost, and although men found her funny, they didn't think more of her. But she knew she had to sleep with Balsan to get anywhere, which was revolutionary for this period.'

At Balsan's, she learned to ride horses like a man (giving rise to her trademark androgynous style and her love of sportswear as fashion) and to reject the elaborate, corseted fashions of the time in favour of creating simple sack dresses.
Audrey Tautou

The fashion designer had a 50-a-day habit which was portrayed in the film. However French authorities outlawed adverts for the movie that featured smoking

Though Balsan regarded her as something of an embarrassment, forbidding her to leave the bedroom when his society friends were around, he grew to admire and then love Chanel, though it came too late as he had already introduced her to the man who was to prove the love of her life - his friend Arthur 'Boy' Capel.

An Englishman from a wealthy coal mining family, Boy was to have a lasting effect on Chanel's life. He is played by actor Alessandro Nivola.

Nivola says: 'What I loved about the story was that Boy's relationship with Coco begins the moment he tells her he's going to marry someone else, which isn't typical of most period, romantic movies.
Coco Chanel

Lavish: The French designer in her Paris apartment actually came from very humble beginnings

'They're both orphans, and he delights in her power rather than being intimidated or turned off by it.' It was Capel who loaned Chanel the money to set up her first fashion salon in Paris and her designs flourished after World War I.

Nivola says: 'She got men to finance her career without being tied to them. But I think it was only human for Chanel to long for something more traditional.'

Sadly, it was never to be, as Capel was killed in a motoring accident in 1919. Fontaine says: 'For Chanel, it was a disaster when he died.'
Jackie Onassis John F. Kennedy

Fan: Jackie Onassis reportedly wore Chanel on the day of husband President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963

The film ends shortly after this period and the truncation of Chanel's life story meant that some liberties had to be taken with the fashions that appear in the film.

The movie's costume designer, Catherine Leterrier, admits: 'The photos of Chanel in the famous striped mariner's sweater didn't appear till the Thirties, so we had to move the fashion forward slightly by showing her walking along the beach and noticing the sweaters of the fishermen as they pull in their nets.

'The Chanel bag is another iconic creation and Anne Fontaine wanted me to imagine how it originated, so I created a quilted sewing bag as if the young Coco had made it out of a remnant given to her by her aunts. I hope Chanel will forgive me!'
Chanel No 5 perfume

Iconic: Chanel No 5 perfume was reportedly the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore in bed

No doubt Coco would have been pleased by the sumptuous feel of the film (£1.3 million was spent on more than 200 costumes and 700 hats which feature in the movie). But by cutting swathes out, it manages to dispense with some of the more unsavoury aspects of her life.

After Capel's death, she embarked on affairs with the composer Igor Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster, with some speculating that she might have become the Duchess had she been able to have children (she was rumoured to have undergone a botched abortion and motherhood and marriage always evaded her).

She later befriended Winston Churchill. But as the Germans marched into Paris in 1940, Chanel closed down her fashion house and ensconced herself in the Ritz, embarking on an ill-advised affair with the Nazi intelligence officer Hans Gunther von Dinklage.

Fontaine says: 'She liked men and had many of them and I don't think there was any anti-Semitism on her part.'

But after Chanel created her own perfume range - the first designer to do so - she tried to wrest control from the Jewish brothers who owned the business by trying to make use of the anti-Semitic laws of the time.

When France was liberated in 1944, she was arrested and evaded punishment, eventually fleeing the country in disgrace and living out the rest of the decade in exile in Switzerland with von Dinklage.

She returned to fashion in the early Fifties, and while the French greeted the new collection with scorn, in America they were more forgiving (the suit Jackie Kennedy wore on the day of her husband's assassination came from Chanel).

The film ends with a strange, dream-like sequence where an elderly Chanel, perched on the staircase of her Parisian atelier, watches the models parade in front of her in some of the label's best-known creations.

Chanel lived till 1971, having spent her final years in her private suite at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.

Fontaine says: 'At the end, she felt a life without a husband and children was a disaster. She was very alone and the day she died, she went up to the concierge and told him: "In about three or four minutes, I'm going to die."

'She went up to her room and was dead five minutes later. She was so much of a control freak in her life that it was no surprise that she had that control in death, too.'

• COCO BEFORE CHANEL is released in cinemas today.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1203293/The-woman-REALLY-invented-French-dressing-New-movie-reveals-different-Coco-Chanel.html;jsessionid=937B2BF57873B581B43CFB83F08FEF10#ixzz0MsipmXo8

Best Cities For Singles 2009

It hasn't been an easy year for New Yorkers, what with the fall of Wall Street, a media-industry shakeout and a significant decrease in consumer spending. Just in June U.S. retail sales experienced a year-over-year decrease of 9%, to $342.1 billion, according to the Commerce Department.

These financial stresses have brought a shift in priorities for singles: Living in New York City no longer requires making your first million by the age of 30, but instead means finding happiness with another person (though having achieved the former certainly can't hurt with the latter).
In Depth: Best Cities for Singles
citysingles_419x98.jpg

With an unemployment rate of 8.2%, many of this metro area's finest unmarried folks-- 28% of the overall population--are taking advantage of generous severances and enjoying the spoils of the city--including its 35,000 restaurants, 3,800 bars and 734 museums--with dates they've found online. The New York metro area boasts a larger number of active accounts on dating site Match.com than any other place in the country, making up 8% of the entire site's active members.

While it's the biggest metro included--New York should have even more active members--other large metros don't participate nearly as much. For example, only 2% of Angelinos, who live in the second-largest metro in the country, actively use the site. (Match is based in Dallas, Texas, which ranks 17th on our list.)

It's still not cheap to live in New York--the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in the borough of Manhattan, for example, is $3,522-- but the average entry-level salary is a lot higher too, at $35,593. (For singles making entry-level money, there are more affordable accommodations in Brooklyn and Queens, as well as across the river in New Jersey.) The average rent for a one-bedroom in Milwaukee is just $813.65, but the average starting salary is only $30,453. Close competition with New York includes Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Washington, D.C., which round out the top five best cities for singles.
Behind the Numbers

To generate our list, we ranked 40 of the largest continental U.S. metropolitan statistical areas in seven different categories: coolness, cost of living alone, culture, job growth, online dating participation, nightlife and the ratio of singles to the entire population of the metro. Each metro was assigned a ranking of 1 to 40 in each category, based on quantitative data, and all categories were weighted equally. The ranks were then totaled to determine the final rankings. A metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is a geographic entity defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics.

The biggest factor in the rankings this year was an increase in online dating, not just in New York but across the entire U.S. Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D., a sociology professor at University of Washington in Seattle and the relationship expert at Perfectmatch.com, says that the Seattle-based dating site has seen a 48% increase in subscriptions year-over-year. She believes that it's directly related to the recession.

"I don't think that it's an accident," says Schwartz. "People are telling us that when things are tough, core needs are most important. And love--someone to share your life with--is a core need."

Of course, not every single is looking to settle down. But that's why our top cities offer a little bit of everything for every kind of person. Washington, D.C., for example, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country--6.2%, compared with a national average of 9.1%--so this metro area is a promising spot for those who are single as well as ambitious. Boston, on the other hand, is ideal for those unsure about their future prospects. Home to over 40 colleges and universities, those seeking graduate degrees find plenty of like-minded peers around them.

Farther down on the list, spots like Austin and Portland prove to be up-and-coming singles capitals. From March's annual South by Southwest music, film and media festival to the city's ever-growing creative community of artists, musicians and designers, Austin ranks high on the coolness scale. It also gets points for job growth; the number of jobs in the city will increase by 17.5% over the next five years, according to New York-based research firm Moodys' Economy.com. And while Portland is pricey--a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1,124 on average, and the entry-level salary is below the national average--the city's indie music and arts scenes, as well as its myriad bars and clubs, are all positives.

But wherever you live, even if it's Jacksonville, Fla., which falls dead last on our list, there's a community of singles making the best of that particular place. Whether that means embracing the great outdoors around Denver or buying the next round of tequila shots in nightlife-oriented Virginia Beach, there are plenty of other like-minded people on the prowl. And right now, the easiest place to find them is online.
Full Methodology

To determine the best city for singles, we ranked 40 of the largest continental U.S. metropolitan statistical areas in seven different categories: coolness, cost of living alone, culture, job growth, online dating, nightlife and number of singles. Each metro is assigned a ranking of 1 to 40 in each category, based on quantitative data. All categories are weighted equally. The ranks are then totaled to determine the final rankings. A metropolitan statistical area (MSA) is a geographic entity defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics.

Coolness: To determine coolness, market research company Harris Interactive conducted a poll in July 2009 of adults from across the U.S., each of whom was asked, "Among the following U.S. cities, which one do you think is the coolest?" Data were provided by Harris Interactive.

Cost of living alone: Our proprietary cost of living alone index is determined by the average cost of a metro area's one-bedroom apartment rent, a movie ticket and a six-pack of Heineken. Additionally, we factored in entry-level salary data. Raw data came from the Accra Cost of Living Index, provided by the Arlington, Va.-based Council for Community and Economic Research and New York-based Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

Culture: Our cultural index is determined by the number of museums, sports teams and live theater and concert venues per capita in each metro area. Data were provided by New York-based AOL City Guide and the U.S. Census Bureau. Job growth: Job growth rankings are determined by the projected percentage of job growth over the next five years for each metro. Data were provided by New York-based research firm Moody's Economy.com.

Online Dating: Online dating rates are determined by the percentage of active profiles in each city of the overall active member data based of Dallas, Texas-based dating site Match.com.

Nightlife: Nightlife is based on the number of restaurants, bars and nightclubs per capita in each standard metropolitan area. Data provided by AOL City Guide.

Admit it -- you used to wear Crocs Crocs

Blue and yellow Crocs decorated with plastic "Jibbitz."

In retrospect, the rise of Crocs seems improbable -- impossible almost -- even to the people who rode the wave all the way to the top.

"For a while, they were just right there, in the middle of American culture," says Richard Polk, the owner of Pedestrian Shops and ComfortableShoes.com, based in Boulder, Colo. Polk's store was the first real shoe store to stock the crazy-looking plastic shoes, a few years back, when they first roared out of nearby Aurora to take the world by storm. Polk was a believer; not only did his shop get on the bandwagon early, but he also wore a pair all through a campaign for Boulder City Council in 2005. Yet looking back, even he can't quite believe it. "It was amazing -- here you got grown-ups talking about serious stuff, wearing royal blue shoes," Polk says. "I don't think that'll ever happen again."

Which is sort of the problem for Crocs Inc. now. Reports about the company's future look bleak -- it lost $185.1 million last year, shed 2,000 jobs, and revenue in the first quarter of 2009 declined by 32 percent. And yes, you read that right -- they had grown so big so quickly that they laid off 2,000 people. Just three years ago, Crocs went public in a splashy stock offering, raising $200 million; now it trades at about three bucks a share, down from a high of nearly $70 in October 2007. Analysts wonder whether a scheduled September debt payment will do the firm in.

Crocs appears to have been a classic victim of its own success. Founded by some friends who somehow got their hands on a new Canadian technology to make lightweight, bacteria-resistant foam, the company launched in 2002, aimed at boaters, who might need waterproof footwear. Things started slowly enough. They sold to people who liked them more for their comfort and support -- cooks, nurses, waiters, anyone who needed to be on their feet for a long time.

But three years ago, they somehow just caught fire, spreading from the heartland to the coasts in a reversal of the usual trend path. New York chef/erstwhile Food Network star Mario Batali endorsed them without reservations, buying dozens of pairs; he would go on to be such an effective evangelist that the company launched a special Batali line. Polk's store started selling as many as 5,000 a month, between the bricks-and-mortar locations and the Web site. By the summer of 2006, Crocs were everywhere. "You've tried to ignore them, but they've spread like vermin," the Washington Post's Style section sneered in an Aug. 1, 2006, piece on the trend. Crocs didn't just roll with the boom, it pushed it along -- the company took out ads in Vanity Fair, with the tag line "Ugly can be beautiful."

That ad campaign gets to the heart of why the rise, let alone the fall, of Crocs was such a mystery. The shoes are ugly. You know they're ugly. People knew they were ugly even as they flocked to buy them; they celebrated, they reveled in their ugliness. They created a whole tacky subculture around them, sticking little plastic charms -- known as "Jibbitz" -- in the holes that dot the tops of the shoes. You could decorate your shoes with hamburgers or sharks, and for some strange reason, people actually did. The shoes sold by the millions. By 2007, even George W. Bush was tromping around in the things.

And Crocs, like any good business, expanded its operations to meet demand. It bought the company that made the Jibbitz, in a vertical integration move straight out of Andrew Carnegie's playbook. It ramped up production, building factories in Canada and Mexico to churn out more and more of the shoes. It set up distribution centers in Japan and Holland to help shovel the things out to a global audience. It tried to launch a line of clothes, made out of the same synthetic material it used to make the shoes.

But the material, it turned out, was part of the problem. With the exception of a few well-publicized incidents where the shoes got caught in escalators, Crocs, it seemed, were virtually indestructible. Which meant no one ever had to buy replacement pairs. Perhaps no one at Crocs HQ had heard the term "planned obsolescence," or seen the movie "The Man in the White Suit." At some point, the company saturated its market and suddenly ... everyone who ever had any intention of owning a pair of Crocs, did. And sales came crashing down. The recession, when it began last year, was the final blow.

Now, in the summer of 2009, just three years after Crocs rocketed up, it's hard to find a pair on anyone over the age of 10. Wandering around the Mall, the White House and the Capitol over the last week, I saw plenty of tourists strolling in flip-flops, sneakers, business shoes -- and only a handful of Crocs. A few years ago, it would have been impossible to walk a block through downtown without spotting them in some garish color.

"So many things happened to have their growth be on such an unrealistic path that when the economy pulled back, they had just figured out how to make more -- and they needed less," Polk said. "You couldn't sustain that fairy dust thing. There's just no reason why such a large percentage of the families in America needed to have half a dozen pairs under their kids' beds." (Incidentally, while Polk is still selling shoes, he's no longer on Boulder's City Council. He served one term, thanks to his Croc-walking campaign, but didn't seek reelection after he was arrested for marijuana possession in 2006.)

Now in its death throes, Crocs has turned to more and more exotic styles. There's the Santa Cruz, vaguely modeled on classic espadrilles -- a pair of which, in full disclosure, I must cop to owning. There are boots, known as the Nadia. There are models with high heels, and golf shoes. There is even a whole run of Crocs lined with fur, known as the Mammoth, which Salon's Rebecca Traister sheepishly admitted to purchasing for her boyfriend.

But if Crocs is to survive its debt burden, it may have to retrench, getting back to basics and its core market -- the chefs, the nurses and the others who bought the shoes in the early days, as well as kids, who retailers say like the shoes because they don't need help tying them. The new CEO, John Duerden, has indicated as much, saying the company knows there's still a market out there for its products and is taking steps to slim down to make sure Crocs can serve it. When pressed, though, he's also defended the recent diversification. "We currently have more than 120 styles of casual, comfortable footwear, including sandals, boots, heels, wedges, flats and functional footwear for people who work on their feet or who have foot or back problems, along with our signature clogs," Duerden wrote in a snippy post on the company's blog after the Washington Post reported on its financial problems.

Regardless, the Crocs Inc. we all knew and loved -- or hated -- a few years ago seems to be a thing of the past. Either the classic Crocs shoes will be sold, quietly, to niche markets, or the company will turn itself into just another anonymous manufacturer of cheap, more or less well-made footwear that looks indistinguishable from anything else on anyone's feet. And all those brightly colored, indestructible marvels will, one day, clog up our landfills. And future archaeologists will find them and say, "Wow. These are some ugly shoes."

Nu Skin Chairman Recognized With 2009 International Award for Outstanding Business Performance

PROVO, Utah, July 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Nu Skin Enterprises‘ (NYSE: NUS) founder and Chairman of the Board Blake Roney was honored yesterday with the International Stevie Award as the top chairman of the board by the 2009 International Business Awards. The International Business Awards are the only global, all-encompassing business awards program honoring great performances in business. This recognition comes on the heels of the company’s largest revenue year ever.

“As founder and chairman of the board for Nu Skin, Blake Roney has shaped the foundation and successful direction of this company,” said Truman Hunt, Nu Skin president and chief executive officer. “Nu Skin’s 25 years of success can, in many ways, be attributed to Blake, his values, his abilities as a businessman and his efforts to improve lives. He represents the company’s mission to ‘be a force for good’ in the world and has demonstrated his passion to improve lives by empowering people with innovative products, rewarding business opportunities and an enriching and uplifting culture.”

Roney’s achievements include developing an enterprise that established a legacy of demonstrating its difference through its people, product, culture and opportunity. The company has grown from a few thousand dollars in start-up capital to a billion-dollar publicly-traded company with more than 750,000 independent distributors operating in 48 markets. Nu Skin boasts an impressive portfolio of skin care and nutritional anti-aging products, and a direct selling model that attracts both full-time and supplemental income seekers. In addition, the company has facilitated the donation of more than 155 million meals through its Nourish the Children initiative and has donated more than $17.5 million to improving lives of children through the Nu Skin Force for Good Foundation.

Recipients of International Stevie Award trophies were selected from more than 1,700 entries received from organizations and individuals in more than 30 countries. Nu Skin has previously been honored with three Stevie Awards - two American Business Awards for Most Innovative Company for the BioPhotonic Scanner in 2005, and for Best Corporate Social Responsibility Program for the company’s Nourish the Children business initiative in 2007. In 2008, Nu Skin Korea received an International Business Award for Best Corporate Social Responsibility Program in Asia.

About The Stevie Awards

Nicknamed the Stevie(R) for the Greek word “crowned,” the awards will be officially presented to winners at a gala dinner on Monday, September 14 in New York City. Stevie Awards are conferred in four programs: The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Honoring companies of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about The Stevie Awards at www.stevieawards.com.

The Company

For 25 years, Nu Skin Enterprises, Inc. has been demonstrating its tradition of innovation through its product portfolio, independent business opportunity and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Nu Skin’s scientific leadership in both skin care and nutrition has established Nu Skin as a premier anti-aging company, evidenced in its patent-pending ageLOC(TM) anti-aging platform and flagship products including the Galvanic Spa(R) System II, Tru Face(R) Essence Ultra, LifePak(R) nano and the g3 nutrition beverage. A global direct selling company, Nu Skin operates in 48 markets worldwide and has more than 750,000 independent sales representatives. Nu Skin Enterprises is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “NUS.” More information is available at http://www.nuskinenterprises.com.