Stephen, your uplifted chin and smirks, unreserved superiority complex and misanthropic nature will be sorely missed.
Captions to animate each photo: 1) I'm so above you I can't even lower my head to see you, 2) I'm simply better than you and 3) I'm recoiled at the thought that we have to share the same air right now.
At least he *is* talented!
I really racked my brain wondering what I would have done had I been assigned the seat next to this guy. Keep in mind that his body mass also extended out of his seat area on the other side, not seen in this photo. As close as we've become over the years I don't feel able to share with you my thought process.
You could say I was surprised when at the end of the flight a little female NYU student with nose ring and ipod emerged out of the seat next to him. Understandably she had gone into 'shrink yourself to a third of your size' mode and most likely punched herself in the face to go into to 'pass-out' mode.
* Flight back from LA on Hawaii trip.
Look at how out of sync they were:
This was the most together they ever got:
Guess which dancer was the most elegant and skilled? Hint: The one opening her legs least.
As I child I flew a lot and fortunately, most often on Singapore Airlines. While that airline still seems like the best, I discovered a pretty cool airline flying from LA to Honolulu...can you guess which one??
Hawaiian Air!! Where everything is purple!
I saved these purple utensils and put them on my mantel and gaze over at them and cry with joy every few days:
HAWAII!!!
The light!!
Darker:
Dark:
Green:
Greener:
Aaaahhh:
You kill me!
With such pretty pay phones it's no wonder you'd be a meth dealer conducting business from these phones and contributing to the horrific meth (aka ice) problem in Hawaii.
This was the beach, Waikiki Beach, that we couldn't go in because it was contaminated from a recent sewage spill:
Me and my bro, he's tanning, I'm hiding:
There are a lot of old limos that are used as cabs in Hawaii.
First in the series of limo as background is me and the OG (my ojichan-godfather that Jonah nicknamed the OG as in Original Gangster):
Me and my dear obachan-godmother, the classiest, most lovely lady I've ever known:
Me and Syuri, my older godbrother Hiromi's extremely precocious and charming four year old daughter:
Series: Syuri modeling hats in limo:
You have a lot of series in this post, you say?
Yes!!
One of two in the series of her shoving stuff up her nose. She was after my heart:
I only used this earplug once after she did this. And then I threw them out!
The tall building behind the Louis Vuitton store was my favorite.
This is what Syuri thinks of that building and my commentary on it:
This is a Monkey Pod tree. It's the OG of trees.
First in the series of 'When you ask a random person to take a photo for you they'll often suck at it'. What's that space to the right??
My signature shot:
Ed and Syuri had a swingin' time!
Swinging makes Syuri dizzy:
Really dizzy:
Pineapples come from the ground and not from trees, people!
Brave demonstration for size:
On the biggest tourist trap of an attraction, the Dole Pineapple Plantation Train Tour, I saw the thinnest farmer and horse I've ever seen:
Syuri checking out Ed's panties:
She wouldn't let go:
They made up quickly as everyone should after getting sexually harassed:
And rolled around in bed. Let's hope this is the most rolling around in bed with a boy that Syuri does for a loooong time:
On a road trip to the North Shore...you gotta install the Japanese speaking navigation system!
Americans in the back:
Rainbow front and center!
Tards at Kaihlua Beach:
My younger (of my two godbrothers) godbrother Yasushi, his very tanned skin and two bright floaty things:
Me, my bro and Yasushi's fiance Keiko whom we met for the first time on this trip. Don't worry, we liked her otherwise we would have drowned her.
White smiling girl and Dark smiling guy:
Why do I look pale?
Keiko and Yasushi, very cute and very near:
Keiko and Yasushi, very far:
Garlic Shrimp on the North Shore!!
Truly delicious, shell and all:
Second in the 'When you ask a random person to take a photo for you they'll often suck at it' series.
Here's the OG on the Beach series.
As eyes can tell, the beach is his element:
Look! It's like we're in Japan!
Ramen!
And more ramen! There can never be enough!
Japanese porno. $60 a pop. It's expensive for the good stuff!
Sweet statue:
Scratch & Sniff it:
Here we are, looking like it's me, my husband and daughter!
Sometimes you forget to zoom back out:
Fancy diner and dinner:
My brother got so spoiled on this trip that he refused to ride with us and rented his own limo to "stretch out his arms and legs". I quickly took a picture before I went back to the other limo:
I fought to have him share his limo to the airport with me:
My godmother and Syuri had folded cranes and instead of throwing them out, my godmother wrote a very elegant note thanking the hotel staff and asking them to please enjoy the cranes - you can't make up this classiness and kindness.
So let me piggyback off that and say thanks for enduring this neverending post!
David Copperfield has won me over.
Excerpt:
The illusionist and assistants Cathy Daly and Mia Volmut were walking near CityPlace toward their tour bus parked at the Kravis when thugs approached them about 11:15 p.m. The group had gone to a steakhouse for dinner after Copperfield's sixth and last show here.
According to the police report, this is what happened next: The Malibu pulled up behind the group, and two of the four young men in the car came out holding handguns. One ordered Daly to "give me what you have." Daly handed over $400 from her pockets. Riley, meanwhile, allegedly stuck a gun in Volmut's face and asked for her purse, and she, too, gave it up. In it were 200 euros, $100, her passport, plane tickets and a Razr cellphone.
When Copperfield's turn came, Riley was bamboozled.
Copperfield told Page Two he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them.
"Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said.
via Kottke.
You can read more about her impressive life and accomplishments here. I agree with Jason that her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities
RIP.
Great, it's yours!
You can pick it up in room 910 of the Imperial Hawaii in Waikiki, Honolulu.
Update: Della Peretti from Oakland, CA has donated $50 for this cause!! Thanks Della, aka awesome mother in law!!
On May 6 (Happy Birthday Bro!!) I will be walking with my dear friend Celeste in the Revlon Walk Against Women's Cancers starting in Times Square and ending in Central Park. I figured, what better activity do I have to do that morning? And the answer was, "nothing".
You can support me via my fundraising page or join the walk! My friend Sarah Verdone will also be walking and you can read about her very interesting personal story here.
My buddy Zee Myers somehow got it in her head that because she's half Japanese she should live in Tokyo for a year. Well congratulations, Zee, you've punched your NYC friends in the stomach and made a great decision for yourself!
Thank god she bought a camera before she left and has been making good use of it.
Check out her Flickr account. Here are highlights:
Her living arrangement perfectly complements her OCD tendencies:
Her BFFs:
Her Tokyo diet:
Her Tokyo diet continued:
Her bathtub:
A gaijin ruined the picture:
Miss you and can't wait to see you in Tokyo in September!! Gennkidene!
When you're up late working until 4 am on an exciting new project that will launch soon, it's fun! When you wake up the following morning and your eyes hurt and you feel slightly nauseous it's not nearly as fun. You also think, "It never used to feel this bad to not get enough sleep. I must be getting older." And that thought process isn't much fun either.
Hint: The project involves cartoons!! Look forward to it. Please.
Check out the CherryWatch at the lovely Brooklyn Botanic Gardens! Looks like they've started blooming and peak bloom will hopefully be during next weekend's Cherry Blossom Festival.
Longtime readers may recall a little love affair I had with the gardens back in the day...it looked like this:
I can't wait for next weekend!
Be warned: When you sit on a plane for many hours such as I did (11 hours to Hawaii, 9.5 hours on the way back) your butt and tailbone will be sore two days after you get back.
"Weather forecast for tonight: dark." - George Carlin
I have figured out the best way to reenter NYC after a vacation! Go to a benefit, two hours after landing at JFK!!
As guests of Katherine Sailer and Ken Lerer we attended the Riverkeeper Benefit which was hosted by SNL comedian Darrell Hammond (he does the best imitation of Clinton), featured musician Carly Simon (and her kids!) and honored Veronique & Bob Pittman for their philanthropy. The highlight for me was hearing Bobby Kennedy Jr speak as he is an impassioned speaker and his knowledge of all the ways our waters are being polluted and how we can help is inspiring. Although when he spoke of our fish being the most polluted they've ever been, I wished we hadn't had fish as our entree...
It was fantastically fun and an important event that raised a significant amount of money. If you're so inclined, please support this great organization. I'm pretty certain it's a great investment in our future.
Look how happy I am to be back in NYC. That's the great thing about living in New York. You can have great vacations but always be excited to come home!
As I was packing to leave, I stubbed my little toe, the nail cracked in half right down the middle (I would never spare you the important details, my fine fans - photos to follow. JK Rowling!) and blood spurted out all over the hotel carpet.
When asked to take off my shoes at airport security (of course I had on my gladiator resembling birkenstocks that you can't hide anything in - they're silver btw) I pointed at my feeble toe and said, "My toenail cracked in half so I don't think I should get it near this floor."
And that was it!!
I highly recommend nearly destroying your pinky toe to avoid the nonsense and nuisance of taking your shoes off for airport security.
The eating of French food is great.
The consequences of eating French food...not so great.
Mahalo* for allowing me to share my digestive problems with you!
My Hawaiian adventure comes to an end today. Had a great time with my ohana*.
Aloha*!
* From here on out I will pepper my posts with at least three Hawaiian words. Look forward to it!!
Thanks to everyone for their love and support regarding the contaminated beaches issue (except Lupe whose comments continue to illustrate a very lonely, poor and hateful woman and I don't understand why she reads my blog - Hey girl! Why are you standing outside my window staring at me? Stop ok??!!).
The North Shore beaches were in fact gorgeous and swimmable as was Hanauma Bay.
The water, earth and air are just divine...photographic evidence to follow!!
Mahalo!
To all the haters out there, you'll be happy to know that I'm sitting on Waikiki Beach staring at the beautifully blue ocean and unable to enter it because of the contamination left over from the sewage spill a week and a half ago.
We got to the beach this morning with all intentions of swimming in the ocean because at least Waikiki Beach had opened again after being closed for a week. We quickly noticed that there were very few people in the water and then a lifeguard warned us against it, telling us about her lifeguard friends who got infections where their board shorts rubbed against their waists...just from being in the beautifully blue water.
It makes me so sad to see Hare Krishna evangelists at airports. I know it could be worse and they could have those vacant eyes and be heroin addicts. And I know that from their perspective they've found 'the truth'. I still can't help but feel deeply distraught by the fact that I didn't get to brainwash them into being my unpaid personal assistants before the Hare Krishnas got to them.
I woke up this morning and said to Jonah, I dreamed about Top Chef last night! That aggressively annoying character Stephen was proving all that he knew, the other character so and so were doing blah blah blah and then the judges were like this and that" and Jonah replied, "Congratulations, your mind has been colonized by TV".
And that is just one of the gazillion reasons I love my hubby :-)
Compliments of a fantastic birthday gift from my brother (3 months early), I will shortly be headed to...hint provided below. You only get one guess.
This is a great great great movie. One of my favorites. Watch it. You'll thank me.
Apparently the beaches are still contaminated so I'll most likely be sitting by the pool - just what I hoped to do in Hawaii!
I'll be testing the limits of my sidekick as blog machine in Oahu.
Nerds! This is a call to meet!
This event at Eyebeam tomorrow evening will be fun. Jonah hosts the remarkable Yochai Benkler as they discuss his promising new book.
Refreshments will be served. If you only come for that, you're pathetic. Or very very thirsty and hungry.
After seeing the Swiss Guards at the Vatican up close, I have to say they should really be called Swiss Hot Guards ('hot guards' should be said with the same ease and rythem as 'hot dogs').
"The guards must be Catholic males with Swiss citizenship who have completed basic training with the Swiss military and can obtain certificates of good conduct. Recruits must be between 19 and 30 years of age and at least 174 cm (5ft 9in) tall." - Wikipedia
*@ the Vatican on our honeymoon last summer.
This is the weirdest post. Where did it come from? I tell you, my readers, it's as if I'm just a vessel and something larger than me, than even us!, composed this immortally nonsensical post.
We went to see Tsotsi the other night and learned that 'tsotsi' means 'thug' in the African language Sesotho. Although it was decent, interesting to see a South Africa I hadn't before and had good music, I I found myself wondering what the Sesotho word for 'dissapointing' is...
This magic show is pretty awesome:
The magician Steve Cohen does magic in a suite in the Waldorf Astoria every Friday night. It's a cool 19th century parlor atmosphere in which he does slight of hand and very weird mind-reading tricks. The $55 ticket price is a little steep but it's worth dressing up and enjoying an evening of good old fashioned magic and wows.
I suppose because he describes himself as the Millionaire's Magician it made sense to have a framed Forbes list.
Here we are, all fancied up! Oh, too far away.
Too close!
I was reprimanded for trying to take photos (yes, I was trying to catch his tricks on camera!) so I'll just have to make do with photos from his site.
Here's a drawing of him and let me tell you, you know magic is involved when he's drawn like this...
And really looks like this! Damn, me!
It was very fun. Highly recommended.
We then had dinner at Basta Pasta, an Italian restaurant run by Japanese people which is recommended too!
Updated Update! I have finally found the best bed sheets ever!
Update: I hate to have to bring this to your attention but after a few weeks of using the bed sheets I went on and on about...
I see that they PILL.
These are the softest sheets ever to be found. And I have an extensive team deployed in search of the softest sheets. They are 100% Modal which is a fiber created from the beechwood tree. I don't really understand how that creates the softest sheets but I know that these sheets are like silk and your oldest softest T-shirt combined.
If in need of sheets and you don't already have these, consider yourself having received the greatest piece of knowledge you could have received today. Roll around in them and rub your face all over them, all the while thinking, "AndreaHarner.com *does* know best!"
This little guy reminds me of my first pet, Julie, the sweetest, smartest rabbit who was potty trained and would snuggle right up to me and my brother and sleep.
For more cuteness, click here.
Thanks to Wonder Girl for the link!
I encourage you to check out these sites to learn about animal testing for beauty products. Is there anything more incongruous? When a *beauty* product needs to be dripped into a rabbits eyeball to see its effect, it's clear how far removed we've become from what is sensical and humane. I say we buy products that don't need to be tested on animals because they don't contain potentially toxic ingredients to begin with and leave the poor animals out of our madness. Cruelty Free products abound!
Leaping Bunny: Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics
Skin Deep: News about the safety of popular health & beauty brands
I donate a small but well intentioned amount every month to the HSUS, ASPCA and PETA. If anyone wants to join me I'll increase my contribution now!
P.S. Urban Decay is cool.
Update: I love The Apprentice & Wife Swap too. Yes, I am addicted to reality tv but only *good* reality tv.
Hints, in order of my affections:
1) 
2) 
3) 
My face still itches like a mother. I wish I had this paw to scratch it with.
* This paw belongs to Peter Green's kitty D.
It is delicious:
For making me look like this:
Notice my red inflamed skin on my face versus my non rash skin on my neck:
It itches like hell:
And continues to itch:
And itch:
Here are the ingredients - let's try figuring out which is the problem! I have my money on the parabens.
Purified water (aqua), glycerin, cetyl ricinoleate, isohexadecane, ceresin, glyceryl stearate, water. titanium dioxide (C177891), propylene glycol, styrene acrylates copolymer, hydrolyzed corn starch, ammonium hydroxide, phenoxyethanol, methylparaben, ethyl-paraben, butylparaben, propylparaben, isopropyl lauroyl sarcosinate, sericin, hydroxydecyl ubiquinone (idebenone), sodium PCA, steareth-2, PEG-60 hydrogenated castor oil, PEG-100 stearate, glycosaminoglycans, linoleic acid, linolenic acid, tocopherol, millet (panicum miliaceum) extract, cholesterol, ceramide III, dimethicone, PEG-50 dipolyhydroxystearate, magnesium aluminum silicate, xanthan gum, cetyl hydroxy-ethylcellulose, disodium EDTA, BHT, diazolidinyl urea, methylparaben, propylparaben.
Prince understated it a little. As far as I can remember, it's always snowed in April.
Earlier today:
Arthur Mac & Cheese:
Here's what it looks like raw:
And cooked:
The only thing that could be cuter is the cute mac and cheese in a cute Doraemon bowl!
With a cute little utensil!
The end:
I'm sorry you had to live through this post.
We watched Word Wars
Jonah really wants me to write about how he got a "bingo", the significance of which you will learn from this documentary and about how he put down "quay" on a triple word score with the "q" on a double letter score.
It's worth renting this and warring with your loved ones!
~You try to write checks your body can't cash~
*Thanks to Anil!
Guys, notice anything different? If you don't, you have some serious problems.
AndreaHarner.com finally feels comfortably clothed and she has Cat Savard, a talented and cool designer in Australia to thank!
If your site is screaming for a makeover, don't hesitate to contact Cat! And don't worry about her being far away because obviously greatness can be achieved transpacifically.
Please leave comments if stuff isn't working right. Thanks, team.
Speaking of 3d glasses...is there anyone out there who is an expert on optics or knows of someone who is? There's a project that needs his/her expertise. I'll reward you with unlimited reading rights to this site if you can put me in touch with this person.
What were you saying? I couldn't quite hear you when my 3d glasses covered my real glasses...
*More from trip to Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria in 2002 or 2003.
You'll love this button!
*Elevator in Linz, Austria several years ago.
