Anaheim Angels 2010 Season Preview and Projections

The Angels won the division title last year for the sixth time in seven years and are one of the most successful franchises in the NHL, but a very important tool of resistance-season makeover, you must fight to overcome the performance of last season. Chone Figgins and Fini John Lackey. His playoff experience was for the 2010 Anaheim Angels invaluable. They are the only players left on his tour of the 2002 World Series. To make matters worse, they have an adequate replacement for the leadoff spot in the rotation Figgins. Brandon Wood and Erick Aybar are both expected to be vaccinated job, but Aybar has to prove he can hit consistently and wood prototypical leadoff hitter is not yours. Angels are not really appropriate, or more. It is the work of Brian Fuentes lose, but has not shown much in the last two seasons. Fernando Rodney might be up, but too close to a major competitor comes to this level of uncertainty at this stage of the season and have so few options. Watch the Angels to trade before the season as one of the keys in the middle of the harvest season team in the World Series contender could vault. Between the loss of two key players and the uncertainty of two important positions until the Angels win in 15:10 games this season. They still have a pretty good shot at the division, but they are good, to Paris, go after the World Series.

What Big Eyes You Have, Dear, but Are Those Contacts Risky

Of all the strange outfits and accessories Lady Gaga wore in her “Bad Romance” video, who would have guessed that the look that would catch fire would be the huge anime-style eyes she flashed in the bathtub?Lady Gaga’s wider-than-life eyes were most likely generated by a computer, but teenagers and young women nationwide have been copying them with special contact lenses imported from Asia. Known as circle lenses, these are colored contacts — sometimes in weird shades like violet and pink — that make the eyes appear larger because they cover not just the iris, as normal lenses do, but also part of the whites.“I’ve noticed a lot of girls in my town have started to wear them a lot,” said Melody Vue, a 16-year-old in Morganton, N.C., who owns 22 pairs and wears them regularly. She said her friends tended to wear circle lenses for theirFacebook photos.These lenses might be just another beauty fad if not for the facts that they are contraband and that eye doctors express grave concern over them. It is illegal in the United States to sell any contact lenses — corrective or cosmetic — without a prescription, and no major maker of contact lenses in the United States currently sells circle lenses.Yet the lenses are widely available online, typically for $20 to $30 a pair, both in prescription strengths and purely decorative. On message boards and in YouTube videos, young women and teenage girls have been spreading the word about where to buy them.The lenses give wearers a childlike, doe-eyed appearance. The look is characteristic of Japanese anime and is also popular in Korea. Fame-seekers there called “ulzzang girls” post cute but sexy head shots of themselves online, nearly always wearing circle lenses to accentuate their eyes. (“Ulzzang” means “best face” in Korean, but it is also shorthand for “pretty.”)Now that circle lenses have gone mainstream in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, they are turning up in American high schools and on college campuses. “In the past year, there’s been a sharp increase in interest here in the U.S.,” said Joyce Kim, a founder ofSoompi.com, an Asian pop fan site with a forum devoted to circle lenses. “Once early adopters have adequately posted about it, discussed it and reviewed them, it’s now available to everyone.”Ms. Kim, who lives in San Francisco and is 31, said that some friends her age wear circle lenses almost every day. “It’s like wearing mascara or eyeliner,” she said.Sites that sell contact lenses approved by the Food and Drug Administration are supposed to verify customers’ prescriptions with their eye doctors. By contrast, circle lens Web sites allow customers to choose the strength of their lenses as freely as their color.Kristin Rowland, a college senior from Shirley, N.Y., has several pairs of circle lenses, including purple ones that are prescription strength and lime green ones that she wears behind her glasses. Without them, she said, her eyes look “really tiny”; the lenses “make them look like they exist.”Ms. Rowland has a part-time job at a Waldbaum’s supermarket, where customers sometimes tell her, “Your eyes look huge today,” she said. Even her manager expressed curiosity, asking, “Where did you get those things?” she said.Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., was a bit surprised, too. When first contacted last month, she did not know what circle lenses were or the extent to which they had caught on. Soon after, she wrote in an e-mail message, “Consumers risk significant eye injuries — even blindness” when they buy contact lenses without a valid prescription or help from an eye professional.Dr. S. Barry Eiden, an optometrist in Deerfield, Ill., who is chairman of the contact lens and cornea section of the American Optometric Association, said that people selling circle lenses online “are encouraging the avoidance of professional care.” He warned that ill-fitting contact lenses could deprive the eye of oxygen and cause serious vision problems.Nina Nguyen, a 19-year-old Rutgers student from Bridgewater, N.J., said she was wary at first. “Our eyes are precious,” she said. “I wasn’t going to put any type of thing in my eyes.”But after she saw how many students at Rutgers had circle lenses — and the groundswell of users online — she relented. Now she describes herself as “a circle lens addict.”“What made me comfortable is so many girls out there wearing them,” Ms. Nguyen said.A makeup artist named Michelle Phan introduced many Americans to circle lenses through a video tutorial on YouTube, where she demonstrates how to get “crazy, googly Lady Gaga eyes.” Ms. Phan’s video, called “Lady Gaga Bad Romance Look,” has been viewed more than 9.4 million times.“In Asia, it’s all about the eyes in makeup,” said Ms. Phan, a Vietnamese-American blogger who is now Lancôme’s first video makeup artist. “They like the whole innocent doll-like look, almost like anime.”These days girls of many races are embracing the look. “Circle lenses are not just for Asian people,” said Crystal Ezeoke, 17, a second-generation Nigerian from Lewisville, Tex. In videos she posts to YouTube, Ms. Ezeoke’s gray lenses make her eyes look an otherworldly blue.At Lenscircle.com, which is based in Toronto, most of the customers are Americans, ages 15 to 25, who heard about circle lenses through YouTube reviewers, said Alfred Wong, 25, the site’s founder. “A lot of people like the dolly-eyed look, because it’s cute,” he said. “It’s still an emerging trend” in America, he added, but “it’s getting more and more popular.”Jason Aw, an owner of PinkyParadise.com, a site based in Malaysia, is well aware that his shipments to the United States are illegal. But he is convinced that his circle lenses are “safe; that is why a lot of customers will recommend” them to others.His “job,” he wrote in an e-mail message, is “to provide a platform” for people who want to buy the lenses but cannot do so locally.Girls like Ms. Vue, the 16-year-old in North Carolina, help steer customers to sites where circle lenses are sold. She has posted 13 reviews of circle lenses on YouTube, enough to merit her a coupon code at tokioshine.com, which gives her viewers 10 percent off. “I have been getting tons of messages asking where to get circle lenses, so this is finally a legitimate answer for you,” she said in a recent video.Ms. Vue was 14 when she begged her parents to get her first pair, she said. These days, however, she is having second thoughts about them — but not for health or safety reasons.Circle lenses have just grown too popular, Ms. Vue said. “It kind of makes me not want to wear them anymore, because everyone is wearing them,” she said.

The treatment beauty teatment of the week

Summer tonic for menTo all the men out there: head to Gentlemen's Tonic for its Summer Tonic – a body MOT to get you beach-ready. First, the hard skin on your feet is removed and toenails are cleaned. The therapist then begins a deep cleanse and exfoliation of the back, shoulders and upper arms, removing all impurities. A wonderful massage completes the treatment. Dove Spa Bottoms UpThe Dove Spa Bottoms Up treatment begins with a brisk dry-body brush to remove dead skin and increase blood flow in the legs and buttocks. This is followed by a deep massage using low-frequency electro currents to shift toxins and penetrate the muscle, lifting the bottom and eliminating the appearance of stretch marks. You leave beach-ready. BriteSmile teeth whitening The new BriteSmile teeth-whitening treatment at the London Smile Clinic is quick, pain-free and dazzlingly effective – it should be, as it was developed by a former Nasa scientist. If you're lucky you might even have Dr James Russell, the dishy cosmetic dentist from the Channel 4 programme Embarrassing Bodies, perform your treatment. Cupcake in the Oven Massage What better way to start maternity leave than with a visit toCupcake Mum for a delicious Cupcake in the Oven Massage. A bed of warm water pillows provides comfortable support while a therapist massages away all your aches and pains, concentrating on those areas most affected by the physical demands of pregnancy. You will walk away feeling relaxed and pampered. Clarins advanced facialThe Ragdale Hall spa is a great escape from World Cup fever. Follow up a morning in the steam rooms with a wonderfully restorative Clarins Advanced Facial. Over the course of an hour the face is thoroughly cleansed and exfoliated using products best suited to your skin's needs. As they are being absorbed, your hands receive a blissful massage, completing the feeling of utter zen.

The Ritual of the First Date, Circa 2010

THERE are nearly four million single people in New York City. A number of them are not as original as they think.
New data from a Web site suggests that not only do many people plan similar dates, but like lemmings, they also collectively migrate from one theme to the next.
In March, scores of New Yorkers opted to have their first dates over tacos: fish tacos, dried cricket tacos, taco tours of Brooklyn, even post-surfing tacos at Rockaway Beach in Queens.
But by month’s end, tacos went out of vogue, and fondue became the fare of choice for first dates. In mid-April, singles relinquished their cheese forks and embraced bring-your-own-beer dates instead. A few weeks later, outings forlobster rolls were all the rage. By mid-May daters cooled on lobster rolls and were eating oysters.
“It was with taco dates that we first started noting that certain types of dates came in waves,” said Brian Schechter, a founder of HowAboutWe.com, a nascent dating Web site that began fostering love connections in the spring. Mr. Schechter created the site with his best friend since kindergarten, Aaron Schildkrout.
The entrepreneurs, both 31, are former charter-school teachers who practiced meditation in India and taught at meditation retreats in the United States. They did not set out to track the dating habits of New Yorkers, let alone suggest that there could be a collective dating unconscious. They simply wanted to create a new kind of dating site where members could demonstrate who they are, not with personal essays and awkward messages, but by proposing dates that begin with the words: “How about we. ...”
Yet since HowAboutWe logs thousands of dates from some 7,000 young New Yorkers — the average age on the site is 29 — it has opened a window onto dating in the city and turned Mr. Schildkrout and Mr. Schechter into accidental anthropologists.
At a reporter’s request, they sifted through thousands of dates to identify where singles rendezvous. It was hardly scientific, though their 10,000-date sample size was larger than the ones used in many sociological studies.
Tucked into a sunny booth in V Bar in the West Village, Mr. Schechter pushed aside a panini and flipped open a laptop, revealing a spreadsheet of dates proposed and accepted by the site’s members: “How about we attend a swing class and wine tasting?,” “How about we grab a beer and play a game of ping-pong at SPiN?,” “How about we check out Ninja New York, a Japanese restaurant with ninjas for waiters in the meatpacking district?”
“You can tell so much about somebody based on the date they propose,” Mr. Schildkrout said.
Both he and Mr. Schechter have profiles on HowAboutWe. Mr. Schechter’s page says he possesses obscure knowledge about chakras. His latest date proposal? “How about we learn how to read tarot cards (after buying a set somewhere in Manhattan) and practice at the 169 Bar?”
Scanning the site’s database, he observed, “There are trends and hot spots.”
Indeed, Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, said strangers have been shown to gravitate to the same things at the same time as preferences are diffused among groups through word of mouth or social networks. “It’s not surprising to see these trends ebbing and flowing,” he said.
Samuel D. Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said that the cuisine trends could occur because members of the Web site value doing the latest thing — until it becomes widespread. (After all, they were early adopters of the site itself.)
“It might be that you only want to do it if 1 percent of other people are doing it,” he said. “You don’t want to miss the trend, but you don’t want to be behind the edge. That sort of decision strategy would result in that pattern.”
That New Yorkers on a dating site would be drawn to similar activities can be explained in part by a sociological principle known as homophily. “It’s the idea that similar people tend to value the same things as other people like them,” Professor Cheshire said.
He and colleagues at Berkeley have studied countless online dating profiles and observed that while people think their tastes are distinct, most everyone’s profile says they like fine dining, movies and long walks on the beach.

And Repetto created ballet pumps

Brigitte Bardot in ballet pumps. Repetto and Comme des Garcons BB ballerina pump, from £275; Dover Street Market, 0207 518 0680. Photo: RexIn a venture that links French ballet tradition with Japanese avant-garde style, the iconic pointe creators, Repetto, has joined forces with Comme des Garcons to create a range of pumps. Repetto, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2007, has shod a cast of notable dancers including Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Maurice Bejart and Sophie Guillem.In 1956, the artisan firm made pumps for sex siren, Brigitte Bardot, to wear in the film Et Dieu…crea la femme (And God…created Woman). Almost overnight the company was transformed from a niche ballet-shoe maker to an iconic footwear brand.Over the years, celebrities including Serge Gainsbourg, Mick Jagger, Sofia Coppola, and Kate Moss have donned the famously comfortable pump. Collaborations with other Japanese design legends such as Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto have helped cement the Repetto pumps status as hot fashion footwear.Comme des Garcons has made-over the Brigitte Bardot Ballerina pump and the Zizi Femme lace-up in its signature, achingly hip, style. The three colourways are stocked exclusively at Dover Street Market 0207 751 80680. Prices start at £275. For a selection of other pumps check out our fashion gallery.