We need to talk. About Facebook. Or rather, EngagementBook.

It’s Spring, the birds are chirping, and everyone is engaging the crap out of each other on my newsfeed.

I’m trying to remember the first day I got Facebook. I couldn’t sign up until I got my .edu email. I remember waiting and waiting for it, because it meant I could officially join a network of what I imagined were cool “adults,” college kids. Would I be able to see what college would be like? Who would I be friends with? Would they, too, put Clarissa Explains It All as a favorite TV show and an ironic throwback?

Or how about the boys. I could see the older guys at Penn, or at least just look at their profile pictures. Endless potential for holding hands on College Green or laughing at a formal or doing whatever college kids did in my mind, like party and fling their arms in the air and learn what it really meant to be able to eat whatever you wanted without parental supervision. No foresight about how 2 a.m. cookies would affect my waistline (though I have to say, leggings were timed perfectly with my college existence).

I could be someone new with Facebook. It was my first foray into the freedom that comes with going somewhere completely new. I got to write a profile, write about my interests, tell you what the quote from Emerson or Thoreau that everyone puts in his or her yearbook page means. It means something deep to me, you know. All those Warhol quotes are seminal sentences in my life (well, because it’s very true, “all I ever really want is sugar.”) So there Facebook was, an oasis from my parents and a glimpse into the person I wanted to be in college.

It was nothing like what Facebook is now — a hodgepodge of Farmville (seriously, if I were to waste two hours of my time, it would not be e-farming, or whatever it is Farmville has become, where you harvest carrots or milk cows. The extent of my knowledge from milking a cow derives from A League of Their Own. I’ll let Geena Davis do it) a million requests to Branch Out (a competitor to LinkedIn, or another app where I’ll feel bad about how few foods I’ve tried in my lifetime).

Facebook was once exclusive.

But more important, Facebook once hinged upon a singular sentence, or phrase, rather, “relationship status.”

It was, singlehandedly, the thing you went to first on someone’s profile. Nobody cared about your interests. They just cared if you’d be interested in them. Or vice versa. Mark Zuckerberg cum Jesse Eisenberg cum hideous flip-flops said it too.

The agony over relationship status. Should you put “single” and seem too available and desperate? Should you marry your best friend, or be “it’s complicated” with your best guy friend? (Seriously, has anyone ever used “it’s complicated” for serious? Because every relationship is complicated Server 2008 Key, and there’s no need to announce it.)

Or what about the ultimate token, sign of a real-life, serious boyfriend: “In a relationship”, without a name. For the more coy — no name necessary. You didn’t need to know WHO he or she was dating, but just that there was someone special enough to warrant a declaration. I remember agonizing over an “in a relationship” from a boy I lusted over who didn’t seem to have a girlfriend. But Facebook told me so. What, or who, was I supposed to believe?

Announcing your Facebook relationship is still a seminal milestone in your adolescence. You can toggle back and forth, linking in your relationship in digital ink. Hyperlinking your significant other, like the Wikipedia page of your life. Don’t lie, you wanted it. You probably still do. It’s still a BFD.

But now, all of that isn’t as important as the ultimate relationship status update: your engagement.

When did this happen? How did this happen? Everybody’s doing it, and they’re definitely linking to each other. Permanently.

Personally, I’m engaged to this pint of Ben and Jerry’s Half-Baked Frozen Yogurt. Can that be an option? I’m deeply, deeply engaged in the third book of the Hunger Games (I’m late to this party).

I’ve been engaged on Facebook, once. To my best friend, because we thought that was hilarious and cool. Three days later, her aunt called her mother telling her that her daughter was engaged to another woman on Facebook and that she had no idea she was gay. We ended our brief engagement on good terms.

Maybe there’s something in the SmartWater. Maybe it’s the debilitating allergies that are forcing everyone to find a long-term Office 2011 MAC Key, forever partner to feed them allergy pills. Maybe it’s because I’ve turned 25, or made the adult decision to store my shot-glass collection under the sink instead of as decoration (and put my lollipops in a classy martini glass from a sorority party). Maybe it’s because I have a business and know some things about a Roth IRA (really, did I go to camp with Roth?)

The second I log on to my Facebook, it is an evitable stream of people getting hitched. Putting a ring on it. No longer neon tank tops at concerts, or Spring Break albums that give you a hangover by just looking at them.

I’m not knocking people announcing their engagement online. In fact, the opposite. Even though it sucks away two hours when I should be doing work, I’ll comb through shocked and happy faces and the 857 MAZEL TOVS! on each person’s Facebook wall.

It’s that same curiosity that allowed me to sift through three hundred “Jareds” when I got my Penn Facebook. Markers of adulthood. Facebook has become a record of milestones in our lives. From college, to post-college sadness that it’s not college anymore, to weekends away visiting friends and going to Lollapalooza and trying to get back to a time and place where there were no consequences. And from now engagement parties to wedding photos to babies to first days of school to grandchildren.

I think, though, we may as well call it Engagement Book. Maybe there should be an entirely separate section for the ring: I Got a Pear Shaped Diamond From Stephen Webster (hyperlink). Or Kevin Proposed to Me During a Romantic Ski Vacation (link to picture). There should be a drop-down menu, for a number of things:

location (skiing, beach, at home cooking whole wheat penne, walking your Dog That Will Give You An Indication If You Will Be Good Parents Even Though It’s Not the Same Species),

reaction (shock, happy shock, teary happy shock, happy happy joy joy, snot, kisses)

reaction-photo (these are my favorite to stalk, capturing genuine surprise among Millenials is pretty damn hard to do) Where to buy windows 7 key,

shape of diamond (Pear, princess, king, queen, pawn, whatever),

friend reaction, (I’ve never seen so many exclamation points in my life)

family embrace (look, Mom’s crying!)

I’ve learned of more engagements via Facebook, a medium on which I play Words With Friends and look up old camp crushes, than anywhere else. And so if this is the next stage of my life, as exhibited through an electronic medium, then so be it.

But let’s be real, all we want to see is a picture of the fucking ring.

Last week while attending the United Methodist Church (UMC) General Conference in Tampa, Florida, I was observing a session where delegates from around the globe were discussing the future of our denomination. Like most other mainline denominations, the UMC has struggled with declining membership for decades replica watches, but only within its U.S. congregations. Its global membership, especially within countries in Africa, is growing rapidly.

One delegate, a pastor from the Katagana province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, commented on the decline of membership in U.S. churches and in particular, its difficulty with attracting and retaining young people. “The church begins with the pastor’s family,” he said. He then went on to suggest that the answer to the U.S. decline was for pastors to simply have more and more children.

In response to this suggestion, the room erupted into heartfelt laughter and clapping, perhaps because it was received as a non-serious, comical recommendation. In the midst of serious deliberation, such moments are far too rare. But as an advocate for maternal health in the church, I sat silently, feeling saddened and unsure what upset me more: the comment or the response.

Maternal mortality claims the lives of nearly a thousand women every day. Nearly all of these deaths happen in the developing world, where women lack access to basic health care. They die from preventable things like hemorrhaging and infection, and often from pregnancies that if given the choice, they would have prevented. For many women replica watches, giving birth is a life-risking endeavor, one not to be dismissed or joked about in conference rooms replica watches, and certainly not by those who seek to bring healing and wholeness to the world.

Mere days after the Congolese pastor spoke, the plenary of nearly 1,000 elected delegates voted to adopt a resolution on maternal health that I drafted. Within it is an affirmation that maternal mortality is a moral tragedy, and that there are many factors that contribute to it, including health and cultural barriers. It calls upon the UMC to take action to support maternal health and family planning through advocacy and direct services.

I never got the opportunity to share my concerns with the delegate who recommended large families, nor do I know if he supported this resolution. As an observer, I did not have a voice at the General Conference. But if I could speak to him today, I would share my vision for what will help save our denomination — a commitment to alleviating the suffering of the world where no woman dies giving life, and no child grows up motherless.

Today was an exciting day here in New York, as NASA flew the Space Shuttle Enterprise over the city on its way to the Intrepid Sea Rotary Tattoo Machines, Air and Space Museum. I braved a very windy morning on the roof of my Upper West Side apartment to see it for myself. I thought I’d share a few of the pictures.

The flight just landed at JFK Airport a few minutes ago; the Enterprise will spend a few months there before being floated on a barge to the Intrepid, where it will become part of a permanent display.

Built in 1976, the Enterprise never flew in orbit as the other shuttles did. It was the prototype for the later shuttles — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor — which did orbit the Earth a combined total of 21,158 times on 135 missions beginning in 1981 and ending last July.

The Enterprise was used instead for approach and landing tests. Hitched to a converted 747 technically known as a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft or SCA — exactly as it was today — it would detach using explosive bolts; and then, under control of an astronaut in training, it would land unpowered, like a glider. NASA conducted five such tests. Too bad it wasn’t possible to allow it to land freely in that manner at JFK today. That would have been pretty cool.

It’s also cool how it got its name. Yes Tattoo Supplies sale, it really is named for the spaceship in “Star Trek.” After fans of the show lobbied President Gerald Ford with a determined letter-writing campaign, he made it so, saying he was “partial to the name.”

Today, the SCA carrying the Enterprise flew up the along the Hudson River, north to the Tappan Zee Bridge, where it circled a few times, and then back down the Hudson. Here it is heading south The Best Tattoo Guns, minutes before it circled the Statue of Liberty:

(Images by Arik Hesseldahl/AllThingsD)

An elderly woman has been assaulted during a home invasion at Para Hills in Adelaide's northern suburbs. Buy Tattoo Gun

The victim Tattoo Grips, 85 Tattoo Kits Supplies, was hurt after she answered a knock about 8:30pm on Monday and a man forced his way into the home in Todd Road.

He then fled with cash and jewellery.

The woman was treated for minor injuries.

Detective Chief Inspector Brian Smith said it was a callous and heartless attack.

Police think the woman may have seen her attacker before.

Neighbour Tamara Bost has lived in the street for about six months.

She said she did not feel safe in the area and planned to move once her lease was up.

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Monday the election of Francois Hollande as French president would not change France’s commitment to budget consolidation and Paris and Berlin would continue to work well together.

“Each country can make its own decisions about how it wants to manage its budget, whether it wants to raise taxes and spend more Replica Herve Leger gown,” Schaeuble told broadcaster ZDF. “But the fiscal policy framework Christian Audigier Clothes sale, the deficit reduction has been agreed and France will stick to this just as Germany will.”

Hollande’s election was greeted by jitters on European markets and a dour front in Berlin where ruling conservatives warned the Socialist on Monday that Germans were not ready to pay for his promises of an end to austerity.

Schaeuble said France and other European countries could bolster growth and reduce unemployment by learning from Germany with its apprenticeship system and so-called Mittelstand small and medium-sized companies.

He added that Hollande’s election would not impact the Franco-German partnership that lies at the heart of the European Union and the euro currency.

“The Franco-German cooperation has worked well over decades independently of elections results in either country and that will be the case also after the election of President Hollande.”

Regarding the rejection by Greek voters of parties which slashed budgets to secure an EU/IMF bailout, Schaeuble said: “Europe remains committed to that which we have agreed.”

“This is the best way to help Greece achieve sustainable growth and more social justice.”

(Reporting By Sarah Marsh and Sabine Ehrhardt; editing by Ron Askew)

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Fixing me with a fierce scowl, the imam made it clear I was unwelcome. I can’t say I was surprised. Somewhere in his 50s, he wore the long beard and calf-length pants that marked him as a follower of Wahhabiism, the strict fundamentalist brand of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia. But I was not in Saudi Arabia. I was in the Maldives, the remote and lovely island chain in the Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka and southern India.

True, the Maldives is a Muslim country—exclusively so, since the practice of other religions is illegal—and has been since 1153, when the king at the time fell under the sway of an Arab traveler and ordered his subjects to convert. The islands had been predominantly Buddhist Tattoo Supplies, a faith they shared with Sri Lanka, whose Sinhala language is similar to Divehi, the native Maldivian tongue.

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But if Islam has a long history in the Maldives, it’s not the kind of place you associate with hostile mullahs. Quite the opposite, in fact. With a population of just 360,000, the archipelago is dotted with luxurious private resorts—think Robinson Crusoe with plunge pools—and is a magnet for celebrities such as Tom Cruise, who honeymooned there in December. In Male, the cramped little island capital, tourists are relatively scarce. But the atmosphere, at least at first, seems laid-back and globalized. The skyline is dominated by modern, pastel-colored apartment blocks that would not look out of place in South Florida, and the streets are jammed with shiny new motorbikes Tattoo Supplies, many piloted by sinewy young men in dreadlocks and baggy shorts. I even saw one young woman in a T-shirt that read, “Good Girls Don’t Get Caught.”

Still, there is no mistaking the Maldives’ Islamic character. Alcohol can only be sold to foreigners at resorts, and nearly everyone I spoke with remarked on the growing popularity of beards and headscarves. When I caught up with the surly imam in Male not long ago, he was preparing for afternoon prayers in an illicit and supposedly clandestine mosque, which was hidden behind a row of stores.  After he shooed me away, I retreated across the street and watched as a steady trickle of young men—all bearded and sporting abbreviated trousers—disappeared into the alley that led to the mosque. When they emerged a little while later, none of them would talk to me, either.

Some fear the worst is yet to come. In spring 2006, authorities  announced the arrest in Sri Lanka of three Maldivians—two women and a man—who allegedly were heading to militant training camps in Pakistan. Charges have since been dropped, and when I spoke to Fatimah Nisreen, a policeman’s daughter who was accused of helping to arrange the trip, she asserted that the man had been escorting the women to Pakistan so he could marry them—something he couldn’t do at home. But the 26-year-old also described herself as “totally obsessed with Islam” and acknowledged that she regularly visited an extremist Web site, although she has yet to make up her mind about Osama Bin Laden: “There are things I support, and there are things I can’t decide on him.”

As elsewhere, the growth of fundamentalist influence can be traced in part to Saudi Arabia, which built a seven-story-high school in Male—the Islamic Studies Institute—whose curriculum runs heavily to Arabic and the Quran.  Moreover, many young Maldivians have studied at madrassas in the Middle East and Pakistan, where some have been recruited by militants. At a counseling center for recovering heroin addicts in Male, I met Ahmed Shah, a former recruit who nervously puffed on a cigarette as he told me of the 31 days he spent at a militant training camp in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, during a break from religious studies in Lahore. The camp was run by Lashkar-e-Tayyba, a Pakistani extremist group that U.S. officials have linked to al-Qaida. Now 28, Shah recalled the camp fondly. “So many Maldivians were training there,” he said.

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So is it time to start the Suzuki dead pool? Automotive News seems to think so. While the newspaper doesn’t go as far as suggesting that Suzuki is not long for the American market, it has compiled a depressingly long list of signs that the company is on its last legs here.

Among the many signs that Suzuki is hurting Herve Leger v neck sale, the most damning might be what’s happening with its dealer body. The report says the brand dropped 32 stores last year, roughly 12 percent, and that it is down to 246 total dealerships in the States. But of those, 150 sell five or fewer cars per month. That would explain why Suzuki only sold 26,618 cars last year Buy White Herve leger, according to AN.

Other signs of distress include sluggish sales so far this year Cheap DKNY Clothes, not exhibiting at the most recent Detroit and Los Angeles auto shows Replica Missoni Dresses, cutting off their deal for J.D. Power customer satisfaction data Buy Christian Audigier Clothing, and a lack of marketing leadership or initiative, according to the report.

While Suzuki’s product lineup is among the smallest and oldest in the industry, that seems to be the least of the brand’s troubles. Heck, even we kind of like the Kizashi.

Candidate to the French Socialist Party primary elections Francois Hollande

Photograph by Samuel Dietz/Getty Images.

Also read Sasha Issenberg’s reporting on the first round of presidential voting in France.

LILLE, France—The three young men monitoring the volunteer sign-up table outside François Hollande’s rally at a large arena here on Monday all hail from Strasbourg but trace their political awakening to Cambridge, Mass. In early 2008, while studying at Kennedy’s Harvard School, Guillaume Liegey learned the rudiments of voter contact through a class with Democratic operative Steve Jarding and encounters with Marshall Ganz, the legendary labor organizer whose protégés included some of Barack Obama’s top field staffers. Another Harvard student, Arthur Muller, saw their tactics at work during regular treks to New Hampshire in the final weeks of the 2008 general election to knock on doors for Obama’s campaign, masking his native accent (out of concern for Bush-era sensitivities) and pretending he was Dutch. Muller was a childhood friend of Vincent Pons, a graduate student at MIT under the tutelage of Esther Duflo, the international development economist and specialist in randomized field experiments that, when applied to electioneering, had quantified the ability of a single door knock to deliver a vote. After the election the three Frenchmen realized where their new curiosities converged. “We got interested in all the voter-mobilization stuff,” says Liegey.

It was an unlikely area of fascination for three foreigners in their first encounter with American politics. Most of the foreigners who made a trans-Atlantic pilgrimage to examine Obama’s campaign up close fixated on the cosmopolitan candidate or the avant-garde trappings of his communication strategy, and reduced it to a series of easily mimicked gestures, like the Israeli website whose design was filched nearly entirely from Obama’s despite the fact that the candidate deployed the American as a foil. Such slavish copying eventually exhausted itself and the marketing slogan “Obama-style campaign” lost its novelty, in large part because few of the copycats actually understood the complex infrastructure that made Obama’s innovations possible. “A lot of people look at the U.S. and see the poli-optics of it but never look at what’s behind it,” says Julius van de Laar, a German national who served as Obama’s Missouri youth-vote director in 2008 and has since opened a Berlin new-media consulting firm.

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Van de Laar is just one of a motley collection of foreigners who traveled to the U.S. to see the Obama operation for themselves and developed a more nuanced appreciation for its accomplishments. The stories of such pilgrims were common in 2008: the Tory foreign-policy aide who left London to get out the vote in Philadelphia, the young Canadian with ties to the New Democratic Party working in South Carolina, the Andorra-based media strategist who announced via press release that he was joining Obama’s team. But as they’ve returned to their home countries they’ve often run up against the hardened political cultures of their homeland. “Campaigns take a different shape in Europe,” says Marietje Schaake, who observed the Obama campaign as a consultant working in the United States and was inspired by his victory to run for the European Parliament, where she has served since 2009. “The money is not there in Europe—on the scale people are doing it in the US would be considered corruption in the EU.”

No members of the Obama diaspora White Herve leger sale, however, have been moved to reimagine their country’s politics as boldly as the three Frenchmen who met in Cambridge. By latching on to that “voter-mobilization stuff,” they stumbled into the most enduring recent shift in American electioneering, one not exclusive to Obama but exemplified by his campaign: a renaissance of individual voter contact, boosted by new tools that allow it to be keenly targeted and its effects clearly measured.

After Obama’s inauguration, Liegey, Muller Herve Leger sale, and Pons returned to France, where elections tend to play out as mass-media pageants with little personal touch. They oversaw a randomized field experiment during 2010 regional elections in the Paris area, demonstrating that with targeted door-to-door contact they could increase turnout among the nonvoters the French call les abstentionnistes by 4 points. An adviser to Hollande, the Socialist Party’s candidate and a favorite to displace Nicolas Sarkozy next month, took an interest in their work and hired them to organize a face-to-face mobilization campaign. They set a goal of reaching 5 million doors by the end of the second-round elections on May 5. Inside the hall in Lille, the actress hosting the Hollande rally reported that Socialist volunteers had reached more than 3 million so far. Before the three Alsatians met in Massachusetts, no one had ever before developed a centralized plan to knock on one.

*    *    *

The Strasbourg troika, all between the ages of 28 and 31, are now known as les Bostoniens in much of the press coverage marveling at the air of foreignness that surrounds their peculiar undertaking. “The media liked us,” Muller said the other day at a café around the corner from Hollande’s Left Bank headquarters. “We were young and talking about modern methods and mentioning Obama in every sentence.” Many of those stories, however Buy Marc Jacobs Dresses, focus so intently on the porte-à-porte aspect—the provocative gesture of arriving unannounced at a stranger’s house Cheap Herve leger strapless, especially in marginal neighborhoods, to talk politics—that they fail to appreciate the most radical aspect of the mobilization project: Liegey, Muller, and Pons are running a campaign operation aimed at nonvoters.

In France, presidential elections have been treated almost exclusively as a deliberative exercise. High turnout rates—regularly hovering around 80 percent of registered voters—mean that there is less room for elasticity in participation than in American elections. But the deliberative paradigm is also testament to national self-regard: Campaign debates play out nightly on highbrow talk shows, and the latest issue of Philosophie magazine devotes its cover to a mockup of the two leading candidates as “Rousseau Versus Hobbes: The Real Duel of the Presidential Election.” Even deploying the verb abstain to describe the 20 percent who stay home on Election Day suggests that nonparticipation is an action Discount DKNY Clothing, derived from an informed stance.

Liegey, Muller, and Pons returned from the United States with a different idea. There were clearly other reasons why people didn’t vote besides principled disillusionment with the political system. Some people simply did not know how or where to cast a ballot. Others lacked familiarity with the specific candidates or parties. When they performed a demographic analysis of the left-leaning precincts with the lowest turnout rates, the three researchers found that age and education levels helped explain most of the phenomenon. Analysts, they suspected Discount BCBG Dresses, had confused disillusionment for disengagement; the former might require a transcendent candidate, the latter only a bit of personal attention. “There are places where political volunteers never go,” says Liegey.

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Here’s a familiar morning routine now that the weather’s turning colder: start car Emilio Pucci Dresses sale, set heat on high Buy White Herve leger, retreat inside to finish coffee. There’s plenty of debate for and against the practice of warming up by idling, but the unfortunate story of this ZJ could bolster the argument for just getting in and going. eBayer buickonly had his 1996 Grand Cherokee swiped from his driveway one morning as it sat innocently trying to generate some warmth. What had been a nice clean vehicle ended up having its nose bashed in and was abandoned after becoming wedged between two trees. The coniferous atomic wedgie sheared off an exterior door handle, so there’s only three working doors, and a Lincoln Town Car donated its proboscis to some crude rhinoplasty, but at least it’s got lights out front again. Naturally, his wife refuses to ride in it Buy Herve Leger v neck, especially with it’s rattle-can chic paint job Buy Herve Leger v neck, so buickonly’s trying to unload it. If you’ve got a need for a vehicle that doesn’t have to be pretty, bids start at $1 Replica Missoni Dresses,600.

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Rumors that the 2013 Mitsubishi Evolution XI will come with a hybrid powertrain aren’t new. In fact, we first heard such rumblings way back in October of 2009 when the Japanese automaker unleashed its PX-MiEV concept Where buy best Replica Jacob & Co Watches, which is also rumored to have received the green light for production using the same platform as the Evo, at the Tokyo Motor Show. But Motor Trend has a few more intriguing details to share Fake Dolce & Gabbana Watches for sale, starting with the fact that it will boast a plug and a short-distance EV mode that won’t ever activate the gasoline-fueled engine.

If MT is correct, a powerful electric motor would drive the front wheels of the Evo XI, drawing power from a lithium ion battery pack Replica Ulysse Nardin Watches, while the (presumably turbocharged but possibly normally aspirated) 2.0-liter engine would drive the rear wheels only when necessary. The two combined powerplants could theoretically put out as much as 350 horsepower (or more Sarcar Replica Watches, depending on final specifications) to all four wheels, catapulting the car from 0 to 60 in just 4.5 seconds.

Finally, the Evo would reportedly be blessed with the Active Steering and Roll Control Suspension that Mitsubishi has been working on getting into production since 2006, as well as a new electronically-controlled Active Yaw Control system for the engine-driven rear wheels. Sounds like a lot of technology Buy Cheap Replica Cartier Watches, which could potentially equal lots of weight and a hefty sticker price. Stay tuned. Thanks for the tip, Jim!

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[Source: Motor Trend]