#jeff meyer

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From Flying Animals by Patricia Lantier, published in 1994 and illustrated by Jeff Meyer

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10 pro tips you can use in any genre of photography

10 pro tips you can use in any genre of photography

From Digital Camera World, words of wisdom, or it’s obvious really but still worth saying

It doesn’t matter whether you like to shoot landscapes, portraits or still life photography, these ten tips from our guest bloggers at Photoventure Jeff Meyer will help you improve your images time and time again…..

©Jane Buekett

1. Keep it simple

As a rule it’s best to keep things as simple as possible. In…

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[theumpires]

Well, maybe not. Indiana's Crean and Michigan assistant coach Schwartz should quiet down. They are coaching teenagers. Grow up you two.

[poshlyinc]

Urban Girl Squad Teams Up With Fresh

No one throws a ladies only party like Urban Girl Squad. They know exactly the right time to take a break from all the craziness of New York’s concrete jungle, and of course, when it’s time to sip champagne and talk beautiful skin. The "Squad" recently held an event at Fresh cosmetics store near Union Square to talk about how to get healthy skin from the inside out.

Natural foods chef and Certified Holistic Health Coach Ella Nemcova talked to the ladies about how diet and other healthy practices will get you there. Some of her key takeaways:

What you put into your body will come out—and it usually shows up in your skin. Eating properly is as important for your skin as it is for your internal organs. A whole foods diet is key because the body doesn’t know what to do with fractionalized foods. When it starts to pull from other sources, you exhaust its engines.

Keep the digestive track on track. Eating raw and fiber-rich foods helps push out toxins, so they are great for the digestive system. Raw nuts and seeds do the body good— they help to digest fat and other foods.

Detox! If you have a date tomorrow, go to the sauna tonight. Also, lemon juice and water first thing in the morning helps you detox (and the vitamin C is healthy for you). Getting all those toxins and unhealthy things out of your skin will give it a glow and add suppleness.

Give collagen longevity. By eating foods that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids (like ground flax seeds, walnuts, and wild salmon) you can replenish the collagen in your skin. The more collagen in the skin, the more elasticity in the skin (which keeps you looking younger, longer).

Get reacquainted with your old friend, H2O. Water is a no-brainer for keeping the skin healthy. Buy a chic little water bottle so that you can get the proper intake of water in the most fabulous way. If you fill a 30-ounce bottle twice a day, you’ll get your day's share.

After the resident health guru wrapped up, Fresh’s own Jeff Meyer put on a makeover demonstration that showed the ladies how to do a fresh-faced look with a few of the brand’s key products. Before doing mini makeovers for all the ladies, he shared a daily regimen to keep skin radiant. The routine looks something like:

Wash. Use Fresh Soy Face Cleanser, which includes cucumber to soothe the skin. It also removes makeup and is an instant toner.

Exfoliate. Fresh Sugar Face Polish gets rid of dead skin and gives the face a glow. It has strawberry extract for vitamin C, which makes the skin vibrant.

Serum. Fresh Black Tea Age-Delay Face Serum loads the skin with antioxidants and has lychee extracts that boost collagen. The treatment goes deep into the cells.

Moisturize. Fresh Black Tea Age-Delay Cream (which also has lychee) locks in the serum and leaves skin glowing and feeling soft.

Many thanks to Urban Girl Squad for these photos from the event!

Shalwah Evans is Poshly’s East Coast Editorial Director. Read her personal blog (tranquilityme.wordpress.com) or tweet to her @Shalwah.

Poshly is bringing you closer than ever to the brands you love. We’re launching a private beta soon, so sign up at www.Poshly.com to get first access when we’re live!

[slacklust-blog-blog]

LIFESTYLE: how I stopped worrying and learned to love damnation JOSH PETERSON

It was during my sixteenth year that I lost my faith in Jesus Christ. It wasn’t anything against him personally.  He seemed like a nice enough fellow what with his wretch-saving and lame-mending, but I found little use in the religion based on his life. At that time, I was racked by depression and teenage senselessness. I lived in Omaha. My hair was long and unkempt, my clothes were soiled and filled with holes. It was the Grunge Era and I wore a thick flannel shirt. It was a predominately red shirt that had worn away at the elbows, exposing the cotton insulation and inner lining. Each month I was given an allowance to spend on bus fare and meals. In order to stretch this pittance out, I walked to and from school, a distance of about thirty blocks. More than once I was mistaken for a homeless man. But it was Christ and his religion that weighed heaviest on  my head in those days. I had been raised a Fundamentalist Christian. I was taught that demons and spirits were real, and that Jesus would come back to earth and kill all the non-believers before my senior year of high school, give or take ten years. Maybe a part of me just couldn’t swallow these claims, or maybe I didn’t want to die before I got laid. Either way, I began to question my faith. * *   Much has been remarked on the astronomical improbability of a specific person being born: The unlikelihood of our species evolving a frontal lobe with the capacity for sentience, the winding histories of our ancestors a mere misstep by any of them could have eliminated thousands of potential offspring a specific sperm combining a specific egg at just the right time and, of course, life emerging from the primordial ooze in the first fucking place. Really, the odds of me being born were 1 in 1. My parents had sex. A zygote was created and out of that mess I sprang. I mean, something had to spring out of there.   God really went through a lot of trouble to make me a Christian. First off, he didn’t make me a beetle. It was biologist J.S.B. Haldane who remarked that the lord had an inordinate fondness of beetles. That’s because 70% of the animal species on the planet are beetles. Also, I could have been bread mold, a stalk of wheat or a protozoa. That is, if souls are shot scatter gun-style at the earth and if entities like wheat get to have them. Secondly, the Lord put me in a veritable Christianity hot spot. Rural Iowa, where I grew up, has only one flavor of religion available and that’s Fundamental-Style Christianity. God could have easy plunked me down in the Godless Soviet Union. Overall, the chances of being born a Christian are pretty good: one in three.  There was a one in five shot of being Muslim and a slightly higher than one in ten probability of being a Hindu. Objectively, these are all fine religions and anyone of them could have ushered my soul into their culture-specific after-death paradise. (The Christians, for example, like gold so much that their afterlife is filled with it.) But the thing is, all these religions are in direct or indirect competition with each other. * * As you can imagine, I wasn’t very popular in high school. In fact, an argument could be made that I was the least popular person in school. However, no one probably remembers me well enough to make any sort of argument at all. The people who talked to me at school were real bottom-of-the-barrel types. I tried be a loner and lose myself in books, but somehow I started attracting the strangest of lunch-table fellows.  For example there was this one guy whose parents were Neo-Nazis. We’ll call the guy Lionel. Lionel, believe it or not, was in much the same predicament that I was in. He grew up with a systems of beliefs that he was now questioning.  He seemed to change month by month. Sometimes he’d walk around with his head shaved, wearing a flight jacket and white suspenders, spouting racial slurs and the next  minute, he’d be heavy into gangsta rap, a fervent anti-racist Then — out of nowhere — he’d be dressed like a cowboy. We were not close friends, but I did go to his house once. He lived with his parents. There was a swastika flag on the wall next to a Confederate one.   I probably shouldn’t have been hanging out with people like him, but that was part of my own personal predicament. Who was I to judge? Like him, I was simply aping the beliefs of my parents. They had pictures of Jesus all over the house, and that was the kind of stuff I believed.

  Also,  I was likely hell-bound due to my waning faith and was in no moral place to cast aspersions. Let’s not forget our scripture: Judge not, lest ye be judged, What you do unto to the least of me you do unto me, and love thy neighbor. * * I remember from one of my old philosophy textbooks that God was supposed to be three things: All powerful, all knowing and good. First of all, the terms all-powerful and all-knowing are dumb and useless terms. I cannot believe that these terms still appear in serious philosophy books. First, if you are all-powerful, then you have the power to become all-knowing, and if you are all-knowing then you know how to become all-powerful. Essentially, you’ve just repeated the same attribute twice. Aside from that, these terms invite a series of paradoxes. The most famous is the creation of the rock so big that God cannot lift it. It’s a silly paradox. Lifting implies mass and gravity and all those things that probably don’t affect God. There are better ones. One of my favorite paradoxes is this:

If God is all-knowing then does he know what it’s like to be completely ignorant? And if someone knows what it is like to be completely ignorant, can they really be said to be completely ignorant?  Maybe its sophistry, but it bothers me. And good? If you think God is a nice guy, forget it. This is the God who once sent rampaging bears to annihilate a group of youths for calling the prophet Elisha bald-headed.       * *

I lost my faith completely one night in downtown Omaha. I was there with my actual friends, a group of high school dropouts. We were sitting on brick planters smoking cigarettes in an attempt to shock the middle class. Two somewhat hip looking men walked over to our group. "Do any of you believe in God?" They asked. I raised my hand. No one else did. They tried to minister to my friends and were told to shut up. These men decided to talk to me, because I, apparently, was on their side.   "Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins?" One of the men asked me. He was balding, his receding black hair was cropped short. The other man was an unremarkable looking blonde man. "Yes," I said. “Do you believe that when you die you will go to heaven?” “Well,” I said. “I think that when I get to heaven, I’m going to ask God to make me not exist.” The balding guy shook his head in astonishment. “Why?”

“I mean, I’m only a Christian because I was born in the Midwest. I was lucky to be born here, but there are a whole lot of people in the world who aren’t that lucky, like the Buddhists.” “Everyone gets at least one opportunity to turn to Jesus Christ.” “Yeah, but the Buddhists didn’t do anything wrong. They are moral people. They just picked the wrong God, and will go to hell because of it.” The men assured me that the Buddhists will go to hell. “How can I enjoy heaven when there are a bunch of people being tortured in hell? It just seems immoral. I’m just going to ask God to make me not exist.” One of the men accused me of being possessed by a demon. That was the last thing they said to me before they left. My friends all thought it was funny. I did not. Those men were supposedly missionaries. I was earnestly looking for sage advice, and these yahoos basically told me an invisible monster lived in my belly like the sexual deposits of an alien face-hugger.

So I quit. * * First, I dumped Christianity and became atheist. Then, I admitted that I don’t know if there is a God and became agnostic. Technically, I am still agnostic, because I don’t know what happens when people die. Nobody does. However, my opinions are strictly atheist. I don’t believe that there is a God and do not care if there is one. Even if there is a God, I wouldn’t worship Him (or Her) because I find that God is something of a tyrant, and I’d rather go to hell than worship a tyrant like that. Despite my conscious and willful thoughts, I am plagued by dreams of Jesus coming back to earth to end humanity. The sky splitting, an obscene and impossibly serrated, borealis-filled gash. The son of God riding a Pegasus, wielding a fiery multi-bladed sword. People in the streets gnashing their teeth, the shrieks of babes, the terrifying stillness of the end. Myself growing weak as life and vigor slip away. But I awaken sweating, trembling. The fear is completely subconscious. It festers underneath the levels of logic, reason and hope. It’s a weed of cultural conditioning that will forever be with me. So, ironically, it is at those times of fear, that I find peace in my agnosticism with this simple prayer. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
 courage to change the things we can,
 and wisdom to know the difference.

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Josh Peterson is an MFA student at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in the New Ohio Review, Big Muddy, Bull: Men's Fiction and the Flatmancrooked Anthology Not About Vampires. He has work forthcoming in the Saranac Review and The Fiddleback.

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"Velvet Globe" is by collage artist and cartoonist, Jeffrey Meyer.