General Conference Highlights

Elder Bednar (Sunday Afternoon): These four words–”Receive the Holy Ghost”–are not a passive pronouncement; rather they constitute a priesthood injunction–an authoritative admonition to act and not simply to be acted upon. The Holy Ghost does not become operative in our lives merely because hands are placed upon our heads and those four important words are spoken. As we receive this ordinance, each of us accepts a sacred and ongoing responsibility to desire, to seek, to work, and to so live that we indeed “receive the Holy Ghost” and its attendant spiritual gifts.What should we do to make this authorized admonition to seek for the companionship of the third member of the Godhead an ongoing reality? Let me suggest that we need to 1) sincerely desire to receive the Holy Ghost, 2) appropriately invite the Holy Ghost into our lives, and 3) faithfully obey God’s commandments.

Elder Oaks (Sunday Morning): On this personal line of communication with the Lord our belief and practice is similar to that of those Christians who insist that human mediators between God and man are unnecessary because all have direct access to God under the principle Martin Luther referred to as “the priesthood of all believers.”

Elder Cook (Saturday Afternoon): Let me be clear that all voices need to be heard in the public square. Neither religious nor secular voices should be silenced. Furthermore, we should not expect that because some of our views emanate from religious principles, they will automatically be accepted or given preferential status. But it is also clear such views and values are entitled to be reviewed on their merits.

GERRIT GONG!!!!!: Perfection

Elder Christofferson (Sat Morning): Five elements of a consecrated life: purity, work, respect for one’s physical body, service, and integrity. “A consecrated life is a life of labor. …God Himself is glorified by his work. We naturally desire to participate with HIm in His work, and in so doing, we ought to recognize that all honest work is the work of God. Thomas Carlyle: “All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven.” Integrity is not naivete. What is naive is to suppose that we are not accountable to God.

Pres Uchtdorf (Sat Morning): hahahaah I know you all are wondering.... “…it is good advice to slow down a little, steady the course, and focus on the essentials when experiencing adverse conditions.” “It is said that any virtue, when taken to an extreme, can become a vice. …There comes a point where milestones can become millstones, and ambitions, albatrosses around our neck.”

Urbanization

So the Financial Times developed this sweet section last week on urbanization. Check it out!

The Examined Life, Age 8

Teaching children philosophy through story books! (New York Times)

Alice!

A compilation of all the gorgeous Alice costumes: http://alice-kingsley.livejournal.com/

Vote for Becca!

Pretty Powerful Sponsored by Bobbi Brown

Buy and Hold: The Intelligent Investor

In finance, for personal investors, they advise us to diversify our investments across stocks (by investing in index funds) and across time, by buying young and holding till retirement. This diversification across time is different from the typical, say, average small company fund that flips its stocks, on average, every five months. One prominent and successful investor, though, took a perspective much closer to our personal finance route. An article in from the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago commemorates the retirement this week of "one of the great traders of the mutual fund industry, John Laporte of T. Rowe Price New Horizons." Mr. Laporte looks for future growth companies, seeking "creative leaders, a strong corporate culture and innovative ways of doing business." It requires immense effort to find these companies, but once you have found them, they can be a huge source of profitability. One in eight small growth stocks becomes large each year and on that cusp, they generate as much as 62% on average. The advantage of this technique is that these are typically only available in small blocks, ideally suited for small investors.  

BRELLIS!

Best quotes.

"Diplomacy is rape described as seduction" 
 
"If you were drunk, I don't think I would notice for a while" (this was about me- I don't think many people would disagree)

Who is Brooke Ellis? "The wierdo econ major who lizzy vaguely dislikes and val loves"

"Dick Cheney suffered his third heart attack last week. Only four horcruxes to go."

 

Power Dressing in Paris

One more thing...

Then I desperately need to go to bed! 

I'm dying to go winter camping- I think the picture says it all. It comes from the coolest site ever. 

Also. 

My addiction to Outside is in full force again... for good reason! 

ARCTIC SURFING!!

Lara Stone; Maillots

I love this photo- I want her outfit, her attitude, her face! 

Especially the maillot. That's what I want to be wearing at Havasupai... 

Python Tries to Eat Alligator: An Analogy for China

I randomly found this when I was looking for pictures of Burmese pythons (because who doesn't look for pictures of Burmese pythons?): 

"In 2005, a 13-foot Burmese python tried to swallow an indigenous 6-foot alligator in Everglades National Park. However, the alligator was too big that python’s stomach ripped open. Later on, the biologists and ecologists figured out that the python was starving for days. This also is an apt analogy that represents the Chinese ambition: desires overwhelming the reasonable consciousness." 

Sick, huh?! (Mostly the python story but I guess China's ambitions are kinda sick, too)

The reason I was looking for pictures of Burmese pythons was because I was reading the "Room for Debate" article in the New York Times: Killing Pythons and Regulating Them.  It is about the fact that Florida has, apparently, experienced an "Invasion of the Giant Pythons,"  at least according to the show of that name on PBS.  They got there by a combination of irresponsible pet owners but also the hurricanes that wrecked exotic-pet warehouses and set them loose across the state. Florida now has the highest concentration of non-native amphibian and reptiles species in the world. 

Now, I kind of think this is wicked cool, but there is the problem of them ruining the entire balance of the ecosystem, like the Brown Tree Snake has done in Guam. Fortunately, the recent cold spell killed as many as half of them. Experts hope that a combination of nature and concerted efforts to manage the population will allow successful containment. 

Now I want to watch A Series of Unfortunate Events!  Uncle Monty is my hero!

It's Time to Make Management a True Profession

HBR Article: It's Time to Make Management a True Profession

Fascinating article arguing: "True professions have codes, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education required of their members." Giving business the equivalent of a Hippocratic Oath would "forge an implicit social contract with society: Trust us to control and exercise jurisdiction over an important occupational category, and, in return, we will ensure that the members of our profession are worthy of your trust - that they will not only be competent to perform the tasks entrusted to them, but that they will also conduct themselves with high standards and great integrity"

Judging a book

The best of fashion week thus far

A few of my favorite shows so far: Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Erin Fetherstone. Aren’t they gorgoeus? Frida Giannini at Gucci especially showed glamourous, exquisitely curated day ware. With knee-length dresses and suede thigh-high boots, narrow and flattering tailored trousers in a “pale palette of neutrals, meant she essentially had a new, quite refreshing look done and dusted” as Sarah Mower on style.com described.  Giannini explained: "I've grown up. It's more mature clothes for more mature women, because that's what I am." Mower compared it to “hitting the kind of equilibrium Stella McCartney reached a couple of years back: the confidence to relax and not try too hard to be super-duper fashion-y.” The show defied the view of Gucci as an exclusively nightwear house: “Gucci ready-to-wear might have a viable life in daylight.”

And while it was not one of my favorite shows, it is wicked cool that Erin Wasson decided to show at the sixth floor of ABC Carpet & Home. Coolest store ever! Over a hundred years old, it occupies a six-floor flagship at 881 Broadway with store spaces for Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, ReGeneration and Ralph Lauren. In 2003, they began the transition to a socially responsible business, emphasizing products made from sustainable materials and serving as a launch-pad for many environmental and humanitarian causes. 

But Wasson’s collection, fueled by her delft personal style, did not live up to it’s hype- as style.com put it: “the 22-look lineup was a little too long on T-shirts and corduroy cutoffs.” 

Details from Carolina Herrera

XC Skiing

Best sport ever. I think I like it more than downhill. We went to Soldier's Hollow today- gorgeous! It 's where they had all the Olympic events. I love how you feel more connected to everything in XC- I miss that in downhill. It’s not going down a mountain just to show off your wicked skills. I appreciate this freaking gorgeous state more when I am XC skiing. About that- never planned on staying in Utah (at least not since I was really young) but I

don’t know how I will ever leave this! It’s so beautiful.

Now I just want some sweet gear! Specifically, Atomic skis and equipment and Spyder baselayers.

I love that the Spyder baselayers are less sci-fi movie costume than the still cool ones that they had last year. By taking the same theme of an ergonomic web but changing it from overt, contrasting black stripes to subtle seams in the same color, it transforms the piece into a far more wearable item! (I can't find a picture of the old one though, so you are going to have to trust me!)

Gross/Fascinating: Jeffry Life Edition

So this is not intended to be a blog about aging and it's probably not even in my top-10 most fascinating subjects, but I just realized that after this post, half my entries are about aging. Maybe it is just because the New York Times has excellent features on it. Or maybe I am subconsciously afraid of aging.

Anyway. This week Tom Dunkel, who often writes for Sports Illustrated and occasionally the Washington Post Magazine, wrote a piece for the Times entitled “Vigor Quest,” about the effort to overcome the frontiers of aging.

The profile centers on the firm Cenegenics, a Las Vegas- based, $50 million “age management” medical company founded by a doctor and amateur body-builder and his workout partner. While it employs doctors with flawless credentials, the safety of its more extreme methods of testosterone-boosting hormones has been met with controversy.

Dunkel described some of the before and after photos as looking like a photo of a bodybuilder with a grandfather’s head superimposed on it (Dr. Jeffry Life- look up the photo its gross!).

And it’s true! It’s kind of creepy- but I think these are valid points in the future of medicine that ultimately have mass potential.

(The book Radical Evolution also touched on this- I can’t remember exactly what he said though, so I will leave that for a future post!)

Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08aging.html?hp

I love Hermes advertising