Viagra Casera

Published: 01 April 2007 Abrir artículo en el Browser. 7 April 2007 09:08 Grow-your-own Viagra craze hits Britain's garden centres By David Randall A winter flowering heather border - mainly Erica carnea types - with a Witch Hazel in background. A chance discovery by a Berkshire allotment-holder that a plant widely available in garden centres has the same effect on men as Viagra has been confirmed by experts at one of the world's leading botanical institutions. The plant is winter-flowering heather, and botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, many of them heather experts who have recognised the source of its active ingredient, now expect it to be the next must-have plant in British gardens. Demand is already high. Nurseries and garden centres in some areas are having trouble finding sufficient supplies as word spreads of the plant's unexpected properties. A spokesman for Wyevale Garden Centres, which has 106 UK branches, said: "At first, it was just a trickle of inquiries, but now stores are virtually being besieged each weekend. We have had men buying dozens of the plants and, at one store in Croydon, there were men old enough to know better fighting over the last remaining trays." The latest gardening craze was triggered by a discovery by a 55-year-old furniture restorer, Michael Ford, on his allotment. He was always experimenting with drinks made from different plants and one day he tried an infusion from his winter-flowering heather. He said: "The effect was almost immediate. I had to stay in my potting shed for an hour or so before I could decently walk down the street." He then contacted the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, famous for their work with the heather family, to see if they could offer an explanation. They could. Botanist Alan Bennell said: "This first surfaced when East European chemists reported finding a Viagra-type chemical in the floral tissues of winter-flowering heaths. They were able to isolate measurable amounts of material that is an analogue of the active principle in Viagra." Winter-flowering heather, he explained, belongs to the genus Erica, a close relative of our own native heather. He said: "As yet, the active ingredient has not been found in these British forms, but it is proving to be most concentrated in many of the widely available hybrids sold as winter-flowering heather in garden centres. Particularly potent are forms of Erica carnea, the Alpine heather, whose range extends into the Balkans. "The work of these biochemists and physiologists - much of it disrupted and lost during the ravages of war - is now coming to light." From the limited amount of information available, it is suggested the Viagra-analogue is best extracted by steeping the detached small flowers in neat alcohol. An infusion of about 20g of flowers in 100ml of fluid liberates the active principle. A quality full-strength vodka (at least 40 per cent) is also effective. Mr Bennell added: "There is some confusion whether oral consumption or topical application is more effective." But not everyone is happy about this new discovery. One woman shopping at a Wyvales in Dorking yesterday said: "It's amazing. My husband has never shown any interest in gardening before, but now he's out there night and day fussing over his heathers. Frankly, I preferred it when he left the garden to me and wasn't so frisky." COPYRIGHT © 2007 The Independent.com UK Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular. Reproduction in whole or in part, or translation without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.

Cuadros Zen.De lo celestial a lo cómico.

Art Review | 'Awakenings'

Portraits in Zen, From Celestial to Comic By HOLLAND COTTER Published: April 6, 2007

Kyoto National Museum "The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments," a work by Oguri Sokei from the early 16th century.

"The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments," Left Panels. "The Four Gentlemanly Accomplishments," Right Panels.

Japan Society, which is celebrating its centennial, has a history of producing exquisite shows of Buddhist art. They appear, on average, every 5 to 10 years, and they can be life-changers. After I saw a show of early Buddhist sculpture there in 1983, I went home, packed a bag and flew to Tokyo. I needed to go to where that art came from, and I spent a month visiting temples and monasteries across the country. "Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" may not be quite so powerful a stimulus to travel. But with four dozen paintings of Buddhist gods and saints hung in shrinelike alcoves, it is certainly visually transporting. And it covers a broad swath of time and geography, bringing together 13th- to 16th-century hanging scrolls not only from Japan but also from China, where Zen, called Chan in Chinese, originated. In the West we still have a 1950s hipster notion of what "Zen painting" means: jazzy, exclamatory slashes and splats of black ink on white ground. An art of the "wow." The Japan Society show gives us a different approach through portraits of some of the personalities, real or fantastic, who generated such energy to begin with. And they're a formidable crew — some of them loftily celestial, others straight from Comedy Central. The show begins with celestial: the Buddha himself in his earthly guise as an Indian prince-turned-ascetic named Shakyamuni. Three hanging scrolls, one Chinese and the other two Japanese, depict him coming down a mountain after six years of practicing extreme austerities in an effort to figure out how to live a spiritual life. He is stooped and frail. The Chinese picture's faint, hazy, apparitional brushwork is a stylistic echo of his emaciation. But despite being wasted, he is smiling. He has the knowledge he was after, though it's not what he was expecting, and it can be expressed in a single phrase: Lighten up! To torment your body, he discovered, is really to value it every bit as much as you do when you coddle it. So leave it alone; do it no harm. Do no harm to anything. Time, the recycler, takes care of that job, constantly, dispassionately, inevitably. Which means you're free: free to be nothing, or nothing in particular, which really is freedom when you consider the grief you caused yourself trying to be something special. Freedom brings responsibility. Shakyamuni explained to his followers his awakened vision of existence and how it works. After his death, generations of those followers carried his word, simplified or elaborated, beyond India and into the rest of Asia.

Kaz Tsuruta/Japan Society "Fish-Basket Kannon," a 15th-century scroll by Bokkei Saiyo, is part of the current Japan Society exhibition.

Kaz Tsuruta/Japan Society "Fish-Basket Kannon," Detail.

One of these messengers was the Indian monk called Bodhidharma, who, in the sixth century A.D. in China, initiated Chan Buddhism, sometimes defined as a body of ideas and practice that emphasized individual meditation over communal ritual and customized master-to-pupil teaching over memorized scripture; eventually it developed methods for achieving the sort of instant enlightenment popularized in the West as satori. By all accounts, Bodhidharma was a forcible, not to say willful, personality. When the Chinese emperor refused to meet with him, the great teacher didn't plead or remonstrate. He left the court, crossed the Yangtze River by balancing on a floating reed and plunked himself down facing a bare cliff wall to meditate on what to do next. He didn't budge for nine years. During that time, various would-be pupils tried to get his attention. Finally one named Huike Shenguang managed to do so by slicing off his own arm. We see the two men together in a marvelous 13th-century Chinese painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art: Bodhidharma, cloak-shrouded and looking like Big Bird, stares at his wall; Huike huddles patiently nearby. Maybe they're communicating telepathically. In any case, Huike became Bodhidharma's first East Asian disciple and, as the inheritor of his Chan teaching, the first link in a grand lineage of individual transmission that traveled from China to Korea and then to Japan, and helped make Chan and Zen, in their many forms, a distinctive strain of Buddhism and source of a distinctive art. But was medieval Chan and Zen art actually as distinctive as is usually assumed? Not necessarily. The exhibition's curators — Gregory Levine of the University of California, Berkeley, Yukio Lippit of Harvard and Yoshiaki Shimizu of Princeton — demonstrate that in fact most of it was conceived within the context of monastic ritual and conformed to figurative painting styles and themes current among artists of the Chinese Song dynasty (A.D. 960-1279). It was this Song art that provided the direct model for early Japanese Zen painting, while what we conventionally think of as Zen art — "untrammeled" ink painting, tea ceremony paraphernalia — was a later, largely secular or non-Buddhist development.

Kaz Tsuruta/Japan Society "Portrait of Mokuan Shuyu," a scroll made in 1373 by an unknown artist.

True to its religious functions, medieval Chan/Zen painting drew in part on an orthodox Buddhist pantheon for its subject matter. A favorite deity was the bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, Guanyin in Chinese and Kannon in Japanese. A kind of multitasking performance artist, he took on dozens of roles, including that of the pretty, stalwart young woman nicknamed the Fish-Basket Kannon. The story goes that she arrived one day in a seaside village populated by wrong-living non-Buddhist types, promising to marry any man who could recite a long and insanely difficult Buddhist sutra at one sitting. Many tried and failed. When someone finally accomplished the task, presumably becoming a convert in the process, she married him, then promptly died. She had done her job. In a neat little postscript to the tale, an old wandering monk revealed her true identity to the stupefied villagers, then beamed himself up to heaven before their eyes. Here we are in a realm of medieval religious devotion that would seem to have little connection to a modern Zen of rock gardens and teapots. Yet in a cross-dressing god and levitating holy man we may spot the roots of the Zen crazy-wisdom that so appealed to the postwar, postbomb, existentialist West, and many of the other characters in the show might be taken to project a comparably absurdist spirit. One is the figure of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, as an androgynous adolescent. Depicted with long hair, a strange smile and a rosy complexion, he holds a folded-up sutra, resembling a remote control, in his hand. And there's Tenjin, a Japanese Shinto god who went to China and became a bodhisattva but appears in paintings dressed as a Daoist priest, thus encapsulating Zen's intercultural makeup. But anyone seeking the shock-effect dynamic for which Zen teaching is famous should seek out the images of some of the renegade characters who exist way beyond the fringes of orthodoxy. One is the vagabond monk named Budai, a giggling, baby-faced, pot-bellied lump of flesh. He was basically a folk deity who worked a Buddhist beat part time, and his grossness was part of his charisma. Some people crossed the street when they saw him coming; others hailed him as the Buddha of the future and kissed his feet. You can tell from paintings of him — there's a beauty from the Kyoto National Museum on view now, and another will arrive on May 8, when several pieces in the exhibition rotate — that artists adored him. His weirdness lets them go wild. Imaginative in the same way are images of the so-called Four Sleepers: the itinerant priest Fenggan, his poet friend Hanshan, his cook Shide and his pet tiger, all shown napping together in a blissful snoring, grinning heap. But why do sleepers appear in an art about being awake? In part to remind us that we are all dozing our lives away. But also to point out that sleep produces dreams, and dreams, to medieval Buddhists, were sources of a self-knowledge that can rouse us, sometimes rudely, from slumber. The Japan Society show, with its dim alcoves and apparitional saints and clowns, has a dream-state feel itself. Every turn of a corner brings a surprise. Each image holds your attention, centers you right where you are. Even after you've left and your eyes have adjusted to the everyday light, you really feel you've been somewhere out of the ordinary. And you have. "Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan" continues through June 17 at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, Manhattan; (212) 715-1258, japansociety.org.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

Cristiano Ronaldo.

Revista ACH Chicos Año 2 - Número 49 Marzo 2007 Buenos Aires , Argentina Hombres en el Deporte

Cristiano Ronaldo ícono gay. By Peter

The Manchester Guardian Cristiano en acción.

El delantero de 21 años que juega en el Manchester United y que en el mundial defendió los colores de su selección Portuguesa fue elegido como el jugador del mundial más hermoso, el más atractivo y sexy por los lectores de la revista gay de Holanda gaykrant. Aunque no solo triunfa entre el público gay ya que con anterioridad había sido elegido como el jugador más sexy de Portugal.

Cristiano Ronaldo hizo su debut en la Selección de fútbol de Portugal el 20 de agosto de 2003 ante Kazajistán, y representó a su selección en los Juegos Olímpicos de Atenas 2004. Pero donde dio el paso a la primera línea del fútbol mundial fue defendiendo a Portugal en la Euro 2004, donde fue reclamado tanto por la prensa como por los aficionados cuando en los primeros partidos no contaba para el seleccionador en el once titular, y acabó siendo una de las figuras de la selección portuguesa en el torneo, acabando subcampeona por detrás de Grecia.

En la siguiente gran cita de su selección, la Copa Mundial de Fútbol de 2006, en Alemania, jugó a un gran nivel, como casi el resto de su selección brilló por su habilidad, lo que le sirvió a su equipo para auparse a la cuarta posición final, cayendo en semifinales ante Francia, y en el partido por el tercer y cuarto puesto ante Alemania.

Características y vida privada Como futbolista puede actuar como extremo por ambas bandas y también como delantero. Se maneja bien con ambas piernas (aunque es diestro), pero sobre todo destaca por su explosiva velocidad, su facilidad para driblar al adversario y su verticalidad cara a puerta. En sus años en Manchester maduraría como jugador, mejorando las cualidades que demostró ante el público mundial en los encuentros con su selección. Fuera del fútbol, Cristiano Ronaldo cuenta con un gran número de seguidoras y seguidores que le consideran un sex symbols de este deporte, hasta tal punto que fue declarado el jugador más sexy del Mundial por una página web de la comunidad gay. En otro ámbito, el jugador fue acusado de violación a menores en Inglaterra en octubre de 2005, aunque un mes más tarde fue declarado inocente de todos los cargos.

Copyright by ACHchicos 2007

Vestido clásico de Pascua Florida.

In an Easter Dress, a Social Set Revealed St. Louis By GUY TREBAY Published: March 18, 2007

Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times EXCLUSIVE The cherry dress, the signature outfit of the St. Louis Woman's Exchange, is still going strong.

WE accept by now that designer collections will whip in and out of style with the aerodynamic thrust of a race car running a lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We understand that obsolescence is built in. We may wish at times that things were otherwise; sadly, they aren't. And so, thanks in part to this dispiriting truth of the market, spirits may brighten when we come across a rare item whose existence rebukes the cult of novelty, some fine and simple product that seems never to change. Who can say when the cherry dress came into being? People here can tell you only that it was always there. For 50 years the cherry dress has been the holiday uniform for the fine-featured towheads at places like the St. Louis Country Club or exclusive Midwestern summer resorts like Harbor Point or Charlevoix, Mich. For 50 years, the cherry dress has been a consistent best seller at the Woman's Exchange of St. Louis, a modest nonprofit shop and institution itself about as old as electrification, having opened its doors in 1883. Come Easter, orders at the store are so strong for cherry dresses that Ellie Dressel, who sews them, says her leg is "chained to the sewing machine." Ms. Dressel, a divorced mother who has supported a family and reared a mentally challenged son at home by sewing this one item (450 dresses a year, she said) for nearly a quarter-century, epitomizes the Horatio Alger principles behind the Woman's Exchange, which a 19th-century newspaper described as "helping those who try to help themselves." In classic form, the cherry dress is a simple box-pleat frock in white cotton, with a piped Peter Pan collar, a snap closure and four paired cotton cherries, in sewing terminology called yo-yos, stitched on the front.

Palm Beach Magazine Jacqueline Kennedy put her son in the boy's version.

There are many variants, including a short-pants boy's version. A snapshot exists of John F. Kennedy Jr. as a toddler, wearing a cherry jumper from the St. Louis Woman's Exchange to accompany his mother to St. Edward Church in Palm Beach, Fla. It is the sort of picture, said Nancy Thomas, the president of the shop's volunteer board, that has caused at least one St. Louis man (her husband) to express relief that he never had sons. WHAT is it about the cherry dress, one may ask? What was it about any of the simple preppy staples that turned into classics, things like penny loafers or blue blazers or button-down shirts? They functioned so well that people forgot to change them. They were so stylistically generic that, for a very long while, they escaped the tentacles of fashion. They were so reassuringly dowdy that they became background, no small point in a world where people still think that it is one who wears clothes and not the other way around. And they were durable. "There's a timeless quality to them, and they're dresses that you hold on to," Carrie Polk, one of four sisters with deep family roots in this river city, said of cherry dresses. "Three generations in our family have worn them. They're like clothes from before the disposable-clothes era, with hems the size of Texas. You didn't just spill chocolate on one and pitch it. You got it cleaned and ironed, and if you grew, you brought down the hem."

Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times HOME INDUSTRY The goods have not changed much at the St. Louis exchange.

A kiddie garment may seem a flimsy thing on which to hang a social history, but the cherry dress is sold in only one place in the world, and that place itself is a historical rarity, perhaps the largest among the remaining outposts of a once-thriving national network of nonprofit "exchanges" for women's work. Of scores that existed at the height of the movement, there are now about 20 left, including outposts in Memphis, St. Augustine, Fla., and Brooklyn. The women's exchanges, voluntary social service agencies, originated in 19th-century Philadelphia as places for genteel ladies fallen on hard times to discreetly earn a living without leaving home. "Consignors were originally known as decayed gentlewomen," said the historian Kathleen Sander, whose book, "The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900," traced the history of a social service federation whose feminist outlines were not always easy to detect behind the chintz-upholstered gentility of the exchanges themselves. Well into the 20th century, society women operated these tearooms and gift shops that sold everything from hand-painted china or smocked christening bonnets to knitted sweaters for dogs. It was the Civil War that propelled the woman's exchange movement, by depleting an entire marriageable generation of men, and forcing women of all economic backgrounds to leave home and forge careers. The percentage of unmarried women in the post-bellum period, Ms. Sander noted, was higher then than at any other time in American history. "The exchanges grew out of this tremendous economic insecurity," she said. That and a flourishing Decorative Arts movement — introduced to the country at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia — helped revive skills largely lost to mass production. "There were wonderful skills that had fallen through the cracks," Ms. Sander said. Marketing those skills became the mission of dozens of similar white-glove enterprises across the country, and helped keep the exchanges alive through the Great Depression and two World Wars. For reasons lost to time, each exchange tended to develop its own particular products. The shuttered and much-lamented New York Exchange for Women's Work — started in 1878 by Candace Wheeler, an interior designer, and Mary Atwater Choate, a prominent New Yorker who also founded the preparatory school now known as Choate Rosemary Hall — made a specialty of smock dresses, bittersweet chocolate cakes and cod balls. (The exchange fell victim in 2003 to soaring real estate prices.) The Baltimore exchange became renowned for sock monkeys. St. Louis had the cherry dress.

Woman's Exchange of St. Louis An undated photo of the exchange.

Even as the populations of consigners shifted from genteel ladies down on their luck to new immigrants trying to find a toehold, the women's exchange in St. Louis stayed afloat, in the way that successful retailers do, by understanding its market. The city has an unusually robust country club scene and its members patronize the gift shop and tearoom as avidly as their mothers and grandmothers did. (The shop also attracts orders for children's clothes from people who live far from St. Louis, including Gwyneth Paltrow, according to the general manager, Jessica Wright.) Although the clientele has remained the same, the consignor profile has changed and many of the women (and men) who now make things for the exchange are not hard-up widows but immigrants from Bosnia, Somalia and Ethiopia. "The wonderful thing about the exchanges is how the managers keep thinking of ways to keep them afloat," Ms. Sander said. Soon after Prohibition was repealed, for instance, the New York exchange got busy serving Manhattans to the socialites of the day at the so-called Crinoline Bar. The place attained the status of minor local legend, in part because of a retail strategy that encouraged clients to start the afternoon with a plate of chicken croquettes and a highball and then stick around to shop. The formula is not so very different at the St. Louis exchange, although lamentably it serves no alcohol. Anachronistic the fashions there may be, but the tearoom menu is a record of stopped culinary time. "I always remember the chicken salad sandwich," said Mary Frances Rand, a New Yorker whose St. Louis family once owned the largest shoe manufacturer in the world. "It was very, very sweet and old-fashioned, even back when I made my debut," Ms. Rand said, adding that her debutante year was 1949.

Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times The tearoom today. The diners are, from left, Charlene Barlow; her daughter, Elizabeth; and her mother, Mary Ann Reed.

If the tearoom offerings have changed since then, it is not obvious how. A chicken salad sandwich is listed ("White Meat Only") alongside the Euclid Avenue, an open-face sandwich of sliced tomatoes and crisp bacon smothered in Cheddar cheese. There, too, is a layered Lucky 7 Cake and the locally renowned Woman's Exchange Salad Bowl, an imposing "medley" (landslide is more like it) of julienned chicken breast, ham, Swiss cheese, tomato, hard-boiled egg, bacon, scallions and iceberg lettuce, topped with a dressing whose highly guarded secret ingredient would appear to be mayonnaise. And cholesterol, to be truthful, is an unwelcome and alien concept in the proper scheme of things. It is certainly one with little place in the charmingly timeless world of Lucky 7 Cake and piped cotton batiste. Sensible people both within and outside of St. Louis innately understand the appeal of this truth. It is why "friends from all over, sophisticated friends," as Ms. Polk said, call asking her to order them cherry dresses each Easter. "They're so handmade and special," she added, and a certified bargain at $60. "They're so vintage, really, they just never go out."

Copyright by the New York Times 2007