San Francisco-based interior stylist Gary Spain creates eclectic interiors that take inspiration from unexpected sources. Indeed, in the current issue of California Home+Design, he notes that, "When I’m on a project, I’m really inspired by everything I see."
Spain's interiors mix high- and low-end finds, global influences, and showstopper new and vintage pieces. This aesthetic can be seen on this month's cover of California Home+Design, where he combines French Provençal chairs, original art, vintage high-end pieces, and a CB2 pendant lamp to create a lively, welcoming living room.
Spain, who previously worked as a creative director and photo stylist in Dallas, TX, has lived in San Francisco for four years, where he works for editorial photos shoots, advertising shoots, and catalogs, concentrating on styling and interior design. In the magazine, he explains his aesthetic by saying “I find interesting, weird things and make them work. I want people to walk in and be wowed. I like to create spaces that make people think." For more pictures of his work, read more.
The dynamic duo of Hurley and Miles teamed up again on last night's Lost for some soul searching — literally and figuratively. Spoilers and a confession after the jump.
First, the confession: I have never seen The Empire Strikes Back. No particular reason—I liked Star Wars and saw it a couple of times in the theater when it first came out. But given the reference in both the title of last night's episode ("Some Like It Hoth") and Hurley's fannish rewrite of the script, not to mention its relevance to the relationship between Miles and his father, Pierre Chang, it seems like a pretty big fail on my part (at the moment, anyway). Faking knowledge I don't have seems like a bigger one ("Ewoks suck! Yay, Hurley!"), so I'll leave it to you guys to discuss these plot points more fully in the comments. As a Lost fan, however, I loved Hurley's plan to help George Lucas out by sending him the script for a Star Wars sequel ("with a couple of improvements") before he's had the time to think of it himself.
By the way, if you're in an Egyptian mood, with a little rearranging the title becomes "Some Like I, Thoth." Thoth was the Egyptian god who among other duties played Smokey in the underworld by weighing "the soul of the deceased, and . . . read[ing] from his tablets a record of his actions in the past life." (William Ricketts Cooper, An Archaic Dictionary, 570.) Thoth is usually depicted with the head of an ibis, but sometimes with the head of a man (which I mention because the statue has humanoid ears after all).
First and foremost, though, "Some Like It Hoth" is Miles Straume's story. We see him as a little kid communicating with the dead for the first time with the body of a man in the apartment complex where he and his mother live. Later, teenage punk rock Miles returns to visit his mother, who appears terminally ill. He wants to know why and how he comes by his special ability — and why won't she talk to him about his father? She tells him his father kicked them out when Miles was just a baby. Now he's dead and his body is someplace where Miles can never go.
Adult Miles is working as a spiritualist when he is recruited by Naomi Dorrit, after an audition in which he identifies the body of man named Felix, killed while delivering photos of empty graves and a purchase order for an empty airplane to Charles Widmore. When Naomi offers him $1.6 million for his services, he immediately accepts. Then he's jumped by a bunch of men who try to talk him out of working for Widmore. Their leader, Bram, promises Miles that if they come with them, he'll find out why he has his gift and his father's identity. Miles asks for $3.2 million, but they are not paying (Miles will later ask Ben for the same amount in exchange for not turning him in). After tossing Miles to the pavement, they tell him he's "playing for the wrong team."
But whose team are they on? Bram asks Miles "what lies in the shadow of the statue." This is the same password/question posed by Ilana to Frank last week, which leads the viewer to think that she and Bram are working together against Widmore. But Ilana also denied working for Ben (to Sayid in "He's Our You"). Are they really working for the family of Peter Avellino, as she says, or someone/something else? Ben Linus after all? Dharma next-of-kin looking for revenge? I'm not sure I can handle yet another major player in what to this point has been the "war" between Ben and Widmore (but I always think that when a new bunch of characters is introduced, and I'm almost always satisfied in the end).
As many fans predicted, Miles's father is Pierre Chang. Miles figures this out when, after three days in 1970s Dharmaville, he discovers his mother behind him in the cafeteria line. When Chang asks Miles to transport a body (a worker killed when something—like a massive jolt of electromagnetism—pulls a dental filling out of his tooth and deep into his brain), Hurley gets himself involved to everybody's irritation. Then again, I suppose without him insinuating himself into the situation, we'd never get to the gist of Miles's relationship with his formerly absent father. Add Miles's name to the list of Losties with daddy issues (Jack, Locke, Ben, e.g.).
Hurley unsuccessfully tries to bring father and son together on a ride out to Swan construction site (I loved the look of disbelief Miles shoots at Chang when he tells Hurley he likes country music), but as far as Chang is concerned, in 1977, Miles is a three-month-old baby. After they drop Chang at the site (where Hurley witnesses a very familiar "serial number" being embossed into the hatch door), Hurley wonders whether Miles could change his own diaper. Which brings up a point: What are the rules about present and future selves meeting? Until last night, no Lostie has done so. According to the Orchid orientation film "outtake," it's implied that unspecified very bad things happen if both selves get near one other, but in "Some Like It Hoth" adult Miles watches as his father reads a book to his baby self, with no apparent ill results.
In other 1977 island doings, Roger becomes suspicious of Kate when she too-strongly suggests that the missing Ben will be okay, and then Jack when he too-strongly sticks up for Kate. Meanwhile, Phil goes to LaFleur/Sawyer after watching the surveillance tape Miles was supposed to "accidentally erase," the one showing Sawyer and Kate taking Ben outside the sonic fence. And who should turn up in a group of scientists arriving fresh from Ann Arbor on the submarine but our own Daniel Faraday! Has he been there for the past three years? He certainly seems in a better frame of mind than when last we saw him. I hope we get to his part of the story soon.
Don't mean to step on Lindy's toes here, and there's no game card for this installment of Scruples on Slog, but...
Let's say someone gave you a pot brownie while you were on vacation in, let's say, Hawaii. And let's say you hung on to it in case you got an afternoon alone—say, if your traveling companions took a surfing lesson or something and you had six hours free and clear—and let's say that you hid the brownie behind a box of coffee filters in one of the kitchen cabinets because you didn't want any of your traveling companions to mistake it for a regular brownie and eat it. And let's say there were no surfing lessons, no afternoons alone, so you never got to eat that brownie. And let's say you forgot to take the brownie with you when you checked out of the hotel and let's say that you were on the other side of whatever island you might've been on when you remembered that you left a curiously strong pot brownie sitting behind the coffee filters in kitchen cabinet.
Do you...
1. Do nothing and trust that anyone who finds a small brownie hidden in a kitchen cabinet in a hotel room in Hawaii won't be dumb enough to eat it?
2. Call the hotel and ask for housekeeping and tell them where the brownie is and ask them to throw it away?
3. Freak out about the possibility that a child and/or someone actually dumb enough to eat it might find that brownie and then turn the car around and go way the hell out of your way to go back to the hotel where you make some excuse about having left something in your room so that you can get a new key and get back in your room and get the brownie and throw it away yourself?
Please note: This is an entirely hypothetical thought experiment meant for entertainment purposes only. Nothing like this has ever happened to me or anyone that I know.
Click above for a high-res image gallery of the 2010 Shelby GT500
Ford has managed to eke out an extra two miles per gallon on the highway from the heavily revised 2010 Shelby GT500, bringing its EPA estimated figures to 14 mpg city and 22 mpg highway. Sure, it seems rather unlikely that buyers looking at a muscle car will be all that concerned with fuel economy, but as much as we'd prefer the figures to be significantly higher, we're not ones to turn down a few free miles per gallon. Of course, the reason this car exists isn't to save on fuel bills. This being the case, the fuel economy improvement is accompanied by a bump up to 540 horsepower and a stump-pulling 510 lb-ft of torque, which is enough blast the GT500 to 60 miles per hour in just 4.3-seconds.
In fact, as is often the case, the revisions that make the latest Shelby more fuel efficient also also end up contributing to its improved ability to accelerate. The biggest change that helps on the highway is numerically lower gearing in the transmission for the fifth and sixth cogs, which, combined with a 3.55:1 axle ratio, allows the big 'Stang to boast improved acceleration in the first four gears to go along with the lowered RPM highway drone made possible by the last two gears.
Ford also points to a refined air intake and a revised twin-disc clutch as reasons the 2010 Shelby GT500 is a step above its predecessor, and we also took note of the vastly superior interior that's standard in all new Mustangs when we last took a look at the GT500. Click here to read all about it, and click past the break for the mpg-touting press release.
Do you talk on your cell phone in public places? Do you also assume no one's listening? Well, watch out, because there's a group that's eavesdropping and then re-enacting particularly loud cell phone offenders to hilarious effect (check out the video below from Loud People).
This totally plays into my insecurity with gabbing on my phone in public. If I have to talk, I try to keep it down. I have plenty of buddies and family members, though, who seem to turn up their voice volume if they're talking on their cell phone. I guess it's a holdover from the days when cell phone reception was so crappy that you had to speak up, but come on, people - You've got enough bars in enough places now!
So tell me: Are you or someone you know a loud cell phone talker?
Cyclists, in all of their skin-tight, spandex fashion may have a winning advantage in their competitions with their bicycle gear, but their fashion choices don't make them stand out from the crowd. A new cycling suit, by Tomek Pietek takes the fashion of bicycle gear to a new level through entertainment and education.
Video Street Fighter II Bonus Stage LIVE
