Left Lane
A touch of spring
Advertiser Staff & Wire services
Doug Jago, head of visual merchandising at Neiman Marcus, came up with charming tabletop decorations for a breakfast at Mariposa recently: a fresh flower stuck in a tiny pot of earth. It's so easy to do at home and costs so little.
He found the glass flower pots at Flora Dec for about $1, filled them with potting soil, and placed a single rose in the middle, leaving air around the stem so it can be watered. Other flowers would also work: a carnation or tulip, perhaps, so long as the stem is stiff enough to stand on its own in the soil.
Total cost: under $2.
— Paula Rath, Advertiser staff writer
Short stop
It seems like the whole world is trying to get shorty: Short titles, short words and short names.
Billy Crystal titled his movie on Yankee legends Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris "61*." "CSI" is the hot new show on TV. The summer movie buzz is about Steven Spielberg's "A.I." Entertainment Weekly has been shortening "Bridget Jones's Diary" to BJD.
Chart toppers include Jon B, Dido, Tank, Nelly, Shaggy, Eve and 112 . Jennifer Lopez's name was apparently so unwieldy that she became simply J-Lo.
Maybe it's Internet-speak, composed of short fragments of thoughts and abbreviations in place of whole sentences and phrases. Maybe we've run out of time for talk. Or maybe we've just become ultra-casual. The president, after all, is called "Dubya."
— Greg Morago, Hartford Courant
Convenient getaways for a nice cup of tea
There's no pastime as civilized as taking tea, and — unfortunately — nothing more uncivilized than tooling around looking for parking in order to enjoy it. But for those who work downtown, or who have business there and have parked already, there are two havens within walking distance of the central corridor: Michelle Henry's established tea room at 1026 Nu'uanu Ave., and, just a few weeks old, the Winterbourne Tea Parlor, located at the Mission Houses Museum.
This latter provides a delightful period setting (it's easy to imagine the missionaries nodding approvingly) and some delectable treats. You can go for the full tea sampler, with assorted nibbles, for $11 (from 2:30 p.m.), but breakfast is served from 7:30 a.m., too. Or $3.25 will get you a pot of tea and a scone to die for. Reservations for afternoon tea: 537-3806.
— Vicki Viotti, Advertiser staff writer
Friends with forceps
U.S. women like their ob-gyns — they really like them, according to a survey released Tuesday. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists commissioned the Gallup poll to commemorate its 50th anniversary and the news was good: About two-thirds of those surveyed gave their ob-gyns an A, while another quarter of the women gave their ob-gyns a B.
About half the women in the nationally representative sample of 1,000 said they preferred a woman gynecologist; 15 percent preferred a man and the remainder had no preference.
— USA Today
