LABJ’s LA Stories
Dress for Success
Haute couture has long sought to blend high and low culture, and the latest marriage is yet another example.
Toymaker Mattel Inc. and Austrian crystal house Swarovski have joined in the training of students at the Otis College of Art and Design’s Fashion School in downtown L.A. by supplying materials as the
students dressed
Barbie dolls in crystal-dotted ensembles.
They worked all semester preparing the Sea Goddess-themed costumes, and Mattel provided custom-made Barbies with a
variety of skin tones and hairstyles to meet the needs of the students’ concepts. Swarovski donated the crystals.
Morgan Olson, a graduating senior, won the best costume award the Golden Thimble with a creation inspired by the d & #233;cor of the ornate hotels in Dubai, where she once spent two weeks.
She spent at least 300 hours, sometimes in all night crystal-gluing sessions, working on her Barbie fashions. The biggest
challenge was attaching 6,000 tiny crystals to the blue-spotted grouper-colored skirt.
“I used a very small toothpick with wax on it,” she said, “a bottle of glue and a lot of patience.”
Steve Silkin
Greased Lightning
A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology has once again broken the Internet speed record, transferring data nearly 10,000 times faster than commercial broadband networks.
The feat was announced at the Spring 2004 Internet2 meeting in Arlington, Va.
The team beat its previous record, set in November, by transmitting data from Los Angeles to Geneva about 6,800 miles at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second, fast enough to download a DVD from halfway around the world in five seconds.
“This is certainly an important
milestone,” said Harvey Newman, the Caltech physics professor who leads the team. “The whole point is to take this record and put it into production use.”
Karey Wutkowski
G’day, Mate
Not what viewers of “Crocodile Dundee” movies might think, but
Gay and lesbian vacationers have for years been drawn to Australia and New Zealand, beautiful, rugged countries that have welcomed and encouraged the visits. Now, Qantas Airways has started actively courting this lucrative market with a promotion touting the atmosphere of tolerance “down under.”
The Sydney-based airline, which has been flying routes from the U.S. to the South Pacific since 1986, is a member of the International Gay & Lesbian Travel
Association and this summer will boost its weekly departures from Los Angeles International Airport to 39 per week, up from 32 per week last summer.
The airline also has thrice-weekly departures from New York, which connect to LAX en route to Australia and New Zealand. “We target niche travelers,” said Michael Abraham, marketing and communications manager for Qantas’ regional North American headquarters in L.A. “These are very gay-friendly countries.”
David Greenberg
Seaside Sasquatch
Santa Monica might do well to tread lightly.
The city is trumpeting the result of a study showing that in the last 10 years it has reduced its so-called “ecological footprint” by 5.7 percent.
For those unschooled in the finer art of municipal podiatry, an ecological footprint is the measure of a variety of environmental factors converted to square miles.
“It’s a way of taking all your resource use energy use, food consumption and all of your waste generation and converting that into a land area,” said Dean Kubani, a senior city environmental analyst.
The result shows how many square miles of land are needed to make the existence of a city possible. Based on the criteria, L.A., for instance, should spread “probably about half the size of the state,” said Kubani.
Nevertheless, Santa Monica ought not feel overly proud of its numbers: the city’s
ecological footprint is 2,747 square miles, more than 330 times larger than its geographical footprint of 8.3 miles. But the latter figure was not included on the city’s promotional material on the subject.
Andrew Simons
The Roving Eye
Caps and Gowns
L.A. college grads will be getting a dose of the wisdom of business, media, cultural and political figures in the coming weeks at their commencement ceremonies.
Carly Fiorina (photo), chairman and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, will deliver Caltech’s commencement speech on June 11, as well as address UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science commencement on June 19.
Among others stopping at the Westwood campus are Frank Marshall, producer of “The Color Purple” and “The Sixth Sense” (College of Letters and Science); lawyer and TV personality Ben Stein (School of Law); Mattel Co. Chairman Robert A. Eckert (Anderson School); Paramount Chairman Sherry Lansing (School of Theater, Film and Television); and Walt Disney Co. Chairman George Mitchell (School of Public Policy and Research).
Republican Sen. John McCain is scheduled to address USC grads May 14. Later in the day, each of the college’s schools stages a satellite ceremony with speakers from the specialty areas. Among these are Tom Stemberg, founder and chairman of Staples Inc., who will address the Marshall School of Business commencement; Westwood One Chairman Norman Pattiz, Graduate School of Communication; and CNN news anchor and correspondent Kyra Phillips at the School of Journalism.
Scheduled to speak at the Claremont Colleges commencements May 15 and 16 are former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley (Claremont McKenna), former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite (Pomona), publisher and activist Gloria Steinem (Scripps) and Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown (Claremont Graduate University).
Steve Silkin
