Like the Razzies to the Oscars, designer counterfeiters find fame for bad behavior.

It must be a tad insulting to the 2007 Oscars Awards that their nod to the best in films has to share February with the worst in movies of the 2007 Razzie Awards. Just imagine what the United States, hell-bent on its counterfeit crackdown, must feel about Asia, in heaven with its bestseller fakes.

Designer knockoffs of brands like Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chanel, Christian Dior, Hermes, Burberry sell hot and fast in cities across Asia. Luxury fakes abound in Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. Counterfeits are now a $500 billion business worldwide.

The vibe in the US is all glum and pointing fingers at counterfeiters as terrorists, but in China and South Korea, the mood is as festive as awards nights, fake merchandisers vying for their claims to fame.

Take South Korea, which vendors all over Asia agree make the best-quality fake designer bags. In the streets of Seoul, knockoff bags are peddled openly at dirt-cheap prices, bearing generic logos that are then replaced with designer logos once purchased.

At Namdaemoon, a veteran market in downtown Seoul, a merchant boasts: “We do not deal with Chinese products. For fake bags, South Korean products are the best. We export these products to…

Read More » Luxury Designer Fakes, Best Quality from South Korea, China

You won’t believe who is earning more money than you thought.

Oprah and Bill Gates, surely. Actors, too, once they’ve become stars; and ordinary people, often, once they’ve joined a reality TV show. But also, you’ll be surprised at high salaries attached to professions you mostly assume don’t pay all that well.

Job: Astronomer. Salary: $101,360 annual average. Just ask Britney Spears‘ manager and Lindsay Lohan’s publicist: as suspected, you can make a fortune by watching the stars. The job of an astronomer is that of a researcher-reporter, except his field of study is the celestial universe, plus the stars in his care hardly behave like primadonnas.

Job: School principal. Salary: $82,225 annual average (high school). Oprah was well-informed to have once given away her ‘favorite things’ to teachers, whose humble salaries are about $40,000 a year. It’s a different lesson, though, with school principals, whose job it is to be the school supervisor, encompassing the administrative, strategic, and psychosocial concerns of student life.

Job: Executive coach. Salary: $350 to $1,000+ hourly average; $70,000 to $100,000 base pay + bonuses if employed by company in-house. If life coaches offer life advice, executive coaches provide managers and CEOs with professional counsel like next career moves. More all-around than a shrink, they can even tip you on where’s a better gym to vent work anxieties out.

Job: Court reporter. Salary: $56,110 annual average; six figures when including freelance jobs. A court reporter functions as a documentor, recording legal proceedings into written transcripts. Given how one word in a hearing can send the accused to…

Read More » Make Money in High-Paying Jobs You Never Knew

Welcome a new rival of Milwaukee, drunkest US city, and Czech Republic, drunkest beer country.

It was not too long ago that we blogged the 2006 Forbes list of America’s Drunkest Cities, headed by Milwaukee, Minneapolis – St. Paul, and Columbus; mentioning that, worldwide, the Czech Republic was the country with the highest record of beer consumption. Now Finland, then No. 9 in world beer consumption, just reported it reached an all-time high in drunkenness last year. Oh-kay-then.

What’s Finnish for horizontal? Finland’s National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health confirms alcohol is the new No. 1 killer of adults in the country. Last year it was accountable for 17% of all deaths among 15 to 64 year old males, surpassing heart disease for the first time, and over 10.5% of all deaths among 15 to 64 year old females, alongside breast cancer for the first time.

More than 2,000 adults were killed by alcohol poisoning, or illnesses due to alcohol consumption, while close to 1,000 died in accidents or violent incidents due to alcohol. The Finnish government’s premier health and welfare agency further reports the cost of treating alcohol-related illnesses peaked last year at $1.1 billion, up 14% from 2003.

It is no woozy coincidence that the increase in…

Read More » Finland Wants to Be World’s Most Drunken Nation

We condemn discrimination against gays, and we condemn sex amongst gays.

The above mixed messages are brought to you by the United States Catholic bishops, who confered Tuesday to draft a document that advises followers of their faith on how to deal with gays, and gayness. The resulting statement contains gay outreach guidelines, which gay Catholic activists find only alienate the very people they attempt to reach.

The statement, Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination, was adopted at a meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops by a 194-37 vote, with one abstention. It is well intended on the outset, encouraging Catholics to make an effort to accept homosexuals; but all the same, discouraging efforts to accept homosexuality.

An example: welcoming gays to the Catholic flock but forbidding those who engage in gay sex to take the holy communion. Seriously, is this still a traumatic reaction to that kiss from one male to another that ended the last supper in bad taste?

Catholic bishops suggest it’s okay to be gay but not okay to live a gay lifestyle, as if the two should be separated. The statement proposes it isn’t a sin to be attracted to someone of the same sex – but it is a sin to act on these same-sex feelings. To wit: fall in love but don’t make…

Read More » Bishops Welcome Gays …with a Judas Kiss

England and Manchester United star Wayne Rooney scored on the internet.

The goal-starved striker won a legal battle for the right to the website address http://www.waynerooney.com/.

Everton fan Huw Marshall, from Wrexham, registered WayneRooney.com in April 2002, when the striker was just 16. The case had been taken to the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland.

A ruling was made that the domain name must be handed to the Manchester United striker and his management company. A World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) panel said the present owner’s claim he had registered the domain in order to create a fan site was “a difficult story to swallow”.

The WIPO panel was set up in 1999 to allow those who think they have the right to a domain to gain control of it without having to fight costly legal battles or pay large sums to so-called cybersquatters.

Mr. Marshall, an actor who appears in S4C’s Welsh-language drama Tipyn o Stad, registered the domain six months before Rooney’s profile soared after scoring a last minute goal for Everton against Arsenal. The strike made him the Premiership’s youngest goal-scorer at the time.

Mr. Marshall, a lifelong Everton fan, said he had registered the…

Read More » Wayne Rooney scores on the Net; wins back www.WayneRooney.com

It’s official. There are more drunks around the White House than in famously bad-ass US cities.

In the 2006 Forbes list of America’s Drunkest Cities, Washington, DC ranked higher than Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and New Orleans. They all ranked lower than Las Vegas but, oddly, Sin City did not even make the top ten. Milwaukee ranked #1 while Nashville came last as #35 in this Forbes survey on the largest US cities in terms of state laws, drinkers, heavy drinkers, binge drinkers, and alcoholism.

It’s a country where college football betting tips involve beer bongs and bungie shots; duh, America has a drinking situation. As a bit of consolation, though, the US did produce such brilliant drunks as Ernest Hemingway, born in #6 Chicago; Edgar Allan Poe, born in #4 Boston; German-born Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits, both based in #23 LA; Johnny Cash, based in #35 Nashville and elsewhere in Tennessee.

Forbes List of America’s Drunkest Cities in 2006

#14 Las Vegas *ranked no. 4 in state laws
Seriously, it’s a poor showing for a city where booze, available anytime, comes paired with gambling, sex, and quickie weddings. Possibly all the drunks are just visiting, as tourism and conventions are top economic drivers other than casino gaming, a $9.1 billion industry last year. When The Mirage started the era of megaresorts in ‘89 while hurting downtown and Fremont, it was clear this was a place to get soused either way, out of…

Read More » America has a buzz – The Most Drunken US Cities (2 of 2)

For decades, the world’s no. 1 beer-brewing city was not in Germany or Belgium but in Wisconsin.

That city was Milwaukee, which now ranks #1 in the 2006 Forbes list of America’s Drunkest Cities. To come up with this list, Forbes did a survey on the 35 largest US cities in terms of state laws, drinkers, heavy drinkers, binge drinkers, and alcoholism.

As if you didn’t know, the United States has an undeniable drinking culture. We drink at spring break, over baseball matches, in poker when it’s best to stay sober. Somebody mentions tips on NFL football and we think they mean tipping the bartender during a game. We glug on when our team wins, or loses, or isn’t even playing.

Forbes’ Top 10 America’s Drunkest Cities

#1 Milwaukee *ranked no. 1 in both drinkers and binge drinkers
#2 Minneapolis – St. Paul *no. 3 in binge drinkers
#3 Columbus *no. 2 in heavy drinkers
#4 Boston *no. 1 in state laws
#5 Austin *no. 3 in state laws
#6 Chicago *no. 5 in both state laws and binge drinkers
#7 Cleveland *no. 2 in alcoholism
#8 Pittsburgh *no. 2 in binge drinkers
#9 Philadelphia *no. 4 in both state laws and heavy drinkers
#10 Providence *no. 2 in state laws

Milwaukee, christened as The Brew City and ‘the nation’s watering hole‘, has…

Read More » America has a buzz – The Most Drunken US Cities (1 of 2)

In today’s age of text messaging, words were stuck in this woman’s throat.

Literally, she swallowed her cell phone while she and her boyfriend were having a fight. He says she did it to hide something. She says he made her do it out of jealousy.

True, women have swallowed larger things. But this one is like a long pass with no NFL betting strategy. If she was hiding anything, couldn’t she simply have stepped on the friggin’ phone? Suddenly, Naomi Campbell’s cell phone flailing isn’t so far-fetched.

It was in December last year, as the Christmas spirit inspired enemies to kiss and make up, when the two-year couple got into a drunken fight one night. Before the night ended, they had taken Deep Throat to a cellular level.

The girlfriend, Melinda Abell, 25, provided the police with a statement before rushing to the ER, whereupon the cell phone was unearthed from her throat. The boyfriend, Marlon Brando Gill, 24, was then charged with first-degree assault for shoving the cell phone down his girlfriend’s throat.

Gill’s defense insists that Abell swallowed the phone on purpose, so her boyfriend would not see whom she’d been calling. In a twist that would’ve rivalled NFL betting strategy, Abell testified this week, on the first…

Read More » Honey, I Swallowed the Phone!

A woman killed on the same time and on the same spot on the fourth anniversary of her brother’s death?

Jeez… This is some sick, twisted and scary stuff.

On the fourth anniversary of her brother’s murder, a woman lighting candles at a makeshift shrine to probably her brother, was gunned down, killing her at about the same spot, on the same day and on the same hour as her older sibling.

Told you this is some twisted stuff.

The woman was killed Saturday at about 11:30 p.m. in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood on a one-way street close to a mass transit station and within view of Boston police headquarters.

The police declined to give the victim’s identity but her friends and relatives identified her as 20-year-old Analicia Perry of the South End neighborhood. She had a four-year-old daughter and had lived with her mother and sister about a mile where her brother was killed.

‘’What are they going to tell that baby? She’s only four,’’ Cleatha Rainey, whose daughter was a friend of…

Read More » Woman Killed at Same Spot, Same Time as Brother

I’d promise you the moon and the stars, but then I’d be lying. What I can promise you is a trip into space. For real. Spacewalks are now available as luxury travel for painfully wealthy jetsetters.

You know all about travel agencies but ever heard of a space travel agency? There is one out there: Space Adventures. It is offering the luxury destination of a lifetime – spacewalks 350 km (220 miles) above Earth.

Jumpin’ Jupiter. We’re not talking Air Jordan kind of spacewalks here. Free online basketball tips are all good but this, my friends, is the real deal. Truth is, the space travel package totally lets you play astronaut, or cosmonaut.

You get 190 hours of training at the Star City cosmonaut school near Moscow. 16 days’ stay aboard the International Space Station. Round-trip rocket flights from Kazakhstan. And the finale – a chance to float outside the orbital outpost for 90 minutes, which is how long it takes to orbit Earth once.

Sheesh. Excuse me while I drool. So what does walking in space cost these days? Well, money talks in spacewalks. Each trip costs £19 million pounds. Now that’s gotta hurt.

Seriously, the amount isn’t so out of this world. You will be wearing a spacesuit worth £6.5 million pounds each, with its own life-support system and designed to protect from extreme temperatures. Safety tethers will anchor you to the space station hurtling about the planet at five miles per second. A cosmonaut will be with you the whole time.

Arthur C. Clarke was right on the…

Read More » Latest in Luxury Travel: Outer Space