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The Hope Diamond

tugumuda — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 01:42:25 +0000

Hope Diamond is the biggest and the most famous diamond in the world. The infamous beauty appearance of this gem is equaled with the myth and superstition it brings anywhere it go. Many people believe that this precious diamond is cursed that will bring bad luck to everyone possess the diamond. Some even believe that if you touch it, you will also be cursed.

Despite its bad image of damned diamond, the Hope Diamond is very amazing with 45.52 carats weigh. This diamond is classified as a type IIb which means it is semi conductive and phosphoresce. The phosphoresce has a strong red color that will last for several seconds after you expose it to short wave ultra-violet light. The blue color of this diamond it self is from the boron content in the stone.

The color is described as fancy dark grayish-blue by the Gemological Institute of America. There was also an examination by another gemologist using a very sensitive colorimeter that revealed a very slight violet component to the deep blue color that you can’t see through naked eye. This precious gem is now have been donated by the former owner, Harry Winston, Inc to the Smithsonian Institution and become the premier attraction of this museum.

Why Does A Platinum Ring Cost More Than White Gold

tugumuda — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:04:06 +0000

When you’re in the market for an engagement ring, a wedding band, or just a fabulous new piece to add to your collection, one of the first things you think about is color. If you know you don’t want yellow gold, the next decision is whether to go with white gold or platinum.

The two metals are the same color but they carry very different price tags. Typically, a platinum ring will cost twice as much as a comparable ring made from white gold. Knowing the differences between white gold and platinum will help you decide whether the higher cost of a platinum ring is worth it to you.

One difference between the two could be referred to as “purity.” That is, white gold is mixed with another metal, usually silver or palladium, to create its “whiteness.” Additionally, white gold is coated with a white metal called Rhodium to enhance its appearance. Over time, the Rhodium plating wears away and your ring will need to be recoated and/or polished. In fact, jewelers recommend you have your ring re-plated every 12 to 18 months to maintain its optimal appearance. Without regular polishing and recoating, your white gold ring will take on a yellowish tinge.

Platinum, on the other hand, is used in a 95% pure form. It’s naturally whiter than white gold and doesn’t need to be plated with another metal, which, in turn, means that there is less upkeep. Because platinum requires less maintenance, it’s possible that a platinum ring is actually more economical than gold in the long run.

Another reason platinum costs more is that it’s sturdier. Platinum is heavier and harder than gold. A platinum ring, then, will be less vulnerable to dings and less likely to lose its shape. This strength also means that jewels set in platinum rings are more secure.

The sturdiness of platinum is related to another reason some people prefer it over gold. A piece of platinum jewelry is likely to last much longer than a piece of gold jewelry. If you’re purchasing a ring that you hope will one day be a family heirloom, it might be worth the extra cost to know that the piece will last for many generations to come—and retain its beauty. Experts say that platinum has a lifespan three times as long as that of gold.

Additionally, platinum is more rare than gold. The more rare anything is, the more it’s going to cost.

Sensitive skin and/or tendency towards allergic reactions also lead some people to buy platinum rings. Many people are sensitive to nickel, and nickel is commonly used to whiten gold. The purity of platinum decreases the likelihood of an allergic reaction.

Finally, it’s not entirely accurate to say the white gold and platinum are the same color. Platinum actually has a grayish tinge to its white, a color that is very flattering to diamonds. Diamonds appear brighter when placed next to the slightly darker shade of platinum. Similarly, some people feel that platinum creates a stronger contrast with yellow gold in a two-tone ring.

By Andrea Morris

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Film: Jumper

tugumuda — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:17:29 +0000

Andrew Pulver
Friday February 15, 2008
The Guardian

Details: 2007, USA, cert 12A, 88 mins, Dir: Doug Liman
With: Diane Lane, Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Samuel L Jackson
***

An elegantly idiotic sci-fi thriller that initially feels as though it might have derived from Philip K Dick – but lacks the master’s lysergic idiosyncracy. It’s the story of svelte and sulky Hayden Christensen who discovers in himself a disconcerting ability to teleport out of trouble. At first, he uses his power to empty bank vaults, pick up women, and picnic in high-security tourist sites, but then he realises he is being hunted by malevolent killers led by a silver-coiffured Samuel L Jackson.

About half way through, Jamie Bell pops up as a Geordie-accented guardian angel of a fellow jumper, and together they must battle Jackson and his “paladins”, who try to disable their prey with massive jolts of electricity. Director Doug Liman, who made his name with Swingers before inaugurating the Bourne franchise, plays everything with a commendably straight face, creating extravagant action sequences and inserting tortured love scenes for Hayden to glower through. But it all amounts to very little in the long run.

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Film: Iron Man

tugumuda — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:13:48 +0000

Peter Bradshaw
Friday May 2, 2008
The Guardian

Details: 2008, USA, Action, cert 12A, 125 mins, Dir: Jon Favreau
With: Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard
Summary: Wealthy industrialist Tony Stark builds an armoured suit after a life-threatening incident and decides to use its technology to fight against evil
***

With fictional movies about the United States’ post-9/11 military adventures now coming fully onstream, it is possible to see two distinct categories emerging. One can be labelled Anti-War: Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha and Brian De Palma’s Redacted. Another group can be called Fence-Sitter – Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, Peter Berg’s The Kingdom, Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss – a muddled, desperately liberal-patriot genre that yearns, in the manner of Gov Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, to support the troops rather than the war. Offhand, I can think of only one truly Pro-War film, and that is Hiner Saleem’s Kilomètre Zéro (2005), about Saddam’s genocidal persecution of the Kurds, a movie that concludes with a remarkable sequence showing forthright, entirely unironic rejoicing among the Kurdish diaspora at the US invasion.

Iron Man is, in its way, a refreshing change to all this. And its opening sequence is an exhilarating, even brilliant wish-fulfilment fantasy dramatising America’s yearning for a virile exit strategy. These are the adventures of the Marvel Comic superhero, updated from the original 60s Vietnam-era setting to the current situation in Afghanistan. We begin with a panoramic wide shot of the stark, spare, mountainous Afghan landscape. A military convoy is speeding grimly along; presently we become aware of a bizarre and incongruous civilian passenger in one of the hulking Humvees, cracking wise and attempting to flirt with the female service personnel: Tony Stark, billionaire playboy, technical genius and patriotic arms manufacturer under sole contract to the US military. He is played by Robert Downey Jr, deploying a slightly modified version of his instantly familiar frazzled, punchy delivery.

The convoy comes under terrifying attack, and louche Tony has time to register his own brand-name on the ordnance before he is knocked unconscious and taken prisoner, coming round in a cave to find a fellow captive and medic has installed an innovative electro-magnetic ring in his chest keeping him alive. His captors demand he builds a hi-tech bomb for them. Instead, in an inspired twist, Stark secretly creates an iron flying-suit exo-skeleton which repels the bad guys’ bullets with a satisfying clang. Iron Man comes clanking out of his cave and kicks insurgent ass before uncorking a flame-assisted vertical takeoff. A new superhero is born and he is capable of one extraordinary, mindblowing, superhuman feat that every US presidential candidate dreams about. He can get the hell out of the Middle East!

Iron Man is a mixture of Robocop and Darth Vader, with a hint of the Iron Man that Ted Hughes once imagined: only he is less mysterious, and essentially duller than each of these. After the hilarious opening section, we return to Tony’s long initiation into his new pacifist superhero identity, developing a Mk II exo-skeleton in a sleek new burgundy-red shade. Unfortunately, it’s one long anticlimax.

It turns out that Stark has a fantastic bachelor pad in Malibu that is already sumptuously appointed in a manner befitting a superhero or indeed a supervillain. This is to be the venue for Stark’s sexual conquest of impertinent Vanity Fair journalist, and blond troublemaker Christine Eberhart (Leslie Bibb), who attempts to patronise Stark’s trusted PA, a woman with the Moneypenny-ish name of Pepper Potts. She is played by Gwyneth Paltrow, the Queen of Bland, and there is a yucky scene in which Stark and Pepper almost kiss and it looks worryingly like some sort of sibling-incest. He also has a best-buddy-cum-wing-man in the form of a soldier called Rhodey, in which role Terrence Howard is performing at about 35% strength. There is also Obadiah Stane, who was a close associate of Stark’s late father and a man who encourages the wayward boy genius to think of him as a dad figure. As played by Jeff Bridges, he is sporting the upside-down face look: completely shaved head and a beard. The question of who is going to turn out to be the bad guy on the home front should not detain you for long.

As I mentioned above, Iron Man, for all its disposability, makes a cheerful and unpretentious change to the current crop of war movies. At least at first. But I am sorry to say that it is guilty of the sneaky chauvinist trick of making the ultimate villain an American: a mannerism common to many Hollywood movies that cannot quite bring themselves to accord foreigners the status of effective enmity.

As for Downey, he is such a distinctive, not to say barking mad performer, quite unlike anyone else around, that it is always good to see him. But I can’t quite see his Iron Man capturing the imagination. Despite the convulsively jittery address to the role, he is never in the smallest degree engaging in the way director Jon Favreau appears to think. We are supposed to see the vulnerable, adorable hero inside the hulking iron shell. Instead, Downey is the Man in the Iron Mask: imprisoned within a carapace of tics and mannerisms. Clearly Iron Man 2 is being readied: but this is a franchise that is already beginning to rust.

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Film: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

tugumuda — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:07:03 +0000

Peter Bradshaw
Monday May 19, 2008
The Guardian

Details: 2008, USA, Drama/Adventure, cert 12A, 122 mins, Dir: Steven Spielberg
With: Cate Blanchett, Harrison Ford, Jim Broadbent, John Hurt, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, Shia LaBeouf
Summary: Set in the 1950s, the now middle-aged intrepid archaeologist takes on Soviet agents in a race for a priceless artefact.
***

Nobody cracks the whip for grey power like Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr, legendary lost-temple-discoverer, baddie-foiler and boulder-evader, in which iconic role the increasingly grizzled Harrison Ford returns in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

It’s a title that no one here in Cannes can quite remember off the top of their heads, preferring to say simply “IJ4″ – and generally adding a whoop of excitement. It’s no exaggeration to say that Cannes has gone Indy crazy, with delegates queueing for hours to get in before the show began at lunchtime. Many threw their cinephile dignity to the winds, attempting to vault the barriers and rush in for the best seats, and having to be hauled back by one of the grey-suited entry police after an undignified scramble. An appearance by Steven Spielberg at the back of the packed auditorium, accompanied by festival director Thierry Frémaux, caused among us a veritable Mexican wave of head-turning and neck-craning.

There’s plenty going on in this movie, with one or two tremendous stunts and some very nasty giant ants. It also steers clear of the dusky-foreigner stereotypes that got the second Indiana Jones picture into hot water. But despite the genuine excitement, and one blinding flash of the old genius, this new Indy film looks like it’s going through the motions. The third film was called Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, after all; perhaps, like the first Star Wars film, that will need a change of title, with the word “penultimate” added to all new DVDs.

Unlike the calamitous Star Wars prequel trilogy, this film doesn’t trash our treasured memories, but it doesn’t add anything either. In fact, it seems like a very, very long extra ending, like the six or seven Peter Jackson tacked on to his The Return of the King.

The idea is that Indy is now plying his trade in the cold war of the 1950s. After discovering a Soviet plot to infiltrate an Area 51-style US military base, with a highly classified alien corpse, he witnesses a nuclear test and is then confronted with the Russian villainness Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett looking like a very, very attractive and taller version of Rosa Klebb. She wants to get her nasty Commie hands on the mythical crystal skull of a pre-Mayan civilisation, and return it to its legendary tomb deep in the South American jungle, created by Erich Von Daniken-style space invaders – and this will give the USSR supreme mystical powers over the free world. But not if Indy gets there first, and he’s accompanied by his unreliable Brit pal Mac (Ray Winstone), addled academic Professer Oxley (John Hurt), new young sidekick Mutt (Shia Labeouf) and it’s nice to see a return from Indy’s first and feistiest love, Marion (Karen Allen).

Like it or not, however, since Indy disappeared in 1989, plenty of movies have been ripping off his act: National Treasure, Sahara – even the dreaded The Da Vinci Code. So when Harrison Ford now returns to discover more tombs, more stone walls that grind apart at the touch of a lever, more waterfalls of sand – well, the thrill is gone. As Indiana says grimly at one point: “Same old, same old.” We were promised an eldorado, and I was hoping for a giant gold city. It turns out the gold is a metaphor for knowledge.

There is one moment of authentic Spielberg genius: Indy blunders onto a nuclear test site in the desert ten seconds before detonation. Desperately, he breaks into a nearby house and begs for help, but the house only has creepy mannequins instead of people. It is an entire fake town, constructed to assess the effect of a nuclear blast on civilians. Convulsed with horror, Indiana scrambles to find shelter from the blast. It really is chilling, and Indiana Jones’s bewildering predicament at the very epicentre of modernity gives a flash of the old Spielberg; the Spielberg of Jaws and Close Encounters.

Everything else is a retread from the VHS age. There are some nice moments, and everything is good-natured enough. But this is a moment for Harrison Ford to hang up the hat.

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Film: Zoo

tugumuda — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:56:47 +0000

Peter Bradshaw
Friday May 30, 2008
The Guardian

Details: 2007, USA, Documentary, cert 18, 80 mins, Dir: Hayden Campbell, Robinson Devor
UK release: 30 May 2008
With: Jenny Edwards, John Edwards, John Paulsen
Summary: Documentary on zoophilia, centring on a sleepy rural town that was turned upside down when a man died after attempting a sexual act with a horse
***

What a deeply strange piece of work this is, a movie that casts an eerie spell, at least partly because of its occult manner of withholding the truth. That title may sound innocuous. It is anything but. Zoo is short for “zoophile”, someone who is sexually attracted to animals, in this case horses. But Robinson Devor’s movie is a world away from the explicit drama of, say, Peter Shaffer’s Equus or indeed the grossout comedy of Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2, with its excursion into “inter-species erotica”.

This can only be described as a docu-drama meditation, an insistently elusive cinematic poem that takes the most brutal and shocking and bizarre subject and turns it into something that – though hardly subtle exactly – is intriguing and indirect. It shies away from the subject (no pun intended) and prefers instead to intuit the moods and psychic weather that crackles overhead, while this awful transgression takes place on the ground: largely unseen and unnoticed by Devor’s camera.

Zoo is based on a true incident that took place in 2005. An engineer in his mid-40s was anonymously dumped at a hospital emergency room in Washington state, dying later of a perforated colon. A police investigation led to a remote farmstead, and officers discovered horrible videotape evidence of equine bestiality, which was, remarkably, then legal in that state, though the ensuing furore soon changed matters. Devor has assembled audiotape testimony from other “zoos”, both those involved and not involved in this particular case, and they talk very indirectly about these matters, these voices being superimposed on an unearthly musical score and photography of an American landscape made to look startlingly alien. Incredible as it sounds, Devor avoids sensationalism, and anyone coming to this with no preconceptions, might well simply be baffled for much of the film, aware of nothing but the non-specific atmosphere of secrecy within a community of people – otherwise rational and law-abiding – who have subject to this grotesque perversion.

Perhaps most importantly, it is a film about the internet (because of course the zoos congregated via the web) and about how the net has created new modes of communication, new forms of identity, new private communities and new shared activities that were unthinkable before. It gives rise to the same debate that is familiar in relation to exploitative pornography: awful thoughts that might once have remained fleeting, private, unexamined, and to all intents and purposes non-existent, can now be acted upon. And this creates the landscape that Zoo shows us. It is the cyber-landscape of the web that makes this sort of connection possible: discreet, hyper-instantaneous, amoral.

This is the arena in which the bizarre zoophiliac community can exist, and it is like an alien planet, without the gravitational forces of disapproval or disgust, still less any basic sense of cruelty to animals.

Some may feel that a film that circles round its subject so enigmatically is wilfully obtuse, but I found it fascinating. Devor uses the possibilities of cinema to circumvent revulsion and shed light on the farthest reaches of psychology and technology.

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Film : Sex and the City

tugumuda — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:44:58 +0000

Peter Bradshaw
Friday May 30, 2008
The Guardian

Details: 2008, USA, Drama/Comedy, cert 15, 145 mins, Dir: Michael Patrick King
With: Chris Noth, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker
Summary: The continuing adventures of the New York City foursome

***

This is a movie so unbelievably girly, whirly and twirly that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like reading three Andy McNabs back to back, just to get my testosterone back up to metrosexual level. As all the world knows, it is a feature-film showcase for New York’s female foursome: Carrie, the journalist (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha, the nympho PR (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte, the Park Avenue Princess (Kristin Davis), and Miranda, the occasionally bi-curious corporate lawyer (Cynthia Nixon). The film tells of their further adventures, which take place in the usual avalanche of Louis Vuitton bags and Manolo Blahnik shoes, one pair of which appears to have heels as long and sharp as Olympic-standard javelins

It tells of their laughter, their tears, their breakups, their bonding, and yet again their tears. As I left the auditorium, the overwhelmingly female crowd were eagerly saying to each other things like: “I was crying for Carrie …” “Oh no, I was crying for Samantha …” “I was crying for Charlotte …” They interrupted their conversations and looked over at me, concerned, as I leant against the wall, bit deeply into my SATC-promotional Galaxy chocolate bar and, empowered by the film’s emotional literacy, found that for the first time I was able to weep for Avram Grant.

At almost two-and-a-half hours, the film is almost like watching a whole new series of the show, run together. The gals are supposed to have moved on – notionally – from when the programme ended in 2004. In the intervening four years, Carrie has become a bestselling author; Samantha lives in LA and is a personal manager to her main squeeze, hot actor Smith Jerrod, played by Jason Lewis so unexpressively he appears to have taken a hit of Botox in the frontal lobe. Charlotte is happily married to Harry (Evan Handler), with an adopted Chinese daughter, but Miranda is having problems in the nuptial bed with her down-to-earth Brooklyn spouse Steve (David Eigenberg). And the most exciting thing of all is that Carrie is about to tie the knot with Mr Big, played by Chris Noth with an intriguing, almost camp habit of sensually pursing his lips, which has always led me to suspect that Miranda isn’t the only bi-curious character in the cast.

Anyway, the most mind-blowing wedding of the decade is on the cards. But wait. You don’t suppose that sneaky commitmentphobe is going to mess our Carrie around, do you?

One of the enjoyable things about the original TV show was its sceptical view of the new micro-celebrity industry, in its infancy when the series began in 1998. In the opening titles each week, we saw Carrie bemused at the sight of her own face on the side of a bus, which splashed through a puddle drenching her – just in case she got big-headed. In the movie, she’s supposedly this bestselling author, but nobody recognises her, and there are no TV cameras or paparazzi or Gawker Stalker civilians giving her grief. No, it’s just Carrie and her buddies, just like in the old days, and Samantha is only positioned in LA so she can periodically return to New York and the girls can greet her with a deafening whoop, opening their mouths in that extraordinarily wide way, like Hillary Clinton, or like a boa constrictor dislocating its jaws prior to gobbling a rabbit. As in the TV show, Parker tops and tails each episode with her trademark rueful voiceover, mostly concluding with the words: “And, just like that …” Before the film started, journalists were earnestly told not to reveal any of the cataclysmic plot developments: and I’m not sure whether or not this counts, but at one stage Carrie sensationally changes her hair colour, signalling a whole new emotional epoch.

There are some funny lines. After announcing to the gang that she will be moving into a glorious penthouse apartment with Mr Big, Carrie says earnestly: “Please go ahead and feel what I want you to feel: jealousy.” When Samantha spots that Miranda has been neglecting her bikini line, she blurts out: “Jeez, honey – wax much? If you let things go on like this, you won’t even be able to find it.”

It is all very trivial and disposable, and yet for all its contrivances, its brand-name silliness and its amplified problems afflicting the comfortably-off metropolitan classes, I can’t help thinking this is still a cut above the sinister romcom slush that we are fed, week in, week out. It is still unusual to see a film that features women as the leading characters of their own lives, and which attempts to imagine life after marriage. Like something glutinous from the pudding menu, Sex and the City isn’t exactly wholesome, but it won’t do you much harm this once.

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tugumuda — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:24:15 +0000

Hope its useful …