Hasta La Gadget!

Over at Google I/O yesterday, the Internet search giant, which has since seen its reach expand to so many different areas of technology, make many announcements that will certainly see a shift towards mobile technology and apps. Having said that, one of the more staunch supporters of the Android platform, Samsung, has just revealed their Samsung Gear Live that will be powered by Android Wear, where this smartwatch will hook users to the rest of the world in a simple and efficient manner.

The Android Wear-powered Samsung Gear Live might be a portable reference point for its user, delivering useful information as and when you need it most. Of course, it would need a connection to the Internet in order to work, but that’s a different can of worms which we will not open at the moment.

The Samsung Gear Live is proud to deliver a powerful mobile experience, heralded design aesthetics and innovative features. On it, your eyes will definitely appreciate the Super AMOLED display that delivers incredible color and screen clarity, where it also delivers easy customization of the clock face while making full use of simple one-touch device wakeup for instant access.

Fret not if you live an active lifestyle with the Gear Live, it will still be able to be worn by you all the time, since the Samsung Gear Live meets the IP67 standard, which ensures that the device will remain protected against the effects of dust and water immersion. Arriving in a standard 22mm band, users will be able to change the band as and when they please to express their taste and personality. Apart from that, this sleek timepiece will also let users have a better grip on their health and fitness, thanks to a built-in heart rate monitor that will function seamlessly across different fitness apps.

Hardware specifications of the Gear Live include a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB of internal memory, Bluetooth 4.0 LE connectivity, a 1.63” Super AMOLED display at 320 x 320 resolution, a 300mAh Li-on battery, an accelerometer, heart rate sensor, compass and gyroscope built in, all tipping the scales at a mere 59 grams. It would be interesting to see how the Samsung Gear Live stack up against the likes of LG’s G Watch and the Moto 360.

Press Release
[ Samsung sees Gear portfolio expand with Android Wear copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

ABC’s Diane Sawyer told her viewers on Wednesday about her decision to leave the anchor chair at “World News,” and she brought on her successor, David Muir, to help her out.

Sawyer is stepping down from her post in September to concentrate on specials and big interviews. Muir will become the new anchor and managing editor of “World News,” though, in a break with tradition, he will not be the chief face of the network during major stories. That role will instead go to George Stephanopoulos, who has been given the title of “chief anchor.”

On the broadcast, Sawyer said she loved “every night I get to spend with you,” adding, “and I am so happy that someone you know well is going to be at the helm of ‘World News.'”

Muir then paid a fulsome tribute to Sawyer, calling her the “captain” of the broadcast. She noted he was filling in for her on Thursday night.

“There’s no turning back,” he quipped.

I don’t think any marriage or relationship is perfect. I think I learned this watching my parents alternate between arguing with great passion and heat — and in the very same breath bearing witness to that same intensity spill over into their love for one another. I also think as an outsider looking in you can’t truly comprehend the magnitude of what it means to live and breathe in the same air as another person for 40-plus years. (I’ve got just 15 years under my belt and can attest to the fact that — at times — it can be painfully EXHAUSTING.) And when you find yourself without said person — I can’t even begin to imagine what that must feel like.

My husband is akin to my second right arm (I’m a rightie by the way). Every morning he is the one who gives me my Vitamin D pill, he pries the cell phone out of my sleeping hands so that I don’t wake up with it pasted to my cheek, and he is the one who listens to me COMPLAIN about everything. Of course LIFE GOES ON. We have no choice, even when we feel like our lives no longer have meaning or purpose without this person — the world does not wait for us — and so we too must continue to move forward.

Which brings me to Sunday, Father’s Day, and my mother’s FIRST DATE in 51 years. To say that she was terrified does not even cover it. To say that she thought bringing a bag which included; Mylanta, Immodium, her inhaler, a stack of magazines and a can of bathroom spray, with her on her said date — to me spoke volumes about her anxiety. Of course I let her bring NONE of said items with her on the date, as I told her it would be quite unlikely that she would need said items for the mere hour she would be on this date and if she did she could call me an, being that I was parked right around the corner, I’d motor over there and bring her the Mylanta for an emergency SWIG.

Sitting in the car, I watched her fix her face as she asked me if she should tell this man that she never graduated from college — to which I responded, “MOMMY at his age, he will be happy if you can make it across the street by yourself without a walker.” I realized that no matter what age we are we all share those same feelings and thoughts about love, rejection and finding happiness.

I also learned another very important thing — people do not look anything like the PROFILE PICTURES they post on dating sites… in fact having seen this man’s picture prior to dropping my mother off to meet him — one might have thought they were two different men. Alas they are the same man — however the picture this man posted might have been of him as a 61 year old as opposed to a 71 year old.

Still we are all HUNGRY for someone to love us. Here I am sitting in the car watching my mother walk across the street to this virtual stranger — who looks like he himself is having a hard time walking — and all I can think is that this 71-year-old man just took a subway and a bus, in the sweltering heat on the off chance that he might find a kindred spirit in my mother. That’s right. At 71, this man is still hoping for the possibility of a connection with another person.

And while my mother did not find her love connection (she said his ear hair and nails were too long and she didn’t like his comb-over) at least she is getting out there — right?!

This post originally appeared on Married My Sugar Daddy

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

[WARNING: Contains spoilers, obviously.]

Hemingway famously rewrote the final sentence of A Farewell to Arms over 40 times. Among his alternate endings are a short, pleasant scene in which he holds his newborn son in his arms, and a bleak, Holden Caulfield-like rumination on the agony of fond memories. One is so romantic that it could’ve undone the author’s reputation for brusqueness. It reads: “… Finally I slept; I must have slept because I woke. When I woke the sun was coming in the open window and I smelled the spring morning after the rain and saw the sun on the trees in the courtyard and for that moment it was all the way it had been…” As fans know, he opted instead to have his protagonist go for a stroll in the rain alone.

When asked about his indecision, he quipped that he was chiefly concerned with “getting the words right,” which is no small task when it comes to penning an ending. Fans are more likely to take issue with a novel’s conclusion than any other part of the story — it is their last chance to interact with the characters, after all.

Not every author imparts a sense of catharsis, happy or otherwise, the way Hemingway did with A Farewell to Arms. Readers seem to abhor endings that involve characters they’ve become invested in winding up with the “wrong” romantic partner. What’s worse: vague cliffhangers. After reading An Imperial Affliction, a sort of story-within-a-story at the center of John Green’s The Fault in our Stars, Augustus Waters panics: “Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something. Hazel Grace, tell me I have not reached the end of this book. OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS?!” He’s referring to the book’s final page, which ends in the middle of a sentence, and without explaining what becomes of many of its beloved characters. Augustus is grasping not for a happy ending necessarily, but, at the very least, for closure.

Ruth Graham cites this scene in her argument against adults reading YA books, stating life isn’t neat, so literature shouldn’t be either. A glaring counter-argument: Sometimes life is neat, so sometimes books should be, too.

So if happy, unhappy and uncertain endings are all acceptable under the right circumstances, what makes an ending bad? In general, an unsuccessful ending involves a disruptive departure from the tone of the rest of the book; when we’ve spent a good deal of time with a story, we expect that its conclusion isn’t jarringly out of place. By those standards, here are 8 of the most disappointing endings in books:

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
If we’re taking the Augustus approach, this book’s final pages definitely qualify as disappointing. Wallace’s choice to end the story mid-sentence is clever, certainly. But it raises the question: Is cleverness more artistic than, say, offering your readers some form of closure? Of course, fulfillment needn’t take the form of a happy ending. But it wouldn’t hurt to clue us in on what happens to Rick Vigorous and at least one of the Lenore Beadsmans. Michiko Kakutani called the conclusion “enigmatic.” And it’d be fair to argue that elusiveness can urge a reader to contemplate possible outcomes. But in this case, the puzzling last scene doesn’t seem to serve a broader purpose, unless the purpose is to preach life’s absurdity and meaninglessness. In which case, touché, DFW. Touché.

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
Yes, the quality of Suzanne Collins’s writing slowly deteriorates over the course of the three books until it resembles so-so but definitely unpublishable fan fiction. But that’s not the main issue with the series’s conclusion. Why does Katniss end up with Peeta after devoting a considerable amount of energy to fending off his advances? It’s understandable that she lacks the energy to lead an entire uprising against the Capitol, but is she really too drained to, say, carve out a life for herself that doesn’t involve settling down with a dude she’s not really that into? In some ways, Katniss was written as a protagonist who was simultaneously feminine and tough, and Collins’s ending undermines that. Also, #TeamGale.

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Never mind that Rowling’s choice to let Harry survive Voldemort’s Killing Curse seems a little like a cop-out; while it’s a shoddy means of brushing over a major plot hole, it would’ve upset a lot of fans and young readers if Harry was killed off. Rowling did admit that she’d considered axing Ron (who she must really have disliked — she’s even deprived him of his happy ending in a statement made last year), but opted to let Hedwig die instead. The way the plot should or shouldn’t have unraveled could be debated all day. But one indisputably annoying inclusion was the story’s epilogue. Rather than allowing readers to imagine what restored peace in the wizarding world would entail, Rowling lists off schmaltzy details of our protagonist’s adult lives, including Ginny and Harry’s three kids, who have the cheesiest names imaginable: James Sirius, Albus Severus, and Lily Luna.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The beauty of Flynn’s domestic thriller (aside from Amy’s “Cool Girl” rant — preach.) is her ability to create equal, if undulating, empathy for the two maniacal narrators, Nick and Amy. After reading Amy’s perspective — she’s endured infidelity and has an apparent narcissism disorder — it’s almost understandable that she’d go to great and meticulous lengths to frame her husband for murder. And Nick’s perspective — he’s sort of just a dumb and careless dude who doesn’t consider the consequences of his actions — allows readers to feel like he deserves to bet let off the hook. Flynn makes the perfect, twisted choice to leave these two in marital purgatory, but not before having Amy commit a needless and unforgivable crime, making it impossible to feel sorry for her. It’d be difficult to leave the story without siding with Nick, which is a shame, because he’s kind of a jerk. Flynn has announced plans to tweak the ending for the movie version of the story — let’s hope she corrects her error.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
This sprawling, beautiful novel (forget what James Wood et al. have to say about it) concludes with tacked-on meditations on art and fate. It’s as though Tartt put down her pen at page 750, then decided her less astute readers might benefit from a few pages explaining the insights conveyed by the plot in clunky, artless detail. The final scenes could more or less be copy-and-pasted into the “Themes” section of this book’s SparkNotes page. IN CASE YOU DIDN’T GET IT, Theo is totally torn between living capriciously (like his dad) and deliberately (like his mom). He also thinks art is good and important. He also loves Pippa.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Alice meets bizarre characters, is shrunk by a potion she drinks, and plays croquet with a flamingo. She’s confronted with a slew of logic problems, including an actual riddle which is left unanswered (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”). Carroll, unfortunately, does not leave the riddle of her adventure unanswered — rather than allowing for the dualities a vague ending would offer, he instead supplies readers with the biggest cliché in literature: It was all just a dream!

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Like Katniss’s decision to wind up with Peeta, Jo’s choice to marry Professor Bhaer ruffled fan’s feathers. Alcott wrote that readers often inquired about who the sisters end up with, and she found the question irksome: “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” Jo and Laurie’s similarities are instead framed as a negative, rather than a positive quality — they’re both ambitious and at times hot-headed. It’d be romantic for two passionate characters to work out some sort of relationship, but Alcott opts for a more practical outcome: Jo chooses to build a school, and a life, with the calm and encouraging Professor Bhaer, and Laurie gets married to her pesky sister, Amy.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Dickens actually wrote two very different endings for this novel. The conclusion that he ultimately went with, which he penned per a friend’s suggestion, involves Pip and Estella walking hand-in-hand into the sunset, and he can see “no shadow of another parting from her.” It’s interpretable whether or not this sentiment implies friendship or something more. Regardless, it seems strangely optimistic given Estella’s established character, and feels discordant with the rest of the novel. Dickens had originally written a more realistic, but still somewhat happy ending, in which Pip and Estella’s final exchange involves his learning that she’s married a country doctor. Pip observes, “suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.”

Most of today’s tourists stick to trendy hotels, ritzy restaurants and absurdly crowded cities.

But travelers? They’re a different story. They know that true highs are hiding in less-trodden and incredibly remote places. This planet boasts stellar natural wonders and travelers want to explore them all.

They need some wide-open spaces — and we’ve got a bucket list that definitely hits the spot.

Hadrian’s Wall Country, United Kingdom
Back in the second century, the Roman emperor Hadrian commissioned a 73-mile wall that stretches from coast to coast in what is now northern England. Its path includes a series of ruinous Roman forts and towns.

Námafjall and Hverarondor Hverir, Iceland
Hot springs, fumaroles and boiling mud pots make this volcanic wasteland both “strange and fantastic.”

The Namib Desert, Namibia
Larger-than-life sand dunes are the ultimate thrill in a desert some 43 million years old. Be on the lookout for fairy circles — mysterious, patterned rings that appear in the sand have scientists stumped.

Yosemite Valley, California
Waterfalls, stargazing, lakes and the infamous Half Dome hike make this THE spot for Californian nature junkies.

Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia, Turkey
When this World Heritage site overwhelms you with its vastness of fairy chimneys and hot air balloons, hide out in a cozy cave hotel.

The Scottish Highlands
This blazing green landscape is dotted with castles, battlefields and Loch Ness, home of that pesky water beast.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
The world’s largest salt flat has a hotel made of salt. Oh, and it doubles as a giant mirror when wet.

Rub’ al-Khali, Arabian Peninsula
This desert — aka the world’s largest area of continuous sand — touches FOUR COUNTRIES on the Arabian Peninsula. Much of it remains unexplored (but that doesn’t mean you can’t take a swing at it!).

Schnebly Hill Road, Arizona
Thirteen miles of intense switchbacks guide drivers through the vast remnants of a primal sea that existed here hundreds of millions of years ago. It used to be covered in lava — but now it serves to link the city of Sedona with Interstate 17.

Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya
On 938 square miles of grassland, you could run into lions, cheetahs, leopards, elephants, buffalos, zebras or hippos. From July through October, you’ve got a shot at catching the Great Wildebeest Migration.

Joshua Tree National Park, California
Nearly 800,000 acres span a low desert (the Colorado) and a high desert (the Mojave). The latter is dotted with Joshua trees, named for branches that Mormons compared to Joshua’s outstretched arms. Catch a break from the heat in one of five fan palm oases.

Hitachi Seaside Park in Hitachinaka, Japan
Plants range from red to blue to green at this Seuss-like paradise near the beach. Cycling paths meander through the foliage.

The Drakensberg, South Africa
Four valleys and a national park make up this massive expanse of hills and peaks (home to the second-highest waterfall in the world). You can climb all over them!

Wadi Rum, Jordan
Imagine a camel trek (or better yet, a camel race) through a minefield of 5,700-foot rock formations in the “Valley of the Moon.”

Menindee Lakes, Australia
Four lakes — popular with fishermen and water skiers — supply water to nearby orchards and farms. On the banks of the lakes, you could sleep on a farm or in a converted train car.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, Arizona and Utah
John Wayne rode horseback over this siltstone basin in the movie “Stagecoach.” You might be more interested in a Jeep tour.

The Red Beach in Panjin, China
A peculiar breed of seaweed turns the world’s largest wetland and reed marsh a deep shade of red in the fall.