Hasta La Gadget!

Before you begin stalking a frenemy’s tragic life on Facebook to feel a sense of schadenfraude, know this: that depression could rub off on you. At least that’s the conclusion Facebook’s researches came up with when they turned 689,000 users into…

A very calm and rational Beijing individual is attempting to win back his ex-girlfriend by buying hundreds of tickets to “Transformers: Age Of Extinction.”

According to The South China Morning Post, the jilted man, identified only by the surname Wang, was dumped after he could not afford to take his then-girlfriend to the movies.

Now, after “striving hard for seven years” and running his own company, he has spent a quarter of a million yuan on tickets to the noisy Michael Bay project in order to get her attention. He is currently giving the tickets away for free to anyone who shares his Weibo blog post, in hopes his long-lost love will see it / maybe still want to go to the movies.

“I only want to say that you might have been wrong when you made that decision,” he wrote, according to the Morning Post.

Once Wang is able to find his ex-girlfriend, suggestions for trying to find her include: 1) playing the “Transformers” soundtrack on a boom box held up outside her window, 2) friending her on Facebook or 3) getting tickets to literally any other movie besides “Transformers.”

[h/t Uproxx]

Crunches, side bends, leg lifts… If you’re tired of doing the same ab exercises over and over again (and perhaps without seeing desired results), well then you’ve come to the right place!

Click here to see All The Epic Ab Exercises for a Firm, Flat Stomach

If your goal is to sculpt a firm, flat stomach, first understand one thing: it involves more than just exercising your abs. These moves will help shape and build your abdominal muscles (increasing your core strength in the process), but if you want those muscles to be visible (think, six-pack ab style) then you’ll have to get rid of any extra fat around the area too.

That means you’ll need to implement a combination of cardio and strength training to create a total-body exercise routine. (Bonus points: most of these ab exercises work multiple muscle groups!) One of the most important things to understand about exercise and fat loss, is that you cannot “spot treat” certain areas.

Where your body chooses to store extra fat is highly based on your genetics. In the same sense, you can’t tell your body where to lose fat first. Ab exercises build your ab muscles, but they won’t specifically burn the fat surrounding the area.

So, in addition to including these eight epic ab exercises in your regular workout routine, be sure to incorporate other varied workouts so that you can build muscle and burn fat all over. For each exercise that involves a dumbbell or cable resistance, try starting with a weight that allows you to complete 12 reps, where you feel almost completely fatigued by the last two reps.

This list includes five innovative and highly effective ab exercises (I know they are because I tried them all) from Kelvin Gary, NASM certified personal trainer and owner of Body Space Fitness in New York City, as well as three of my own favorite core moves that I picked up while training and working with clients at various gyms.

If you’re ready to sculpt a tight tummy, you’ll love these epic ab exercises.

Click here to see the Full Story: Epic Ab Exercises for a Firm, Flat Stomach

But before you get started, remember one more important thing: your diet plays a huge role in fat storage, too. Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “Abs are built in the gym and revealed in the kitchen” thrown around the gym or online fitness community before? Well it’s true and it means that if you’re after that six-pack aesthetic, you’ll have to be extra attentive to your diet too.

-Katie Rosenbrock, The Active Times

More Content from The Active Times:
6 Highly Effective Crunch-Free Ab Exercises
Arms & Abs: Ultimate Upper Body Workout
How to Get Flat Abs

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I was quite excited when I first learned that Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, was releasing a memoir titled Under Magnolia, for Frances and I seem to be living parallel lives. We both began our literary careers as poets, poets who longed for the grandeur and beauty of Italy, and so subsequently spent extended time abroad there. Frances gravitated to the pastoral ecstasies of Tuscany, while I reveled in the energy, history and passion of The Eternal City, Rome. We both then penned works of literature inspired from our Italian sojourn: she with her many books on Tuscany, and me with The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos.

It now seems that both of us have elected to settle in North Carolina. Frances has set out about restoring Chatwood, a Romantic old farm, just outside the town of Hillsborough, while I am in the process of developing Bramabella in Wilkes County into a vineyard estate. We both seem enthralled with the world of wine, no doubt from our exposure to a thriving wine culture in Italy: Frances has launched her own brand of wine titled appropriately Tuscan Sun Wines, while I spend countless hours a day tending to my baby vines with high hopes that they will one day produce fine wine. Sometimes I even read the poetry of Homer and Horace to them like some eccentric madman, so as to beautify their developing Souls.

I must also confess that my adoration of a figure like Mayes partly stems from my distaste for the trends and sensibilities unfolding in American Literature where minimalism, cynicism and realism reign supreme. To me, to choose to live in bucolic bliss in Cortona, Italy or in Hillsborough, North Carolina as opposed to say PoMo/Hipster Brooklyn, the epicenter of contemporary American Literature, is a bold declaration of aesthetics. Perhaps Frances does not see herself in this rebellious, iconoclastic way, and is simply just pursuing τò καλόν on her own terms. Though in her work Bringing Tuscany Home she did comment upon her colleagues in The Academy drifting towards arcane literary theory and the like, which she responded to by simply closing her office door so as to read highly individualistic writers.

Besides being attracted to her italophilic sentiments, I have always adored the aesthetic quality of her prose, a prose that is at once descriptive, lyrical and poetic. It is as if she made the conscious decision when she transitioned from poetry to prose to ensure that her prose would be as lovely as a dream of Roses, as gorgeous as a lingering Tuscan sunset, and as lush as a flush of passion. One might even say that she is the closest modern approximation to the great female aesthete and student of Walter Pater, Vernon Lee.

She continues in this aesthetic vein in her newest memoir, Under Magnolia. I found myself immediately drawn to similes like, “I swam in his green eyes, like reflections of pines in the stream.” (Under Magnolia, 169) and such diamantine passages as, “as if my words could re-create a single glimpse of a panel of sunlight on the grass, the flash of a fish, antique gold in the murky pond, the first scent of wet lilacs, and then the underscent of ashes and rain. The blank leather book Rena gave me is where I will begin. I fill my pen with lavender ink.” (Under Magnolia, 247) I just excerpted these two particular vignettes, but the entire work gleams and glimmers with such verbal gems.

One of the surprises of Under Magnolia was encountering the dysfunction that Mayes endured growing up. I had assumed from her other books that she was descended from a genteel, one might even say aristocratic southern family, yet this is far from the case. She details excessive drinking, domestic violence, rabid racism, poverty and even suicide amongst her family and social circle in the tiny town of Fitzgerald, Georgia. Perhaps her interest in Literature, which affords one the ability to disappear into the world of the imagination, served as a viable escape from this reality.

Towards the end of the tome she notes the transformation of the South, a place that she left for San Francisco and then Tuscany, but has decided to return to in this phase of her life.

I returned to a South where racism, while not erased, is no longer publicly virulent, and this makes it an entirely different South from the one I knew. You still can see the Stars and Bars flying over a trailer in the woods on Martin Luther King Day, still hear an occasional slur from someone who doesn’t have the sense to see that you don’t agree. But mostly the good inheritance of southern manners in both races prevails. (Under Magnolia, 271)

Friends of mine who have visited from Florida have also noticed this phenomenon, as I think secretly some of them harbored illusions that it would be insular, backward and redneck. I could almost hear them saying in their minds when I announced that I was purchasing land in North Carolina, ‘And exactly why would you leave Palm Beach County for North Carolina?!?!’ Yet, when they visited they too were enamored with the southern hospitality, the slower pace of life, and the wild, untamed beauty of the area that they are now considering relocating here as well. In closing, I thoroughly enjoyed my reading of Under Magnolia and would recommend it highly, but most especially to dreamers and Romantics.

-Pietros Maneos

Howard Webb is not afraid to make Hulk angry.

The veteran referee outraged the Brazil striker and stunned the crowd at Estadio Mineiro in Belo Horizonte by making a handball call that negated what initially appeared to be a goal. With Brazil and Chile deadlocked at 1-1 in the second half of the opening game of the knockout stage at the 2014 World Cup, Hulk put the ball into the net in the 55th minute after controlling a long, high through ball into the penalty area. As Brazil and its fans celebrated, Webb waived off the goal and showed Hulk a yellow card for using his right arm as he brought the pass from Marcelo under control before his shot.

RESULTS! 79% think Howard Webb made the right decision & this was a handball from Hulk. You be the judge. WATCH »
http://t.co/0pQI9H3NRZ

— ESPN FC (@ESPNFC) June 28, 2014