Hasta La Gadget!

A happening bar scene is as crucial to a ski town’s success as stellar snow conditions. “Skiing is a social sport by nature, but it’s the après-ski culture of relaxing with friends and recounting the day’s adventures that really makes a ski vacation awesome,” says Erica Mueller, director of relations at Colorado’s Crested Butte Mountain Resort.

Toasting post-shred–no matter language, location, or libation–is universal. And it doesn’t matter whether you aced a black diamond mogul, skidded down the bunny hill, or spent the afternoon curled up by the fire. Any and all such daytime activities warrant an invite to lift a glass and kick up your heels as the sun begins to kiss the mountaintops.

Après-ski is a time-tested tradition begun in Telemark, Norway, in the mid-1800s. Back then, it was grog or aquavit shared among friends at skiers’ homes. Today, no longer the humble house gathering, wintertime mountain merrymaking is soaring to new elevations.

Twerk in your ski boots at a Vegas-style club in Lake Tahoe, NV; don furs at a bar fashioned from 20 tons of ice in Queenstown, New Zealand; clink glasses of champagne paired with caviar at Aspen, CO’s roving pop-up Oasis Bar; or hug complete strangers while shooting schnapps at Trofana Alm in Austria.

From refined to rowdy, we’ve rounded up 17 bars where you can celebrate post-slopes.

–By Lanee Lee

See All of the Hottest Après-Ski Bars

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A San Francisco man is one race away from completing seven marathons in seven days on seven continents.

Tim Durbin is the only American competing in the World Marathon Challenge that started last Saturday and ends in Sydney on Friday.

So far, the 31-year-old has run six marathons, each 26.2 miles, through snow, rain and jetlag in Antarctica, Chile, Miami, Madrid, Morocco and Dubai.

4 down, 3 to go. Madrid in 5 hours 24 mins. Morocco race stars in ~7 hours to make it a double day!

A photo posted by Tim Durbin (@24901experiences) on Jan 20, 2015 at 9:21am PST

“In the last 48 hours I’ve slept less than 9 hours and ran three marathons,” he said in an email earlier this week. He said most of his sleep has been on the airplanes between cities with a few hours spent in hotels following the races. He did have one full night of rest after running in Chile and before heading to Miami.

Durbin added that the biggest challenge has been the quick turn-around times.

“Twice we have done two marathons in 24 hours. Sleep deprivation will likely be a factor going forward,” he said.

So far, the Morocco marathon was the toughest.

He started running in Marrakech less than 7 hours after he completed the race in Spain.

Durbin is averaging about 5 1/2 hours for each 26.2-mile marathons.

Here we go again!! #running #rain

A photo posted by Tim Durbin (@24901experiences) on Jan 20, 2015 at 4:20pm PST

The race in Morocco took nearly six hours.

Durbin spent roughly $37,000 to participate with 11 others, who are from Brazil, India, Great Britain, Hong Kong, France, Finland and Australia.

The World Marathon Challenge is part of a bigger challenge that Durbin started two years ago. In 2013, he started logging his miles for walking, running, cross country skiing and swimming in order to complete the distance around the equator – 24,901 miles before 2022.

“I am just trying to prove to myself that an average person can do what most others think is impossible,” he said. “It’s a mental challenge as much as it is physical.”

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Predicting the Supreme Court’s decisions is like reading tea leaves. Still, we never tire of either, even if only for the sake of enjoyment. So in that spirit I offer a potential outcome on marriage equality when the Supreme Court takes it up this spring that New York Law School professor Art Leonard, who has studied Supreme Court legal decisions on gay issues for decades, suggested as a possibility come June: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the majority and writes the decision himself, making it the narrowest possible ruling with regard to the ramifications for LGBT equality beyond marriage.

This would be the best possible scenario for anti-gay conservatives, including Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who surely have come to see that nationwide gay marriage is a done deal. Their big hope and challenge now is limiting any decision’s ramifications. Roberts, who might not want to be on the wrong side of history, and also might want to do what he can to help conservatives, can thus serve both sides and himself.

With 70 percent of Americans now living in a state where same-sex couples can marry, we are largely in a post-marriage-equality world already. Religious conservatives are moving on (though hardly giving up), recalibrating their tactics and targets, trying to blunt the expansion of rights to LGBT people in the name of “religious liberty” in a whole host of other areas, from allowing businesses to turn away gay and lesbian customers, particularly in catering their weddings, to firing a teacher because his or her gay marriage doesn’t adhere to a private school’s religious views.

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent days about how the Supreme Court framed the questions for attorneys representing plaintiffs in the four states in the Sixth Circuit on whose gay-marriage bans the Supreme Court is hearing arguments in April. Fears have been expressed that the questions betray that the court is trying to “split the baby,” perhaps ruling that a state must recognize all gay marriages from outside the state without being compelled to perform gay marriages itself.

But this outcome has seemed extremely unlikely for a while, as the court has allowed lower courts’ rulings to stand, bringing marriage equality to state after state, now with 36 in total. It would be quite chaotic if the Supreme Court didn’t strike down marriage bans now. And the court will be seen as having been exceedingly reckless. That doesn’t seem like something Justice Kennedy wants as his legacy on gay rights, having crafted it very carefully for several decades. He’ll go all the way, and the liberals will go with him.

But there are different legal theories on which the decision can be based and which could have profound implications for other kinds of discrimination against LGBT people. And, as Art Leonard told me in an interview on my radio program, that’s where Justice Roberts could come in to narrow the decision.

“Two of the circuits out of the four that have decided this issue in favor of marriage equality used the fundamental right to marriage as their gateway to the decision,” he explained. “They located it in the due-process-clause protection for liberty. They said the right to marry is fundamental, going back to Loving v. Virginia.” (The Supreme Court deicision in Loving v. Virginia struck down bans on interracial marriage.)

The other two circuits that decided in favor of marriage equality did not use the Constitution’s due-process clause. They said marriage bans were discrimination based on the sexual orientation and based the decision on the equal-protection clause of the Constitution.

“The Ninth Circuit said discrimination based on sexual orientation involves a suspect classification” and requires “heightened scrutiny” because of the Windsor case, Leonard noted. “They said they thought that in the Windsor case, which struck down DOMA, that the court had used some sort of of heightened scrutiny in that case.” The Seventh Circuit, Leonard said, was also an equal-protection decision but ultimately didn’t base its decision on heightened scrutiny and instead said there was no rational basis for the bans.

“So there are all these different theories floating around,” Leonard said. “Kennedy won’t want to go the due-process [route] because it could leave open to Scalia’s fears of polygamy and incest [being constitutionally protected]. But Kennedy has shied away from equal protection and heightened scrutiny. The Windsor decision — a key element was animus, that the law was driven purely by animus. On that basis he could strike down the marriage bans and the bans on recognition [of out-of-state marriages] without giving heightened scrutiny, without saying marriage is a fundamental right and thus not having much of an impact on any subsequent case [on LGBT rights or marriage]. I hope he doesn’t do that, but he could.”

But precisely because no one knows on what basis Kennedy would decide, Roberts could step in to make sure it’s clear and narrow.

“If [Roberts] decides to vote with Kennedy and the four liberals, he would then control the decision, because as Chief Justice, he could assign it to himself or any of the other justices,” Leonard explained. “He could keep it away from Kennedy. I think if he votes [for marriage equality], he would keep the decision for himself, and he would try to write it as narrowly as possible. But I don’t think he’s happy about the animus argument [of Windsor, in which he was in the dissent], so I don’t know how he would do it. He might just decide that there’s no rational basis. The narrowest basis is that there’s no rational basis [to the marriage bans]. You don’t get into whether marriage is a fundamental right. You don’t get into heightened scrutiny. It doesn’t set any major precedents for future cases on LGBT rights.”

It would still be a big win for marriage equality, but the anti-gay crowd would have more to work with in fueling its unending crusade.

Design by Joseph Dahlstrom

It was Morning in America for President Obama last night. Social media and headlines captured that mood. “Obama Is Finally Having the Reagan Moment He Dreamed About for Years,” screamed a New Republic headline to its SOTU story. Yet I see a few rain drops drizzling — not on Obama — but on the Democratic Party.

While the president delivered a powerful SOTU, Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan wins the GOP reaction show. Forget about the official and unofficial Republican responses last night — most well-suited for Barnum & Bailey. Ryan’s comment on the SOTU on Morning Joe today contained an insight into the 2016 landscape that flies through the haze of last night’s happy blue smoke. Ryan, former GOP Vice Presidential Candidate and current Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, offered a little praise, “I gotta say the guy is a gifted communicator.” Then in a swift parenthetical to that complement, he added: “the solace I got out of last night is that the Democrats don’t have anybody in the stable who can match that.”

And so goes the vision of a Great Red Dream. It is 2016, a donkey without Obama stumbles into an electoral nightmare for Democrats. In other words, can Democrats win in 2016 with the inevitable absence of Obama on the ticket? I took that question to Racine, the Bush-Obama county in Paul Ryan’s district. “It’s difficult to imagine someone coming up and having his stature,” says Robert Golub, Editor of the Journal Times in Racine. “But in either party there are always people that do. Bill Clinton kind of came out of nowhere. Racine residents and to some extent Wisconsinites in general are practical people. We’re pragmatic. I think if something makes sense to a Wisconsinite then it just makes sense, party politics aside. That is why our area is kind of on the edge politically. It doesn’t take much to push us over to one side or the other…

“We’re also on the edge because Racine is a microcosm of the country. We’ve got an urban center that faces a lot of the challenges that other urban centers face. We have children who go to school hungry. We have homeless children who attend our school district and then we have middle class suburbs. We have upscale suburbs, and then we have rural areas. We have business people who are working, small business people who are working hard to make ends meet, we have big companies that are working hard to compete in the country and in the world.”

Tampa, Florida has many of those same microcosmic socioeconomic qualities. The city in the county seat of Hillsborough, Florida’s lone Bush-Obama county. As publisher of The Florida Courier, a newspaper that focuses on black communities across the state, Charles Cherry has closely covered the president and the impact of his policies on African Americans. He gives the president higher marks than usual for last night’s speech.

“I think from a negotiation standpoint, it was noteworthy that he came out on the offense. That’s something I had been writing about since he won in 2008. This is the kind of speech he should have started out with, which is that I stand for something and this is what I want. What he actually started with was an assumption that the Republicans would negotiate with him if he moved closer to their position. He started out giving them what they wanted and trying to negotiate from there. I’ve consistently called him one of the weakest high level negotiators I have ever seen.”

Looking to 2016, Cherry predicts black voters, the Democrats’ most loyal constituency, will not be inspired to go to rush to the polls for Democrats. “It’s gonna be tough for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton is cautious. She’s careful… As the possibility of being the first woman president, she doesn’t quite have the historic shape that Barack Obama had. I don’t see her exciting women and especially black folks generally as Obama did. I mean Obama was a once in a lifetime lightning in the bottle. The thing about Obama was that he loved campaigning. He didn’t love governing and was better at campaigning.”

Congressman Ryan’s comment highlights another twist to the snarky Republican applause to Obama’s remark: “I have no more campaigns to run.”

Yes those GOP cheers resembled Joe Wilson’s ugly scream — “liar” at the President’s 2009 State of the Union Address. Yet should the GOP claps really cheer the coming fate of not facing Obama in 2016. While Obama lovers will live in that special moment of the President’s brilliant wit: “I know because I won both of them,” maybe Republicans will have the last laugh in 2016 when they won’t endure a campaign against a ticket with Obama and possibly face Hillary Clinton. Despite her strong showings in current polls of match-ups against potential Republicans, she is not Obama. Yet Bush the elder was no Reagan and he defeated Dukakis in 1988. This poses the challenge for Republicans. Do Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush have the Reagan-Obama swag that can waltz through the party of those multiple responses to SOTU last night? Or do they look more like the former Massachusetts Governor — Dukakis?

We’ve seen our share of Dalek dresses. In fact I’m surprised they haven’t taken over the world like the Daleks themselves tend to do. These are a little different than the typical Dalek dresses we are used to seeing.

These screenprinted versions are from Etsy seller Kaotichandbag. They look like they came straight out of the show and possessed these dresses. They are available in both black and gold versions. This would make a neat gift for any female Doctor Who fan.

They will cost you about $100(USD) but they are totally worth it since they are pretty stunning. All eyes will be on you, that’s for sure. And then you can exterminate them.

[via Fashionably Geek]