Hasta La Gadget!

The ageless Cher just turned 68. She recently was seen attending the Met Gala in New York City. The theme of this year’s gala was everything Chinese and those in attendance wore costumes to reflect an aspect of the museum’s exhibition. Cher wore a long gown of bended vivid dark colors with less vamp than in previous decades (think Bob Mackie’s beaded bustier-and-loincloth she wore at the 1986 Oscars, complete with headdress). The only alluring factor was a risky décolletage. Oh dear me! What happened to Cher?

There are certainly aspects to aging that might require reframing as each decade passes. I assume Cher was reframing at the Met Gala this year. Cher is still very much Cher, but she saw no need to compete against Gaga and Sarah Jessica Parker.

I just took a road trip with my best friend from grammar school (we have known each other since we were 3 years old and lived on the same street), and tromping through wineries in the Napa Valley reminded us of how our rhythms and energy have changed very little since we were children and teenagers. We seemed to intuit each other’s awareness and pace. Yet, we reflected that we couldn’t drink as much wine as we thought; we looked more forward to reading before bed than drinking at a local pub — and we ate less. But still, we had energy to spare and laughed outrageously.

My favorite reframing age anecdote happened when I recently purchased a used, fixer-up bike. I test rode five bikes with the vigor and excitement of a 10-year-old, but the bike I selected was a downsize version of a Gary Fisher mountain bike. It will do just fine.

Recognizing that you are undergoing subtle changes in the aging process require less literal thought and more mindful awareness.

Here are 5 ways to reframe aging with subtlety and grace:

1. Take Care of Yourself, Not Just Others
It is an axiom that women are the caretakers of the world. And of course, there are men who are very good in the nurturing department. People, organizations and places where you volunteer give gratitude for your help and that makes you proud and happy. But as you age, the way you take care of yourself matters more. In fact, you probably need more breathing space, more reflective time and more mindfulness during the aging process. It’s perfectly awesome to give yourself many gifts throughout the day, the week and the month: practice yoga, meditate, play a round of golf, read, learn something new, take a bath and relax in bubbles. You are the most important gift to yourself as you age.

2. Set Boundaries in Personal and Professional Relationships
From the time you entered adulthood, you heard the caution: set your boundaries with family, friends and in your professional life. As you age, there may be a growing or extended family that requires your attention; you might have friends who need your companionship or your resources. Yet, part of reframing age is that time is precious. And the mantra – honor your body, mind and spirit – takes precedence. Listen to your needs and desires and be aware when no is the appropriate response. Sometimes, I tell my family I can’t pick up the grandchildren from school. And the joy is that they completely respect my response and time.

3. Face Life’s Challenges and Changes Joyfully
You’ve lived many decades. You are one of the fortunate people. Most of the struggle has passed and you are living a freer life. Yet, there are still challenges and changes you face – physical moves you might make to other cities or other locations or travel that might be uncomfortable. As you age, there is a need to reframe your needs and desires, to leave your comfort zone due to necessity or just to reconfigure your life. Remember to manage these changes with joy and remove negative responses and feelings. Challenges are stimulating, exciting and motivating.

4. Learn from Your Mistakes, Forgive Yourself and Move On
We all make mistakes. And it is often said that it is hardest to forgive yourself for those mistakes rather than forgive others who inflict verbal injury toward you. Forgiveness is about surrendering and moving forward. If you get sucked into the vortex of the unforgiving mindset, you will risk losing clarity of thought, clear communication and empathy. Reframe the way you look at forgiveness. Take time to assess those negative feeling that result from closing off your heart. Practicing a generosity of spirit will make life easier as you age.

5. Learn to Develop a Greater Sense of Personal Awareness: Stay Present
As you age, it is often noted that past memories seem more important than the present. In fact, during the aging process, you remember more of the past than you might imagine. It’s easy to be drawn into memory, but it is mentally more productive and exciting to stay present, to be aware of your environment, the people who surround you and the opportunities that are in front of you. Reframing age means staying in the present and realizing the possibilities of living joyfully.

Taking time to live a healthy and well-balanced life is your legacy. It is an accomplishment, an acknowledgement that you are still unleashing and reframing your personal power and professional integrity as you age.

Joan Moran is a keynote speaker, commanding the stage with her delightful humor, raw energy, and wealth of life experiences. She is an expert on wellness and is passionate about addressing the problems of mental inertia. A yoga instructor, Moran is the author is “Sixty, Sex, & Tango, Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer.” Visit her at www.joanfrancesmoran.com.

Follow Joan Moran on Twitter: www.twitter.com/joanfmoran

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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When looking for alien life, astronomers pay special attention to planets in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” — that is, planets that orbit their host stars at just the right distance for water to exist in a liquid state.

But a new study shows that some otherwise habitable planets might be rendered unsuitable for life because gravitational forces exerted by neighboring planets have nudged these “chaotic Earths” out of stable orbits and given them unstable climates.

“Just like people, some planets are victims of circumstance, and won’t enjoy a placid existence,” Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who was not involved in the new research, told The Huffington Post in an email. “That might be bad news for them — at least in terms of harboring life over very long time periods.”

Planets go haywire. For the study, astronomers at the University of Washington built computer models of solar systems in which planets orbit their host stars in different planes. (The orbits of planets in our own solar system all lie in the same plane.)

The planets in the models had orbital periods that were integer multiples of one another, or in integer ratios. For example, if a planet orbits its host star in 200 days and another planet orbits the same star in 300 days, their orbital periods are related in a 2:3 ratio. This coordination causes the planets to pull on each other’s orbits in the same spot over and over again, which over millions of years can cause major changes in these orbits.

“What we found was that things go all haywire,” Dr. Rory Barnes, one of the astronomers and the study’s lead author, said in a written statement. “Those little perturbations that keep happening at the same point cause one of the orbits to do some crazy things — even flip over entirely — and then kind of come back to where it was before. It was pretty unexpected for us.”

Wacky climate changes. According to Barnes, one effect of the perturbations would be to give the planets wildly shifting climates.

“You would never know when the next ice age or hot spell was coming,” Barnes told Space.com. “In many cases, the changes can take thousands of years to occur, so they wouldn’t be changes over your lifetime, but they would certainly impact the rise and fall of civilizations as rapid and constant climate change transformed deserts into ice fields and tropical rain forests into oceans.”

Though unstable climates might make some planets uninhabitable, Shostak argues that such climates might actually lead to the formation of life on others.

“When our planet was frozen over during an episode known as ‘snowball Earth,’ the effect on the biota seems to have been to stimulate the emergence of complex, multicellular organisms,” he said in the email. “In that sense, a planet’s hard times might be just what’s required to produce interesting life forms.”

Barnes and his colleagues are calling for more research to determine how common “chaotic Earths” are, and to distinguish between the ones that might host life and the ones that don’t.

The study was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. A pre-print version of the article can be found here.

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I know the fat shamers on the anti-fat Reddit threads and the “concern trolls” all over the world will disagree heartily, but I am allowed to take up as much space as I want to take up. And, you know what else? I do not OWE IT TO ANYONE to be fat and healthy, either.

Contrary to popular opinion, I can be fat and healthy if I want to be. I can also be fat and unhealthy. Fat people have existed as long as humans have existed, so get used to us. We’re not going to go and hide just because a bunch of people who have a lot of time to waste on a computer are creating hate sights dedicated to making fun of our fat body. I’ve been fat for over 30 years. My fat skin is extra thick and used to your vile and mean comments. They roll right off my back. (And right over my fat ass, too.) And, the mean threads that are started by the fat haters actually fuel my fire and serve as a reminder as to how much there is still to do in the Body Acceptance movement.

To me, it’s plain and simple: You get to exist any way you want to exist. As Pink so eloquently put it recently when being attacked about her body: “I’m not worried about me. And I’m not worried about you, either. I am perfectly fine, perfectly happy, and my healthy, voluptuous and crazy strong body is having some much deserved time off.”

Pink is saying what a lot of us “fatties” in the Body Acceptance movement repeat over and over. “My body, my business. Your body, your business.” I have had my run-ins with people (total strangers) trying to police my body and the customers of my lingerie boutique. I even was on CNN talking about the right to be fat and wear lingerie. My boutique and I got embroiled in a fierce media debate about whether or not my plus size lingerie boutique glorifies obesity.

I think it’s happiness that really infuriates and confuses some fat haters. People are often baffled when they see happy fat people. And when you add in the idea that we are not addicted to dieting or working out or obsessed with the notion that we should become some thin version of ourselves, well, that really throws the shamers and haters for a loop. I literally had to defend, on national TV, our right to exist as fat women who want to wear sexy and very revealing lingerie. All bodies are good bodies. All bodies deserve to be celebrated. No one body is better than another body.

So, yes, you can EXIST and take up more space than your neighbor. You do not have to quality that existence with a “but, I am fat and healthy.” You don’t have to justify anything to anyone about your body and what it looks like on the outside or the inside. The people who want to police your body are just sad, unhappy people with way too much time on their hands. They have nothing better to do. Me, on the other hand, I have shit to do. And, the first item on my TO-DO list is to help fat, thick, curvy women to find some sexy lingerie and help them celebrate their fat, luscious bodies.

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SpaceX has released a few Mars travel posters in the same vein as NASA’s vintage exoplanet ones, and they’re making us sad we were born too early for space exploration. Valles Marineris the “land of Martian chasms and craters,” as the poster says, is…

By James M. Dorsey

Against a backdrop of the violent redrawing of the map of the Middle East as minorities assert their rights, rebels challenge the existing order, and militant Islamists seek to carve up the post-colonial order, Iranian soccer pitches are signalling that the Islamic republic is not totally immune to the region’s upheaval.

To be sure, the territorial integrity of Iran which unlike countries like Syria and Iraq boasts a strong state, rooted institutions, an imperial history and a culture that dates back hundreds of years, is nowhere close to being called into question.

Yet, soccer fans in different parts of Iran populated by ethnic minorities as well as protesters in Kurdish regions of the country are demanding rights and in some cases hinting at a desire to break away from the Islamic republic.

In the latest incident, soccer fans took this week to the streets of Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan province, and other cities in the province, according to opposition groups, in protest against what they see as political interference in the Iranian Premier League final between Tractor Sazi Tabriz FC, a symbol of Iranian Azeri identity, and Naft Tehran FC, owned by the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to prevent the Azeri club from clinching this year’s trophy.

The protests centre on a decision by the referee in the last 20 minutes of the game to give a red card to Traktor Sazi midfielder Andranik Teymourian, which allowed Naft Tehran to turn defeat into a tie. ‘The atmosphere within the stadium quickly shifted from celebratory to anger after the referee’s call,” said Araz News operated by the National Resistance Organization of Azerbaijan (NROA). It said throughout the game fans had been chanting Azerbaijani nationalist slogans.

Southern Azerbaijan, another opposition website, said that clashes with security forces erupted in the Sahand Sport Stadium and the streets of Tabriz at the end of the match as protesters decried the alleged manipulation of the match. Fan shouted ‘Stop Persian Racism, ”Down with Islamic Republic,’ and ‘Long live Azerbaijan’ during the protests.

The website said Traktor Sazi had been playing defensive in the last 20 minutes of the match because the team’s coach Tony Oliviera had been informed by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Football Federation (IRIFF) that the results of parallel matches meant that the Tabriz club would only need a draw to win the championship. “We were tricked,” Mr. Oliveira told the official IRNA news agency.

Southern Azerbaijan said that mobile communications in the stadium in the last minutes of the match had been disrupted. “We were following the other game on television in the changing room but at 87 minutes in, suddenly the TV, radio and cell phone networks blacked out and we had no means of communication,” Agence France Presse quoted Naft Tehran CEO Mansour Ghanbarzadeh as saying.
East Azerbaijan governor Esmaeil Jabbarzadeh reportedly conceded on television that the outcome of the match was questionable as he called for calm.

Stadia in Tabriz have in recent years been the scene of a number of environmental and nationalist protests and clashes with security forces in which fans chanted secessionist slogans. “The main (Iranian concern) is that the idea of Turkism is strengthening in South Azerbaijan,” News.Az, a pro-Azeri news website, quoted Saftar Rahimli, a member of the board of the World Azerbaijani Congress, as saying. Mr. Rahimli was referring to Eastern Azerbaijan by its nationalist Azeri name.

Similarly, a soccer pitch in the Iranian city of Ahvaz, the capital of the oil-rich southern province of Khuzestan and home to Iran’s Arab minority, emerged last month as a flashpoint of anti-government protest at a time of rising Arab-Iranian tensions over the status of Shiite Muslim minorities in the Arab world, the crisis in Yemen, and the outlines of a multilateral agreement that would curb Iran’s nuclear program and return the Islamic republic to the fold of the international community. Teachers in Ahwaz have since held anti-government protests.

Soccer fans clashed with security forces twice in recent months in Ahwaz, the second time in April after a match between state-owned Foolad FC and Teheran’s Esteghlal FC, according to the National Council of Resistance in Iran, a coalition of opposition groups dominated by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a group that was tainted when it moved its operations in 1986 to Iraq at a time that Iraq was at war with Iran after being expelled from France.

Ethnic Arabs have long complained that the government has failed to reinvest oil profits to raise the region’s standards of living. The World Health Organization (WHO) identified Ahwaz in 2013 as Iran’s most polluted city.

Authorities distributed in February tens of thousands of surgical masks and more than 26,000 gallons of milk in Ahvaz, a city of more than 1 million, when it was hit by a severe sand storm that forced the closure of schools and offices, the cancellation of flights, and prompted scattered protests. Some Arab commentators have called against the backdrop of Saudi Arabia and Iran fighting proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen for Iranian Arabs to secede from the Islamic republic.

If soccer fans in East Azerbaijan and Khuzestan were not a big enough headache for the government, police in the majority Kurdish city of Mahabad sought earlier this month to quell riots after a 25 year-old hotel maid died jumping from a fourth floor balcony as she tried to escape from an intelligence official who was allegedly trying to rape her. Crowds mobilized by women’s rights activists demanded answers refusing to be sent home with an announcement that a civilian suspect had been taken into custody. Amateur video showed the hotel allegedly being put on fire. One person was killed and 50 reportedly injured in clashes with police.

Iranian Kurds concede that hopes that this month’s demonstrations will ignite a wider spread protest are likely to prove wishful thinking with Kurdish groups hopelessly divided even as Kurds in Iraq and Syria have carved out entities of their own and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) negotiates greater rights for Kurds in Turkey with the government in Ankara.

“All of these parties are frozen in the past and completely dependent on the Iraqi Kurds. They made no effort to create a clandestine movement inside Iran, believing that the regime would implode. Their calculation proved to be wrong,” Al-Monitor quoted Abbas Vali, a prominent Istanbul-based Iranian Kurdish academic, as saying.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.

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