His Front Luxury Homes

Okay, so we can't help wondering outloud, what the hell happened to our taste?  What is it that make MTV's Jersey Shore popular?  What is it that sells magazines that featured Gary Coleman's deathbed's picture?  Worse yet, CNN's poll shows that 85% of people think that it's OKAY for his ex-wife to sell those pictures!!!  Why, why, why we ask?

And did you know, the White House crasher made the cut to the Bravo's series Real Housewives of DC?

Here's an excerpt from the Bravo site:

"Michaele Salahi
This northern Virginia native and model is a big part of the inner workings of the D.C. life. She and husband Tareq together founded America’s Polo Cup, for which he is the U.S. team captain. Through her involvement in the Polo Cup, which has become one of the largest and most high profile polo events in the U.S., Michaele has met numerous political leaders across the globe. Additionally, the two are involved in running the Salahi family vineyard, Oasis Winery. Always on the move and juggling multiple projects at once, Michaele is heavily involved in charity work, including being an advocate and fundraising for MS and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. A family girl at heart, Michaele loves spending time at the family vineyard with her stable of horses and beloved dog Rio."
 
No mention of how tacky these people are and how many lawsuits they are involved with (check out the details here).

We saw this picture from Vanity Fair today and we just love it.  It's under the slide shows titled "Oscar Moms".  The picture is of a young Audrey Hepburn pushing a baby carriage (were baby carriages this big in the sixties?).

We also just finished watching a couple of episodes of  the "Real Housewives" series and thought about the contrast of how the women look there vs here.  Enough with the Botox, hair extensions, bad French manicures!

Doesn't Hepburn look so beautifully natural?

A friend of ours who runs a small drapery wrote us an email to vent about a particularly nasty client of his. The woman was referred to him by a friend.  She insisted on meeting early in the morning, so to get to her house at 10am in LA traffic, my friend has to leave his office at 8am.  He spent a couple of hours the night before picking out fabrics for her.  Once he got there, she proceeded to tell him that she only wants to have someone measure the windows for her so that she can buy the window treatment over the Internet.  Mind you, she wants to have the measurement done for free! 

Another friend of ours owns a restaurant in San Francisco.  We don't know if you know, but this is a particularly trying time for the restaurant business.  Our friend is struggling to survive.  At any rate, there was this group of four young guys.  They ordered a noodle dish and the dish had a tiny thread (that was used to tie the dry noodle together).  My friend apologized and made a new one.  When the check came, they demanded that the whole meal, including 2-3 bottles of wine, be comped!  My friend explained that that is not possible, but she would comp them for the appetizers.  They proceeded to stomp off and left the waitress no tip.  Then wrote a Yelp review about it.

One recent customer of ours ordered $4000 worth of merchandise, then proceeded to cancel/return/refuse 80% of them, leaving us with restocking fee, shipping fee and opened merchandise that we now have to salvage. 

Which leads us to the question, is common decency dead?  Do people feel that merchants exists to be abused and used?  Is common courtesy only goes one way-from the merchant to customers but not the other way around?

If a customer experiences bad service, and we have many times ourselves, there are many outlets they can vent to.

Yet if a merchant gets used/abused like this, all we can do is vent privately.    Yet the same customers will go elsewhere and repeat this deplorable attitute to other businesses.  Most small businesses that we know, especially retail/restaurants are working fingers to the bone to survive day to day.  Having this type of customers just kill us.

We wish sometime that people understand that businesses are people too.

PS We do have a lot of many good and amazing customers that we just love.   To them, we say thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

We haven't posted for a while.  Mainly because it has been raining dogs and cats here in LA.  We LA people are like cats, we don't like rain too much. We just stop functioning!  The other reason why we haven't posted is because we've been busy launching our new sites and going to the Vegas market.  We were so hoping we'd find great things in Vegas for you, but oh my God what a bore it was!  There was nothing new, nothing inspirational.

But more on that later...

We found something we just have to share with you today.  It has nothing to do with decorating really, but it's a blog with  some really good writing.   This blog is called "American In Short" and it is written by Tim Sullivan, the translator for Garance Dore (a very popular fashion blog).

The blog is about America--told through stories and pictures. 
Here is the description of the blog:

"Our stories are the most important. When I arrived in France, I found that the French knew the story of America to be Starbucks and McDonalds. There is more in there, in the States, a liberated spirit that was engrained during the Revolution, doubled by Jefferson, sung by Walt Whitman, kept together by Lincoln, built through dust bowls and depressions, breakthroughs and downfalls. It is a subtle spirit alive in diners and toll roads, in cheap coffee and giant redwoods. These are the stories of our wars, our peace, our land and our people. As I stepped foot on foreign soil, I missed these stories and saw how just engrained the American Spirit is within me.
So here are stories from the America I miss, the short stories in Jersey diners, short anecdotes about Truman’s favorite toilet, short recipes about turduckens and short explanations of why such things exist, and just general attempts to approach the beast that is American culture and history in whatever way seems necessary. And they’ll be short. Did I make that part clear? This is my America, the America I still see and the America I want so desperately to always exist."

Check it out. You'd love it!

The New York Magazine has a great article on 50 ways to make yourself happy.  And we're not talking about taking an expensive vacation, getting stoned- or drunken stupid...anything like that.  We're talking utterly simple things you can do to feel good.
Some of the gems:

-Say yes everytime your partner wants to have sex.
-Eat dark chocolate everyday.
-Get a poor's man massage.
-Put down the Blackberry.
-Make your bed.

and more...

Click here to see the entire article. You'll love it.  We promise!