Beauty in the West Indies

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Genuine:

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This teenager was walking and giggling with a girlfriend when saw me taking snapshots outside the cricket ground in St. Vincent. Just goofing around, she playfully called out for me to take her picture, posing as a joke for a few seconds while I made her friend laugh again by calling her bluff.

Could this young girl possibly be lovelier? I cannot imagine how.

Not quite so genuine:

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The model in the window display is not Jessica Simpson, even though it looks almost exactly like Jessica Simpson. No, it’s Hilary Swank, an actress with two Oscars, and who is absolutely gorgeous in her own right, without trying to look like someone else. But for the cosmetics ad, she’s made to look remarkably like Jessica Simpson, who didn’t know that Chicken of the Sea isn’t chicken.

So the ideal of beauty here isn’t the model herself, but someone else entirely — someone with incomparably less to offer, and whose face isn’t even real in the first place.  (Jessica Simpson’s eyes, lips, and nose have all reportedly been surgically altered.)  And then somehow an airbrushed photo of all that — literally, a fake of a fake of a fake — is supposed to be reason to believe that some fragrant goo in a jar will suddenly transform you in some beneficial way.  Which of course, it can’t.  So that’s fake, too.

That’s weird enough as it is.

Then put all that in a store window here in Basseterre, the capital of a country which is maybe one percent northern European.

That’s not beautiful. It’s just…bizarre.

Sign for today

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Signs all over St. Kitts:

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There seems to be one of these every couple of miles.  Of course, with hurricanes an annual menace, you’d expect a responsible government to help keep people on their toes, and not in the politicized pre-election Orange Alert sense.  Plus, the volcano on Montserrat — which I can see from where I’m sitting — has been rumbling again, and it once wiped out half of that island while covering this one with ash.  So, yeah, disasters are part of life here.

And everywhere.

Still bummed about yesterday’s news (below).  I only crossed paths with Rich in passing once or twice, but he was one of the funniest people in his generation, and I have several friends who knew him well.  It’s a sad day for people I care about.

I don’t know if the mortality rate for comics is higher than the general population, but damn, we lose a lot of the best ones early.  Bill Hicks.  Mitch Hedberg.  I could make a long list, but I don’t feel like it.

Swift, sudden, deadly.