Whitney’s Protective ‘Baby Girl’

Whitney’s Protective ‘Baby Girl’ - As close friends and family begin to absorb the news of the death of Whitney Houston, many are taking time to reflect on the last few years of a career and life they had a chance to share with the superstar—and its abrupt end.

While Houston had recently stepped away from the spotlight she dominated for so many years, her longtime hairstylist and good friend Ellin LaVar says the star remained firmly focused on two important goals in her life—keeping her marriage to Bobby Brown together (before the divorce), and bonding more with her daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who is now 19.

Close friends and family say she had been so blindly committed to her marriage to the New Edition singer that she left the familiar, comfortable surroundings of her native New Jersey to move to Atlanta, where most of Brown’s extended family lived. The two divorced in 2007.

“Her thought was Bobby had lived in New Jersey for all those years for her and now she would move for him,” says LaVar. “She believed her marriage was for a lifetime and she was going to do what it took to keep it together.”

LaVar, who began her friendship with Houston shortly after the singer’s self-titled debut album was released, in 1985, says that major move for love’s sake would ultimately prove to be a decision Houston deeply regretted.

“We were like sisters for years. We grew up together in this business and I was there for everything in her life. I told her she was pregnant before she knew it because her hair texture changed,” remembers Lavar, who is Bobbi Kristina’s godmother. “But when she moved to Atlanta, so much changed for her. People and employees kept her away from me and her family. The people who looked after her and really cared about her couldn’t get to her anymore.”

LaVar says that during one of their last phone conversations, several months ago, Houston expressed a desire to move back to her hometown so she could be close to her mother, friends, and other family members once again.

“I think she knew she needed our support to get better,” says LaVar. “People don’t care about you in this business and she knew that. I watched her struggle so long with her addiction. We cried together about it many times, and I told her I didn’t understand why this was happening because she was such a good and smart girl. I just wanted to be there for her and not watch this happen from afar.”

Still, friends and family admit they do know in part why Houston so was unable to fight the lure of substance abuse that haunted her for most of her career. Pressure to perform and succeed at all times. “She had so much on her early on,” says LaVar. “She took care of so many people in her family, his family (Bobby), and the people who worked for her. That was a lot to handle and think about. She was so very young when she started and became so big. We learned the movie industry on a major film likeThe Bodyguard. We had no idea what we were doing, and this was a huge deal. But we had to learn it, and we did. She brought so many people along for her ride. That’s a heavy burden on anyone, and it took its toll on her.”

LaVar and others point to the reality show that featured Houston and Brown as a tragic turning point in Houston’s already turmoil-filled life.

Being Bobby Brown ran on the Bravo network for one season, in 2005, and showed a chaotic and mostly dysfunctional relationship between the two singers. It also portrayed Houston as a foul-mouthed, angry, and confrontational woman with countless unhealthy vices, including chain-smoking.

“I remember Bobby Brown calling me and saying, ‘You and Clive [Davis] and everyone has to help me get Whitney to do this show,” says Clarence Avant, who represented Brown for a short period and is also the former head of Motown Records.” He said, ‘They won’t give me the show without her.’ She did it and I saw that show one time and was like, ‘What a mistake.’ It was heartbreaking to watch. I told him, ‘No matter how much they offered for another season, don’t do it.’”

LaVar adds that Being Bobby Brown further proved to what desperate lengths Houston would resort to keep her toxic marriage afloat.

“Whitney was a straight Jersey girl,” she says. “She wasn’t into being on TV and being seen all the time. She was private and liked her business private. Other people told her business—she didn’t. This is a girl who loved to vacuum to calm her nerves and relax. I watched her vacuum all the time. She didn’t want those cameras in her house or to be shown like that. But she went along for Bobby and it cost her, I think. I think she felt that way too because she didn’t like the way she came off at all.”

After the marriage to Brown ended, in 2007, friends say it became just Houston and her “baby girl,” Bobbi Kristina, leaning on each other for support.

Though there was talk of Houston having a 23-year-old adopted son, friends say he is a friend of Bobbi Kristina’s whom Houston had agreed to mentor. He lived in Atlanta with mother and daughter.

“Honestly, Whitney in many ways depended on Bobbi Kristina more than Bobbi Kristina did on her,” says a family member. “That was her friend, confidante, and her protector. No matter what she did or how drunk she got or how much her voice cracked at times, Bobbi Kristina still loved her so much and never gave up on her.”

The 19-year-old also wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps with a singing career, and the two were said to be working on several tracks together in the studio. Houston had been working for the last two years with producer Ne-Yo on a new album as well.

“She was sounding good and we had some good stuff on there,” says Ne-Yo. “Because of her schedule, it was hard to put together quickly, but it was going to happen. People would have been happy with it.”

Many are now worried about Bobbi Kristina’s well-being and mental health after she was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Sunday morning following “an anxiety attack” at the same hotel where her mother had passed away hours before.

Beverly Hills police confirmed that Bobbi Kristina was taken to Cedars-Sinai early Sunday morning. “It wasn’t along the lines of yesterday. It was for ‘precautionary measures,’” says Beverly Hills police Sgt. Brian Weir. “I think she is going to be fine.”

Others aren’t so sure. Family members are concerned that the loss of her beloved mother—“her world,” say some—may be too much for the teenager to handle.

“It was just the two of them after the divorce,” says LaVar, “They depended on each other, and it was so natural for Bobbi Kristina to take care of her mother in any way she could. She wanted her to be OK more than anything.”

Friends say Bobbi Kristina tried to stay as close to her mother as possible wherever they happened to be. She would often guide the superstar away from situations that would cause embarrassment and push aside people she deemed to have an agenda not in her mother’s best interest.

At a Grammy press junket on Thursday, Bobbi Kristina removed her mother after Houston’s behavior and conversation turned erratic. Hotel employees say Houston was sweating profusely and had been seen earlier skipping around the hotel. “Her daughter just pushed her past the reporters who were asking questions,” says a hotel employee. “She was like, ‘Mama, let’s go. Let’s go.’ She just took charge.” But Bobbi Kristina wasn’t as successful at keeping her mother away from Los Angeles nightclubs, where she’d chain-smoke and drink the night away.

Over the years the 19-year-old had become all too familiar with her role as caregiver for her mother and her father. Both singers spoke publicly about their drug use over the years with Diane Sawyer and Oprah Winfrey, describing addictions that would make any parent unfit.

“Even as a child, she felt responsible for Whitney in so many ways,” says a close friend of the singers. “And for Bobby as well, but Whitney was her heart. That’s a lot of pressure on a child, but she also knew her mother needed her more. How does a young girl handle losing all of that at once?”

While Bobbi Kristina may have appeared to be the “grownup” in the mother-daughter relationship, Houston was fiercely devoted to her daughter and had become more so in recent years. Houston reportedly told those close to her that she wanted to be fully present in Bobbi Kristina’s life from here on.

That desire also stemmed from Houston’s belief that because of her hectic career, she’d missed many of the key moments in her daughter’s early life. There was also concern over racy pictures the teenager posted of herself on Facebook and other blogs.

Last year it was even suggested that Bobbi Kristina had entered rehab for drugs as well. Family members deny that Bobbi Kristina had or has a drug problem.

“Again we’ve been kept away from not just from Whitney but Bobbi Kristina as well,” says LaVar. “We couldn’t talk to her or gauge how she was doing or what she was doing. That really hurt because it’s so easy to get lost out there in that industry. It happened to Whitney.”

Avant can’t forget the last advice he gave Houston when he saw her in the Bahamas in 2009. The singer was divorced and discussing plans for comeback, despite the negative impact of her marriage.

“I told her. ‘Don’t blame Bobby. This isn’t about Bobby. This is about you,’” says Avant. “I wanted her to understand that and to do something about it. I told her bluntly, ‘You have to get it together if you want to get better and get back on top. Blaming someone else makes it easy not to fix the problem.’ I wanted her to fix the problem. She didn’t, and I’ve lost a good friend.” ( The Daily Beast )

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Warm and Furry, but They Pack a Toxic Punch

Warm and Furry, but They Pack a Toxic Punch - What’s black and white, with a skunkish look to its cover, And from bark wrests such bite it makes lions fall over?

Meet the African crested rat, or Lophiomys imhausi, a creature so large, flamboyantly furred and thickly helmeted it hardly seems a member of the international rat consortium. Yet it is indeed a rat, a deadly dirty rat, its superspecialized pelt permeated with potent toxins harvested from trees.

As a recent report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B makes clear, the crested rat offers one of the most extreme cases of a survival strategy rare among mammals: deterring predators with chemical weapons.

Venoms and repellents are hardly rare in nature: Many insects, frogs, snakes, jellyfish and other phyletic characters use them with abandon. But mammals generally rely, for defense or offense, on teeth, claws, muscles, keen senses or quick wits.

ARMAMENTS Capuchin monkeys co-opt extracts gathered from millipedes and ants to ward off mosquitoes.

Every so often, however, a mammalian lineage discovers the wonders of chemistry, of nature’s burbling beakers and tubes. And somewhere in the distance a mad cackle sounds.

Skunks and zorilles mimic the sulfurous, anoxic stink of a swamp. The male duck-billed platypus infuses its heel spurs with a cobralike poison. The hedgehog declares: Don’t quite get the point of my spines? Allow me to sharpen their sting with a daub of venom I just chewed off the back of a Bufo toad.

Other mammals chemically gird themselves against smaller foes: Capuchin monkeys ward off mosquitoes and ticks with extracts gathered from millipedes and ants, while black-tailed deer rub themselves liberally with potent antimicrobial secretions produced by glands in their hooves. According to William Wood, a chemistry professor at Humboldt State University in California, these secretions have been shown to be effective against a broad array of micro-organisms, including acne bacteria and athlete’s-foot fungus, which could explain why teenage deer are especially diligent with the hoof-rubbing routine right before the annual deer prom.

For each newly identified instance of a chemical fix, researchers seek to identify its benefits, drawbacks and evolutionary back story, and to compare it with other known cases of chemical arms. Distinctive themes have emerged.

For example, whereas poisonous insects tend to advertise their unpalatability in bright colors like red, orange and yellow — the better to warn off their major predators, the diurnal, keen-eyed birds — most mammals and their mammalian predators are nocturnal or crepuscular, dawn and duskular. Color is wasted on them, but strong contrast between dark and light is not.

This is why skunks, zorilles (also known as polecats) and the African crested rat have independently converged on a similar pelage theme of black against white. The pattern is unmistakable in very low light, and its message is too: You’ve seen me. I’m noxious. Now buzz off.

In their fetchingly titled paper, “A Poisonous Surprise Under the Coat of the African Crested Rat,” Jonathan Kingdon and Fritz Vollrath of Oxford University and their colleagues described the complex of traits that give rise to the rodent’s rottenness.

The researchers determined that the rat spends many hours gnawing on the bark and roots of the Acokanthera tree, from which it extracts the same curare-type heart toxin that African hunters have traditionally used to kill elephants. The rat then slavers the toxic masticant onto tracts of specialized hairs running along its flank.

Those hairs, when observed under a scanning electron microscope, look very different from ordinary fur, Dr. Vollrath said. Each outer shaft is stiff and full of holes — like a dead cactus, he said — and inside are a series of long, fluffy microfibers. The researchers showed that the applied toxin seeps through the outer holes of the hairs and is wicked up and stored by the fibers, lending the rat twinned flank strips of doom.

One little nip is all it would take to sicken or even kill a predator, and the crested rat is well equipped to endure exploratory bites, Dr. Vollrath said: Its hide is unusually thick, and its head is helmeted like a turtle’s. Whether through trial and error or by following an enlightened elder’s example, Africa’s many carnivores give the rat a wide berth.

So, too, do Lophiomys researchers. “Jonathan is a highly enterprising researcher, and he normally eats every animal he studies,” Dr. Vollrath said of his colleague. “But he admitted he would rather not eat this one.”

The researchers don’t yet know why the rat is itself immune to the toxin, or how its fate came to be bound up with the Acokanthera tree. Dr. Vollrath looks to basic rat nature for ideas.

“The rat eats a lot of things that other animals won’t,” he said. “If it eats something disgusting, it tries to spit it out, clean it off, using its skin as a napkin.”

If an early crested rat, while sampling and gagging on a toxic tree, incidentally end up protected against predation, well, evolution has a way of turning a contingency into a necessity. The crested rat is now anatomically and behaviorally dependent on tree toxin for protection, and should Acokanthera go extinct, its little chiseler would soon follow.

In contrast to the crested rat, skunks synthesize their toxins from scratch, yet they, too, have taken chemical defense to a highly derived, almost mannered extreme. Skunks stand alone in mammaldom, and though they once were considered a kind of weasel, the world’s 10 or so species have recently been assigned a family plaque of their own, the Mephitidae, from the Latin for “bad odor.”

Through anal scent glands just inside the rectum at the base of the tail, skunks generate an extreme version of the familiar spray with which carnivores mark their territory, wildly accentuating the chemical components that we and most other mammals judge to be very bad news.

At the heart of skunk spray is a thiol, the signature of nasty environments high in lethal hydrogen sulfide and low in oxygen — places like mines, swamps, and oil and gas wells. “Our nose is able to detect thiols at extremely low levels, parts per billion,” Dr. Wood said. “We needed to stay away from areas with low oxygen, where we could die.”

Skunks, he added, “have come along and capitalized on this.”

Capitalized and canonized — or maybe cannonized. The skunk’s scent glands have evolved into structures that look like swollen nipples, each able to swivel independently of the other to take perfect aim, and to perfectly calibrated effect (as can be seen in spectacular video on the PBS program “Nature”).

To deter a predator chasing behind at an unknown distance, the skunk goes for the atomized mist effect; if the harasser is within view, the skunk may choose a straight stream to the face.

Skunks are confident in their repellent prowess, but nowadays their swagger can prove fatal. Researchers suggest that one reason skunks constitute a large proportion of roadkill is that they see cars as another predator in need of a lesson: Come ahead, pal, I’ll just stand here and spray.

A good defense means never taking offense. Researchers have been impressed by the ardor with which monkeys in the field prospect for novel forms of insect repellent, and their willingness to withstand extremely irritating chemicals for the sake of rebuffing the bloodsuckers that plague them.

“Capuchin monkeys are notoriously generalist and destructive in their sampling,” said Jessica Lynch Alfaro, the associate director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They break everything open, and you have to watch out or they’ll drop branches on your head.”

Every so often, they come upon a product that looks or smells promising, at which point they crack it open and start anointing themselves. They tear up chili peppers to release the capsaicin, rip apart millipedes to procure a few droplets of searing benzoquinones.

If they find a nest of carpenter ants, pay dirt! The monkeys plop down on top and roll every which way, to soak up the ants’ formidable formic acid supply.

Such treatments are clearly painful. “Capuchin monkeys get very agitated when they’re anointing themselves,” said Dr. Lynch Alfaro, who with colleagues recently reviewed capuchin anointing behavior for The American Journal of Primatology. “But they’re keeping off parasites, and they seem to have a high threshold for pain.”

Besides, it’s not all pain and suffering. Anointing is a supremely social affair, and one rubbing monkey soon attracts others.

“They get into such a frenzy that the social order breaks down; everyone is anointing with everyone else,” Dr. Lynch Alfaro said. “It’s like a big, wild party.” They may be black and blue, but the magic potion is spread all over. ( nytimes.com )

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Kate Middleton's Mustique Vacation Is Royal Pain for Other Guests

Kate Middleton's Mustique Vacation Is Royal Pain for Other Guests - While Kate Middleton and her family enjoy a luxurious vacation holed up in a $23,000 per week mansion on the Caribbean island of Mustique, the rest of the island is on near lockdown, upsetting tourists and locals.

The Mustique Company, which owns the Caribbean getaway, is restricting the movements of other guests to protect the Middletons' privacy, the Daily Mail reports.

Tourists have reportedly been banned from using the rented "mules," or golf carts, normally used to zip around the island, and are being quizzed by security before being allowed to access the beach and other island hot spots.

The Middletons - Kate, along with her parents, Michael and Carole, brother, James, and sister, Pippa - jetted off to Mustique on Friday, sitting first class on a British Airways flight out of London's Gatwick Airport, a photographer blogged.

The family, owners of a party-planning business, are frequent visitors to the island and reportedly have looked into purchasing a vacation home there. Kate and her husband, Prince William, traveled there in 2006 for a luxury getaway while they were still dating.

But now the security and strict regulations that follow the Duchess of Cambridge, as Kate became known when she and Prince William tied the knot last April, no matter where she travels are creating a stir, even in an island known for hosting A-listers like Jennifer Lopez and Mick Jagger.

"This isn't exactly the way one expects to be treated when you pay very good money to visit the most exclusive island in the Caribbean," one local told the Daily Mail.

A source told the paper the Mustique Company is covering the costs of the extra security, said to be put in place after discussions with Kate's bodyguards.

"A couple of years ago, don't forget, the Middletons were just a regular family, very regular," Dickie Arbiter, former press secretary to Prince William's grandmother, the Queen, told ABC News.

"Then, Kate met a prince, Pippa wore that dress, and the Middletons, all of them, are now neo-royalty," he said.

The security can be expected to increase even more in the week ahead when Prince Williams joins the family for vacation.

People magazine reports Middleton's husband, the Duke of Cambridge, will join his wife's family in Mustique once his military shift schedule allows. He is currently at RAF base in Anglesey, Wales, fulfilling his duties as a search and rescue helicopter pilot.

Neither the palace nor the Mustique Company had comment on the royal couple's vacation plans. ( ABC News )

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6 Good Reasons To Tell Your Children Bald-Faced Lies

6 Good Reasons To Tell Your Children Bald-Faced Lies - Lies We Tell Our Children - I am a liar. I lie daily to my children, if not two or three times a day. Some of these lies are mere bluffs. Imagine my lovely four-year-old refusing to brush her teeth before bed. Frustrated, I tell her that if she isn't polishing her pearly whites by the time I count to three, she's in time out. Actually, there is no way I am going to prolong the bedtime routine another five-minutes while she loudly moans behind her bedroom door waking her younger sister. However this one little fib accomplishes my main objective; it's a quicker path to me being able to type at my computer with a glass of white wine, and the current season of Real Housewives of Any City playing on Bravo.

My lies vary in great degree. There are small lies like "Sure I'll buy you that princess ball gown for your birthday!" The truth is that I am just attempting to make it through Target without a colossal breakdown and her birthday is over five months away, so the possibility that she will remember this request come April is less than the chance of Elmo being hit by a runaway bus.

There are also big lies, such as, "Neko (our cat) went to live on a big farm where she will be able to play with other cats and dogs." We all know what the farm metaphor really stands for, but at the time I wasn't prepared to tell my then three-year-old about the harsh realities of pets and death. I was grateful for such a simple alternative explanation.

As parents we lie for various reasons. Many of them are for the benefit of our children, but in the spirit of "truthiness" the majority of these deceptions are for our own sake. Here are just a few of the reasons we so readily bend the truth with our little ones:

1. To save time. On a typical weekday morning I am in a rush to wrangle two kids into their car seats and make it to preschool by 8:45. In the process one asks, "Can we watch Team Umizumi this afternoon?" Instead of explaining that there will be no time, what with the myriad of errands I need to accomplish, including toting both girls to the doctor's office for their annual flu shots, I simply respond, "We'll see." The child, satisfied with the reply, climbs into the car.

2. We lie because sometimes we don't know all the answers. "Mommy, why is that flower blue?" Having no clue, and knowing that admitting this will get me nowhere with this particular toddler, I respond, "So that it can combine with the red flowers to make purple ones."

3. We lie because it is often easier than telling the truth. "If you don't eat your vegetables, you won't grow big and strong." To be honest, I've known plenty of children who refused all things green or orange and lived to be healthy adults. However, explaining nutritional wellbeing, the national obesity epidemic, and the value of consuming one's daily vitamins is futile with the four-and-under crowd.

4. We lie to be nice. "I made you a beautiful picture of a butterfly. Do you like it?" Umm... what butterfly? All I see is a pink scribble next to a green one. "I love it!"

5. We lie to keep their innocence. That is what Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy really are -- lies we perpetuate to keep our children innocent, young, and believing in magic. Some may argue that this is wrong, but maybe the real harm is not fostering their beliefs in fairy tales.

6. We lie to protect ourselves. For parents, simple lies to avoid the subject of death, flow from our mouths like cheap from Target. When seeing a dead pigeon on the sidewalk, I have effortlessly fibbed, "Oh Honey, he is just sleeping." While I do want to protect my girls from sorrow, I know that the larger part of me is lying to guard my own anxiety with mortality.

I am not advocating dishonest parenting. I know fully well that these are just excuses for my behavior. I've read the articles that explain how children learn to lie from their parents and that by the age of four children already lie at least once every two hours. Yet I still hope to raise my own girls to be honest and trustworthy. That said, I am still not sure if I am ready to give up my white lies; I just foresee too many extended conversations delaying getting out the door for school, prolonging bedtime, and requiring me to explain the intricacies of human reproduction to a child that sleeps in Dora the Explorer diapers. ( huffingtonpost.com )

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Don't Dim Your Light for Your Man

Don't Dim Your Light for Your Man - Don't play conservative, if you're not! Don't play anything -- be yourself!

If you're Christian, you grew up singing that song in church, "This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine." My heart melts when I see the toddlers sing that today at my church. Such a simple song with a huge meaning -- God/the Universe has given you a light to shine and therefore you should let it.

I love to watch children play, specifically my Godchildren, Jayden and Elliot. They are discovering the world -- one leaf, one spider, and one ice cream cone at a time. It is wonderful to see them attack life with such a brilliant and pure light.

It is the main reason why I hate to see some parents and adults do things to dim that light by forgetting kids are kids and not adults. I think the worst thing you can do to a child is dim the natural light that shines within her. It is equally disheartening for me to see adults dim their own lights, especially for someone else.

One of my sister-friends, who I'm not that close with, but have known for years, has always been a vibrant person. She's the type of woman who wears those outfits that borderline outrageous, but work for her because she has that type of personality. I have always admired her zeal for life and her indifference to what other people think. She did her thing no matter what!

It was her enigmatic personality that always made everyone want to be around her. She was definitely someone you wanted on the list at your party, as you could count on her to do something ridiculously fun. We all loved her just the way she was.

I hadn't seen her in a couple of years and we both ended up at a mutual friend's birthday party. Turns out, she had gotten married and had a baby. I was so happy for her and wanted to know everything about her husband and her new life. I offered to grab us some cocktails so we could sip while we caught up. She said she no longer drank alcohol. It was a shocker to me because she could drink a linebacker under the table. But, I do understand people evolve and didn't think much of it.

When I returned with my gimlet in hand and her Sprite, we sat down to shoot the breeze. As she told me about her day-to-day life, I felt like I was talking to a complete stranger. This couldn't be the wild and crazy girl that I'd known for years. Instead, some demure Stepford Wife had invaded her body. Then, I noticed how she was dressed; floral print dress, two-inch pumps and pearls. Wow!

As she continued about her life, I felt like I was in an episode of Charlie Brown, because all I heard was "womp, womp, womp!" I was stunned! Don't get me wrong; I know people do change. But, this was like Snooki becoming Mother Theresa; people don't change that much! More importantly, I was getting bored. The interesting, hip, life on the edge girl I knew was clearly gone and I was counting the moments when I could break away from her.

Then, I said it! I was probably out of line, but I had to do it. I asked, "So, what gives? You're a completely different person than what I remember you to be." At first, she was taken aback by the question. Then, she paused for a moment and saw an opportunity to talk. She told me that her husband was really conservative -- a Republican -- and how over the course of their relationship he'd made "suggestions" on how she should conduct herself. He had intentions of running for office.

I could tell she was unhappy with this change, but she clearly loved her husband and child. My question was, "Who did he think he was marrying?" Her response, "He says he saw my potential past all of the other stuff." I was heated! All that "other stuff" was what made her special; it was her light.

Of course, I went on to encourage her to let her light shine. Otherwise, she was going to be miserable for the rest of her life. I asked, "Do you even like pearls?" She gave me that smile that reads, "Hell no!" My goal was not to interfere in her relationship because she had clearly made some choices. I did, however, want to encourage her to seek a way that she could be more of herself and let her true light shine.

I don't know what happened with my sister-friend after that birthday party. I haven't seen her since. I pray that she is becoming more secure in who she really is at the core and allowing herself space to be that person within the confines of her marriage. Not only is she doing her self a disservice, her husband is missing out on a truly awesome woman.

I see so many women dim their lights for men and nothing upsets me more. Don't play dumb! Don't play conservative, if you're not! Don't play anything -- be yourself! If a man is looking for you to mute your music, then he's not the man for you. You can only be someone else for so long before your true self comes out. And, it's usually too late then. So, it's best for you to stay true to the light God gave you and let it shine! ( msn.com )

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Sell your life to a stranger?

Sell your life to a stranger? - You may be able to get cash by selling your life insurance policy to an investor. Here's how to find out whether it's a smart move.

If you've heard anything about the life settlement industry, it's probably because of deals that went wrong.

Life settlement is the practice of selling your life insurance policy for cash to investors who continue paying your premiums and who collect the death benefit when you die.

The practice has been around for a few decades, but it gained notoriety starting in the mid-2000s after hedge funds became big investors, wealthy people began buying policies specifically to flip them and many individual investors got burned by people who hung around much longer than their life expectancies suggested.

Here are just some of the cases that made headlines:

• Talk-show host Larry King sued an insurance brokerage in 2007, saying he was paid too little for the $15 million in policies he sold and wasn't told how tough it would be to get affordable replacements.
• The widow of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer sued after learning her late husband bought $56 million in life insurance coverage and quickly sold it to investors. She argued the death benefits should have come to her.
• An 81-year-old man in Los Angeles sued his agent, an insurance company and a bank after he said he was persuaded to pay $690,000 in premiums for a $6 million policy, only to find out there were no investors who wanted to buy it.

The idea of giving strangers a financial interest in your death may strike you as kind of creepy. But life settlement is a legitimate option for older people who have policies they no longer need, said Darwin Bayston, the executive director of the Life Insurance Settlement Association, an industry trade group.

What's your policy worth?

"So much of our senior population is just not prepared for retirement," Bayston said, noting that selling unneeded life insurance policies could be an alternative to selling a family home or using a reverse mortgage to tap the home's equity for cash. "Maybe their policies have value. . . . They can take a look at it and see what it might be worth."

The answer could be: not much. The recent boom in life settlements ended with the 2008 financial crash, which wiped out most of the market for what Bayston calls "manufactured STOLI," or stranger-originated life insurance, that was taken out by rich, healthy people to sell for a quick profit. Changes in life-expectancy tables -- actuaries figured out we were living longer -- dealt the industry another blow.

Today, most of the business involves policies owned by seniors in poor health, and "it's a buyer's market," said Glenn Daily, a fee-only insurance consultant who evaluates policies for investors and sellers.

The institutional investors that buy most policies -- big banks, pension funds, hedge funds, even life insurance companies -- are looking for a sizable expected return, typically in the range of 15% to 20%, after accounting for the policyholder's life expectancy and the cost of future premiums. Broker commissions and other costs further reduce the potential payout to sellers.

Often, Daily said, "people are disappointed."

"They think there's this pot of gold they can take advantage of," said Daily, who evaluates individual polices for a $1,895 fee. "They find out their policy is worth 10 cents on the dollar, or you go through the work (of trying to evaluate its worth) and it's worth nothing."

When is a life insurance policy most likely to have value in this market? Here are some guidelines, according to Daily:

• It's a cash-value policy, particularly a universal life policy. Cash-value policies, also known as "permanent" insurance, combine a death benefit with an investment component that builds up value over time. Term insurance, which is pure insurance with no investment component, typically has no value unless the owner's death is imminent.
• The policy has a face value of $250,000 or more, although some investors specialize in big portfolios of smaller-value policies.
• The owner has a life expectancy of 15 years or less. As you might expect, the shorter the life expectancy, the more the policy may be worth.

The policy also typically needs to be at least two years old and cover only one person. So-called second-to-die policies that cover couples are usually valuable only if one of those covered is already dead.

How to sell

To sell a policy, you'll need to work with an insurance agent or broker who specializes in this market, but you also should have an independent adviser -- such as an attorney, CPA or financial planner -- who isn't earning commissions from the sale.

Here's what to do:

• Make sure you no longer need the policy. The factors that are most likely to make your policy valuable -- you're over 65 and in poor health -- mean you're unlikely to qualify for new insurance. So review why you bought the policy in the first place, and make sure the need you were trying to cover is no longer there. If you still have people financially dependent on you, for example, you may still need insurance.
• Consider your alternatives. If you need money, you typically can borrow against your policy's cash value and still keep your coverage in place. You also may surrender your policy to the insurance company for cash, although your payout could be less than you'd get from a sale. If you're considering selling your policy because you can no longer afford the premiums, talk to your insurer about your options. You may be able to lower or skip premiums if you have a lot of cash value in the policy. Another option: Ask your kids or other beneficiaries to take over the premium payments. This is often the best option if your life expectancy is very short, since selling the policy would net you only a fraction of what the policy will shortly be worth.
• Get several offers, if you can. This market is neither efficient nor robust, and some policies will generate little interest. But push your broker or agent to bring you more than one or two offers, since otherwise you may be presented with only the offers with high commissions attached.
• Negotiate commissions based on the purchase price. Some brokers try to claim a commission based on the policy's face value, regardless of the amount they eventually get for you. Daily says that's wrong, and that you should base the commission you pay on the purchase price. "You shouldn't have to pay more than 10% if you're a responsible seller who appreciates the business reality of the broker," Daily said. "If the broker can make a good case for charging more, then I'd be willing to listen. But this market has a history of taking advantage of policyholders, so you're justified in being skeptical." ( msn.com )
  

READ MORE - Sell your life to a stranger?

Why I quit lying

Why I quit lying -- I spent my childhood listening to my mother tell one whopper of a story after another.

One set of our ancestors allegedly found a baby wrapped in vines after a storm, she said. Another discovered a valuable diamond brooch covered in tar in a bathroom stall. What's more, three of her uncles, all baseball aficionados, were buried at the site of a North Carolina field where they once played. And here's the kicker: They were supposedly interred in their respective fielding positions.

No wonder she held people in rapt attention at dinner parties, in line at the market, at bus stops.

Jaw-dropping events were apparently commonplace in my mother's formative years -- no surprise, since she was such an outsize character herself. A saucy redheaded southerner, Mom could be demure one moment and shocking the next, with a laugh so loud and sudden it turned heads. And she had stories to tell.

Sometimes parents' tall tales are handed down to their children like family heirlooms

I didn't, as far as I knew. I was raised in Delaware (referred to by many as Dull-aware and Dela-where?) with three older siblings in a garden-variety suburban atmosphere. I yearned to be unique like my mother; I wanted to fit into the world of fascinating dinner-party conversation that she so effortlessly inhabited. And so I invented other realities in order to make myself equally intriguing and charismatic.

After my brother and sisters flew the coop, I frequently traveled as an only child with my parents. Our journeys provided me with countless opportunities to make things up. I often pretended to be Lebanese, speaking in a broken accent and refusing to do certain things that went against the "rules of my culture," like eating Pop Rocks, which I hated anyway. On other occasions, I told people my mother was a flamenco dancer, or that I was related to Goldie Hawn.

I was careful not to bring up these fibs when my parents were around, and so I never got caught. Later on, in college, I kept on lying. Why not? I was good at it. Studying abroad in France one semester, I felt truly fluent in French the night I was able to tell an histoire à dormir debout (tall tale) in a bar.

My fictions continued over the years and even bore fruit: I went to graduate school for creative writing. There I was in my ideal habitat -- a natural exaggerator surrounded by natural exaggerators -- and yet, to my surprise, I found myself drawn to Dave, the one student in my program who didn't seem eager to impress everyone with his raconteur skills.

In short order, he forced the truth out of me. On our first or second date, Dave asked me so many earnest questions about my award-winning background in ballroom dance that I finally confessed I knew only the jitterbug. I braced myself for his reaction, but he didn't recoil in horror. To the contrary, he said he found me fascinating -- the real me, completely stripped of my fabrications.
As I began telling him about my actual childhood, I discovered that my life hadn't been as ho-hum as I'd always thought.

I had spent years pretending to be Lebanese! That was interesting. My dad was a corporate lawyer who danced in the kitchen like Zorba the Greek. Pretty colorful, right? What's more, I was raised around the corner from my maternal grandparents -- my step-grandfather, a double amputee from World War II, and my grandma, an oyster-bar owner who once sang back-up for Mel Tormé.

Come to think of it, my childhood was wonderfully weird, and if I hadn't spent my time trying to shock and amaze people (and keep pace with my mother), I might have realized it earlier.

I practiced living Dave-ishly, engaged by the real world and paying close attention to its stunning details. He was a constant source of inspiration: When I introduced him to my family and friends, he asked authentic, probing questions and found out more about them in minutes than I had in years.
He was the one to learn that my elderly neighbor had survived the Bataan Death March, why my brother had given up the saxophone, and that my father had gotten caught in a snowstorm on the night of President John F. Kennedy's inauguration.

I followed his lead. Now that I was not expending considerable energy trying to keep my fibs straight, I found that I was better at inquiring about other people -- and at listening to their answers. I cordoned off fiction, saving it for my novels, and dedicated myself to nonfiction in my everyday life.

I also concluded that it would be a good idea to marry Dave, and did so.

Not long after the wedding, inspired by Dave's relentless search for truth, I confronted my mother and demanded that she come clean about her outlandish stories, which I had long since figured were bunk.

There was one tale, for example, that she would tell about an aunt who had cared for her blind, bed-bound mother for years -- and then suddenly hanged herself from a bedpost. I told my mom it wasn't possible. "How does someone hang herself from a bedpost? It's, what, three feet off the floor?" I pressed for a confession.

My mother was flustered. "It's true!" she insisted indignantly. Two days later, flushed with vindication, she knocked on my front door and handed me a yellowed newspaper clipping. The headline read: WOMAN HANGS HERSELF ON A BEDPOST.
It was a true story. Unlikely, but true. And it forced me to reconsider the veracity of all my mother's wild tales. What if somewhere in North Carolina there was an old baseball field where her uncles were buried at first, second, and third plates? Maybe I was the descendant of a baby who was found wrapped in vines. Or not. Or maybe the truth was someplace in between.

I decided then and there to hand these legends down to my own children, much the way another family might bequeath a cherished homemade quilt. And I'll be honest: I don't know whether the stories are fact or fiction. But they are part of our heritage nonetheless.

This year my mother gave me a present, an old-fashioned dinner ring with five small diamonds embedded in white gold. She had worn it for as long as I could remember. I was touched beyond words. The diamonds of my mother's ring, once part of that aforementioned brooch found in a lump of tar in a bathroom stall, remind me, daily, that I don't need to make things up. The world, just as it is, has endless gifts to offer. ( RealSimple.com )

READ MORE - Why I quit lying