How women want to be kissed

How women want to be kissed - Kisses are more than a meeting of the lips. When done well, they’re a form of communication, a surefire way to tell a woman “I want you” and “I love you.” When done badly, kisses can be... well, the kiss of death for a new relationship. So, forgive us for asking, but how do your kisses rate? You’ve probably been smooching for so many years that you take your skills for granted. Stop for a moment and think about it, though: Are you really good at it? Could your repertoire use some refreshing? 

To help any man become an even better kisser, we went on a fact-finding mission. Below, nine women reveal what makes them go weak at the knees. (Is some of this information contradictory? Well, yes; what can I say? One woman’s thrill is another woman’s turn-off. Love is like that sometimes.) Now go ahead and read their stories, and then put these insider insights to work for you. 

Put some passion in it

“We want to be kissed slowly, constantly, and passionately, all over... like you really mean it! We want to be kissed long, slow, deep and hard — all at once.”
– Cynthia Garrett, actress/television host and “Hip Girl” blogger 

Inch on over and make that move... slowly

“Never ask a woman if you can kiss her. If you really can’t read the signs, you are better off not even trying. What does work? Getting closer and closer without touching builds tension, and that leads to the ultimate lip-lock.” 
– Amy Sacco, owner of NYC clubs Bungalow 8 and Lot 61 

Watch out for the nose!

“A deep, hot kiss for me means mouth on mouth, the perfect alignment of noses, and a hand inching up to hold the back of my neck.”
– Elizabeth Lippman, photographer 

Try a kissing bandit technique

“A kiss doesn’t have to be face-to-face to be breathtaking. When my husband and I first started dating, I was standing at a bar ordering a drink when he came up behind me, put his arms around my waist and kissed the side of my neck, right under my ear. It literally sent shivers down my spine. I remember thinking: ‘Wow! I hope this relationship lasts!’”
– Kimberly Lewis, magazine editor 

Always be a gentleman

“A man needs to have the right amount of confidence and gentleness to deliver a good kiss. Being over-confident is a big turn-off for me. I hate when a guy is so full of himself that he goes in for the kiss when you haven’t given him a single signal yet to do so. Yuck!”
– Danna Weiss, fashion expert and founder, consciousjewelry.com 

Put your fingers in her hair

“I like to have my hair stroked while kissing or having him pull my head closer. Men taking control is a total turn-on.” 
– Melissa de la Cruz, best-selling author of the Blue Bloods series 

Don’t underestimate the power of eye contact

“I love it when a guy stops kissing me for a moment, places his hand on my face, and then just stares at me like he could devour me before going in for another kiss — that is just heaven.”
– Carmindy, author and makeup artist/beauty expert for TLC’s What Not To Wear 

Pull off the perfect PDA

“An intense kiss when you’re not expecting it is so sexy. I was on a date with my now-husband and we were walking down the street, when out of nowhere, he pressed his body up against mine and began making out with me passionately. He didn’t care who walked by or if anyone screamed, ‘Get a room!’ That was a while ago, and I still think about it all the time.”
– Alexis Karl, painter and creator of the cherry bomb killer perfume line 

Deliver the sweetest series of smooches

“After a make-out session, end it with a hint of sweetness... like a tiny peck on each cheek, then the tip of the nose, and then the forehead. That mix of naughty and nice sends chills up my spine. Yum.”
– Alexandra Bellak, real estate agent ( yahoo.match.com )

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New, Colorful Monkey Species Discovered

New, Colorful Monkey Species Discovered - A shy, brightly colored monkey species has been found living in the lush rainforests at the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a find that utterly surprised the researchers who came upon it.

"When I first saw it, I immediately knew it was something new and different — I just didn't know how significant it was," said John Hart, a veteran Congo researcher who is scientific director for the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation, based in Kinshasa.

An adult male lesula, a newly-identified monkey species native to a limited area of central Democratic Republic of Congo.

The picture that started it all: Georgette with her monkey friend.

In fact, the find was something of a happy accident. Hart first spied the suspect monkey in 2007 while sifting through photographs brought back from a recently concluded field expedition to a remote region of central DRC.

Yet the image that caught his eye hadn't been taken in the field. It was snapped in a village, and showed a young girl named Georgette with a tiny monkey that had taken a shine to the 13-year-old. 

What is that?

It was a gorgeous animal, Hart said, with a blond mane and upper chest, and a bright red patch on the lower back. "I'd never seen that on any animal in the area, so right away I said, 'Hmmm,'" he told OurAmazingPlanet.

Hart decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. Fast forward through five years of field work, genetic research and anatomical study, and today (Sept. 12) Hart and a list of collaborators formally introduced to the world a new primate species, dubbed Cercopithecus lomamiensis, and known locally as the lesula. Their work is announced in the online journal PLOS One.

It turned out that the little monkey that hung around Georgette's house had been brought to the area by the girl's uncle, who had found it on a hunting trip. It wasn't quite a pet, but it became known as Georgette's lesula. The young female primate passed its days running in the yard with the dogs, foraging around the village for food, and growing up into a monkey that belonged to a species nobody recognized. 

Further investigation revealed the full story of the strange monkey. It turned out that C. lomamiensis, a cryptic, skittish primate, roams a swath of dense rainforest some 6,500 square miles (17,000 square kilometers).

"For a big mammal to go unnoticed is pretty unusual," said Kate Detwiler, a primatologist and assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University, and an author on the paper. Yet one visit to the area that the lesula calls home reveals why the monkeys escaped scientific notice for so long, Detwiler told OurAmazingPlanet. This region of the DRC is remote and vast.

The trees tower overhead, blocking out the sun, and the forest floor — the chief domain of the lesula — is steeped in a permanent gloom. The forest is full of sounds. At first light, the lesulas raise a lilting chorus of booming calls, distinct from the cries of their monkey neighbors who pass their lives in the trees high above the forest floor; at dusk, the cries of African grey parrots echo through the canopy. The earth is wet and soft, and feet sink into the ground with each step. There is a gentle, steady thud as fruit falls from the trees.

One gets the feeling of being on a ship very far out to sea, Detwiler said ?only here, the ocean is the endless expanse of the trees. "I felt so privileged to be there," she said. "I wish everybody could have that experience."

Blue buttocks

The lesulas live in this isolated region in groups up to five strong, and feeds on fruit and leafy plants. The males weigh up to 15 pounds (7 kilograms), about twice the size of the females. They also have some rather arresting anatomical features.

"They have giant blue backsides," Hart said. "Bright aquamarine buttocks and testicles. What a signal! That aquamarine blue is really a bright color in forest understory."

"So in terms of monkey viewing, females can definitely find males," Detwiler said.

"We don't really know what this means because it's very uncommon for monkeys in this lineage," she added.

The only other monkey to share this feature is the lesula's closest cousin — the owl-faced monkey, a species that lives farther east. At first it was thought the monkeys were close kin, but genetic analysis suggests the two species split from a common ancestor about 2 million years ago.

Now that the new species has been formally identified, Hart said, the next task is to save it. Although the lesula is new to science, it is a well-established sight on the dinner table.

What's for dinner

There's a thriving market for bush meat, particularly in urban areas, Hart said, and the monkeys are just one of dozens of species, from snakes to elephants to apes, that are targeted.

"People have disposable income, and this is the cheapest meat," he said. "Bush meat is a go-to item because it's less expensive than chicken or beef. This is not a new problem, but it's a problem that doesn't have a solution yet."

Hart and his wife, Terese, are partnering with local people to try to set up a national park in the lesulas' territory, but it's still a work in progress. In the meantime, researchers have set up camera traps in the dense forest to try to better understand the habits of the shy animals.

Georgette, the girl whose lesula companion started it all, is now 18. "The animal was very attached to her," Hart said. But one day the monkey disappeared.

"It was suspected that somebody in town had taken it in," Hart said. "And it ended up in their cooking pot." ( LiveScience.com )

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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 )

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Earl of Cardigan speaks of marriage to woman he met in therapy

Earl of Cardigan speaks of marriage to woman he met in therapy - The Earl of Cardigan has spoken for the first time of how he met his new wife at an American therapy clinic, and that her son believed she was about to become an accountant, not a countess.

The Earl of Cardigan has spoken for the first time about his marriage to a woman he met at an American therapy clinic.

Lord Cardigan, 58, admitted the couple’s courtship had been “pretty strange” because he was being treated for his “despair” after the collapse of his first marriage.

His new bride, Joanne Hill, 46, was at the Trauma Resolution clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico, trying to kick an addiction to prescription pills.

Lord Cardigan said he had decided to speak out partly to correct what suggestions that the new Lady Cardigan had left her husband for him, which he described as “rubbish”.

The old Etonian went to the clinic to help him get over the sudden ending of his marriage to Rosamond, the author of a number of cookbooks.

The then Mrs Hill was being treated for addiction to Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, which she had been prescribed after being sexually assaulted at knifepoint while walking back to her car in Phoenix, Arizona.

David Cardigan, 58, married American Joanne Hill at the beginning of May in a private ceremony in the romantic mediaeval hilltop village of San Miniato, near Pisa in Italy

“I suppose the circumstances of our meeting were pretty strange, because Joanne and I were in therapy,” Lord Cardigan said.

“I was in deep despair and shock in 2005 because of the very sudden termination of my twenty five year marriage. Joanne was there to address the cause of her use of Xanax addiction, which was the attack she had suffered in the first place.

“We met there during very intense therapy when we were both part of the same Trauma Resolution group”.

“Our relationship really began when we went our separate ways at the end of the therapy,” said Lord Cardigan.

“I’d gone to live with my very dear sister Carina, who lives on the Caribbean island of Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.”

He continued: “I missed Joanne hugely, and we began contacting each other, and it grew from there.”

Lord Cardigan attacked what he described as “malicious rubbish” which had been written about their relationship.

“I think it is as good a time as any to put the record straight, starting with the simple fact that Joanne and her husband had already both filed against each other for divorce before she and I ever even met”.

“Actually we first met in a room where the most personal of things had to be openly discussed, and we had to go through the story of our lives examining the good, the bad and the ugly.

“There were no secrets in there, and to that extent we knew some very deep and very personal stuff about each other before our relationship even started, and like everyone else in that group we implicitly trusted each other with all that.”

The couple married at the beginning of May at a private ceremony at San Miniato, a hilltop village near Pisa and have set up home at Lord Cardigan’s estate in Savernake Forest, near Marlborough, Wiltshire.

Lord Cardigan has two children from his previous marriage, Thomas, Viscount Savernake and Lady Catherine, who is better known as Bo Bruce, a singer songwriter, from whom he is estranged.

The new countess has a 13-year-old son, Wolfy.

Lady Cardigan said her first impressions of the man who became her husband was of an stereotypical Briton.

“When I first met David in group therapy I thought he was an archetypal Englishman. Very up-tight and proper, and initially very unwilling to open up, which of course is what Group Therapy is all about.

“But we learned the worst about each other first, and since then I have come to love him for the warm, sensitive man that he is.”

Lord Cardigan said the couple who, having “put the record straight”, were looking forward to starting life together in Wiltshire.

“My heartfelt wish now is to be reconciled with my two children. I've missed them both enormously”. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Why I'll keep opening the door for women

Why I'll keep opening the door for women - Sexism is civilised – whatever the Society for the Psychology of Women might think, says Stephen Bayley.

I always hold the door open for women. But, then, I always hold the door open for men, too. For this small act of graciousness, the peer-reviewed, humourless, bad-tempered, lunatic fringe of feminism – in the form of the Society for the Psychology of Women – now accuses me of "benevolent sexism".

Being, as they insist, a knuckle-dragging male gorilla, I took it to be simple good manners. Thank God I have been corrected before I went too far. Just imagine – I could have ended-up smiling at girls. I was going to write "pretty girls", but it would have been dangerously self-incriminating too early in the piece.

While writing that first paragraph, I said a sly, manipulative "thank you" to a male colleague for the espresso he so kindly put on my desk. I expect he will soon be tempted to raise his game and accuse me of chauvinistic bullying in the workplace. Sisters, believe me, we must be alert and vigilant!

It's an incautious man who makes the case for sexism

In the summer of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's discontent, it's an incautious man who makes the case for sexism. But my roiling cauldron of ungovernable hormones encourages recklessness, so here goes. Sexism is a mark of civilisation, as is all behaviour based on perceptions and intelligently adapted to different circumstances. Life is about gradients – the ascending, sometimes meandering, paths between different values. Vice/virtue, young/old and male/female are simply the most obvious.

Manners are the device we use to negotiate these sometimes tricky and precipitous social slopes. It's a contract based on respect, an unforced standard of conduct intended to enhance another's self-esteem. This is why, when body-checked on the elevator at Piccadilly Circus this morning, I didn't kick the obstructive old boy in the ankle and say: "Get out of my way, you economically insignificant, ugly, feeble-minded crumbling old dotard."

I wonder what goes on in the firmly closed minds behind the bitterly closed doors of the Society for the Psychology of Women. I imagine the stern researchers responsible for coming up with the idea of "benevolent sexism" are charged with scrutinising global media for occult offences against the pure, uncontaminated cause of feminism. Enraged to madness by pervasive images of elegance and notions of courtesy, they remove themselves to the Ops Room to plan a world drained of enchantment and refinement. Fortunately, you can recognise leading Society members quite easily: most have suffered maxillofacial trauma, broken teeth and soft tissue injuries when liberated males, sensitised to the charge of "benevolent sexism", have preferred to let heavy swing doors thud into their faces.

It's true, of course, that new technology has tended to confuse the old contract. Somehow, doors are often involved. That business of opening the car door is made nonsensical when you have a remote blipper to do the central locking. In public buildings, automatic doors remove the need for the farcical theatrics of after-you-no-after-you. Meanwhile, sat-nav has freed women from the irksome, debasing, sexualised chore of map-reading, during which Ordnance Survey sheets were routinely covered by floods of tears.

The victories and liberations of classic feminism have, deservedly, become well-established. I don't think anyone argues about opportunities (equal), ceilings (glass), careers (open to talent), pay (rational) and housework (shared). Advanced males have for 30 years been extremely self-conscious about all of this, and of practising conventional politeness – or, indeed, any sort of conventional gender-based behaviour – lest they be accused of jungle-based stereotyping.

We know all of this. Very glad it happened. And this gives the survival (or revival) of good manners an added force. For my part, I have never met anyone who plays rugby, or been to either a football match or a stag do. And I much prefer that my wife (who is a woman) lets me do the shopping and cooking. Yet I still want to do that courtly thing with doors and compliment women on their appearance. Mind you, I compliment men, too.

This is why the absurdly negativist ideas of the Society for the Psychology of Women are so ugly and wrong. They seek to forbid charm, subtlety and nuance in human behaviour. Still, we must not attribute to malice what can readily be explained by stupidity. Do they have a copy of Doris Langley Moore's The Technique of the Love Affair (1928) in the society's library? Do they know that the ultimate in female packaging, the bra, was the work of a woman and peace activist called Mary Phelps Jacob? Or that it was another woman who told us blondes have more fun? I take my hat off to them, sexists one and all. Except that, being a truly advanced male, I don't own a hat. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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