-from today's "It was probably all just hot air anyway" Department:
LONDON (Reuters) - It is the one moment every man wants to get right -- and which London floor-fitter Lefkos Hajji could hardly have got more wrong.
The luckless 28 year-old's dreams of giving his sweetheart, Leanne, 26, the ultimate proposal have literally vanished into thin air.
Hajji, of Hackney, east London, had concealed a $12,000 engagement ring inside a helium balloon. The idea was that she would pop the balloon as he popped the question.
But as he left the shop, a gust of wind pulled the balloon from his hand and he watched the ring -- and quite possibly the affections of his girlfriend -- sailing away over the rooftops.
"I couldn't believe it," he told The Sun newspaper.
-from today's "It Pays to Keep Your Shirt On" Department:
(Reuters) - Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the call girl at the center of the Elliot Spitzer sex scandal, watched the potential earnings from her new-found fame drop by $1 million on Tuesday as old nude videos of her emerged.
Adult DVD distributor "Girls Gone Wild" discovered videos of a semi-nude Dupre, now 22, in its archives and plans to sell them on its Web site, a company spokesman said.
"Girls Gone Wild" had offered to pay Dupre $1 million to pose nude in a magazine it plans to launch but, after discovering the old footage, the company withdrew its offer.
-from today's "Every Fashion Tells ... On Itself" Department:
India's middle class is humming with "brand freaks" obsessed with luxury labels like Prada and Louis Vuitton, according to a February Washington Post dispatch, even though more than half the country lives in "abject poverty."
Said one super-consumer, "I'll spend my whole salary for a really swank brand and eat steamed rice cakes for the rest of the month."
According to the newly launched India edition of Vogue, the country's "Me Culture" has taken over, where, on an Ahmadabad road underneath towering billboards for Tag Heuer and Mont Blanc pens, barefoot kids with begging bowls tap on car windows. -original source
