gemahrv0430 

Wanted: Luxury-loving couples available to globetrot for six months and get paid to test out the most romantic wedding and honeymoon destinations around the world.

It’s a hard offer to resist, but what’s being Louis Vuitton Belts described as “The Ultimate Job” is just the latest in a series of recent dream positions to capture the public’s imagination and serve as a brilliant marketing tool for people and places.

“It’s been sort of crazy,” said Rosemarie Meleady, managing director of RunawayBrideAndGroom.com, describing the response to the new promotion.

The Irish travel agency came up with the idea in part after seeing last year’s blockbuster “Best Job in the World” campaign in Australia.

More than 1,000 couples have already applied for the chance to be sent to resorts in Africa, Europe, Asia and the United States.

The winners will be asked to blog about their experiences a few times a week “when they can get out of the hammock after sipping a glass of champagne,” Meleady said, and write for The Irish Times once a month.

They will also be paid 20,000 euros (about $27,000). Hopefuls have until April 7 to apply for the “horrendous assignment” — as the company teasingly calls it — which starts mid-May.

You don’t have to be Irish to apply, but you do have to tout Ireland as part of the process.

“We’ve had applications from Korea, China, Macedonia, Croatia, India and Saudi Arabia,” Meleady said. “They’re coming in about five every hour — I’m working around the clock.”

There’s also been high interest from the United States, with one couple who is to be married in a California vineyard this summer vowing to cancel their plans if they win so they can get hitched in Ireland instead.

How it started

The travel dream job craze exploded onto the scene in January 2009 when Australia’s Tourism Queensland announced it was seeking someone to spend six months on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef.

The person was to be paid almost $140,000 to blog about the experience and promote tourism in the area — or the “Best Job in the World.”

Ben Southall, a 34-year-old British man, beat out 34,000 other applicants for the gig, which ended earlier this year.

“I think I’ve done more in these six months than I’ve done in the previous 34 years of my life. To be able to do this sort of thing, in this location, and report on it can’t really be classed as work,” Southall told CNN as he prepared to return home.

The success of the Tourism Queensland idea inspired several similar dream jobs.

Last fall’s “67 Days of Smiles” campaign by the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau in Florida paid a couple $25,000 to spend 67 days visiting every theme park and attraction in Orlando and — you guessed it — write about it.

I had a lot of spectacular times, but it was never a vacation Hardy Wallace, former wine country lifestyle correspondent

Then there was the “Really Goode Job” created by the Murphy-Goode winery in Healdsburg, California. About 2,400 people applied last spring to become the company’s “wine country lifestyle correspondent” — a person tasked with promoting the winery through social media sites. The six-month gig paid $60,000.

“It was the most fun job I’ve ever had in my life,” said wine aficionado and blogger Hardy Wallace, 36, who was selected for the position just a few months after he was laid off from a sales and marketing job in Atlanta, Georgia.

He knows what you’re thinking: The gig probably amounted to nothing more than sipping wine and visiting a few Web sites, right? Wrong, Wallace said; it was actually a replica handbags ton of work. In six months, he wrote 200 blog posts, shot 45 videos, sent 7,000 tweets and attended numerous events to promote the winery, he recalled.

“I had a lot of spectacular times, but it was never a vacation,” Wallace said.

The job opened up many doors when it ended last month, and Wallace now permanently lives in Sonoma County, California, splitting his time working for two small wineries he’s always admired, he said.

“A year ago, I was unemployed, and I was trying to figure out how to make this work. And when I think of everything that’s happened in the past year, I’m extremely grateful,” Wallace said.

Allure of travel fuels viral marketing

Some of the companies behind the campaigns are probably very grateful too.

The “Best Job in the World” generated tens of millions of dollars in free publicity for Tourism Queensland thanks to bloggers and media outlets fascinated by the story, said David Meerman Scott, a marketing strategist and author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR.”

He travels all over the world as a speaker and has been asking audiences in countries like Japan, India, Estonia and Latvia whether they have heard of the Australian campaign. On average, 20 percent of people raise their hands.

“That’s remarkable — that you can do something which doesn’t cost a lot of money, compared to television commercials, and 20 percent of the world … has heard of it,” Scott said.

The chance to go to exotic places was a big selling point in the “Best Job in the World,” and copycats have followed because travel is associated with luxury and it’s something lots of different people can write about, Scott said.

RunawayBrideAndGroom.com can attest to the allure of globetrotting and the power of viral marketing. The company’s Web site has had 100,000 hits since announcing “The Ultimate Job,” Meleady said.

“It snowballed, it’s so exciting,” she added.

gemahrv0429 

When I’m a hundred years old, I wonder what I’ll be doing—in fact, I wonder if I’ll even be alive. Modern medicine is constantly increasing the span Louis Vuitton Belts of active life, so maybe, after blowing out my hundredth candle, I’ll be heading out for a night on the town and atoning for it the next day at the gym. I hope that’s what the future has in store for me, so it’s inspiring to read these stories of centenarians whose accomplishments prove that age is just a number.

1. Canadian Does Laps Around Younger Swimmers

After one-hundred-year-old Jaring Timmerman, from Winnipeg, Canada, set a new world record in the backstroke, he earned the title of Canada’s Swimming Centenarian. According to Fox News, he swam one hundred meters in three minutes and fifty-two seconds, beating the previous world record of just over four and a half minutes.

Timmerman is a role model for late bloomers—very late bloomers. He didn’t start competing until he was eighty, proof that you’re never too old to start something new.

His secret to success? A good diet, exercise, and the fact that he’s the only one swimming in the 100- to 104-year-old category.

2. The One-Hundred-Year Dash

One hundred seems to be a good age for record breaking. According to the Guardian, a South African man named Philip “Flying Phil” Rabinowitz also chose his hundredth year to challenge the limits of human capability.

In 2004, Rabinowitz (who passed away in 2006) clocked 30.86 seconds in the one-hundred-meter run at a Cape Town stadium. The previous record, held by Austrian Erwin Jaskulski, was 36.19. The Guardian reports that Rabinowitz ran an even faster time a week earlier, but that it couldn’t be verified because of a faulty timer.

Rabinowitz’s secret to longevity was taking good care of his health. He drank fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning before breakfast, snacked on an apple after every meal, and walked four miles a day to work at his daughter’s factory.

“Oh, I feel wonderful now, absolutely wonderful,” he told the Guardian a few years ago. “I don’t know how long it is going to be like this. Every time I go, I break my own record. I get younger and younger.”

3. Now, That’s Job Loyalty

If Social Security goes bankrupt, we may all end up like Errett “Eddie” Horst, a Minnesota centenarian who still works half days at the company he has owned since 1955. The difference is that Horst really loves his job, and stays with it out of sheer loyalty. Horst, who marked his one hundredth birthday in February 2009, according to UPI, still punches the clock at Globe Publishing in South St. Paul.

It’s his work that keeps him young, says his son, Bill Horst. “He would’ve been gone at eighty-five if he had retired,” Bill told a reporter from the Pioneer Press. “He comes here every day, and it makes him feel like he’s a part of the place. People—his old clients—still come in replica handbags here to see him and call to see how he’s doing.

” Though Eddie Horst may not have broken any world records, his dedication and conscientiousness are feats of strength we all can emulate.

No Expiration Date

These three centenarians’ everyday accomplishments prove that there is indeed life after one hundred. Whether they’re breaking world records or simply enjoying life, these men and women inspire us by showing us that youth is not just for the young.

gemahrv0427 

On Saturn’s giant moon Titan, it is so cold that water is frozen as hard as granite. And yet there is a complete liquid cycle of methane and ethane. Scientists wonder whether there could also be life.

New discoveries have a way of messing with old definitions. Take, for example, the concept of a habitable world. The Louis Vuitton Belts standard definition of a “habitable world” is a world with liquid water at its surface; the “habitable zone” around a star is defined as that Goldilocks region – not too hot, not too cold – where a watery planet or moon can exist.

And then there’s Titan. Saturn’s giant moon Titan lies about as far from the standard definition of habitable as one can get. The temperature at its surface hovers around 94 degrees Kelvin (minus 179 C, or minus 290 F). At that temperature, water is a rock as hard as granite.

And yet many scientists now believe life may have found a way to take hold on Titan. Water may all be frozen solid, but methane and ethane are liquids. In the past few years, instruments on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and images captured by ESA’s Huygens probe have revealed an astonishing world with a complete liquid cycle, much like the hydrologic cycle on Earth, but based on methane and ethane rather than on water.

“What Cassini actually found on Titan, from 2004 onwards, was a methane-ethane cycle that very much echoes the kind of hydrologic cycle we see on the Earth,” says Jonathan Lunine, currently at the University of Rome Tor Vergata while on leave from the University of Arizona. Cassini has revealed rivers and lakes of methane-ethane, the lakes evaporating to form clouds, the clouds raining hydrocarbons back down onto the surface, flowing through rivers and collecting in lakes. It is the only world in our solar system other than Earth where a liquid cycle like this takes place. There’s just no water.

But there are plenty of hydrocarbons. Methane and ethane are the simplest hydrocarbon molecules. By themselves, they are of limited biological interest. But hydrocarbons are versatile: they can assemble themselves into fantastically complex structures. Indeed, complex hydrocarbons form the basis of what we call life. So one has to wonder: has hydrocarbon chemistry on Titan crossed the threshold from inanimate matter to some form of life?

One thing is for certain: if there is life on Titan, it is not life as we know it. There is no way that terrestrial life could have originated or could survive on Titan. “DNA and RNA,” says Lunine, “form out of compounds that require oxygen and phosphorus, and there’s very little oxygen in the Titan system.” And the very structure of DNA depends on liquid water. “DNA forms a helix because of its water-loving and water-repellant ends.” So life on Titan “would have to find other molecules that carry information.” Moreover, because Titan is so cold, the amount of energy available for building complex biochemical structures is limited. But as Lunine points out, that’s not necessarily a showstopper. “We don’t have a lot of experience with the chemistry that might go on at these temperatures.” We don’t know what’s possible.

The chance to discover a form of life with a different chemical basis than life on Earth has led some researchers to consider Titan the most important world on which to search for extraterrestrial life. In a recent paper in the journal Astrobiology, Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, and Dirk Shulze-Makuch of Washington State University rated Titan a higher-priority target for investigation than even Mars.

On Mars, and on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus as well, astrobiological efforts center on the hunt for water-based life. But such life, even if it is found, could have shared a single origin with life on Earth, getting started on one world and being transferred by meteorites to others. Not so for Titan. If there is life on Titan, it arose separately from life on Earth.

Not everyone agrees that Titan is the priority, though. NASA and ESA recently gave the nod to a Jupiter-system mission that will explore Europa as the next flagship mission to the outer solar system. It may be decades before another major mission flies to Saturn and Titan.

But a smaller-scale and less-expensive lander known as the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) could launch as early as 2015, arriving in 2022 or 2023. Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research in Rectortown, Va., the principal investigator for the TiME mission, described the lander as a buoy-shaped capsule that would splash down in one of Titan’s northern lakes and float across its surface for a minimum of two Titan days (sixteen Earth days).

“We have a number of instruments on board. The most important from a pure scientific point of view is a mass spectrometer,” Stofan said. “We’ll take basically a sip of [the lake] liquids, several times, and analyze them to really nail down their chemical compositions. We know there’s methane, we know there’s ethane,” but TiME would inventory more complex organic (hydrocarbon) compounds, as well.

If there is life on Titan, it may be difficult to detect. “I don’t expect you to go to these lakes and see beautiful filamentary structures made replica handbags of cells that are macroscopic in size or easily seen,” says Lunine, who is a co-investigator on the proposed TiME mission. The clues could be subtle. “We would have to look for particular peculiarities in composition, hydrocarbons that are lacking that should be there, others that are more abundant” than expected.

No-one knows “what happens to organic chemistry in [Titan’s] environment,” Lunine adds. “Does it go to a kind of a chemistry that we can call life but works in liquid hydrocarbons? We don’t know the answer to that. But the answer is profound.” Because if the answer is yes, it means that the origin of life has taken place more than once. “If the answer is yes, then it says that life … must be a common outcome of planetary processes in the cosmos.”

If the answer is yes, it means we are not alone.

gemahrv0419
At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through Louis Vuitton Belts all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

“Where’s Russell” she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

“I’m Russell,” I said.

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

“Russell’s only this big,” she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.

Early one morning she phoned me in New York. “Are you coming to my funeral today?” she asked.

It was an awkward question with which to be awakened. “What are you talking about, for God’s sake?” was the best reply I could manage.

“I’m being buried today,” she declared briskly, as though announcing an important social event.

“I’ll phone you back,” I said and hung up, and when I did phone back she was all right, although she wasn’t all right, of course, and we all knew she wasn’t.

She had always been a small woman — short, light-boned, delicately structured — but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming tiny. I thought of a doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness in her. It showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued an opinion, and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.

“I tell people exactly what’s on my mind,” she had been fond of boasting, “whether they like it or not.”

“It’s not always good policy to tell people exactly what’s on you mind,” I used to caution her.

“If they don’t like it, that’s too bad,” was her customary reply, “because that’s the way I am.”

And so she was, a formidable woman, determined to speak her mind, determined to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. She had hurled herself at life with an energy that made her seem always on the run.

She ran after chickens, an axe in her hand, determined on a beheading that would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she set the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up from the cellar even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and tumbled down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the drugstore cowboy, the mush-mouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind. She ran.

But now the running was over. For a time I could not accept the inevitable. As I sat by her bed, my impulse was to argue her back to reality. On my first visit to the hospital in Baltimore, she asked who I was.

“Russell,” I said.

“Russell’s way out west,” she advised me.

“No, I’m right here.”

“Guess where I came from today?” was her response.

“Where?”

“All the way from New Jersey.”

“No. You’ve been in the hospital for three days,” I insisted.

So it went until a doctor came by to give one of those oral quizzes that medical men apply in such cases. She failed completely, giving wrong answers or none at all. Then a surprise.

“When is your birthday?” he asked.

“November 5, 1897,” she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.

“How do you remember that?” the doctor asked.

“Because I was born on Guy Fawkes Day.”

“Guy Fawkes?” asked the doctor, “Who is Guy Fawkes?”

She replied with a rhyme I had heard her recite time and again over the years:

“Please to remember the Fifth of November,

Gunpowder treason and plot.

I see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot.”

Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes’ failed scheme to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder in 1605. “You may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously don’t know any history,” she said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.

Then doctors diagnosed a hopeless senility or hardening of the arteries. I thought it was more complicated than that. For ten years or more the ferocity with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage against the weakness, the boredom, and the absence of love that too much age had brought her. Now, after the last bad fall, she seemed to have broken chains that imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time inhabited by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I understood.

Three years earlier I had gone down from New York to Baltimore, where she lived, for one of my infrequent visits and, afterwards, had written her with some banal advice to look for the silver lining, to count her blessings instead of burdening others with her miseries. I suppose what it really amounted to was a threat that if she was not more cheerful during my visits I would not come to see her very often. Sons are capable of such letters. This one was written out of a childish faith in the eternal strength of parents, a naive belief that age and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good pep talk to recharge a flagging spirit.

She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein intended to demonstrate, I suppose, that she was mending her ways. Referring to my visit, she wrote: “If I seemed unhappy to you at times, I am, but there’s really nothing anyone can do about it, because I’m just so very tired and lonely that I’ll just go to sleep and forget it.” She was then seventy-eight.

Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she replica handbags had managed to forget the fatigue and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on those fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at her bedside she was radiant.

“Feeling good today,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t I feel good?” she asked. “Papa’s going to take me up to Baltimore on the boat today.”

At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf, waiting for the Chesapeake Bay steamer with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years. William Howard Taft was in the White House, America was a young country, and the future stretched before it in beams of crystal sunlight. “The greatest country on God’s green earth,” her father might have said, if I had been able to step into my mother’s time machine.

About her father, my grandfather, my mother’s childhood and her people, I knew very little. A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs. It was useless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely touched present interrogators for more than a moment.

Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and children in general, and about the disconnection between children and parents that prevents them from knowing each other. Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. If a parent does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.

I had been guilty of this when my children were small in the early 1960s and living the affluent life. It irritated me that their childhoods should be, as I thought, so easy when my own had been, as I thought, so hard. I had developed the habit of lecturing them on the harshness of life in my day.

“In my day all we got for dinner was macaroni and cheese, and we were glad to get it.”

“In my day we didn’t have any television.”

“In my day…”

“In my day…”

At dinner one evening a son had offended me with an inadequate report card, and as I cleared my throat to lecture, he gazed at me with an expression of unutterable resignation and said, “Tell me how it was in your day, Dad.”

I was angry with him for that, but angrier with myself for having become one of those ancient bores whose highly selective memories of the past become transparently dishonest even to small children. I tried to break the habit, but must have failed. Between us there was a dispute about time. He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.

As I hovered over my mother’s bed listening for some signals from her childhood, I realized that this same dispute had existed between her and me. When she was young, with life ahead of her, I had been her future and resented it. Instinctively, I wanted to break free, and cease being a creature defined by her time. Well, I had finally done that, and then with my own children I had seen my exciting future becoming their boring past.

These hopeless end-of-the-line visits with my mother made me wish I had not thrown off my own past so carelessly. We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.