being straight-haired, I admire a head of curls

FECAL FACIAL LATEST SKIN TREATMENT

The N.Y. Post reports that for just $216, Shizuka Bernstein will slather your face in feces for a full 50 minutes -- what she calls the "Geisha Facial" -- at her Midtown New York spa, Shizuka.

It's bird poop.

The ancient Japanese cleanser - geishas and kabuki dancers have been using the bird poop to wash off their heavy white makeup since the 18th century - contains guanine, which supposedly removes pollutants and blackheads, and helps even out skin tone. The exotic excrement comes in a powder form, directly from Japan, and is sterilized with UV light to kill bacteria.

Marilyn Phillips, a 58-yearold Upper West Sider who had a Geisha Facial late last week, said, "I figure if poop was good for the soil, it's good for your face. And it doesn't smell at all. I'd say hair coloring smells way worse."

32-year-old massage therapist Andrea Nieto who went in for the facial last week, said, "You wouldn't even know it was nightingale droppings. And after, my skin was softer than it had been in a really long time. And it looked clearer to me, too. But you gotta wonder how they figured to use these things. Who put 2 and 2 together like that?"

"I figure if poop was good for the soil, it's good for your face"

E-Mail Shows Racial Jokes by Secret Service Supervisors
By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: May 10, 2008
WASHINGTON — Secret Service supervisors shared crude sexual jokes and engaged in racially derogatory banter about blacks, and passed around an anecdote about a possible assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, according to internal e-mail disclosed in a federal court filing on Friday by lawyers for black Secret Service agents.

The filing includes 10 e-mail messages that were among documents the agency recently turned over to lawyers for the black agents as part of an increasingly bitter discrimination lawsuit. The messages were written mainly from 2003 through 2005, and were sent to and from e-mail accounts of at least 20 Secret Service supervisors.

The messages offer a glimpse into the darker recesses of an agency known for protecting presidents and other dignitaries but whose culture is regarded as one of the most insular in federal law enforcement.

The disclosure of the messages follows an incident last month in which a noose was found in a room used by a black instructor at a Secret Service training facility in Beltsville, Md. Agency officials said that episode was under internal investigation.

Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said he would not comment directly on the e-mail but said the agency deplored racially insensitive jokes.

“We are deeply disappointed by any communication or action on the part of our employees that exhibits racial or other insensitivity,” Mr. Zahren said.

Mr. Zahren said the messages were the result of a search of 20 million electronic documents over 16 years. He said that an internal inquiry had been opened and that the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, had been alerted.

In some of the court documents, the senders of the e-mail messages are identified only by the jobs they currently occupy and the rank they held when the messages were sent. For example, an Oct. 9, 2003, message referring to a “Harlem Spelling Bee,” ridiculing black slang, was sent by Thomas Grupski, then assistant director for protective operations, who, according to the filing, now heads the Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs.

A March 3, 2003, message describing Mr. Jackson as the “Righteous Reverend” was passed among several Secret Service supervisors. The message, about a missile striking an airplane in which Mr. Jackson and his wife were traveling, concludes, it “certainly wouldn’t be a great loss and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”

Another message contains what one Secret Service official said was a joke referring to interracial sex. The joke circulated in February and March 2003. It was sent, according to the lawsuit, by Donald White, who heads the Presidential Protective Detail, to Kurt Douglass, an agent in charge of the Secret Service office in Cincinnati.

The legal skirmishing in the discrimination suit has heated up in recent months, with Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson rebuking the Secret Service for failing to produce documents and for destroying relevant records and e-mail.

Judge Robinson had ordered the agency to turn over the documents by late March, but the e-mail disclosed in the court filing on Friday was not turned over to lawyers for the agents until late April.

E. Desmond Hogan, a lawyer for the black agents, said the agents were “shocked but not surprised by the late production of significant evidence of racism at high levels in the Secret Service.”

“The government’s delay,” Mr. Hogan said, “follows a pattern of the Secret Service stonewalling plaintiffs and ignoring court orders, depriving African-American agents of the fundamental evidence of race discrimination that is key to their claims.”

The lawsuit, which has dragged on through years of litigation, was filed in 2000 by 10 black agents who charged that they were unfairly denied promotions. The agency employs about 3,200 agents, about 10 percent of whom are black.

Thomas Grupski, then assistant director for protective operations, who, according to the filing, now heads the Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs.

PHILADELPHIA - Philadelphia's police commissioner said Monday that four officers will be fired and four others disciplined for their roles in the beatings of three shooting suspects, an encounter that was captured on videotape and drew widespread outrage.

Another eight officers who had physical contact with the suspects will undergo additional training on the department's policies concerning the use of force, Commissioner Charles Ramsey said. He said the police department made the disciplinary decisions after reviewing frames from enhanced tape of a video shot by a television news helicopter on May 5.

The video, shot by WTXF-TV, shows the suspects being pulled from their car on the side of the road and groups of officers kicking, punching and beating the men. A total of 19 officers — 18 city police and one transit officer — were involved.

Two of the officers being fired are relatively new to the force and can be terminated immediately, Ramsey said. Two others are being suspended without pay for 30 days with intent to dismiss.

Three other officers are being suspended and one sergeant is being demoted. A criminal investigation is continuing.

Police said they had been pursuing the car in connection with a triple shooting. The three men — Brian Hall, 23, Pete Hopkins, 19, and Dwayne Dyches, 24, all of Philadelphia — have been charged with attempted murder and related counts stemming from the shooting. Their attorneys have said they had nothing to do with it.

One of Dyches' attorneys said he suffered a welt on his head the size of a baseball and that one of his legs was seriously injured.

All three of the shooting suspects are black. Ramsey has denied allegations that the beatings were racially motivated and said at least one officer involved is black.

The beating occurred at the same time police were conducting an intense manhunt for a suspect in the slaying two days earlier of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski, but Ramsey said Monday that there was no indication that any of the officers thought the suspect was among the three men in the car.

The problem is not so much that officers in ill-regulated departments thnk that it's okay to beat up black people, but that it's okay to beat up anybody if they are perceived to be the Other Side.