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Adrianne Jeffries

By Adrianne Jeffries 4/25 11:29am

STUFF HAPPENS

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Divya Anantharaman

Look Alive: Fashionistas Get Game as Taxidermy Trend Lives On… And On

On Saturday, the 28-year-old fashion designer Divya Anantharaman struck a coy pose in the doorway of her kitchen. “I’m going to take the bird out of the fridge so it gets to room temperature,” she breathed, as if the “bird” were perhaps a roasted turkey, and not a pair of dead finches in a Zip-loc bag.

When she’s not traveling for her day job as a shoe designer for women and tweens, Ms. Anantharaman spends her weekends doing taxidermy. She answered the door in high-waisted black shorts, oversize glasses studded with rhinestones, sparkly green stick-on fingernails and bare feet—a bit of Brooklyn, where she lives, meets Miami, where she grew up. Ms. Anantharaman, who is dark-skinned, curvy and full-lipped, is gorgeous enough to pull this garish combination off—even as she clears a model of a human skeleton from the dining room table. “Last night I had some friends over and we were going to do taxidermy stuff, but we ended up just playing with my anatomy model,” she apologized.

Ms. Anantharaman has stuffed about 50 animals, and collected many more off eBay and from friends, who know that animal remains make an ideal house gift. The young fashionista tried to stuff her first mouse about four years ago on a whim, an experiment that evolved into an obsession with the rite of animal preservation. She’s using her winnings from Lifetime’s 24 Hour Catwalk, a grand prize of $10,000, to create a new line of taxidermy-themed footwear: high-heeled bunny slippers with real bunny heads, pumps covered in white mouse skin, that kind of thing. She has yet to name the collection. “Probably either ‘Ampoule’ or ‘Friends Forever,’” she said. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 3/28 9:00am

Love for Sale

I Dated a Zombie! To Keep Membership High, Dating Sites Buy Profiles

Angela is a 34-year-old single woman from Alabama. She’s a Leo. According to her online dating profile, she is 5’8” with blue eyes and dark brown hair. “I am a creative, witty, intelligent girl looking for someone to shower with all my love and affection!” she declares, appending a smiley face.

Angela was included in a 1,000-pack of allegedly single, supposedly American women, which Betabeat purchased for $35. Her profile is one of a purported 14.9 million for sale on SaleDatingProfiles.com, where the inventory also includes 10,000 U.K. profiles for $200; 15,000 Russians for $240, and 70,000 Australians for $95. A pack of 2,500 lesbian profiles goes for $120, or 4.8 cents apiece; gay men are .003 cents each and are sold in a pack of 410,000. “High quality Gays adult dating profiles for sale with multiplay photos located in USA, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries,” the offer states. At the time of writing, SaleDatingProfiles was having a 75-percent-off spring sale.

Angela, who asked that her last name be withheld, has been dating online for years. But she never imagined her profile was for sale on the open market, or that it now appears on MeetGirlsGuys.com, which she never signed up for. “I have never even heard of that site!” she said, adding that she lives in Texas, not Alabama, and the photo is at least seven years old.

Online dating is a fast-growing industry, with current revenues estimated to run between $1.5 and $3 billion a year. But every new dating site faces the same problem: finding souls to mate. Recruiting new customers is expensive; industry experts put the customer acquisition price at $1 to $5 per person.

SaleDatingProfiles and its competitors BuyProfiles.com and DatingProfilesSale.com offer a shortcut. They sell bulk packages of profiles that seem to include a fair number of actual singles alongside somewhat more questionable Russian beauties, Nigerian bankers and half-empty profiles, which sometimes sell for less than a dime a dozen. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 1/26 12:40pm

Unreal Time

Startup That Predicts Pageviews 15 Minutes Into the Future Just Raised $1.7 M.

What's cooler than real-time? New York-based Visual Revenue is building technology that purports to predict web traffic in advance. We first wrote about the startup just over a year ago when it officially launched. At the time, founder and CEO Dennis Mortensen wrote a blog post about how the company was aiming to replace the "front page editor" position that has become a staple of new media newsrooms. At the time, the New York Daily News and eight other publishers were testing Visual Revenue's claims that it can predict how well a story will do on the front page 15 minutes in advance. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 1/03 8:07pm

Inside Jobs

Mr. Greenberg. (Getty Images)

Cyber Schmucks: How the Manhattan DA’s Cyber Squad Did a Mitzvah for UJA

Back in February, Josiah Boatswain, a 26-year-old from Flatbush, Brooklyn, and a few friends were pampering themselves at Fontainbleau: a $600-per-night resort that bills itself as the most luxurious hotel on the strip, promising high-end shopping, celebrities at every table, “24-7 glamour,” and an “expansive poolscape” on the stretch of Miami Beach known as Millionaire’s Row. Mr. Boatswain spent his vacation sipping Champagne, nibbling tiny chocolate cakes, and buying armfuls of couture, which he arranged in tableaux in his hotel room and photographed for his Facebook page. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 12/21/11 12:21pm

seasons greetings

Mr. Ruprecht?

Teamsters: Sotheby’s Is Killing Christmas

So far the art workers and their supporters have tried pranks, picket lines, an Occupy Wall Street alliance, a legal appeal to the National Labor Relations Board, and traditional negotiations, all to no avail. But perhaps a Christmas card will do the trick.

Sotheby’s has yet to let its locked-out workers back in after more than four months off the job due to disagreements over their union contract. So now the workers of the Local 814, the Teamsters union that includes art handlers at Sotheby’s high-end auctionhouse, have launched an email campaign comparing Sotheby’s CEO William Ruprecht to Scrooge and claiming the Teamsters have no money to care for their Tiny Tims. The catalyst? The locked-out workers are on the verge of losing their health insurance. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 12/14/11 9:29am

It's Who You Know

As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit

Let’s take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future. The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey’s taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu’s photo album, “Saturday Nite!” And what was this tweet from a few years back: “FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge”? Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 12/08/11 11:59am

The Education of Occupy Wall Street

(stern.nyu.edu)

Occupation 101: NYU to Offer Two 'Occupy Wall Street' Classes

Undergraduate tuition at New York University is around $41,000, but parents can be assured their bright young things are still getting The People’s Education, reports the student newspaper The Washington Square News. NYU plans to offer not one, but two classes on the burgeoning social movement known as Occupy Wall Street, so that the 1 percent may study the 99 at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Read More

By Foster Kamer, Drew Grant and Adrianne Jeffries 11/20/11 5:10pm

Occupy Wall Street

A poster for the protest

Your Daily Occupy Wall Street Primer: A 24-Hour Drum Circle at Mayor Bloomberg’s Mansion, No RSVP Necessary!

(Though not intended to be all-inclusive, this page will be updated as events occur. Have a suggestion? Leave it in the comments!)
Contents
Key Organizers and Affiliated Groups
NYPD and the City’s Reaction
Media Coverage: Must Reads
Celebrity Support

Latest Updates

Update, Day 64: Newt Gingrich continues to call Occupiers names. A 24-hour drum circle begins outside Mayor Bloomberg’s mansion, while in Oakland, police manage to clear Occupiers out of their camps “without incident.”

Update, Day 63: The second marriage in Zuccotti Park…and it’s a gay wedding! A video of police using spray on  University of California’s demonstrators enrages protesters around the nation. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 11/10/11 12:44am

Confrontations

sothebys ows

Class War? Occupy Wall Street, Unions Protest at Sotheby's–8 Arrested [VIDEO]

You could hear them a block away; their whistles and chants preceded them. About a hundred protesters stood outside Sotheby’s at the beginning of the auction house’s contemporary evening sale, the last important art sale of the year. ”We’re fired up! Won’t take it no more!” The crowd outside Sotheby’s was made up of N.Y.P.D., the auction house’s security, students from Hunter College, union members and Scabby, the oversize balloon rat who never seems to miss a strike, as well as a Scabby-sized balloon fat cat who squeezed a cigar in one paw and a union worker in the other. Picketers hoisted cutouts of the heads of Sotheby’s COO and CEO at the ends of long poles. Read More