FITNESS centres are increasingly exercising the productivity pitch to attract corporate memberships, writes OOI TEE CHING
Healthy employees are happy workers.
And happy workers make a productive workforce which contributes towards bigger profits for employers.
This is the marketing pitch a growing number of exercise centres in the Klang Valley are using to to boost their clientele, particularly among working professionals. Read the rest of this entry »

For some women the term “beauty myth” conjures up Naomi Wolf’s feminist tome on the politicization of the fashion and diet industry.
 But for the small group of predominantly women who gathered on May 24 in Mishkenot Sha’ananim for a conference entitled “The Beauty Myth feminist theory was conspicuously absent. Instead most of the presenters - artists academics writers and filmmakers - were far more interested in discussing the history of the development of what they called standard Western beauty.” Read the rest of this entry »

Brazil are playing England at football at Wembley tonight, so it’s time to celebrate all the usual stuff about the beautiful game: o jogo bonito. But how beautiful is football? Sometimes very, often not at all, sometimes unapologetically ugly. And I wondered: which is the most beautiful game of all? Is it football? Or what?
Define beauty, then. Oh, for heaven’s sake: pulchra sunt quae visa placent - beauty is what pleases the sight. That old maxim will do. I’m looking for an aesthetic beauty here. Some may talk of a moral beauty in boxing, but that is beyond our remit. So is dramatic beauty; many sports offer that, in their different ways, but here we are discussing the sports that best fill the eye. Read the rest of this entry »

The accomplishment of Riyo Mori, a 20-year-old dancer from Shizuoka Prefecture who won the Miss Universe 2007 pageant last week, appears to offer a good opportunity to review changes in popular perception of beauty in the past century.
Mori’s victory in the contest in Mexico on May 29 marked the second time a Japanese contestant was crowned Miss Universe since Akiko Kojima in 1959.
Mori’s triumph came 100 years after the first full-fledged beauty contest was held in Japan to choose the nation’s most beautiful woman. It was held in 1908 under the sponsorship of a newspaper, Jiji Shimpo, that invited entries from across the country for screening through their photos. Read the rest of this entry »

The beauty scheme is one of the best known of the 36 strategies, but many do not recognise it as a strategy of disadvantage. It is used to distract opponents who may use overwhelming force. Its crude interpretation bears little relationship to the more sophisticated applications of this strategy in business and the markets.
Sometimes the real deception comes because people think they understand the strategy and so fail to recognise it when it is applied. Read the rest of this entry »