The artist, 
known as 43, paints puppies and nude 
self-portraits of his G-rated body
parts (shoulders, knees, toes) in the shower. The shower scenes are from hacked Bush family emails but the portrait of his late dog Barney was released by the painter.
Before she was a brand, Nutley N.J. student Martha Helen Kostyra was a model, multi-tasking before the camera to supplement her partial scholarship to Barnard College. 
Highly rated and dog friendly, Shrimpton’s Hotel Abbey is somewhat of a cheap-thrill for travelers and dog-friendly.
Quoting Heidi Klum, “In fashion, one day you’re in, the next day you’re out”. In her early 30’s, the face of the 1960’s and one of the most beautiful women 
ever to grace a Vogue cover, opted out. Jean Shrimpton’s disappearing Garbo act took her North of London to Penzance where she has owned and run The Abbey
Hotel for over 30 years.
Shrimpton shocked the world by appearing at a racing event in Australia without gloves, hat and in the first mini-skirt photographed on a celeb. It was 1965 and the dress seems so ladylike and modest now.
“Fashion is full of dark, troubled people,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. “It’s a high-pressured environment that takes its toll and burns people out. Only the shrewd survive – Andy Warhol, for example, and David Bailey.” We are talking about British fashion designer John Galliano, who was sacked by Dior last month after allegedly making antisemitic comments. Shrimpton, dressed
in a simple, unostentatious black dress – more bohemian than haute couture – is quick to lament the fashion world’s excesses. “No one can condone what he said – it’s reprehensible. But it’s hypocritical to pretend that fashion is normal, that people in it are role models. And it’s stupid to deny that people behave badly.”
We have heard little of “The Shrimp” since she vanished from swinging London
and took off to the West Country. She recently popped up in Channel 4’s Country House Rescue, and in 1990 a ghostwritten autobiography appeared, but Shrimpton makes no bones about why she played ball. “I needed some money to renovate the roof of the hotel,” she says, her blue eyes flashing, arms firmly folded. She adds, curtly: “I didn’t want the book to appear. I’ve hated publicity all my life. I didn’t even like it when I was a model.”
Jean and former flame David Bailey who she left for Terrance Stamp
Shrimpton & Stamp
Even vets 
believe in sweaters and coats for their dogs this time of the year. Here, the Ralph Lauren pooch collection of coats and sweaters (including cashmere), at cheap thrill, post Xmas prices (from $20.30–$76.30) reduced in time for all those reluctant wintery walks still to come.
Question, July 2012 Issue of Vanity Fair:
“In general, which of the following is the most likely to have your best interests at heart?”
Your In-laws 29%
Your Pet 27%
Your Employer 5%
Your Government 5%
Your Landlord 1%
None Of The Above 32%
William Wegman Photograph
In the midst of the horror and the grief, there is this: the comfort and unconditional love of a dog. Eight golden retrievers, a breed known for its kindness, were flown to Newtown this weekend by an Illinois-based 
charity.
The Lutheran group started the comfort dog program in 2008 after a shooting at Northern Illinois University that left five students dead. The dogs were able to provide a healthy distraction to those students who were overcome with grief. The comfort dog program started with a handful of dogs and now has 60 caring canine grief counselors.
.Des Moines artist Larissa Kabel added a white scarf and a wintery White House wonderland to her painting of Bo for the winning White House 2012 Christmas Card entry. First Lady Jacquline Kennedy painted two White House Christmas cards in 1963 that were reproduced by Hallmark and sold to benefit what is now the Kennedy Center.
Two additional White House Christmas cards were produced in 1963 by Hallmark. The designs were painted by Jacqueline Kennedy, herself, and the proceeds from their sale went to build the present day Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. One of the designs, entitled Journey of the Magi, depicted the three wise men on their way to Bethlehem. The other design, entitled Glad Tidings, depicted a golden-haired angel announcing the birth of Christ. –WhiteHouse.gov
Via Yahoo…” Larassa Kabel never expected to be chosen when she submitted her painting to be considered for the White House holiday card this September.
The Des Moines, Iowa, artist said “it was a very surreal moment,” when she got the call from the White House secretary’s office while cooking pizza for her family one night, hearing that first lady Michelle Obama had chosen her piece.
The dog in the portrait is sporting a scarf, something Kabel says was an addition she made to the photo the White House sent out for her as part of the competition.
Jackie Kennedy’s Painting Of The White House Christmas Tree, 1961
“They asked us to do an interpretation of the photo, and I did need to change a couple of things,” Kabel said. “Black animals are difficult to
Jackie Kennedy For Hallmark, White House Christmas Card Painting, Journey Of The Magi, 1963
represent and have them read as three-dimensional.”
To make the snow look realistic, Kabel used a tool most people have inside their bathrooms: a toothbrush.
“It splatters so it looks like snow,” Kabel said.
The White House
The Last Kennedy Christmas Card, 1963
Never Sent
won’t be paying Kabel for her portrait of Bo (“I’m living on glory,” she said when asked about compensation), but she and her husband will attend the White House holiday party on Dec. 18 “–Via Yahoo
Asked what the best day of her life was, she answered, “It was a night”.
I have stilll not forgiven PETA for rejecting BB’s offer
to pose nude (in 1994, at age 60) for their “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” advocacy ad campaign. “Ageist” and “sexist” are not strong enough words for that call
or the snarky comments all over the net because Bardot’s been brave enough to age naturally–wrinkles, weight gain and all! So here’s to Brigitte,
sex symbol, style icon
Bardot And Jane Birken
and 
animal activist before it was cool:
Bardot & Harley Davidson (1968) (VIDEO):
Bardot and Sacha Distel
“I have always adored beautiful young men.
Just because I grow older, my taste doesn`t change.So if I can still have them, why not?”
``I gave my beautyand youth
to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.“
15 Central Park West
NY College Student Katreina Rybolovleva’s part-time home at 15 CPW:
Even without the “tax break” received from the developer, RE taxes are only $145.000 a year for the $88 million dollar apartment. Is it me, or has our bottom-line obsessed Mayor (and son of an accountant) forgotten how to count?“the financier Sanford I. Weill sold it to a trust controlled by Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the daughter of a Russian billionaire — were also helped by a program called 421a, which gives developers big tax breaks for a certain number of years that they can pass along to condo buyers, in exchange for which the developers build or help finance affordable housing.”–NY Times
At the Plaza Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, owners of luxury apartments benefit from a quirk in the tax code.
The NY Times calls it a “quirk in the tax code”. Sorry, it’s more like “Where’s The Beef?”, the iconic 1984 Wendy’s Commercial. My question for Mayor Mike is “Where’s The Affordable Housing ?” (VIDEO):
“We Don’t Pay Taxes. The Little People Pay Taxes”–Hotel Tycoon Leona Helmsley, who went to the slammer for tax evasion in 1989 and left a lot of her loot to her Maltese “Trouble” when she died in 2007 at 87 (VIDEO):
That kind of disparity is true for many of the stratospherically expensive apartments in the city. As a result, their owners pay far less in property taxes, relative to the value of the apartments, than most New York apartment owners pay. So despite a boom in the upper echelons of the real estate market — 125 apartments have sold for at least $20 million in the last five years, and developers are churning out more every year — the city is unable to truly cash in.
The effect ripples down from there. “If a certain kind of property is systematically undervalued, another kind of property has to pick up the slack,” said Andrew Hayashi, a property tax expert at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.
In a study of 2010 nationwide property tax rates, the average homeowner paid a median of 1.14 percent of home value that year, according to the Tax Foundation, a research group. In Manhattan, that figure was 0.78 percent. For the $88 million apartment at 15 Central Park West, 0.78 percent would be $686,000. But this year, the property taxes due on that penthouse were $59,000.
The relatively low tax bill was mainly due to its valuation, but the owners of that penthouse — the financier Sanford I. Weillsold it to a trust controlled by Ekaterina Rybolovleva, the daughter of a Russian billionaire
22-year-old Ekaterina Rybolovleva buys record $88m NYC apartment.
The record was broken a few months later at One57 where the penthouse was sold for $90 million. The buyer there also got a tax break.— were also helped by a program called 421a, which gives developers big tax breaks for a certain number of years that they can pass along to condo buyers, in exchange for which the developers build or help finance affordable housing.
Odds are that any one of these pricey sparklers cost more than the $145k due in annual real estate taxes on the $88 million co-op.
But even without the 421a abatement, the bill for the penthouse would have been only $145,000.NY College Student Katreina Rybolovleva’s part-time home at 15 CPW
These comparatively meager official values are the result of a state law dating from decades ago that requires the city to calculate the value of condominiums and co-ops by using rental buildings as comparable properties, instead of apartment sales. At the top of the market, populated by $20 million, $30 million, $40 million, even $88 million apartments, real estate experts say that truly comparable rental buildings essentially do not exist.
“The highest-value ones are going to tend to be the hardest to line up,” said George Sweeting, deputy director of the city’s Independent Budget Office. Their resulting effective tax rates, he continued, “will be extremely low, even by the standards of the city.”
According to the Independent Budget Office, the overall city valuation for condos and co-ops is only about 20 percent of what it would be were the city allowed to use comparable sales. That is a striking discount, but one that shrivels in comparison with the market’s upper echelons, which means the percentage of the sales value that those apartments pay in taxes shrivels right along with it.
An apartment at the Plaza Hotel that sold for $48 million last year is valued by the city at $1.7 million, or 3.5 percent of its sale price. A condo at 80 Columbus Circle that sold for $30.55 million last summer is valued at $2 million, or 6.5 percent. And the $88 million apartment is valued at $2.97 million, just 3.4 percent.
The state law mandating the use of rental data has been on the books since the 1980s, when the market in the city was a very different place. Manhattan had more rent regulation, many fewer condos and lots of co-op conversions. A 2006 city report said tying the value of co-ops and condos to rentals was expected to keep an apartment’s official value — and, thus, its property taxes — from rising too quickly, because rent regulation kept rental values relatively stable.
Today, to find a condo’s or co-op’s comparable rental cousin, the Finance Department looks at factors like age, location and size. Older buildings, even the grandest, often have a greater value discrepancy than new condos because older rentals are more likely to have at least some rent-stabilized units; this means that the taxes on those properties are generally lower.
But for any truly lavish building, finding a comparable rental is a challenge. One of the rental buildings used to find the value of 15 Central Park West, for example, is 145 West 67th Street — a very tall, but otherwise unremarkable, building.
“We understand that the requirement by state law to ignore sales prices makes an already complex property tax system even more confusing for property owners, which raises questions of equity within the system,” Owen Stone, a spokesman for the Finance Department, said in an e-mail. “We are always looking for ways to make things more transparent.”
Property tax experts say that from time to time, some effort is made to rethink the way apartments are valued. But changes can be made only by the State Legislature, and the technical and political pressures tend to overwhelm the cause, which then is quietly put on a shelf.
“It’s not so easy to go and change one screw,” said Ana Champeny, a supervising analyst at the Independent Budget Office. “Potentially, you have to redo the whole system.”
These property taxes, of course, are not paid in a vacuum. The city does receive a transfer tax every time a property is sold, as well as a mortgage recording tax, though many high-priced homes are bought with cash. And while the property taxes on mansions in the sky may be a relatively low percentage of sales value, they are still substantial.
A spokeswoman for Extell — which is developing the luxury market’s hottest ticket of the moment, One57, where two apartments are under contract for at least $90 million — said the project would contribute over 1,000 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent jobs to the city.
As it happens, Extell has also applied for 421a tax abatements for One57.
But if the property taxes on these luxury apartments were to rise, would it even make a difference in sales to the superrich?
“I think you’d choke off that market,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel.
Mr. Miller said that in some instances, exceptionally high carrying costs had tugged down prices and slowed the pace of sales, even in apartments that cost tens of millions of dollars.
“The logic was that the high end of the market doesn’t really care if the monthly charges are high; it’s more readily absorbed than on the lower end, and that turned out not to be true,” Mr. Miller said. “The conventional wisdom was, ‘Ah, the wealthy don’t care!’ But of course they do.”–NY Times
landlordrocknyc 
