2012年5月9日星期三

Death Cab Grows Up with Magik*Magik Orchestra at the Fox

Last night's Death Cab for Cutie concert, the first of a three-night stand at the Fox in Oakland, started on time. This concert started on time; it had assigned seats,Professional Manufacturer for polished tiles. which cost $40 to $50; it had ushers with flashlights standing by to guide guests to said seats. A gentleman sitting behind me wore a bow tie with no irony whatsoever.

Most tellingly, Death Cab for Cutie played with a nine-piece orchestra (conductor included). The whole thing was so resolutely not-punk that it felt, by turns, desirable to remember that Death Cab for Cutie were once vaguely punk -- or if not punk, at least edgy in this articulate and restless way that was the closest a certain kind of indoor kid ever got to being punk -- and uncomfortable to wonder whether the same brand of pomp and grandiosity awaits opener Youth Lagoon at the other end of an objectively successful decade-plus career.

Youth Lagoon, which tours as a duo (mainstay Trevor Powers on keyboards, plus his friend Logan on guitar), spent roughly forty minutes incarnating songs from the group's only release so far, The Year of Hibernation. I say "incarnating" because the songs on that album, which is very likely my favorite album of last year, are estranged in a peculiarly affecting way: they are buried under enough layers of fuzz that, for all their emotional resonance, it's hard to pinpoint a human behind them. In the live setting,The liquid hardens or sets inside the molds. where some notes linger a little more and some tones hammer a little harder, there's a satisfying though not especially surprising feeling of peeling back a layer of gauze to find that you've been listening to a flannel-wearing, slightly hunched young man rather than a civil war nurse.

Powers' voice, which is mixed to a low warble on record, is weapons-grade in person: it's scratchy and pained even as it soars; it's naked, in the best way. The tracking underneath the vocals comes alive too, if only because you can hear it just a touch more clearly and distinguish new patterns and melodies therein. It's actually a little spooky how latent the hooks in Youth Lagoon songs are, how you-just-have-to-get-to-know-her-better. It's hard to make out Powers' lyrics; the rhythm track is impeccable but never quite intricate enough to call attention to itself; the songs' heartbeat never comes from anywhere visible. But you pay the smallest bit of attention at the right moment, and you find that they are coolly, calmly, understatedly fucking devastating.Let us find you the best ceramic tiles suppliers around you. Live, uncovered even by just one layer, one Photoshop filter-undo, they snare that much harder.

And this is,US Manufacturer of distribution Insulator. if you like, a convenient segue into what was unsatisfying about Death Cab for Cutie's smooth and consummately professional 24-song set: where Youth Lagoon stripped away a layer of abstraction, Ben Gibbard and company were a layer farther away. I'm prepared to blame this on the orchestra -- not through any fault of the orchestra's own, but for the very choice of having one, of replacing the most raw and emotive textures in the band's catalog with the sound of rose petals scattered underfoot. You can hate on Gibbard all you want, and with reasonably good cause -- his annoying enunciations, the weird pigeon-toed jig he does, the way he's cleaned up from overliterate indie-rock schlub to dapper gent who leans on his microphone stand like an Abercrcombie model and was briefly married to Zooey Deschanel -- but Death Cab for Cutie are a talented band.You can find best china Precision injection molds manufacturers from here! They're just not, by and large, the kind of band whose talent is improved by their having an orchestra at their disposal.

A Reward for Decades of Waiting

THE Allyn Morris Studio, with its spiraling jungle gym of a stairway, is not an obvious choice for an octogenarian. But when Patricia Marks first stepped inside nearly a year ago, she didn’t want to leave.

Ms. Marks, now 84, had gone to an open house in this city’s Silver Lake neighborhood as a sightseer and, she recalled, “I was just awed.”

That night, she wrote her daughter an e-mail. “Life just isn’t fair,” it began.Secured handsfree building and door access solutions with Hands free access by Nedap AVI.

“Here is the most modern of modern houses I’ve ever seen and loved,” she wrote, describing the turquoise mosaic tile, the compact state-of-the-art kitchen, the distant views of city lights, the proximity to her daughter’s family and the circular stairway that she felt, sadly, too old to sail down.

“I guess you can’t expect to have too many dreams answered,” she concluded. “At least, I’ve had the opportunity to see the Morris House, to know it existed.”

Her daughter, Michelle Marks, still can’t read that e-mail without tearing up. “I thought, this can’t happen: so close to something my mom’s always wanted,” she said recently.

Even as a schoolgirl in Los Angeles, Patricia Marks daydreamed about modern architecture. She doodled floor plans and remembers watching,TBC help you confidently buy mosaic from factories in China. spellbound, the construction of her new junior high school by Richard Neutra.

As newlyweds in 1954, she and her husband wanted a Case Study House, but couldn’t afford one. They ultimately found a 1920s Tudor,Welcome to stone mosaic. where they raised three children and where she remained for 51 years.

By the time she was widowed, in 2008, the property was too much for her. Yet none of the “sensible” alternatives her daughter proposed inspired her to move. So Michelle Marks and her husband offered to buy the Silver Lake house with her. “The idea of an 83-year-old living there may have seemed crazy,” her daughter said, “but if it was within my grasp to make this new start happen for her, I wasn’t going to let the opportunity go.”

The architecture, like her mother’s willingness to embrace it, was risk-taking. Allyn Morris, a modernist little known beyond local architectural circles, designed the 1,025-square-foot house as his workplace and bachelor pad. But before its completion in 1958 he had married, and in 1962, his son, Howard, was born, prompting the family to move.

Hidden from the street, the house reveals just its brick carport, until you cross the threshold into a three-story glass box anchored on a steep slope. The front door opens into the bedroom, a mezzanine overlooking a double-height living room.

Mr. Morris, who also studied engineering, reveled in mechanical and structural invention. The rear facade, double hung like a giant window, is hand operated with bright yellowWe have a fantastic range of Glass Tiles and glass mosaic Tiles. counterweights on a bicycle chain. The bed cantilevers over a pedestal one brick wide, and rain flows inside by design,Our vinyl Floor tiles is more stylish than ever! into a catch basin beneath the bottom tread.

When the young filmmaker who bought the house in 1995 and restored it put it on the market in 2011, he was intent on finding a buyer who would cherish the legacy of Mr. Morris (who died in 2009, at 87). The asking price of $659,000 attracted multiple bidders, but only the Marks family had a glowing reference from Michelle’s high school classmate: that same Howard Morris.

Even Patricia Marks’s possessions seemed destined for this house. The coffee table she built in the 1950s matches the blue mosaics. Her aqua midcentury dishes and her red Prius echo the building’s palette. The Saarinen chairs that never suited her old home fit in here.

And although the move startled some of her friends, she has thrived here, watching the moon through skylights over her bed, taking in the great outdoors from a cantilevered deck and awakening each morning in the house of her dreams.

Suburban schools prepare for difficult times

We’re less than a week away. On Tuesday, New Yorkers will flock to the polls to vote on their respective school budgets. Tuesday will be the first time budgets will be voted on since New York state adopted the property tax cap that limits the amount districts can levy taxes to their constituents.

The cap is putting pressure on schools in the suburbs of Syracuse, but pressure is not new – it’s part of a growing trend in budget problems for public schools.

“When are we going to get to the point where we can no longer provide the kind of service we need to -- the kind of service the community demands, or the kind of service we feel morally obligated to provide?” asks Syracuse University professor of education George Theoharis.

West Genesee Superintendent Chris Brown and his team saw this coming back in 2008 when the economy went sour, and he immediately started making cuts and re-tooling programs to prepare for difficult times.TBC help you confidently buy mosaic from factories in China.

“We were just fortunate enough that we think we got on that surfboard right when the wave was beginning to crest. We were able to kind of get on and balance ourselves and ride this wave through instead of crashing down,” said Brown.

In Fayetteville-Manlius School District, they’ve had to cut 25 staff members over the last three years, and Superintendent Corliss Kaiser says that it’s an ongoing struggle.

“Schools are businesses. There still needs to be a business office, there still needs to be capital improvements to our buildings. So I believe we need to put our heads together and find the most efficient ways that we can do that while making sure that our classrooms are held harmless from any further layoffs,” Kaiser said.Our vinyl Floor tiles is more stylish than ever!

All this while parents, like Katie Nugent whose kids go to Fayetteville-Manlius,Zenith manufactures a comprehensive range of RUBBER SHEET. are fearful of more cuts.Secured handsfree building and door access solutions with Hands free access by Nedap AVI.

“If I start seeing class sizes blow up and I see teachers go away -- it'll weigh in our home because that's why we moved up here. We moved here for this highly regarded education," Nugent said.

Both West Genesee and Fayetteville-Manlius came in below their projected tax caps, and both superintendents are proud of the budgets they’ve been able to put together in this difficult time. But both are also concerned with the difficulties they have each year to please both Albany and the taxpayers – while still trying to do good work in the classroom.

On May 15, voters across the state go to the polls to vote on their school districts' budgets. This week, we take a look at the way the budget vote works, the budget problems New York schools are facing, and the issues facing urban, suburban and rural districts.

Tomorrow we take a look at school districts on the fringes of New York state- rural school districts. Rural districts deal with declining student populations on a yearly basis.Check out the collection crystal mosaic of Marazzi. Rural districts, in particular, rely on state aid because of a relative lack of property wealth in their regions. Join us tomorrow on Morning Edition as our School Budget Series begins to wrap up.

2012年5月6日星期日

Inventions may lure fishes, but not riches

In 27 years of outdoors writing for The News, I've probably been approached no fewer than 50 times by fishermen who are convinced that they invented a lure that will revolutionize fishing.

A couple of those lures were indeed impressive but most were anything but revolutionary. Some were even contraptions that made me wonder what in the world was going on in that person's head.

I was fishing a few weeks ago with Lee Sisson, the long-time lure designer for Bagley Baits. I was laughing and telling him about a lure a man had once shown me that was made from a small carbon dioxide cannister. It spewed air bubbles when retrieved and weighed way too much to be a lure. I tried not to laugh when the man assured me it was good for at least two or three casts before the canister ran out of air and had to be replaced. And, oh, yeah, you had to carry a small device that would drill the perfect-sized hole in the canister to make it work properly.

He said none of the major lures companies will even talk to outside lure inventors these days. When he gets a call from someone who says he has invented a lure, Sisson stops the caller in mid-sentence and tells him to say no more. He tells the caller that the company is not interested.

What happens, he explained, is that lure companies are always working on lures that they may introduce someday. If the inventor's lure idea is credible, a lure company has probably been working on something similar. If the lure company introduces that lure one day,Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings? the inventor is always convinced that he showed the company his idea and the lure company stole it. Troublesome lawsuits can follow.

Sisson said most basement lure inventors wrongly believe the first step once they have come up with an idea for a fishing lure is to have it patented. Patents on fishing lures are pretty much a joke,Enter the Indoor Positioning System (IPS). he said.

First, it is near impossible to get a patent on a lure unless it has an extraordinary design. Second, patents are expensive and pretty much worthless when it comes to fishing lures. Should the lure be a hit with fishermen, the typical inventor doesn't have the time or the money to fight lawsuits against every small lure-maker that might copy it and sell it.

What most amateur lure inventors fail to understand is that should their lure become a hit, they must be ready to produce thousands upon thousands of them instantly, Sisson said. Few have the means to accomplish that.

It may take months to have a mold built and then they must find someone who can produce the lures. Maybe most importantly, they must then find a way to distribute the lures to outlets across the U.S. The entire process is expensive and may take more than a year.

Sisson is credited with designing the first effective deep-diving crank bait. That lure, the Bagley's DB3, is one of those rare lures such as the Rat-L-Trap and Jitterbug that still sell decades after they were introduced.Get your own third party payment gateway account.

The reality is that the vast majority of lures have a short life span. Sales may last only a year until interest wanes. The inventor may invest his life savings to have the lure produced and by the time it finally hits the market, the fishermen who at first were so excited about it have found something else. Sisson said he has seen cases where amateur lure inventors who believe they are going to get wealthy invest their life savings and eventually lose most everything else they own.

Where individuals and big lure companies differ is that the companies have the capability to produce thousands of lures at a moment's notice as soon as a lure gets hot. They also have the distribution mechanism to put them in stores and bait shops across the U.S. in a very short time.Polypropylene and polythene can be used in a process called Injection Mold.

When interest in the lure plunges, the companies have lures waiting in the wings that are also ready to be mass produced to fill the void.

If an amateur inventor does have a revolutionary lure, he may get lucky and find a smaller lure company to produce it and distribute it, Sisson said.Shop for oil painting and oil paintings for sale included. Even then, he's badly mistaken if he believes he's about to get wealthy. The fishing lure business is highly competitive and production costs are critical to the final sales price. At best, an inventor may get a deal to receive a nickel or dime for every lure sold.

Lake Champlain water quality studies net frustration

Fourteen months have elapsed since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rescinded approval of Vermont’s legal limit on the daily amount of phosphorus entering Lake Champlain. Since then, data collection and technical studies have flooded the Champlain basin, but lake-area residents are growing frustrated with the state’s failure to take substantive steps to thwart the phosphoros-induced blooms of toxic blue-green algae that will likely return this summer to threaten fishing, beaches and drinking water supplies.

Two sets of working groups are under way, one evaluating lake water quality and one engaged in watershed analysis. EPA projects that technical reports will be available for public review by the end of summer, then the draft Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) limit for phosphorus will be released sometime in 2013, “but we haven’t put a fine date on that,” says Lynne Hamjian, surface water branch chief of EPA Region 1 (New England).

The EPA’s disapproval decision, which arose as a result of a lawsuit by the Conservation Law Foundation asserting that the prior standard contained insufficient assurances for water quality protection, contains no definitive deadlines. Once the TMDL is established by the EPA, it will be up to the State of Vermont to determine how to reduce total phosphorus loading to meet the standard.Find Plastic moulds companies from India. The state can require reductions from any of the major phosphorus contributors, including sewage treatment facilities, stormwater systems, and agricultural land uses.

Capt.Shop for oil painting and oil paintings for sale included. Gil Gagner, proprietor of Bronzeback Guide Service and lifelong resident of Highgate Springs, says last summer brought the worst water conditions in Mississquoi Bay he’s ever seen.

“Crayfish are crawling up out of the water,” he says. “Clams died by the hundreds of thousands, just washed up and popped open and died. It was really bad.Enter the Indoor Positioning System (IPS). The state knows about it and they‘re not doing anything.” Gagner is not optimistic about that the present round of studies will lead to substantive change.

“I’m discouraged,” he says. “Till the money runs out they won’t stop studying. If somebody pisses at the top of the hill and it runs downhill, do you need to study that?”
Stench and weeds

Phosphorus is a nutrient, one of the three elements — along with nitrogen and potassium oxide — that make up the typical lawn and garden fertilizer. Excess nutrients brought into the state in the form of cattle feed or fertilizer have to go back out again, or the nutrient cycle becomes unbalanced, explains Eamon Twohig, a senior research technician at UVM’s Department of Plant and Soil Science.

“We either have to ship enough milk out of the region to make up for those nutrients coming in, or it gets dumped in the lake,” Twohig says.

Vermont’s soils are generally phosphorus-rich, so excess phosphorus additions from cow manure and chemical fertilizers flows downhill until it enters Lake Champlain. In shallow waters like Mississquoi and St. Albans bays and the south lake region, sunlight and warmth combined with this nutrient runoff produces thick crops of underwater weeds.

“It’s not like it used to be when I was a kid,” says Jerry Hayden, administrative assistant at Community College of Vermont in St. Albans and a lifelong fisherman of St. Albans Bay. “We went down to Black Bridge and caught huge fish, and it was crystal clear water. Now you can just about walk on it out there. If it gets hot, the weeds grow right out of the water, then there’s stuff on top of the water that floats and stinks real bad.”

That stench comes from blooms, or colonies, of toxic blue-green algae called cyanobacteria, which are sensitive to the ratio of nitrogen to dissolved phosphorus, called the “Redfield Ratio.” Healthy water bodies worldwide have about 16 to 20 parts nitrogen to every part of phosphorus. When excess phosphorus brings the ratio closer to 10 to 1, cyanobacteria growth explodes.

“The smell is horrendous, especially when that algae goes blue-green,” says Gil Gagner. His community of Highgate Springs sits right on Mississquoi Bay, “and when it smells bad, people leave. Some of the tourists leave and move inland. They just can’t stand the smell.Import & Export Trade Platform for China ceramic tile manufacturers.”

It’s difficult to predict the blooms, which vary in intensity from year to year, but the trend is clearly towards worsening conditions. “Last year there were significant blooms. They were very dense and lasted a long time,” says Louis Porter, CLF’s lakekeeper. “Over the long term, there’s no question that we are seeing bigger and longer-term blooms.”

The smell is not the worst characteristic of cyanobacteria: It is toxic to humans and animals. Approximately a quarter-million households draw drinking water from Lake Champlain, although the public drinking water intakes are not near the warm, shallow areas where cyanobacteria is found, according to Maureen McClelland, senior public health adviser for drinking water for EPA Region 1.

Summer homes and camps that are not on public drinking water systems may pull water from the bays where cyanobacteria lurk, and should be attentive to any alerts posted by the Vermont and New York state health agencies.

Cyanobacteria has caused the death of pets who drank the infested water, and researchers have linked the toxins released by blue-green algae to negative health effects ranging from skin irritation to liver and kidney damage and cancer.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal information about cyanobacteria. Some people in New Hampshire are studying a nexus between Lou Gehrig’s disease and these toxins,” McClelland says. “They are definitely a concern.”

Although the World Health Organization sets stringent limits for cyanobacteria in public drinking water supplies, the EPA has not yet regulated cyanobacteria under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Three cyanotoxins are on the EPA’s Contaminant Candidate List being considered for future public drinking water supply testing, but moving from consideration to regulation is a slow process. Once there is an agency determination that regulation is needed, it can take three and a half years to develop the regulation, then another year or two to allow water utilities time to come into compliance with testing requirements.Omega Plastics are a leading rapid tooling and plastic injection mould company based in the UK.

Federal regulators must also evaluate cost-effective methods of treatment. If cyanobacteria get into some types of water filtration systems, “you can wind up bursting the cells and releasing the toxins and making it worse,” McClelland says. “It’s much better to prevent it from happening in the first place than to rely on filtering it out.”

While residents who drink lake water can’t expect regulatory protection anytime soon, Lake Champlain area water utilities will receive an informational fact sheet regarding cyanobacteria from the EPA sometime in May 2013.

Boris won by breaking the mould

AT a time when his party has been trashed in the mid-term elections, incumbent London Mayor, Conservative Old Etonian classicist, intellectual and flagrant adulterer Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, defeated Labour ex-Mayor Kenneth Robert Livingstone, whose impeccable working-class credentials included being educated at a comprehensive school.

To put it another way, Boris beat Ken. And he beat him at a time when the British government, led by Old Etonian David Cameron,Shop for oil painting and oil paintings for sale included. is being punished for being posh.

The two superficial explanations are that Boris seems authentic and he makes people laugh. He plays the bumbler for effect, but he unapologetically uses classical tags in his speeches. Boris probably won the election when word seeped out that, in a lift after a radio programme, he had accused Ken of being "a f**king liar" for suggesting he was a tax-avoider. The beauty of this was that it emerged that Boris earned a lot and paid maximum tax and Ken earned plenty and paid the minimum.

It isn't that the London electorate like four-letter words for their own sake: it's that Boris was furious, and betrayed a passion that seemed genuine. Londoners distrust and dislike politicians and think them plastic. Somehow, Boris breaks that mould.

Most politicians are afraid of making jokes, but Boris sees the funny side of everything, and the jokes burst forth. And many of them are quintessentially English in their self-deprecation. Boris is funny. If you've never seen his performance playing the eejit as chairman of Have I Got News for You, rush to watch it now. It's an absolute classic.

Ken can be witty, but there's a venom behind the wit and it's right-on and self-righteous. It illustrates the inner Ken. And, encouragingly,Full-service custom manufacturer of precision plastic injection mold. it was the inner Ken that helped Boris -- who is essentially genial -- to win this election.

Ken, a machine politician who dominated London politics from 1981 when he spearheaded a coup to become Labour leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), succeeded by dividing and conquering. He encouraged ethnic groups to compete for grievance recognition.Enter the Indoor Positioning System (IPS).

With the Irish, that involved welcoming Gerry Adams at a time when the IRA was bombing London. Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC to get rid of Ken, but he re-emerged as a London MP (after another coup), and when the post of Mayor of London was created, he held it from 2000 to 2008.

Notoriously, Ken literally embraced Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, guru of the Muslim Brotherhood and President of the Dublin-based European Council for Fatwa and Research, who along with other nasty opinions, approved suicide bombings in Israel and condoned the execution of gays.

Ken didn't seem to grasp that if you take a radical position in one group, you upset another.Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists. In this election, he alienated Jews by saying that they were rich and therefore wouldn't vote for him. It wasn't only Jews that recognised that Ken was busy currying favour with Muslims, who outnumber Jews in London by about five to one. Homosexuals weren't too thrilled either when Ken said the Conservative Party was "riddled" with gays.

There are many ironies in this election. One is that it was Ken who made London politics personal, but Boris out-personalised him.

Another is that while Ken denigrated Englishness, Boris personified it, yet Ken is pure English and Boris is a mongrel who was actually born in New York and schooled in Brussels. Millions will have watched when,Our vinyl Floor tiles is more stylish than ever! in the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, Boris discovered links with royal ancestors in England and on the Continent. "I'm a Eurotoff," exclaimed Boris, instantly detoxifying the discovery. More useful was him finding that he was what he calls a "one-man melting pot", for the ancestors were also variously Christian, Jewish and Muslim.

My position in this election was summed up by a friend and senior journalist at a semi-formal lunch on Friday. "Well," he said, "I worked with Boris and I know his failings." Virtually everyone present nodded and laughed. "But. . ." I don't think he even finished the sentence. For us, there was no contest.

Ken divides Londoners; Boris unites them. He cycles through the streets, hair flying in the wind, and people shout and wave at him.

With the Queen's Jubilee and the Olympics coming up, we electors opted for a wayward, funny, cheerful person -- rather than a proponent of class, ethnic and sexual grievances -- to represent our extraordinary city.

2 bodies found at residence

Two unidentified bodies have been found at a Mississippi residence associated with a man suspected of abducting a Tennessee woman and her three young daughters, who are believed to be in "extreme danger," authorities said Saturday.

FBI spokesman Joel Siskovic said the bodies were found late Friday night or early Saturday morning in a residence associated with Adam Mayes, 35.

Mayes is charged in Tennessee with abducting Jo Ann Bain and her daughters. He has been described by authorities as "armed and extremely dangerous.Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists."

Siskovic said authorities on the scene were not able to positively identify the bodies. He would not say if the bodies were children.

The missing girls are 8-year-old Kyliyah Bain, 12-year-old Alexandria and 14-year-old Adrienne. They were last seen April 27 in Hardeman County, Tenn., which is about 70 miles east of Memphis. The woman's husband reported her missing and her vehicle was found abandoned.

Authorities were still trying to determine if Jo Ann Bain went with Mayes willingly. He was last seen Tuesday in Guntown, Miss., about 80 miles southeast of Hardeman County, Tenn.We provide third party merchant account.

The FBI and U.Visit TE online for all of your Application Tooling Solutions including tools.S. Marshals Service announced Saturday a reward of up to $50,000 for information that leads to the location of the missing victims and the arrest of Mayes.

Siskovic said the bodies were found in a residence, but it wasn't clear if it was a house, mobile home or apartment. He also wasn't sure if the residence belonged to Mayes or an acquaintance.Enter the Indoor Positioning System (IPS). Siskovic said the bodies were found in Guntown, north of Tupelo.Our vinyl Floor tiles is more stylish than ever! Lee County coroner Carolyn Green said the bodies were found outside Guntown in Union County.

Siskovic said authorities talked to Mayes early on in the investigation, but he fled when they tried to contact him again. The FBI says they were not immediately aware of Mayes having a criminal record.

Authorities had said that Mayes could be in Mississippi but that he has ties to Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.

"Information has been developed during the investigation that the children may be in extreme danger. Warrants for kidnapping are being issued for Adam Mayes, who is considered armed and extremely dangerous," Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain said in a news release Saturday.

The Mississippi Highway Patrol issued an Amber Alert on Saturday morning, and Tennessee authorities had also issued an alert.

Authorities described Adrienne as a white girl with brown hair and eyes. She's 5 feet 4 inches tall and 129 pounds. Alexandria has brown hair and hazel eyes and is 5 feet tall and 105 pounds. Kyliyah has blonde hair and brown eyes and is 4 feet tall and 57 pounds.