Preshowtino's purpose driven life...

Féerie
Van Cleef & Arpels 
EDP

Top notes:Violet, Red Berries (Black Currant) Italian Mandarin.
Middle notes:Bulgari an Rose and Egyptian Jasmine.
Bottom Notes:Iris Butter and Vetiver.

Perfumer: Olivier Pécheux



Review:...

Name: Preshowtino
October 31 1985
11:28 AM Time Zone is AWST
Shanghai, CHINA

Rising Sign is in 16 Degrees Capricorn
You are practical and reserved but very ambitious. An achiever and a hard worker, you respect success. Older looking and very serious as a youth, things lighten up and you relax more as you mature. You have a serious view of the world as being a difficult place to be in. Very envious of those who seem to have an easier life than you have, relaxation and play do not come easily. It is important that you had abundant parental support as a child so that you do not feel lonely and isolated as an adult. Generally, you have a good, earthy sense of humor that can carry you through when times really do get tough. You are purposeful, self-willed, industrious, realistic and responsible.

Sun is in 07 Degrees Scorpio.
Intense and complex by nature, you have extremely strong emotional reactions to most situations. Feelings are often very difficult for you to verbalize. Therefore you have a tendency to be very quiet - - to brood and think a lot. You seldom get overtly angry, but, when you do, you are furious and unforgiving. When you make an emotional commitment, it is total -- you are not attracted to superficial or casual relationships. If you are challenged, you take it as a personal affront and tend to lash out and fight back in a vengeful manner. You love mysteries and the supernatural. A good detective, you love getting to the roots of problems and you enjoy finding out what makes other people tick. You are known to be very willful, very powerful and quite tenacious!

Moon is in 03 Degrees Gemini.
Restless in the extreme, you are easily bored because of your short attention span. Your emotions change rapidly and you love to talk about your feelings. Generally, you have good judgment -- your intellect controls your emotions and you do not overreact emotionally to things. A good jack-of-all-trades, you have many- sided interests and enjoy reasoning things through. With your mental agility and need for physical mobility, you are attracted to traveling and learning about other peoples and cultures. You have vivid powers of emotional self-expression - - you can be a nonstop talker. You love to share your ideas with anyone who will listen.

Mercury is in 29 Degrees Scorpio.
You are a born investigator. You are fascinated by secrets and mysteries and unanswered questions of any kind. When you become upset or angry, your emotional reactions are overpowering -- reason and logic disappear in an uncontrollable passionate outburst. You tend to keep your thoughts secret and bottled up and this makes others regard you with suspicion. It is not that you are trying purposely to be evasive, it is just that you would rather not deal with the explosions and hassles that often occur when you reveal your true feelings and opinions. Your sense of humor tends toward sarcasm and irony.

Venus is in 18 Degrees Libra.
A very friendly and outgoing person, you hate to be alone. Beware of a continuing tendency to compromise yourself in order to avoid being lonely. Try to be yourself, not what others would like you to be. You have an innate desire to be in refined and elegant surroundings and will go out of your way to create a plush and comfortable atmosphere around you. You have heightened aesthetic sensibilities and are attracted to music and the arts. Try to avoid using your well-known seductive charm in order to get out of doing what you consider to be dirty work!

Mars is in 02 Degrees Libra.
You are very aware of the need to cooperate with others in order to further any effort. You are usually willing to compromise with others, although you can be quite competitive in a friendly way. Very fair- minded and impartial, you have the ability to sense injustice and the desire to take corrective actions to make proper compensations. You see both sides of issues and questions, but you tend to be undecided or wavering when forced to make choices that might make you vulnerable or unpopular.

Jupiter is in 08 Degrees Aquarius.
Your personal growth occurs when you have the freedom to do things in new and interesting ways -- this brings out your natural inventiveness. You are an individualist, but you are also attracted to mass movements that emphasize social betterment and you will devote much time and energy to their efforts. Very fair- minded and objective, you have extraordinary skills at organization and administration.

Saturn is in 28 Degrees Scorpio.
You tend to release emotional energies only very reluctantly. This is partly due to your fear of what horrible calamity might occur should they be released -- your emotions are terribly complicated and intense. Try not to repress these energies entirely, however, or you will succumb to negative and destructive forms of compulsive behavior. Give yourself the freedom to look awkward or silly once in a while. The relief you feel will be quite therapeutic and the embarrassment (whether it is real or imagined) will pass quickly.

Uranus is in 15 Degrees Sagittarius.
You, and most of your peers, have the tendency to think that all ideas, customs and traditions from the past are outmoded and irrelevant. You are attracted to radically new ideas, philosophies and religions that will, hopefully, cause sweeping changes throughout the world.

Neptune is in 01 Degrees Capricorn.
You, and your entire generation, will idealize work, practicality and the ability to attain reasonable goals. But, because you will also stress the need to be selfless and giving, you may find it difficult to attain your goals unless you have lowered your expectations on all fronts.

Pluto is in 04 Degrees Scorpio.
For your entire generation, this is a period of intense research and discovery in areas that were heretofore considered mysterious, remote or taboo. The root causes for many complex occurrences will be unearthed due to the intensity and thoroughness of the search.

N. Node is in 09 Degrees Taurus.
It's not in your nature to seek out many casual acquaintances in your daily round of activities. You feel much more comfortable with a small, close-knit group of people -- those with whom you can relax and work toward known and clearly defined goals. Your loyalty to a person or group, once given, is forever -- you'll expend all of your quite considerable energy in seeing that the group stays together and prospers. You choose your partners and relationships so carefully that you're bound to gain certain advantages from them, including those of a material nature. Be careful though not to let mere self-service be your motivation in establishing your connections -- make sure that there's an even give-and-take!

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Preshowtino Sex F
Shanghai 0 China 31/10/1985 11:28 - Julian day 2446370.31
Adjust 8.00 ST 6.14 Lat 31.15 Long -121.26

Snow fell across this mountain valley as red-robed monks in a prayer hall beat drums and chanted in tantric harmony, a seemingly auspicious start to Losar, the Tibetan New Year.

But a monk watching the ritual on Wednesday morning made it clear: This was a ceremony of mourning, not celebration.

“There is no Losar,” he said, standing in this monastery town on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. “They killed so many people last year.”

A few weeks ahead of the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, and a year after a crackdown on renewed ethnic unrest in this area, Tibetans are quietly but irrepressibly seething. Monks, nomads and merchants have turned the joyous Losar holiday into a dirge, memorializing Tibetans who died in last year’s conflict and pining for the return of the exiled Dalai Lama.

An informal grass-roots boycott is under way. Tibetans are forsaking dancing and dinner parties for vigils with yak-butter candles and the chanting of prayers. The Losar campaign signifies the discontent that many of China’s six million Tibetans still feel toward domination by the ethnic Han Chinese. They are resisting pressure by Chinese officials to celebrate and forget.

“It’s a conscious awakening of an entire people,” said Woeser, a popular Tibetan blogger.

Tibetans here and in other towns, including in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, say government officials have handed out money to Tibetans to entice them to hold exuberant new year parties. On Wednesday, state-run television showed Tibetans in Lhasa dancing, shooting off fireworks and feasting in their homes.

At the same time, the government has drawn a curtain across Tibet. Officials have shut down access to many Tibetan regions to foreigners and sent armed guards to patrol the streets.

Here in eastern Qinghai Province, near the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, the boycott of festivities began as early as January, during the Chinese Lunar New Year. On Wednesday in Tongren, called Rebkong by Tibetans, one of the few bursts of firecrackers took place outside a Chinese paramilitary compound.

“The government thinks we should celebrate this holiday properly,” said Shartsang, the abbot of Rongwo Monastery. “Certainly this year people haven’t celebrated it in the same way they did in past years.”

Shartsang was one of more than a dozen monks interviewed over three days at Rongwo, called Longwu in Chinese. The 700-year-old monastery is a sprawling complex of golden-eaved temples and labyrinthine alleyways that is home to 400 monks. It draws pilgrims from across the Tibetan plateau.

The government has stepped up security across Tibet. Here, more than 300 security officers with riot shields were seen training in the stadium on Wednesday afternoon. On Monday night, a unit of officers marched in formation along a cordoned-off road.

Chinese officials are wary of the boycott’s mushrooming into larger protests, and of Tibetans taking to the streets next month, which marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight from Lhasa. Most Tibetans revere the Dalai Lama, who advocates autonomy, but not secession, for Tibet.

Last March, China was convulsed by the largest Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in decades. It began when the suppression of protests by monks in Lhasa led to ethnic rioting by Tibetans. Eighteen civilians and one police officer were killed, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. Riots and protests flared up across western China. Tibetan exile groups say hundreds of Tibetans died in the crackdown.

Rongwo Monastery was a locus of resistance. Even before the riots in Lhasa, monks joined Tibetan townspeople to protest the way the police had handled a dispute between Tibetans and ethnic Hui Muslims. More than 200 monks were detained in that incident. During the March uprising, security forces surrounded the monastery, only to be met by stone-hurling monks.

Over the summer, leading monks were detained in a nearby school and forced to undergo patriotic education, which meant studying Chinese law and being told to denounce the Dalai Lama.

Waves of crackdowns have fueled resentment.

“They broke into my room and took away all my photos of the Dalai Lama,” said one monk, 53, as he held up a pile of five empty glass picture frames. “Then they led monks away with their wrists bound by wires.”

Like almost all the people interviewed for this article, the monk asked that his name not be used to avoid government reprisal. The monastery is under surveillance — cameras have been installed throughout, monks say, and security officers dressed in monk’s robes wander the alleys.

Nevertheless, the monks have put photographs of the Dalai Lama back up in prayer halls and in their bedrooms. One monk held up an amulet of the Dalai Lama dangling from his neck.

“The Chinese say this is all one country,” he said. “What do we think? You don’t know what’s in our hearts. They don’t know what’s in our hearts.” The monk tapped his chest.

Some of the greatest hostility comes from 30 or so monks from the Drepung and Sera monasteries in Lhasa who have sought refuge here, even as some monks from Rongwo have tried fleeing across the Himalayas to India. Last spring, after the uprising, security forces in Lhasa cleared out monasteries and jailed monks for months. About 700 were sent to a camp in Golmud, in Qinghai, for patriotic education, then ordered to return to their hometowns, said three young monks who were at the camp.

“We want to go back to our monastery in Lhasa, but the police would check our ID cards and evict us,” one of them said. “We came here because we wanted a good opportunity to study.”

To try to maintain calm in the monastery, government officials meet regularly with a council of eight older monks. In early February, they had a frank discussion with the council, a senior monk said.

“They said they don’t want any trouble from us,” he said. “They said they punished us last year by putting us in jail. This year, the punishment will be this — ” The monk held up a thumb and index finger in the shape of a pistol.

Eager for the pretense of calm, government officials handed out nearly $100 to some families in surrounding villages to hold Losar celebrations. But Tibetans came up with a strategy.

“A lot of village leaders got together and said, ‘If the government comes around, we’ll tell them that a lot of Tibetans and Chinese were killed in the earthquake last year, so we can’t celebrate now,’ ” said a 31-year-old Tibetan man from the area.

He said that not a single firecracker had been heard in his village.

G.M. also said it was considering its options for the Pontiac division. The Pontiac name, part of the car business since 1932, could remain on some models, but may no longer be a separate division. G.M. said Pontiac would be a “focused brand” with fewer models.

The disclosures by G.M., contained in a viability plan submitted to the government, means that G.M. plans to cut its brands in half, to four: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC.

It said last fall that it would try to find buyers for Hummer and Saab. On Tuesday, it said it would decide on Hummer’s fate by March 31.

But is four the right number?

After all, most of its big competitors, including Toyota, Honda and Chrysler, build their businesses around three brands or fewer in the United States. Ford is moving to shed its foreign brands and plans to focus primarily on three — Ford, Lincoln and Mercury.

“A volume brand and a premium brand can get the job done. Toyota has proven that,” said Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, a Web site that offers car-buying advice. “Cadillac, Chevy, done.”

The more brands a carmaker has, the more it must spread money around to develop vehicles and market them.
 

As a result, “every brand suffers,” said A. Andrew Shapiro, a managing partner with the Casesa Shapiro Group. “No particular brand or brands can achieve the share of voice that they need.”

Its extensive brand lineup has long been G.M.’s primary weapon. Founded in 1908 by William C. Durant, who brought together a collection of car companies, G.M. made the concept of “a car for every purse and purpose” its strategy during the 1920s for retaining buyers from their first car to their last.

Brands were a crucial element in G.M.’s effort to thwart Ford, then the country’s biggest car company, whose founder joked that buyers could have any color they wanted, as long as it was black.

G.M.’s strategy paid off during its best years, when it controlled more than half the American car market. But it held only 22 percent of United States auto sales last year, with more than half of its share coming from a single division, Chevrolet.

G.M. found out last decade just how expensive it could be to unwind a brand. It spent more than $1 billion to buy out dealers at Oldsmobile, which built its last cars in 2004.
 

Rick Wagoner, G.M.’s chief executive, said the automaker had set aside money to buy out dealers, but declined to specify a figure. “We have reserves in our plan to facilitate that,” he said.

He cited the economic downturn as the reason G.M. was phasing out Saturn. “Frankly, the opportunity for any brand, and for our volume as a whole, just looks radically different,” he said. “It is unfortunate and it seems like a cruel twist of fate at a time when Saturn is loaded up with a fantastic product portfolio.”

In a letter sent Tuesday to Saturn dealers, G.M. said it would entertain a plan from Saturn dealers or other investors for a spinoff of the division to keep it operating. It said it would provide information to potential investors.

But it warned a spinoff would be “a difficult and complex task, and some of the issues that must be resolved include product sourcing, capitalization and financing issues,” G.M. said in the letter signed by Mark LeNeve, a G.M. vice president for North American sales, and Jill Lajdziak, the general manager of Saturn.

When Saturn was started in 1990, as a “different kind of car, a different kind of car company” aimed at owners of small Hondas and Toyotas, its small cars were immediate hits. But G.M. executives decided in the mid-1990s that they needed to support G.M.’s other brands over Saturn, which by then had cost $5 billion.

G.M. did not add any new vehicles to the Saturn lineup for five years, despite pleas from dealers for bigger vehicles. Earlier this decade, G.M. decided to start selling vehicles from its Opel division, with some design changes, as Saturns in the United States.

Saturn sold 188,004 vehicles in 2008, down 21.7 percent from the previous year. Its best-selling vehicle was the Saturn Vue, a small sport utility vehicle.

Strict franchise laws protect dealers across the country from seeing their operations shut down without advance notice.

G.M. dealers said they were led to believe that the company was committed to the division.

“G.M. is picking on Saturn,” said Sherrill Freeborough, who owns Saturn dealerships in Grand Ledge and Okemos, Mich. “I want G.M. to be successful but I don’t think that always happens the other way around.”

In 1992, when G.M. began discussing the end of Oldsmobile, the division sold 412,000 vehicles. Except for Chevrolet, none of G.M.’s current brands sold that many vehicles last year.

Mr. Shapiro, the analyst, said G.M. should have rethought its divisions in the 1980s, when a number of new brands appeared in the United States, including Acura, Lexus and Infiniti, the Japanese luxury brands, and the Korean makers Hyundai and Kia.

“There were always good short-term reasons for not doing something,” Mr. Shapiro said.
 

Ed Dena, a Pontiac dealer in Dinuba, Calif., said he would eventually have to focus on his other G.M. brands, including Chevrolet, Buick and GMC. “Of course we’re sad because Pontiac is an icon,” he said. “But right now, in this industry, nothing is a shock anymore.”