Word: customs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Business for products aimed at the newly divorced, from greeting cards and postbreakup getaway packages to custom-made cakes and joke gifts like wedding-ring coffins, is booming. New Orleans resident Reneé Savant bought a hearse, thinking she would rent it out for over-the-hill-birthday celebrations. But since she began her service last October, the hottest demand has come from clients who want to ride around as they and friends celebrate the death of their marriages. "I would never in a million years have thought the fad would be divorce parties," says Savant...
...used to baking cakes for "people's second, third and even fourth weddings" but has recently been getting orders for confections to mark the end of marriages as well. The designs feature scenarios like a bride kicking her former groom down the tiers of the cake. At Sprinkles Custom Cakes in Winter Park, Fla., Larry Bach has been getting requests for his upside-down wedding cake with the bride or groom's legs sticking out at the bottom as if the cake had crashed down on the figure à la the Wicked Witch of the East...
...hard drives or computer models. In his recent book about life inside Hizb ut-Tahrir, British Muslim Ed Husain contrasts the aggressive, intolerant Islam he found in Hizb ut-Tahrir to the "Islam of the heart," the tolerant, humanistic Sufism of his migrant parents. In modern Islamic radicalism, custom and humanism are jettisoned in favor of logic and politics. Hizb ut-Tahrir, which targets youth on college campuses, promotes itself as the thinking Muslim's alternative to blindly following parents, mullahs or tradition...
...ones appealed to them. Time and again, they chose the ones worn by men with a safely different MHC. And if the smell of MHC isn't a deal maker or breaker, the taste is. Saliva also contains the compound, a fact that Haselton believes may partly explain the custom of kissing, particularly those protracted sessions that stop short of intercourse. "Kissing," she says simply, "might be a taste test...
...anyone who has been under love's spell, these theories seem preposterous, and so they are. Nothing so primal could have been created out of thin air as a mere custom or product. To the contrary, romantic love is a human universal. In 1896 a Kwakiutl Indian in southern Alaska wrote the lament "Fire runs through my body--the pain of loving you," which could be the title of a bad power ballad today. Similar outpourings of passion can be found all over the world from those with broken hearts...