It’s easy to see how a baby shower diaper cake can be the centerpiece of the shower, but to really get the most out of your presentation during the shower, here are a few suggestions.

If you are the host of the baby shower:

If you decide to use the diaper cake a centerpiece on the food table, consider placing it directly next to the real cake. In fact, placing the two cakes right next to each other is a fun way to call attention to the diaper cake (it being the non edible one).

If you have a one or two tiered diaper cake, look into placing the diaper cake on a cake pedestal to give it some height. With the diaper cake elevated you can place items under the cake to help accentuate the center piece. Items to include under or around the cake could include:

Baby blocks
Flowers (silk or real)
Small plush animals
Baby blankets, towels or washcloths
If you opt to place it on the gift table, we highly recommend using a cake pedestal. This will act as “lighthouse” in guiding your guest in where and how to place the gifts on the table. If you’re unable to find a cake pedestal place a large pot upside down on the table and cover it with a table cloth, towels or baby blankets. Make sure the pot has a large bottom so that the cake does not topple over.

If you are the guest of the baby shower:

No one wants a guest barging in and taking over the decor. So be sure to contact the host of the baby shower and let her know that you are interested in bringing a baby shower diaper cake and offer it up as a centerpiece. The host will be grateful that you asked and your gift for mom-to-be will surely make it’s presentation.

It often seems that no matter how hard you try, your carefully folded clothes packed away into your case before you left for your holiday, somehow arrive looking ten years older and entirely unwearable. This has considerable impact on the smart evening out to a classy restaurant that you were planning for your first evening. So is it possible to arrive with your clothes looking presentable? How do some people manage to arrive, unpack and immediately have a full wardrobe of presentable clothes? Is it magic?

There are several very effective tips to bear in mind if you would like to become one of the smug tourists that sees to arrive unscathed by the experience of the journey itself, and have a clean, uncreased and wearable array of clothes without having to spend the first day of your holiday wearing an odd combination of clothes which look as though you travelled in the baggage compartment yourself.

A good tip is to think in advance of the type of clothing you’ll actually need (rather than the outfits you’d like to show off). Think about the materials as well – obviously some travel better than others. Cotton is a definite no, because as you will almost certainly know, it tends to crease very easily. Nylon and polyester, the manufactured fabrics, tend to crease far less, and lend themselves much better for traveling. Wool travels well, but is very bulky, and so is not advisable. Instead, a couple of polyester or nylon tops with a jacket will give you just as much warmth, but with less bulk and more flexibility.

Another secret kept by those who travel professionally is not to fold your clothes at all. Instead, rolling them keeps them very much better and makes it much easier to pack as well. Lay your tops out flat, and then carefully roll them together into a tube, keeping it as tight as you can. You’ll find that the resulting tube can be squashed into your bag very easily, yet at the other end, when you unpack hem, they will be relatively unscathed, and ready for wearing.

Another, increasingly popular tip is to use a compressor. If you haven’t yet seen one of these, they are basically a combination of plastic bag and small vacuum cleaner. You lay your clothes in the plastic bag, and zip it up. A small air pump is then connected to a valve on the side of the bag, and the air is extracted. This drastically reduces the overall volume of the clothing, meaning that they take up a lot less room in your case. It also means that the clothes will be virtually uncreasable, and when the bag is opened at the other end, the clothes will be in the same condition they were when you packed them.

The one thing to bear in mind when using these compressors of course is that at the other end of your holiday, you will need to do the same thing if you are to get all of your things back into a tightly packed case. This may well require an electric socket, and this in turn may require you to have a suitable adaptor.

In the last few years there has been many in the music industry who have speculated on the next viable move. I have watched many talk about everything from the 360 deal to the utility deal but know one has made them work; once again mostly talk and no show and mostly from industry “tastemakers” that don’t know what the hell they’re saying.

As the major labels still struggle to keep their catalogs in play they have basically dumped the signing and DEVELOPMENT of new acts therefore leaving the field wide open to the latest movement of new acts to tear into what was once a coveted audience. The new music industry business model is no longer in the hands of the majors!

The only real power left for the majors is the relationship with other major content outlets (radio, TV, internet, etc.) but even that is showing signs of serious weakness. The majors only moving part in the game is to hover around and wait until an act does all the work and then scoop them up, but at that point, who needs them.

Acts/labels who are working on their music marketing initiatives need to focus on the ownership of the content and the ability to deliver. Is that not what TV has been doing all these years? Yes, and now the same power is in the hands of the artists and labels.

Everyone should turn their websites into web channels and approaching the stream of income the same as TV. Taking a page from the 1940′s TV business model, instead of loading up advertisement from many who want to buy into it, you get a single company to advertise and they become the present’s packager.

Another form of the presents deal is the endorsement deal. This is all done through the management of your web channel and utilizing super niche social media marketing which works for both labels and artists alike.

The idea is to drive and keep a fan base on a site for stick time. Stick Time is one of the most powerful emerging measurements by witch advertisers are starting to gage their placements. But who are the ones that can facilitate stick time; recording artists and internet media producers.

By fully attacking your music marketing with multi level social media tactics that re-route to a final web channel destination, you can get someone to stay on a site longer than they would watching a half hour of TV programming (actual program time 22 minutes without advertising).

So at the end of the day if you have enough content on your web channel as well as loss leader programs and mailing data mining programs you can build a successful place where your fan base can be entertained and interact with you. Your site numbers go up as your stick time and you become a viable resource for an outside company to partner with and all of sudden you’re getting a monthly check just to do what you love – selling your music and entertaining.

Water that has passed through municipal treatment systems has had most of the toxins and foreign particles removed from it, but not all of them are filtered out. In recent studies conducted by the Associated Press, pharmaceuticals in the water supply were detected in a number of American cities. This raised the question for many people- does reverse osmosis remove pharmaceuticals from water? The answer resides in the nature of pharmaceuticals and how reverse osmosis systems work.

The alarming report showed that a wide variety of pharmaceuticals were present in alarming levels in drinking water. The systems that supplied these contaminants served millions of customers each. This made the originators of the study suppose that many, many more municipal water supplies were likely tainted with drugs but had simply not yet been tested for them.

One of the reasons that the drugs were present in so many water systems was that treatment plants are not required to test for them. Most systems don’t have a budget that allows plants to test for things that they aren’t required to test for or to remove. For this reason, the exact number of pharmaceuticals in the water and the number of systems that contain them are unknown.

Some of the many drugs that have already been found in municipal drinking water include drugs for depression, painkillers, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. Estrogen in the general water supply may have a feminizing effect on the men who drink it. It may also be responsible for some cases of certain cancers in women, such as breast cancer.

Does Reverse Osmosis Remove Pharmaceuticals From Water?

There has been some debate about whether these systems can be adequate for taking drugs out of drinking water. There are some pharmaceuticals that may be filtered out during the process. However, many others will not.

The drugs that remain in the system simply make it through to the drinking water supply. However, because the water has been through the reverse osmosis system, it may be assumed that the pharmaceuticals in the supply have been removed. This false sense of security can be dangerous to anyone counting on the system to take these substances out.

Reverse osmosis is done by filtering water through a very tight membrane. The pores on the membrane are tiny enough to allow H2O particles to pass through but nothing larger than those particles can pass. Therefore, if the particles of one drug are larger than H2O particles, they will be filtered out. If the particles of another are smaller, they will pass through.

Pharmaceuticals in water supply a number of harmful chemicals into the drinking water of many residential areas. They can be contraindicated with the medications that a person is taking, resulting in adverse reactions. When people ask — does reverse osmosis remove pharmaceuticals from water — there are no hard and fast answers. Trusting the systems to remove all of these substances, however, will always result in some degree of disappointment.