Blog Posts by Piper Weiss, Shine Staff

There's the miracle of childbirth. And then there's the miracle of a child shaking hands with her doctor before she's exited the womb.

In October, Randy Atkins was poised with camera as his wife Alicia gave birth via C-section. He was planning on capturing the moment for friends and family, but he didn't expect to snap an image that would captivate the planet.

The year's most interesting babies

In an unbelievable debut, Nevaeh Atkins, age one millisecond, reached out from her mother's belly and offered her own delivery doctor a hand.

"The doctor called me over and said, 'Hey, she's grabbing my finger.' So I ran over there and just grabbed the shot and I was just in awe looking at it. It was such an amazing picture," Randy Atkins told the website AZFamily.com. The Phoenix-based Atkins and his wife Alicia shared the incredible photo on Facebook the day after Christmas. Soon after the image was shared by hundreds and viewed by more than 10,000 users, making it the first and most

Read More »from Most Polite Baby Ever Shakes Doctor's Hand from Womb. The Bar Has Been Set, Folks

A participant in a recent Tough Mudder race crawls in the mud under live wires. (Getty images)

Warning: Before you attempt this year's trendiest workout, you may have to sign a death waiver.

The world's most bizarre races

No, seriously. Adventure racing--a workout event that combines hardcore endurance training (cross-country running, climbing) with reality-TV-like, into-the-wild challenges (obstacle courses, mapping)--is  quickly becoming one of the nation's fastest growing outdoor sports, according to everyone from Outdoor Magazine to Forbes. It's also one of the most painful. Barbed wire, freezing dipping pools, and even 100-miles of rugged terrain with little more than a compass for navigation serve as obstacles in the growing number of team races being offered around the country for both triathletes and amateur goofballs alike. 

Though it was originally designed for super-athletes (your 'Iron Man' types, Navy Seals), in the past two years, courses have been modified for amateur daredevils who want in on the action. Instead of 100-mile courses, many adventure

Read More »from So long, Soul Cycle: "Adventure Racing" will be 2013's most popular, painful, obsessive-crazy workout

It was the year of the woman, obviously. But we had to hand it to a few good men who inspired us to be better parents, braver citizens, kinder critics, and smarter meme-writers. Join us in a salute to the dudes who won our hearts in 2012. --Piper Weiss, Shine Staff

You're never too young to become a viral sensation. Thank you, internet for that valuable lesson. In 2012, you didn't have to have a lot of babies to know a lot of babies. Here are the newbs we couldn't stop talking about all year long.

Read More »from The Year in Babies: The Cutest, the Bravest, and the Biggest

Missett's original workout album (via carrieshare.com)

"Find your pelvis, ladies. I've know you've got one and it's okay to move it for heaven's sake!"

This was the kind of instruction founder Judi Sheppard Missett would provide via Beta Max for thousands of women in the early '80s. And you wonder why Jazzercise was so popular?

Misset, Jazzercise's CEO and founder, dreamed up the aerobic formula--incredibly simple dance moves to original versions of popular music--from the basement of a Chicago dance studio back in 1969. By the mid '80s, you couldn't hear the "Theme Song from Arthur" without imagining Missett doing a plié in blue stirrup tights. Well, some people couldn't.

Fitness flashbacks for a better workout

But somewhere around the turn of the century, Jazzercise the workout became Jazzercise the punch line, a comic relic from a bygone era of fitness along with Jell-O salad and Thighmaster.

But you know what aerobics instructors say: "Own it, ladies."

In the past few years, Jazzercise has made a comeback,

Read More »from Jazzercise is back, so you can't make fun of it anymore!

Linda Hegg can't remember how she ended up in a homeless shelter three months ago. (AP)
You are Linda Hegg. Your home state is Delaware. You have a degree in linguistics and served time in the military. You are the subject of a three-month missing persons search and it's time to go home.

Missing woman joins search for herself

If someone told you this, it would sound as foreign and unreliable to you as it did to the 56-year-old woman living in a Toronto homeless shelter. Only for Linda Hegg it was true.

Three months ago, she arrived at a Canadian shelter with $20, a paper bag stuffed with shredded paper, and only the knowledge of her first name. Who she was and how she got there was as much a mystery to case workers as it was to Hegg herself.

On Tuesday, Toronto police pieced together Hegg's identity with the help of concerned family members and an anonymous web sleuth, who linked Hegg's online trails to the missing persons report. Hegg, a former Naval Officer, had traveled to Canada by bus with an expired passport, according to the Toronto Star, and

Read More »from 'Lost Souls' Disorder: How Could a Missing Woman Be Found by Everyone but Herself?

If you're not part of their inner-circle, the private moments of Kate Middlton and Prince William's marriage are best left to imagination--or photographer Alison Jackson. For the past two years, Jackson has been staging royal scenarios, with the help of a camera and some very convincing lookalikes. There's the photo shoot of faux Will proposing ('marry me' is scrawled on his chest), and another of fake Kate taking a pregnancy test in a bathroom. Jackson's work, which hangs in galleries from London to Los Angeles, satirizes the public's insatiable hunger for royal insight, and meditates on "voyeurism, on the power and seductive nature of imagery, and on our need to believe," according to her website.

Even if you know her royal images are fake (her debauched Harry shots are pretty spot on), it's hard not to imagine 'what if'? What if we had access to more princely private moments? What if we really knew how Kate and Will reacted to the baby news, how they spent their holidays, how

Read More »from Kate and Will's Christmas: A Facebook Photo Album

Uggs just got uggier. I thought we had this thing under control. Kate Hudson wasn't wearing them with jean shorts anymore, and most had accepted that the foot couches were best suited for red-eye flights and winter dog-walking. Then I landed on Ugg's homepage and was almost blinded by the new holiday shoe arrivals. Sparkles! Zebra prints! 40% more sheep fur! The Ugg elves have been hard at work creating party-time nightclub boots guaranteed to triple the width of your feet for the Christmas season. Ugh.

Read More »from Fashion that Makes Us Sad: Ugg's Holiday Boots