Blog Posts by Jessica Ferri

This letter was found in Halloween decorations purchased from KmartJulie Keith was unpacking some of last year's Halloween decorations when she stumbled upon an upsetting letter wedged into the packaging.

Tucked in between two novelty headstones that she had purchased at Kmart, she found what appeared to be a letter from the Chinese laborer, who had made the decoration, pleading for help.

Samsung in hot seat over abusing Chinese workers

The letter reads: "Sir, if you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever."

"I was so frustrated that this letter had been sitting in storage for over a year, that this person had written this plea for help and nothing had come of it." Julie Keith told Yahoo! Shine. "Then I was shocked. This person had probably risked their life to get this letter in this package."

The letter describes the conditions at the factory: "People who

The ever-evolving 'perfect man.'Have you ever looked back at an ex-boyfriend and asked, how did I ever date that person when we were so obviously incompatible?

It's not necessarily that you were incompatible...then. According to a survey conducted by Match.com over the past year, your tastes have simply changed over the years.

Is your family keeping you single?

Men must possess certain qualities to be considered "the perfect man," and those parameters change drastically as women age. In the survey, called "The Ages of Man," what women want from their relationships with men is broken down according to age range.

"[The research] also disproves the notion that standards drop later in life, as women over 55 were shown to be most picky about who they date," a Match UK rep told Yahoo! Shine.

The results of the study are summarized below. You can see the full study results here.

Age 18-24:

Women's main concern in their late teens and early twenties is that their partner gets along with their friends. "47 percent said

Little Hashtag or Yoga?Over half-a-million parents shared their unusual name choices with Baby Center over the course of 2012, and the results are in.

In 2012, a baby was named "hashtag." Little Hashtag Jameson takes the best (or worst) social networking name title away from baby Facebook, who was born last year.

What your baby's name says about you

Parents reported to Baby Center that the name's uniqueness was at the top of their list of concerns in choosing a name for their baby. They also seemed to hope for a fashionable and beautiful child, when it came to girls (though there's no excuse for "Thinn") or a weird, wacky or brand-affiliated child, when it came to boys.

Here are a few of the highlights from Baby Center's very strange list:

Girls:

Fashion-conscious: Couture, Fedora
Rolling Stones fans: Jagger
Altered names: Joshitha
J-names: J'adore, Jazzy, Jeevika, Juju, Jury
Aspirational: Ace, Admire, Excel, Monalisa, Oasis, Queenie
Places: Americus, California, Zealand
Just plain weird: Inny,

The family cookbook with grandma's notes covered in splatters from years in the kitchen could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to the popularity of food blogs and cooking apps. But a new "DIY History" project through the University of Iowa hopes to bridge the two worlds. The university is scanning a 20,000-item collection of vintage recipes, and asking food-loving volunteers to help transcribe and tag them, making gems like the ones below searchable and accessible to the public.

Proceed with caution, however. These recipes might be a little trickier to execute than grandma's artichoke dip. It takes an adventurous chef to follow vague instructions from hundreds of years ago, before the modern oven was invented.

The best cookbooks of 2012

Mrs. Samuel Leeds's recipe for 'Cold Slaugh' and ale From the cookbook and travel diary of Mrs. Samuel Leeds, a recipe for 'Cold Slaugh' is followed by a recipe for beer!

Cold Slaugh
Cut your cabbage fine, make a regular drawn butter, then pour in some vinegar. When it boils beat up the yolks of two

Long waits result in frustrated passengersAs we all know, air travel has become a nightmare, from long security lines to flight delays and it's only worse at the holidays. Though it's easy to blame the airlines for everything that goes wrong, the quality of passengers has also declined, according to a new tell-all book, "Tales from the Tarmac."

Self-published by Claudia Helena Oxee, "Tales from the Tarmac" has already received a good deal of publicity, with a write-up in the Los Angeles Times and PRNewser. Oxee worked in airline ground operations in major airports like JFK and for airlines like TWA and Pan Am for 16 years.

Modern manners: travel ettiquette

“Once, a passenger of considerable size, a bride, stampeded the gate area in her complete wedding gown attire, tiara and all,” Oxee writes. “After asking her to change into comfortable clothing for her overseas flight, she boldly refused and demanded an upgrade using locker room profanities.” Another passenger demanded a ticket to Germany in spite of the fact that he

The image as scanned by Photoshopped Disasters.File this ad in the vault of epic airbrushing fails.

Model Joan Smalls appears to be sporting a strange extra limb in a campaign for Gucci's spring collection. The offending photograph was discovered in an issue of American Express Departures magazine by the watchdog website Photoshop Disasters, and it's certainly a sight to behold.

5 Photoshop fails you wouldn't believe

At first glance, Smalls's good looks distract from her lower body, which is blocked by a snakeskin purse. But then, wait-what's that? Is that supposed to be her leg, under the purse?

"Women keep a lot of things in their purses, but their hips aren't one of them. I'll be the first to admit that I'm no expert on women's hips (having spent little to no time near them) but even I know that they tend to be somehow connected to an actual woman," wrote Bryce, at Photoshop Disasters. "One day, I hope to confirm this."

It appears that Smalls perched on the corner of the table with both legs pointed towards her right, then

Though at first glance they may look like dollhouses, these photographs are actually miniature recreations of rooms from classic novels like Jane Eyre and The Awakening. In the nineteenth century women were confined to the home, literally and symbolically. They were expected to put their domestic roles as wives or mothers above all else, and female writers of the period reflected on that feeling of isolation in their work. Artist Julia Callon explores the concept of dangerous domesticity in this photo series that she calls "Houses of Fiction." In the first photograph, the private rooms of the heroines appear clean and tidy-but in the second photograph are destroyed by a malevolent force.

Is 12-12-12 a lucky wedding date?Forget once in a lifetime: this year, thousands of couples are tying the knot on 12-12-12, a once in a century wedding date.

According to a survey by David's Bridal, approximately 7,500 brides will tie the knot on December 12, 2012. To put things in perspective, that's a 1,446 percent increase from last year's un-special 12-12-11.

What's in a wedding date?

The date is popular across the globe. French news agency the Agence France Presse reports that in Hong Kong nearly four times as many couples will be married on 12-12-12, as compared to last year, and in Singapore, 540 couples will be married on 12-12-12, eight times as many from the previous year.

Marry Abroad UK, a planning website for weddings abroad, told Yahoo! Shine it has received a 15-percent increase in inquiries about that date, despite the fact that it falls outside the traditional May to September wedding season. "The lucky couples who have succeeded in booking 12-12-12 will be amongst a very select few in the world,