Do you love soaking up warm rays while listening to water lap the shore? If you’re like most people, you relish spending time on a gorgeous beach in the summer sun. The next time you’re daydreaming about a beach vacation, consider heading to one of these fabulous destinations:

 

The Outer Banks, North Carolina

The Outer Banks are a breathtakingly lovely chain of barrier islands off of the coast of North Carolina. They have long been one of the most popular East Coast beach destinations. The Outer Banks are known for their calm surf and great swimming conditions, as well as for the variety of great activities offered – horseback riding on the beach, hang gliding, and a variety of water sports. You can also tour shipwrecks, visit the famous Currituck Beach Lighthouse, or make a fascinating trek to the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hill.

 

Miami Beach, Florida

Miami Beach is popular with people from all walks of life – well-moneyed vacationers, the 20-something party crowd, families with kids, and folks just looking for a low-key and relaxed getaway. The white sand beaches are stunning and the warm Atlantic water offers wonderful opportunities for recreation, including kayaking and surfing. There are excellent restaurants, shops, and spas in the area, as well as more serious cultural offerings like the Bass Museum and the Holocaust Memorial.

 

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Myrtle beach is located just a short drive from gorgeous Charleston, SC. It’s a favorite East Coast hotspot for beachgoers of all stripes. The area offers large resorts at reasonable prices, as well as opportunities for boating, myriad watersports, and snorkeling and scuba diving. Myrtle Beach is also a great choice for you if you’re looking to include some golfing in your vacation getaway, since the area boasts over a hundred high-quality golf courses. If you’ll be traveling with kids, make sure to visit the area’s hugely popular Family Kingdom Amusement Park. 

 

San Diego, California

San Diego is a destination that lets you relish the surf and sand while also enjoying a variety of urban attractions just nearby. The area is famous for its glorious weather, ever-sunny skies, vividly blue ocean water, and bright white-sand beaches. The opportunities for watersports (particularly surfing) are endless. When you’ve had your fill of the beach, you can head out to great cultural and recreational offerings like the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla and SeaWorld San Diego. In addition, the area offers wonderful hiking, walking, and running trails, like the hugely popular trails at the Torrey Pines State Reserve.

 

U.S Virgin Islands

This Caribbean hotspot offers you a wonderful combination of remote peacefulness and bustling entertainment. You’ll enjoy relaxing on the quiet and expansive beaches, as well as engaging in fun watersports like parasailing, snorkeling, and jet skiing. The area also offers wonderful restaurants and shopping venues. If you’re a history buff, you’ll enjoy learning about the colonial past of the U.S Virgin Islands, since there are ample opportunities for exploring the historical background of the area. There are three islands you can visit, each with its own unique flair – St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. Why not visit all of them while you’re there? 

 

What’s a worthy protagonist without a formidable rival? If you love diving into a good book, then chances are you’ve come to appreciate the tension and complexity that a memorable villain can add to a piece of fiction. Here are five of the most unsettling and enduring villains to ever appear between the covers of a book:

 

Long John Silver from Treasure Island

Long John Silver is one of the most fiendish characters ever created by author Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a shrewdly calculating and treacherous one-legged pirate whose duplicitous nature makes him quite a slippery challenge to the story’s hero, Jim Hawkins. Though he starts out as a mentor to Hawkins, his commitment to his own best interest makes him willing to turn on his young mentee without an ounce of regret. 

 

Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist

Bill Sikes is among the most vicious characters ever penned by Charles Dickens. He is a rough, violent, and brutal career criminal, both a robber and an exploiter and abuser of children. He is prone to sudden bouts of terrifying rage and even goes so far as to explode in anger and beat his girlfriend to death, one of the most viscerally terrifying scenes to appear in any of Dickens’s novels. Dickens gives Sikes no redeeming qualities, and this makes him one of the darkest villains in literary history. 

 

Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley is the brilliant villain in a series of crime novels by Patricia Highsmith. He starts out as a petty criminal getting by on his smarts in the realms of forgery, deception, and impersonation. Eventually, he goes so far as to murder a wealthy young man and assume his identity. Whenever Ripley’s charade is questioned, he is willing to resort to extreme (and often bloody) measures to keep his assumed identity protected. His wicked and ever-scheming ways make him one of the brilliant bad guys ever inked onto paper. 

 

Count Fosco, The Woman in White

This villain from Wilkie Collins’ popular novel became the archetype for many crime-novel antagonists – a corpulent, refined, cultured, self-indulgent but shrewdly intelligent and calculating villain, hiding deviance beneath a well-dressed exterior. Fosco conjures a scheme to deprive Laura Fairlie of her wealth and soundness of mind, and chillingly destroys Laura’s sister without an ounce of regret. 
 

Have you heard the online buzz about “Pinterest” and found yourself wondering what exactly it is? Read on to learn about this exciting photo sharing website that is has been rapidly gaining in popularity since its launch in 2010:

 

An Overview of Pinterest

Pinterest is a social photo sharing website with a pinboard-style format that enables users to create and organize image collections based on specific themes – for example, certain events, interests, holidays, and hobbies. As a Pinterest user, you can browse other people’s photo pinboards, hit “like” on photos you admire, and “re-pin” other people’s images so that they will appear in your own collection. Both Twitter and Facebook have options that allow you to share your Pinterest “pins.” Essentially, Pinterest acts as a personalized media platform in which users’ content can be browsed on the main page.

 

Background of Pinterest

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009 and started with small test group of invitation-only members. Just nine months after the website was officially launched, it had over 10,000 users, and shortly after that it was named Time Magazine’s August 2011 issue as one of the “50 Best Websites of 2011.” By December of that same year, Pinterest had become one of the largest social networking services on the web, with over ten million visits per week, and shortly after that it was recorded as having 11.7 million unique users, which made it the fastest site in history to break through the ten million unique visitor mark. The popularity of Pinterest has continued to spread at a rapid pace and it is now the third largest social network website in the United States. 

 

Using Pinterest

How do people use Pinterest? In a nutshell, the site is designed so that you can connect with others around the world over imagery that relates to mutual interests. So Pinterest essentially serves two main functions, a personal one and a social one. On the personal front, it provides a forum for the preservation, archiving, organization, and displaying of photos that matter to you, arranged around themes of your choosing – like a virtual version of your own family albums. On the social front, its purpose is that it allows you to share those images with other users and also interact with those users’ photos, connecting with others based on similar interests. 

 

Getting Started With Pinterest

To register a new Pinterest account, you can either receive an invitation from a friend already registered or go to the Pinterest site and directly request an invitation. You can also establish and access a Pinterest account by linking Pinterest to a Twitter or Facebook account – however, it’s important to note that, in order to interact with Pinterest on Facebook, you need to have the new Facebook Timeline format activated. In addition, once you have a Pinterest account, you can get the Pinterest app for iPhone (which was recently updated with exciting new features) and the company now has an iPad app in development. If you’re a non-iPhone user, you can use Pinterest Mobile to access the site from your mobile device.

 

Other Useful Aspects of Pinterest

Pinterest is designed to help you connect with things and people that interest you. Here’s how it works – on the main Pinterest page, a “pin feed” appears, displaying the chronological activity from the Pinterest boards that you have chosen to follow. To help you find new boards and pins that might compel you, you can visit a “Tastemakers” page that recommends content to you (based on your past pins, etc). There are presently four central sections to browse, under the following titles: everything, videos, popular, and gifts. These categories are in place to help you connect as quickly and conveniently as possible with pins and boards relevant to your taste and interests.