London fashion designer ­Carmina De Young is bringing her first ready-to-wear collection to market with the support of two local fashion mavens, wardrobe and image consultant Susan Jacobs, and business mentor Gloria Dona.

De Young’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection is now available by appointment at the Pop with Purpose studio,

The studio recently held an informal fashion show featuring De Young’s collection.

De Young was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico and discovered her passion as a young child, taking inspiration from her mother’s creative flair for fashion and design.

A graduate of Fanshawe College’s Fashion Design program, De Young’s clothing has been showcased locally and on national platforms, including at Vancouver Fashion Week and at the Caisa Fashion Show at Western University.

De Young started her own label in 2012 and now has a 25-piece ready-to-wear collection ranging from office to casual activities to a night on the town.

Each piece is available in size XS to XL with prices ranging from $79 to $259.

Instead of trying to break into the notoriously-difficult retail market, Dona and Jacobs offered to bring the De Young collection directly to London women through the Pop with Purpose studio.

“We love that we can offer women locally designed and manufactured clothing where they know the designer and know that they are helping make dreams come true,” says Jacobs. “There’s power in that. It’s incredible.”

Topspin scoops award

London-based Topspin Technologies Ltd., has been awarded the Synapse Life Sciences award for innovation in health. Their product, the Topspin360, beat out more than 60 invited applicants for products that demonstrate an innovation in health in Ontario.

This award follows the London-based Techalliance “Techcellence” award the company won earlier this year.

The Topspin360 is the first patented training device that helps improve neck muscles to reduce concussion risk.

Theo Versteegh, who earned his PhD in physiotherapy from Western University in 2016, developed the device after watching the Sidney Crosby hit in 2011 that caused his concussion.

Versteegh found that many sports concussions are the result of the whiplash effect.

The Topspin can be used in all sports, especially those at high risk for concussion, and also in military applications.

Northerner joins Fortune

David Ramsay, a former cabinet minister in the government of the Northwest Territories, has joined the board of directors of London-based Fortune Minerals .

Ramsay has more than 20 years of elected public office experience in the Northwest Territories. His cabinet portfolios included industry, justice, transportation and public utilities.

Fortune is working with three levels of government on infrastructure projects important to the success of the company’s NICO gold-cobalt-bismuth-copper project in the Northwest Territories.

One project is a 94-kilometre all-season highway to the community of Whati, northwest of Yellowknife.

The road is supported by the Tlicho Government, a Dene First nation and would reduce the cost of living and improve the quality of life in the outlying Tlicho communities and promote economic activity. Fortune has already received environmental assessment approval to build a spur road from Whati to the NICO mine.

Delta hosts bridal show

The London Wedding Professionals will hold their second Bridal Showcase at the Delta London Armouries on April 30.

The event offers a smaller, more intimate experience for brides to meet local wedding industry experts, ask questions, and get inspired for their wedding day.

The show features products and services from professionals including gowns, photography, florists, venues, DJs, hair and makeup and wedding planners.

The showcase also puts a focus on inspiring brides with Vignettes throughout the space showcasing different themes or colour palettes.

The show runs from 11 a.m-3 p.m. and admission is free.

Student makes his pitch

Sean Cornelius from St. André Bessette Catholic secondary school in London is one of 20 teenage entrepreneurs heading to Toronto May 8–10 to compete in this year’s edition of the Young Entrepreneurs, Make Your Pitch competition

Selected from the 204 two-minute video pitches entered, Cornelius earned the right to participate in a Dragon’s Den-style pitch contest at Discovery, Ontario Centres of Excellence’s annual innovation-to-commercialization conference, to be held on May 9 at Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Hamilton Road looks ahead

Business people in the Hamilton Road will hold an information meeting Wednesday about the creation of the Community Improvement Plan that could lead to the creation of the Hamilton Road Business Improvement Area. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the BMO Sports Centre on Rectory St. and guest speakers include Mayor Matt Brown and MPP Teresa Armstrong.Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/****-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/vintage-formal-dresses

A Grande Iced coffee sweetened with whole milk always
supplied Trey, the Zombie, with energy. On a bright yellow morning
Trey sat down on a canvass deck chair outside of Starbucks.
He puffed on his e-cigarette. Then he took a sip from his plastic cup.
And as he tasted the refreshing creamy coffee, he remembered
what it was like to be a human being. Before the infection decimated
the world’s population of men, women, and children, everybody
was killing each other with double barreled shotguns, sleeping
with their best friend’s girlfriend to prove that they were not
in love with their best friend, forcing girls and women of all
ages into cramped basements leaving them with a bowl of
white rice and a cup of water, telling them that they had to sleep
with strange men who lived in America and other countries polluted
with lust and desire, or else they would get sent to the bottom
of a swamp where the Alligators roamed the muddy shores in
search of flesh. Trey remembered that he had been a college student
living at home, working as a tennis instructor part time at the
rec center down the street from where he resided at.
This little girl Amy bit him on the ankle. It was the first time
he had taught her how to hit a topspin serve with such
velocity that the tennis ball would bounce off the service box
and rise over the chain-linked fence, where the zombies were, crawling
over and up onto the hard courts. As Trey drank his iced coffee
he realized that life was more pleasant now. People didn’t shoot each
other anymore. Closeted gays and lesbians didn’t sleep with their best friend’s boyfriends and girlfriends just to prove that they were heterosexuals. And wicked men with shaggy hair and yellow teeth didn’t buy young girls and women from cramped basements and **** them because they had the money and the motivation to follow their lustful desires. No. None of this happened anymore. Now that the Zombies had taken over. Everybody just went to Starbucks, and drank iced coffees sweetened with milk.

The moment I was told I had talent,
Lit up my eyes so fast,
That feeling of self-belief,
I knew my talent would last.
The rush of hitting a tennis ball,
With topspin or slice,
I was becoming something indescribable,
It felt more than nice.
This sport means the absolute world to me,
If not mistaken, it's my life,
I'll do whatever it will take,
Dedication, consistency, and strife.

Stilted lingerie that fashions a kneaded traipse between trap-door destiny of double-take simultagnosia is a harder fright to outfox that even the most ghoulish amicable maskirovka of a throttled sapience beleaguered by the tropes of a tattermedalion class of Scarface vigor in the face of benighted tomes of a cruised palindrome of efficacy bromides flickering on the outskirts of esoteric thrones of catapults droning on about the listless squalor of philandering phronesis of ecdysiast *** in the cyprian hedges of limited wealth bemoaning the poverty of deprivation because of whiskers through feline sight languid in the remedial dances of captaincy snuck between the edges of destiny cordial only to Home Alone. We must sneak through the verdant pacification of an accordion grimace flanged by the eked snide spite of termagants of termination ruined by the future flickering into past distance because of spartan brutish mannequins of pasteurization glimpsing the thanatousia of death vindicated by vengeance brazen with a Colorado snare of a pinned etiolation of marauders of corsairs that only brave the delusion when the eternity is a trick-or-treat truth and dare consummated on the flimsy agape lychgates of constraints in flair that damage the ragged hypostasized engine of a blinkered hubris belonging to an anointed rigmarole fashioned into the pottery of fungible metamorphosis rather than frangible pulverization that scrapes through liturgy with abnegation rather than relishing plumage beyond the apes of apish planetary scares.


Trimming the blockbuster wearisome hardihood of plumes of fumigated regal ******* in the softened epigone of whiter masks of screaming scares
The times aplenty of swansong ignorance are a plaid disaster of Twister renegades that spar against the visagist carapace of hearkened live aware of ghosts that fuel the hypocrisy of belligerent mares
Forever stranded through the finifugal heaves of a 32 leaves magician of rollicking base jumps with acidic tatters in King of the World stunts the hirsute body politic is a pump and dump trumpery of livid thrills on the substitution of funk for skunk rather than grooves for humps
Nevertheless the scrappy schlep of a foggy dreary destiny is ablaze with Sergeants blistering through Forest Gump bumps as the alighted 80s returns with a vengeance in empires of victory rather than slippages of slump
Renewed by the litigable menace of oilers ****** with crudity and swimming in the askew verdure of the lewd and **** we bolt through the coltish demiurge of fastened fascination flaming with firebrands of deliberation scampering away in blemishes of profanity too rude
We scrape the legacy of elegant injustice and injury because the flamestun hypocrisy of leprosy caused by time is a rustic blue suede shoe that flummoxes in hibernation because of staggered queues ravishing too much of a screwball to be nailed because black artifacts are always unscrewed
Thanks to teamwork the cosmogony of regalia knows the Montana providence of a lissome liposuction radical in renewal because of the Morrison Hotel rather vacant but always populated with a carpal tunnel of slick oleaginous dramatics for histrionic history likable because the news is a purple hue relishing the paradise of cineaste rundles of candlelit mood
Imagine searing the sunlit halidom of the peak-time grooves of unbuttoned blarney frank and swiveled on sclerotic pretense slippery in fashion only to be ironclad in personas of the whispered woo in termagant liturgy that is a colporteur of genius hinged upon collective suitcases of IOUs blameless because the criminal is always hatched upon a 108 pentagon of newsy gripping footage of managerial flames of a barnstorm beyond booths but never above the scarecrow minister of the voguish tempers of trudgery spawned into the folkspun homely ties and wrinkles of wizened love too Titanic to be used
Parker hobohemia scowls at the punitive warbles of marsupial kingpin southern flashes of hyperborean ramshackle ruins of pooches scampered around like littoral fragments of a cinematic crudity in defeated torpindage blistering with foresight in vengeance because the clockwork hour is amazed but horrified by belligerence in overdosed ledgers of legends amused
Time hearkens that craven radication of rhizogenic demiurge blinking above the sleeping awake ringleaders of sedition enthused because of malapert princes crackling with homage to honed sharpened edges of a double-edged whisper reversal into the antithesis of the heaving red serrated by the vindication of impertinent criminals flustered by the pinpointed genius of the Primarily Blues.
Time sees past the sedative fliction of fictitious mangers on primipara  tunes that the euphoria of the now is the cement of every LP belonging above the charlatans of chavish sutured into a surgical effigy of the whitewashed preeminence of discernment into the discs that surpass the ashen cordiality of permissive and permissible leaky faucets rasping through the headlines because of craters of love becoming glabrous above the halvorked entropy of newsy Newport News living above Virginia in Deep Impact legends tipsy on shipwrecks happening too soon to be  immaculate in any crimson style of an inescapable rhyme scheme trying with clambered witticism to achieve belletrist while escaping capstone filigrees of untouchable Terry Crews.
Flickering whimpers of the scary impenetrable Kansas City brain of the touchy hedges of fumigated marstions of erratic flackeys of breweries enthused in an amazed skullduggery of time slipping on crackles of fizzgigs of clambered retinues of radical roots between a tight avenue and a broadened broadway limping on the cinemas that belong to the truth and not the rickety barnstorm of ostentation encased by bonanzas to pontifical to create a topspin of HappyGilmore erasure in bridewells of roomy litigation in uncomfortable contortions of contacts without lenses to excuse.
In the cavernous spelunk of 1990s crimson bleeding into the  expansive liturgy of the ripples of percolation cornered into diminished vacancy anointed as ritualized contrition craving a tighter grip on the tightest swank that could ever be parlayed into New England madcap screws the hunters of the hunted hypocrisy become the travail of the antagonized epiphany of flackey rice in avaricious retches beyond the squabble of punks in due times for clockwork tickers and tickets swarming with infested blemish
The ridicule of sapience is the knowledgeable manicure of livid lurid hypertrophy in exaggeration of the knowledgeable tongue of the Flemish foundering on seaworthy chemists of menace and muse too suburban to ever be urbane bourgeosie limited rankled rancid rancor of ramshackle rackrent gouges too much of a Beetlejuice excuse.
Rhythm for the fulcate furrows of the hypogeiody of epochs slinkywith aced endeavors for misadventure likened to the greatest oiler in the 1980s terror list is a craven capture of photogenesis in rapture that fastens seatbelts of strawberry deaths of crackles of blinkered hubris accelerated by the twisters of vulcanized culmination blasted for history for headlines in ravines of mastery beyond the persnickety prestidigitation of magic sarcasm in the avalanche of dynasty never nastier than violence vile in acerbic posterization of plumage that is blacker than Rush Hour in the menace of Dennis in fractal philosophy funneled into one brittle muster of height rather than weight in freakish geometries of squirrels battering a home run cast away in fracture

I watch you as you do
we figure and I glue to it
small simples, lowly tries
as tears stream to break
and settles, wiley
pried open, the shopper lurks
products glow, seems too real
luster bursts and courts
to configure as topspin
directs, sets and disperses
this I see, selective
and the curse it churns
to pours so seeply.

Rocks

I threw them for no reason
Other than Old Harrisburg Road
Ran thick with crushed limestone
Inexhaustible at a languid pace
But finite as my patience with the pious
When I threw them fast and furious
At the window lights of the old school house
Or poor cousin Reesy
Out of plain spite
Rage cupped
In the palm of my hand
Fired sidearm with topspin
Until my arm ached
All those sharp edged consonants
Nuggets of vowels
From ancient pages of seabed
I threw them for no reason
Other than mindless thrill
Heedless of the crunch of words
Beneath the wheels of the morning milk truck.

This world is defiled quite
when the wildlife
try all night
to exile light.

A bunch of pompous pawprints
mark cacophonous coffins
where differing dolphins boxed in
fell to a bomb with topspin lobbed in.

The waxy ghosts
make flaxseed toast
while black sheep boast
that they’re lacking most.

The hyenas just laugh
at the beleaguered giraffe
sticking his neck in the path
of a snake oil salesman’s trap.

Now the derelict spiders
are perilous fighters
but carnivorous biters
lit them with lighters.

The alabaster wall
makes ever-after small
and lesser actors tall
through the collapse of all.

Now Cerberus
returns to us
as we burn to dust
for serpent trust.

So the deadened world is dismantled
like someone stepped on an ant hill
with a deafened anvil in a stampede standstill
because killing animals is the jaded man’s will.