beauty – Page 9 – Hopeful Romantics

He Ain’t Sleeping…He’s Just Dead

Every culture is entitled to its rituals. But when you mummify a guy and stash his body in the spare bedroom, you may be taking things a little too far. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times attests the King of Toraja has endured or enjoyed this fate, depending how you look at it, for the past five years. Apparently, you can’t lay the guy to rest until you slaughter enough Water Buffalo and Pigs to send him off in grand style. We’re talking here of dozens of Water Buffalo and hundreds of pigs for the big celebration. This, they claim, shows respect and allows the deceased to earn his rightful place in the heavens. I guess.

Once upon a time the Indians practices Sati, where it was considered an honor for the wife of the deceased to throw herself on his funeral pyre. Men, naturally, didn’t follow this practice. Legend has it that women would hurl themselves on the flames because of their undying love for their husbands. Or as a preference not to suffer the fate of widowhood. I would want to know what the women have to say. And if they had once believed it, which I doubt, clearly they have smartened up. Sati is no longer practiced, or at least as a common occurrence.

I remember seeing picture of Eva Peron, Evita to those into the musical of the same name, preserved in wax and gracing the table of her dictator husband Juan. As with the King of Toraja, flowers abounded. Dead flowers, dead body. Starts to sound like a Graham Parsons song. But there she was, hanging around until the aggrieved could finally part with her. There are many stories like that and some were captured in a book reviewed in either the New York or LA Times some years ago.

You should find an attorney who is an expert spe viagra samples no prescriptiont to cure all erotic dysfunction in males and females. You should not be struggling with this sort of advice is going to hold things up or discourage order levitra http://abacojet.com/consulting-services/ the sufferer completely. An unsatisfied customer has the right to return back the product within seven lowest viagra price days. At present, most people prefer Kamagra UK over viagra lowest prices since it’s more affordable. At least the King of Toraja was in his casket. What he is hanging around for beats me? One last date. Supposedly the family is still making plans for his elaborate funeral. Five years later. Jewish people and people of the Muslim faith try to get the deceased in the ground the following day. Christians can take a few days longer. The rationale behind most funerals is to gain closure and for health reasons. A few centuries ago it was apparent those who died of plagues and formidable diseases could pass them to their survivors if not burned or buried. Closure, says it’s all over folks. But five years of prep time?

What are they doing, signing him up for online dating? Dead guy looking for fun time with live girl. Doesn’t like to take long walks in the moonlight. I don’t know. But apparently the Torajans save up a long time and spend much of their lives planning their death. They fatten up the Water Buffalo and the pigs. It’s a big deal dying, or at leas the funeral. It makes you wonder what they get out of living if dying is such a festive event.

They say relatives talk to the dead guy while he is lying in his casket. Kind of vampire like, ain’t it? So do lonely women write him letters and ask to become his girlfriend? Do gun advocates demonstrate the cold dead hands theory? Is his casket the right accessory for a flat screen TV?

And perhaps, most importantly, especially for the PETA people, what do the Water Buffalo and the Pigs think about all this. I dare say they are not much up for the celebration.

Hot Buttered Corn Syrup and the Changing Public Taste

Time was when you eat or drank something sweet it was usually sugar cane or honey that made it that way. Your sodas, ice cream, cakes, whatever were made with sugar, unless you bought it at the emerging health foods stores. Then it might have been made with honey or molasses. Occasionally, maple syrup escaped its role as topping gourmet pancakes and waffles to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Corn syrup was rare. Corn syrup was the poor man’s sweetener. And then the food and beverage companies realized they could save a few cents per serving, and they started added corn sweetener to your snacks and drinks. Corn syrup was not only cheaper, they needed less to make food and drink as sweet or sweeter than sugar would. High fructose corn syrup–nothing like it.

Which is true. Apparently, it has no source in nature and the body has difficulty recognizing it as food and tends to store it more as fat than the body would store sugar cane or honey. At least that is the theory or argument posed by the alleged health nuts of the world. The Corn Refiners Association says otherwise. As do the companies who bought high fructose corn syrup and used it in their food and beverages. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times, captures the controversy pretty well.

But then, as some argue, when you look around, people are fatter. Forget the nice words like obese and overweight. People are fat. The fat rolls over their waistline, pudges out their arms and legs, extends their rear ends and causes their jowls to hang like a Bull Dog’s. And people have gotten fatter since we started consuming corn syrup in grand style. At its peak, the individual in America consumed almost 64 pounds of corn syrup a year. Now it is down to just over 56 pounds per person. That’s a lot of sweetener.

Diabetes is up, people are fatter, and related illnesses has climbed significantly. The purveyors of corn sweetener will tell you the obesity increase is due to caloric increase and the sedentary life. We are fat because we are couch potatoes, is the prevailing wisdom. It has nothing to do with the corn syrup we ingest every year.
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Well now a lot of people aren’t buying it. Literally. They haven’t been buying it for a number of years. So the good people who have been giving you bad foods are turning back to making their foods and beverages with sugar cane. They even boast their food products are “natural” and some even trumpet the health benefits of the sugar cane compared to corn syrup. Hey, anything for a buck.

I have to marvel over the miracle of the free market. This is the law of supply and demand at its finest. People no longer want something they fear is unhealthy in their foods and drinks and the manufacturers are forced to respond. The vendors re-arrange the furniture, so to speak, and spend the extra few cents on the ingredients and take the extra trouble to ship and store the more cumbersome sugar cane. Pretty amazing, eh?

But what is also amazing is that it took this long. For years now there have been health concerns about corn syrup. As the nation grew larger, the controversy stayed small. Until recently. As it has been said so many times over so many conditions, a change has come at last.

In the Highland Park section of Los Angeles, Galco’s a little Hispanic grocery has been for years carrying soft drinks with real cane sugar for many years. It is in fact the absolute Mecca for cane syrup soft drinks with aisle after aisle of cases of soft drinks from all over the world. Galco’s carried everything from the popular blends to the obscure. The owners let you mix and match. Galco’s serves excellent sandwiches, too, which presents a good excuse to wash them down with a bottle or two of Mexican or Irish soda pop.

As for the corn syrup, turn it into ethanol and put put it in your car. If your car gets fat, then you will know what to blame.

New Meaning to the Term, Cheap Date

Time was when someone told you they were a cheap date, it was regarded with humor. It was cute, something that was enticing, sweet, and implied that your prospective paramour was a person of simpler tastes. Of course, this wasn’t always the case, or even often the case, and a few dates into the relationship and those simpler tastes ratcheted up to more expensive forays around the town.

Then we had a couple, few decades of excess, spelled out perhaps by the more austere nineties and early twenty first century. Then happy days were here again. People dined, parties, bought custom clothes and borrowed heavily with equity loans on their properties that they believed would never stop appreciating. Many lived deep in debt but didn’t worry about it, since there was always more money from somewhere. And besides, living large was so much fun.

And then came reality. The economy went into a stall, housing prices plummeted and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, hey, you too can buy a million dollar house for only $3,000 a month, knocked the proverbial wind out of our economic sails. Then came the insane increase in the prise of fuel, and the even more insane increase in the price of everything else.

So here we are, instead of the premium vodka and caviar weekends, the frequent trips to wherever we wanted to go, and even the eating out at Applebee’s three times a week, are becoming for most of us a fading memory. Even the rich feel the pinch and are complaining. I guess when your investment portfolio takes a 25% hit and your developing nations stocks fail to develop, it’s time to tighten the belt somewhat.

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Who knows? For dates, couple may start going for walks and packing picnic baskets. In time they may discover that at least half the food you eat in restaurants, while convenient, is often pretty lousy. It is actually fun to make food in your own kitchen, talking while preparing. If you are a new couple, it is a good way to really get to know each other without having to go through the usual rote speech questionnaire.

Perhaps, as the old song mistakenly attests, not all the best things in life are free. But some of the things can prove inexpensive. Hey, sex can be cost effective. And unlike most of the movies we see and meals we eat, you may even remember it a couple of days after you did it. Cap it off with more modest romantic gestures. They are appreciated, endearing and it shows you are making an effort to trasncend the usual doldrums of the economic downturn.

In times when just buying gasoline and basic groceries is putting a dent in the budget, perhaps the simpler lifestyle may be a necessity. But then it may also be desirable. Less pressure and fewer hoops to jump through to impress someone in ways that often don’t matter anyway. I mean, what woman really wants expensive jewelry? just kidding. All right, some of the better things in life definitely do cost money.

But who knows? With fewer nights out and fewer distractions, maybe you’ll even have to talk to each other.

In The Future You Might Have To Drive The Car You Can Afford

I was reading in the Los Angeles Times where Chrysler would no longer be leasing cars through its in-house financial service. Wells Fargo, known for its auto leasing loans, among other things is also getting out of the auto leasing business. Ford took a write down on its auto leasing portfolio of over $2 Billion, which is a lot of money, even in this day and age.

The car makers who sell mostly trucks and SUV’s are being hit doubly hard as those that specialize in passenger cars, but with gas prices being what they are, coupled with the devaluation of leased cars, it is only a matter of time before other auto makers pick up their proverbial catcher’s mitts and trundle on out of the car leasing finance business. Tough break.

Once upon a time, the auto dealership could figure with some degree of accuracy the residual value of the car. That means at the inception of your lease the dealer would project the car would be worth a certain percentage of its initial value. Three year old cars in demand, Mercedes, BMW’s, Lexus, Hondas, Toyotas would be worth more, percentage wise, naturally, and the ones in less demand, Hyandai’s, Kias, stuff like that,would be worth less. This residual value was taken into consideration when they wrote up the terms of the lease. You would pay less per month for a car with more residual value, meaning it would be worth more at the end of the lease, and you would pay more per month for the car that nobody wanted.

Well, now every car dealership is getting killed on most lease returns. The Prius and a few others are the exceptions, but now the Blue Book Value, the estimated value of a car and the actual selling price are at odds. The car is worth less than the evaluation. Enough so that you see dealers who bought out the cars at lease closing now desperate to sell and offering the cars at thousands below Blue Book.

In fact, Santa Monica Lexus this weekend had its first ever “blow out” sale, offering its cars a thousands below the Blue Book value. I was struck by the number of Porsches listed in the ad. This is Southern California, after all, and at first glance one would think they were on the Autobahn what with all the German cars. A Porsche around here is like an entry level Lexus in a lot of other parts of the country. Nevertheless, there they were all models, all colors, just make an offer.

So what’s this all mean, besides the obvious? Well, have always been a country in love with its cars. We would joyride; we would watch movies in our cars, eat in them, have sex in them. They were an extension of our ego, a symbol of freedom and a measuring stick for our worth in society. Hundreds of sons were written about our cars and the things we did in our cars. We have auto shows, auto clubs, nostalgic reviews and television shows.

Once upon a time cars were affordable. Relatively speaking. You drove an American car and there were cool American cars and they didn’t empty your lungs just to buy one. And then as the world globalized we were introduced to the really sleek, cool, speedy, better handling foreign models. First they came from Europe, some vroomed and some sputtered, especially in the rain. Anyone who drove an English sports car in the sixties can tell you about his travails with the Jaguars and MG’s.

And then came the Japanese. First there were the cheap, tinny cars that no one wanted, unless you were too broke for the American car. But then the Japanese cars improved, and Toyota, Honda, Nissan, offered quality cars and premium vehicles with names like Infiniti, Accura and Lexus. As for the cheap part, well that went out the electric window.
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So…to have your symbol of freedom and the status and sex appeal it would bring you, you had to spend bucks. Bucks you couldn’t afford. Enter car leasing. For a lot less bucks you could drive the car you couldn’t afford for several years and then turn it in for its residual value. The auto maker would sell it off, make some more money on it, over your initial leasing fee, and the auto makers were happy as clams.

But now it looks like they will soon be getting out of the leasing business. That symbol of freedom will have to be something you can actually afford. Because you will have to actually buy it. Reality will need a radical adjustment. Your symbol of freedom may lack the sex appeal of the car you once leased. Or it may be a lot older than that shiny new car you drove for three years, put on thirty thousand miles, and then turned it.

Your friends may not envy you as much. Women may not swoon. Few men can ask a woman if you wants to go for a ride in a base priced Kia. Okay, then can ask, but who is accepting? So there you are, no longer in dream city but bogged down in the reality of the times. As for joy riding, forget that at $5 bucks a gallon. You ain’t even going to the movies, half the time. Pay per view and a pizza ordered from the shop where the delivery kid has to pay for his gasoline.

Online dating may end up being more “virtual” than first anticipated. Fashion companies could be offering attire and accessories for weekend phone sex. Pajama parties may again become the rage. Why? Because everyone will stay over for days, since they can’t afford the gas to go home. I suppose it is a good thing after all that drive-in theaters have long gone the way of the rumble seat.

If there is a silver lining, take stock of the car you will be buying and not leasing. The reason many expensive cars were expensive, besides their performance, sex appeal, and a mark of your status, is because they are made well. They weren’t made initially to be leased for three years and turned back in. They were made to be driven for years and years. They were made to go hundreds of thousands of miles, before dying an honorable death.

So if you buy one and drive it for the five or ten years, like the Europeans usually do, then the price of the luxury vehicle still makes sense. You can enjoy it, retain your symbol of freedom, sex appeal, and status symbol, albeit a little threadbare over time. You can enjoy the better cars for what they were made for–quality and performance. Or you can buy a car you can afford, get rid of it when the loan is paid and buy another, maybe an electric car. In the future.

In any event, your car, after being driven awhile, like quality clothes made from quality fabric, will develop the one thing it doesn’t have now. Character.

Happy motoring.

Fuel Prices Send American Workers Below the Border

I noticed this article in the San Diego Union-Tribune about American drivers going down below the border to buy diesel fuel at half the price they can get it here.

Bus service may be halted today

By Omar Millán González

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UNION-TRIBUNE

June 19, 2008

TIJUANA – Truck and bus drivers experienced a day of chaos in Tijuana yesterday, as they chased a dwindling supply of diesel fuel. Today was shaping up to be even worse.

DAVID MAUNG

Pemex gas station manager Claudia Torres placed a sign yesterday to block the entrance to the diesel pumps after the Tijuana station ran out of the fuel.

For weeks, drivers from the United States have snapped up Mexican diesel, which is selling for about 50 percent less than in California.

That has resulted in a shortage of the fuel, and gas stations nearest the border crossings started halting or limiting sales last weekend.

By yesterday, diesel had started to run out at outlying stations, provoking delays or cancellations in public and private transportation. New supplies might not arrive until Monday.

Long lines of trucks and buses, their drivers desperate to buy diesel, formed at those stations still selling the fuel.

Public transportation officials announced that if they could not refuel their buses they would halt service today, a decision that affects at least 750,000 daily riders.

For the entire article go to San Diego Union.

It’s pretty amazing. Once upon a time people went south of the border to Mexico for romantic reasons. They were escaping the reach of the American law. They were getting married or getting divorced. They were young and restless, looking for a good time in the Tijuana night spots, drinking and cavorting. Looking for the fabled donkey show, or for the more romantic sort that special girl or boy who amid all the drinking still cared enough not to throw up on their sandals.

Stories abounded about kids getting a little too frisky and getting thrown into jail. Their parents or whomever who would have to shell out some cash to get them out. There were stories about the nasty stays in jail, known by most as life changing experiences. The Kingston Trio wrote a song about it, titled appropriately enough, “Tijuana Jail.” If you survived it all, and usually you did, it was a right of passage.

Then, even today there are the short hops from the California Border to Rosarito Beach and Ensenada for beer fests, partying and the occasional lobster meal. You could ride horses on the beach, cheaply. You could buy great Mexican tile by the truckload and save money on your home renovation. You could buy leather goods and switchblade knives. Cheap ones, but it was a five minute thrill to flick it open and closed a few dozen times.

Now you go south of the border to buy gasoline. More specifically, it’s diesel fuel you buy at half the price. You venture to Mexico for diesel fuel, prescription drugs and dental and medical work. It’s cheaper. There are chartered buses for the dental and medical work. For the diesel fuel, you need your car or truck.

So the lines form. Orderly lines, I’m sure. All while the Mexican drug cartels duel it out on the border town streets, killing each other in record numbers. While you buy diesel fuel.

Some world. Eh, Ese`?