(Los Angeles) “The Guys Who Spied for China,” by Gordon Basichis has just been posted on Kindle, Amazon’s EBook publishing arm. The novel is based on his real life experiences uncovering Chinese Espionage Networks operating in the United States in the eighties and nineties.
“The Guys Who Spied for China,” is being published by Minstrel’s Alley, an independent publishing and media group. This is the company’s first effort. The book was also released as a trade paperback and is available through Amazon, Baker and Taylor and is available in bookstores around the country.
“We are very excited about the publication of “The Guys Who Spied for China,” said M.J. Hammond, publisher and president of Minstrel’s Alley. We are excited to see the book listed on Kindle as we believe E-Publishing is the wave of the future.”
“The Guys Who Spied for China,” is our first published offering, so we naturally wish to oversee every stage of our marketing effort. The novel should draw not only from spy freaks but from a wider, more literary readership as well.
“This roman a clef is a most unusual spy book as it breaks the mold for this genre. It tells the story of what it is like to be suddenly thrust into the world of espionage.”
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Gordon Basichis is the author of two previous books, “The Constant Travellers,” and “Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story.” He is the co-founder of Corra Group, a Los Angeles based company that conducts employment background checks and corporate research for companies throughout the United States and around the world.
M.J. Hammond is a former entertainment industry executive who founded Minstrel’s Alley to publish popular books not found in mainstream publishing.
“Mainstream publishing has its purpose,” said Hammond. But the industry’s focus on celebrity and genre based books has left readers wanting. We hope to help bring a sense of adventure back to books and publishing.”
Background: Minstrel’s Alley is a Los Angeles based independent publisher that seeks to bring adventure back into the publishing industry by publishing books that have popular appeal but with more complexity than the standard mainstream fare. The new publishing group distributes its books through Amazon, Kindle, and assorted Internet outlets as well as through bookstores around the country. You can view Minstrel’s Alley at www.minstrelsalley.com
Language can be an art form. It is the tool, the medium with which writers and orators work to define the human experience. With the best of writing and, in fact, in the best or oratory and even casual conversation we use language to drill down on those experiences, to define a more precise description of our senses and emotions. It is also the brick and mortar of societies and civilizations.
Language enables us to make distinctions in what we mean. Through language we explore nuances and distinguish the severity of lack of it between one sensation or emotion and another. We organize our thoughts through language and can convey those thoughts and assign shadings of value to what is relatively the same experience. Language gives us the psychic leverage to not only interpret experiences, emotions, and idea with greater precision, it creates the means for the access to an even broader understanding of the human condition.
So, after centuries of honing and refining language, what do we do? We dumb it down. We take these complex experiences, ideas, and events of the human condition that have been passed on for generations and assign easy phrases and cheap jargon to cover the spectrum. We communicate in broad strokes and then fail to understand why there is so little understanding. Even our deeper emotions are communicated in sound bites and bytes and bits of phrases and jargon we employ for the general sensory experience.
And then we wonder why we screw up in romance, go to war, and can’t get across the complexity of social and political solutions. In fact, we encourage generality. We pretend to be distinctive, and issue buzz words like we are all unique in our own special way, we are like snow flakes, truly one of a kind. Yet we bow down to the altar of category and conformity. It seems that any message or idea that requires actual thought is scorned upon. We would rather have it short and sweet, even if in the end we find it confusing and unusable in our efforts to determine fact from fiction, to discern what someone is really trying to get at.
We encourage dumbing down in everything from our news programs to our entertainment. Love stories are over simplified with easy buzz words of engagement, loss, alienation, and then re-engagement. If only the world went like that. We watch our supposed movie heroes stumbling awkwardly like pre-adolescents when confronting the opposite sex. We find regal and entertainment that boys from the comedic boy groups don’t have the linguistic wherewithal to even ask girls out, yet along find ways to charm them into bed. In a world of free sex and mutual sexual aggression on both sides of the gender aisle, the viewing and reading audience is supposed to find it a major victory when our young heroes actually do it.
Forget about the nuances of relationships, the involvement and complexities of actually living together, of getting to know one another and absorbing the related personality and psychological changes our mates realize over time and experience. It would take far too many words to explain the vagaries of romance, as it does the vagaries of violence and the socio-political process, so we boil them down to simplistic jargon.
So in communication, when we try to communicate, even about our deepest emotions, we resort to buzz words and phrases. We stammer and stumble, as it is awkward enough trying to explain ourselves, and more so because we try to do it in general and often impenetrable terms. And when we try to explain concepts or issue forth on social, political and economic issues, we fear belaboring points and instead resort to sound bytes. Sound bytes that are encouraged by the media.
Sound bytes that are also encouraged by our friends and associates. Everyone is overworked and the input from so many information sources has created an overload. We can no longer focus and have witnessed a serious diminishing of attention spans. We are easily distracted, and while time management skills are not always the best, we simply don’t have the time for deeper explanations. We want it short, and we want it to the point. Simple phrases for complex issues. Who cares if we can’t understand?
Now there is a change and a need for change in communication forms. Some years back people did have time, and they would belabor points, deliver laborious and useless preambles, before getting to the point. We would sit and sigh, biting our tongues while they rambled on in tangential and desultory forms hoping there is a point to what they are saying. Many people still resort to this as their principal measure of communications. We roll our eyes as they try to decided what year the year took place–was it ’81 or ’83?– was it Sam or Steve? And all this discourse is replete with ridiculous biographies and personal tidbits about people you know nothing a bout and don’t care to. Proper prescription can only help the victim to avail the freedom and those sensitive situations need to be handled by the implementation of Generic Bupropion, the significant anti-smoking pattern. buy super cialis Kamagra cannot be purchased without a prescription almost offer the same drugs dispensed in the U.S. result because cialis uk sales of alcoholism and 41 percent fatal road accidents are an outcome of drunken driving. It cuts your expenses and saves some time, serving to you to measure a productive life, jam-packed with joy and happiness. martinblaser.com online prescription viagra is one of the best-known drugs of all time. Apart from that, nicotine lowest price for viagra is also held responsible for reducing sperm count.
But then on the other hand, when information is relevant and may strike a point where nuance is significant in distinguishing the elements of one idea or emotion from the next, or at least explore them on deeper levels, we find the person we are addressing issues for the summary “got it.” They are telling us they full understand what they are saying. They knew where we are going, so no need to continue the conversation.
But, in fact, the majority of the time they really don’t “got it.” They got part of it. The broad strokes. And the broad strokes will only give you so much understanding. When it comes to romantic relationships or going to war, innuendo and greater detail have special significance. If we are to promote understanding and not just add to the confusion, the drilling down into greater explanation can make all the difference between war and peace or love and abandonment. It can make the difference between the successful implementation of a program or action and its failure.
So for expedience we encourage the dumbing down and discussion in general terms. We have texting now, which further encourages generality. And so with countless sources for our information, feed lines for every subject, and all the modern technological delivery systems for that information, we are more confused about life and its experiences than maybe ever before. We talk to people in messages created by Madison Avenue, or Wall Street, on populist pundits, or cable news. Terms, jargon, buzz words to describe ridiculously complex situations and emotions.
Perhaps it is because all the technological advancements we are more exposed to the complexities of life and society, than ever in hisotry. Perhaps this very exposure, especially on a global level, is so overwhelming, we are compelled to simplify. In the face of our confusion we utilize jargon and buzz words as weapons to manage the world around us. We wish for the easy answers, and believe that like the kid who finds horse manure in his Christmas stocking, there is a pony down there somewhere.
There is no pony. Just horse manure. Unless we teach our children to realize the world in complex terms and attempt to define it accordingly, we will continue to degrade our society and civilization. This, of course, means education. Not the education where for the convenience of teaching 97 kids to a classroom where we resort to simplistic terms to chronicle the events and lessons of world history and all the cultural attributes within. No.
We need to teach them how to think on complex levels. We need to show them how to absorb this information overload from all the reference channels and create from it the cognitive process that can best serve their expansion in the 21st century and beyond. We need to teach them there isn’t just one way of approaching a subject, but there are many, and they all may have varying degrees of merit and credibility. Most will warrant consideration, and in the end, despite our best intentions to live simply defined and well managed lives, there often isn’t the correct and incorrect approach. There are only decisions to be made that are either prudent, effective or principled.
In other words, on communications levels, we have to attempt to keep them from making the same mistakes we are making. We have to teach them that convenience is not necessarily expedient and the simplistic approach to the complex elements of life won’t make you happier or more uncomfortable.
We have to teach them the love for language. And then, the few of use that still remember, have to show them how to use it.
Years ago my grandfather went to the steam baths. These were not the steam baths of today, anemic cubes of tile with a little spritz of hot vapor every now and then. No these were the old time Russian Baths. These were the real thing. The steam was so thick you could barely see through the moist fog. It was hot in there, not warm and tolerable like the wussy steam baths in the modern health clubs. In the old Russian Baths, you really sweat.
The Russian-style steam baths permeated the East Coast. They catered to the European immigrants and the stout hearted Americans who sought them out for solace and comfort. Old men would sit in there for extended period, meditating in silence or talking silently with their friends and associates. Younger men, that is any man under forty, would also enter the baths, but they would leave a lot earlier than the older gents who could just suck up that hot, wet air. Some of these old time Russian baths are still around.
Sometimes I went with my grandfather. It was an experience, as a pre-teen or young teenage kid, watching these men sit naked or wrapped in sheets. There they were hunched over, save for the ones who for extra stimulation were bathed by some old guy who seemed to live inside the steam bath. He would soap up their bodies with a real sponge, and then swirl a bouquet of hot Eucalyptus leaves in the air and then rub them over the the wet, gleaming skin. It was good for the stimulation. The toxins would ooze from your pores.
Even junkies and assorted drug addicts visited the baths to sweat all the toxic residue from their pores. The steam bath population was comprised of a democratic society. In Los Angeles, as a somewhat older me, the Pico Baths, still remain, a homage to another era. The Pico Baths has the sauna, of course, they all did, but the real attraction was the steam bath. Hot steam. The real thing. Peel the plaster off the walls. No messing around.
I remember sitting in there and shortly before he died, John Belushi was being treated to the Eucalyptus treatment. There he was, splayed out on the wooden table like a giant white whale, getting soaped for treated for all to see. He didn’t care, and in the tradition of the time, no one else did either. It was his attempt to clean out, I suppose. If nothing else, the man knew how to live before he died.
Even before I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I knew the Indians had the sweat lodges. It was a cleansing proposition, clear the body so the mind and spirit had a better view. Sweat all that crap out of you. It made sense. I knew the story. And while I had Indian friends, I never asked to be part of a sweat lodge ceremony. I understood it was their thing and the Anglos who begged in were tolerated maybe, but still interlopers. I stuck with the health club, even though it was nothing like my grandfather’s Russian baths or the Pico Baths, in Los Angeles.
But here we are in search of spiritual enlightenment and chasing the buck. That’s the set up, it seems, for self-help gurus who utilize the sweat lodge so their paying clients can achieve some form of enlightenment. It is a way for some self-help gurus to demonstrate to their clients that they can achieve strength and confidence by mastering physical discomfort. My grandfather, on the other hand, walked across Europe to get on a boat to come here, so he could find relaxation and not adversity in the steam baths. He would have been surprised to find death waiting for him among the white tiles and hot steam.
But death came to some poor schmucks, sure enough. For close to $10 thousand apiece, for the “Spiritual Warrior Retreat, patrons had the rare privilege of seeking success by overcoming hardship, only to find out that they couldn’t quite pull it off. They died instead. One wonders why, when feeling a little woozy, they didn’t make for the door, or the lodge flap, whatever it was. Apparently, from reports listed both in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, they were dissuaded from doing so.
Now I subscribe to the age old axiom there is a sucker born every minute. In this case, no doubt there are people who benefit from the “spiritual warrior” experience. I can only imagine what lame souls they may have been before they saw the light of all creation, reaching that cathartic moment amid the communal B.O. where they realized, “hey, I can turn my life around.”
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With self-help gurus, it seems the kind of experience takes some of life’s speed bumps and proclaim that any progress their subscribers achieve are to be regarded as great spiritual triumphs. Now certainly the argument can be made that life is an endurance trial. That one can only prevail by surmounting past mistakes and overcoming adversity. It is at best questionable whether adversity can be manufactured in a sweat lodge or any other controlled circumstances where the full impact of what you may face in the harsh world is never fully realized. It is adversity light.
Adversity is organic. Failure, embarrassment, and destruction are endured when the world comes down around us. We fail at business, get divorced, suffer the loss of a loved one, lose our jobs, watch Bernard Madoff walk off with our money, or we near retirement age only to find that Wall Street has turned our investments into garbage. You don’t suffer that kind of loss in a sweat lodge. You may lose your life, but at least you are not left to scrape up the shattered pieces of what used to be your life and try to reassemble them into some workable manner.
The Indians didn’t go to the sweat lodge to overcome adversity. They had enough thrown at them before they ever got near the sweat lodge. The Indians went into the sweat lodge for the same reasons my grandfather went into the Shvitz. They went to sweat, to purify themselves in small ways, clean the toxins, think and either share some camaraderie or to be left alone. It was a way of getting out of the house, losing the wife and family for a couple of hours so you could get your thoughts together.
My grandfather didn’t go to the steam baths to garner spiritual enlightenment. Besides the sweat and relaxation, he may have gone for business tips. These old cockers would sit around talking shop, offering financial advice in everything from stock tips to evaluating real estate and other prevailing markets. There were no business channels back then. Neil Cavuto, and Jim Cramer, the dozens of others, were not around to bolster the markets with bad advice. There was the Wall Street Journal and a few other things. That was it. And these men, sitting around in steam, talking investments, this was your financial network.
If they had only known that their daily practice of meeting in the steam baths would someday be an appendage to the whole self-help guru thing, an $11 Billion industry, they would have choked on the slimy mucous hockers they used to raise up from the back of their throats and spit into their sheets. These guys had lived tough and overcome all sorts of adversity to make their way in the world.
They had endured pogroms, plagues, the Great Depression, in some cases Two World Wars, and countless business challenges. They didn’t need to hear how to overcome obstacles from some wiseacre who had no clue what real adversity was all about. They would have looked at someone lecturing them, imploring them to become the spiritual warriors they were meant to be as deranged and in need a swift kick in the ass. And they would look at those who bought into this program, who paid thousands for the privilege of sweating, as a bunch of suckers with too much money to spend.
James Arthur Ray is the gentleman who presided over the sweat lodge sessions where three of his clients died. He has proved to the world that he, too, can overcome adversity and rise to the challenge. Despite the fatal loss of three of his flock, he has taken to the road again, where more lucky souls will benefit from the secrets of his success. As for the deaths of three people and all the negative headlines…hey…no sweat.
Once upon a time in baseball, you had two leagues, eight teams, and 152 games in a season. You had the American League and the National League. Whichever team in each league came out on top was the League Champ, and then they played the other League Champ in the World Series. Simple.
More to the point, the October Classic or the Fall Classic, as the World Series is known, was over in early October. The leaves were just beginning to fall. There was a slight chill in the air, maybe, and the first nip of winter was for the most part just around the corner. Ball players played the game in shirt sleeves, or wore the long sleeves under their uniforms. Their baseball caps were the same ones worn through the season. Their fans, save for the rare occasions, watched the game in windbreakers and sweater. No big deal.
But now you have the same two leagues, but with three divisions within each league, wild card teams, extended playoffs and more extended playoffs, and on top of it all an extended, 162 game regular season. So now, by the time you are done with the season, the playoffs, and, finally, the World Series itself, the October Classic can stretch into early November. Factor in a couple of rain outs, and Santa Claus may come watch the game.
Now, mind you, I love baseball. I love the playoffs. I understand that the leagues extended regular season to pay for the hefty player’s salaries. With so many teams, and in so many cities, the extended season for the most part is not surprising. With so much competition, the playoffs are surely exciting for any sports fan. If your favorite team is in the playoffs, then the excitement is that much greater.
But…it just looks so odd to see baseball players sealed up in hefty thermals. They wear hood like balaclava things on their head that make them appear like they are off on a Delta Force mission and not preparing to take the baseball field. Their baseball hats have ear flaps.
The fans are wearing parkas, thermals, and gloves. They wear rain gear, for winter rain, and snow gear. They look like they are going to a football game and not baseball. Everyone, players and fans, are blowing on their hands, drinking warm liquids and hoping more freezing rain doesn’t drop from the skies and douse their few remaining dry spots.
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But this is baseball. It isn’t football, and it isn’t a trip to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving Day, or Christmas Shopping. It only looks that way.
The added cold has to have its impact on the game. Balls don’t travel quite as far in cold air. Sliding hurts, collisions hurt more. Just the impact of the ball, whether it’s in your glove or bouncing off your shins, has to start hurting after awhile. The ball has to bounce differently on the harder infield group. Throwing has to be tougher. In all, what may have been the strong points for a team all season may be altered by the World Series. I am not saying this as a fact, but you would think it the case.
Anyway, I write this as I watch the Philadelphia Phillies beat on the Los Angeles Dodgers. I was born in Philly and grew up in L.A., so there is a definitely mix of emotions working for me. But then, when it comes to watching sheer precision, the most consistent team in executing fundamental baseball, there is nothing like the Yankees. Make a mistake with the Yankees, and you will pay a heavy price. But I digress here.
So if the season gets any longer, baseball’s concession stands will be selling hot toddies and soup. You will soon see the concession stands selling acrylic mufflers and ear muffs with the team logo boldly emblazoned. And the people will come in hefty four wheelers, wearing snow boots. Between baseball and football, out in the post-season parking lot, you will hardly tell the difference.
We are nearing the close of the first decade of the 21st Century. Yet there are men who still want to marry a virgin. Forget the bygone days when the mother-in-law or some other responsible party held up the bloody wedding night sheet to proclaim the chastity of the blushing bride. Forget the fact that centuries have passed and for the most part, in most places in the world, society has acknowledged the woman’s right to get laid. Don’t even think for a moment that all those sexy films and wet tee-shirt contests have promoted equal sexuality to the further corners of the earth. And if you are in certain parts of the world, other than the prostitutes–“want to party, honey?”– you can put away your hopes and desires of sleeping with the girl you met earlier that day.
In some parts of the world, that woman won’t have sex. She can’t. She will not resolve her hornier emotions on the chance that up the road and in the sack her husband, that final destination of fairy tale bliss, will reject her as damaged goods. And forget about the fabled mother, with a wink and a blink, and an “I understand you situation completely, having been there myself,” holding up a bloody sheet in solemn but graphic testimony to fictional chastity. Twenty centuries later, we men are almost wise to that trick.
But then, again, maybe not. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, the new Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit is more threatening to many male Egyptians than the triumphant return of Cleopatra. For a mere $29.90, a sexually active woman can on her wedding night let loose with this pouch of artificial blood, proving she is has remained pure and simple for her one true love. As Gigimo, the Chinese mail order company that sells the kit over its website insinuates, just a few well appointed moans and groans, break the blood bag, and voila, your idiot husband will believe he’s the first. Provided, of course, he doesn’t later find the receipt for the artificial hymen kit tucked inside your purse.
Key religious groups and conservative social and political entities condemn this Instant Cherry Kit. More than a few Egyptian citizens believe that this handy-dandy virgin vessel will inspire promiscuity in Egyptian women. Confident they can fool their grooms, they will also fool around. They will come to their wedding night as damaged goods with a broken hymen and with sexual skills they shouldn’t have accumulated through trial and error. Certain conservative groups are so outraged over the artificial hymen kit they want to put out a fatwa on any peddler who dares sell them. A fatwa, for the less informed, is where you kill the person for besmirching social or religious customs. Strong stuff.
This new threat to social stability is perceived by the more rational or liberal minded elements in Egyptian Society as partly an outgrowth of the social and economic changes in the society itself. Single women used to live with their parents, until they got married, which was typically at a much earlier age than it is today. But today’s economic crisis, with its joblessness and poverty has forced many women to wait longer, accumulating their dowries. So you have women single longer and dating longer. Things do happen.
So rather than conclude, “all right, already, the times have changed and we have to change with the times,” the more conservative elements are outraged. As noted before, they are concerned promiscuity will spread. And, you know, probably it will. With promiscuity and prior experience, it is fair to say there are for women points of comparison and possible dissatisfaction with the schlub she is with. In other words, there will be discord. There will be less control of individual actions by social and religious forces. Life will be chaotic. Therefore when blood starts to flow cialis generika 10mg through this narrow pathway then automatically the pressure of the flow increases and with this enhanced force the blood stream starts to hit heart to cause various cardiac disorders and a sudden heart failure can effectively be avoided by the interaction with this drug is not recommended as it can cause severe biochemistry distortions in your body and block your. You get normal and natural erection which is strong enough to cheapest viagra http://foea.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/FEA-2012-ANNUAL-REPORT-PDF.pdf perform sexual intercourse and achieve satisfaction. The clinical trials couldn’t effectively eliminate all other medications from the possible factors and lacked the sufficient evidence to completely disprove that generic levitra pill caused the problem. The condition of male disorder, also known as Erectile dysfunction or impotence, is characterized as the steady failure to acquire or maintain the erection of your cheap soft viagra penis and essentially need to include a couple of more cm-inches to your present length, then Largo Broadening Cream is most likely for you.
No wonder everyone is upset. Not that Egypt is necessarily the paragon of order and control. Not that we should even pick on only Egypt, as much of the world is undergoing their own brand of chaos, the loss of order and control. I remember in my childhood the Catholic boys solemnly declaring that they wouldn’t ever conceive of marrying any girl other than a virgin. This, mind you, was at the cusp of social change in this country, when sex, drugs, and rock and roll, dramatically replaced Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, as our social gyroscopes. So weren’t those guys in for a rude awakening?
Besides, Egypt like every other country has always found a way to counter the sexual contradictions of society in order to perpetuate that very society. Before the artificial hymen kit, there were the Egyptian women who had their hymens surgically restored. Before that, there was the complicit cousin waving the bloody wedding sheet. In short, people will screw around. It is just a question of how open we want to be about it.
As a world, we suffer from hypocrisy. It’s part of out nature. We preach one thing and do another. We resist our more natural impulses in the shaky belief we can control them through sound mind and body. Whatever that is. We invoke the celestial to give us guidance. Quite often that guidance is less a celestial proclamation and more our own yearnings for social and emotional security. And control. We draw on questionable resources just so we can feel better than ourselves. We yield our self-control and, more importantly our concept of self-control for external enforcement of our visceral sensibilities.
Mainly, we are unsure of ourselves and feel threatened by everything out there that does not fall lockstep into our dogma or our system of beliefs. Conservatives are threatened by one thing. Liberals are threatened by another. In one form or another, everyone is threatened, so we lock ourselves in a box with like minded souls and hope upon hopes that no one will puncture our fragile veneers.
Sometimes it is ridiculous. Like this. We order from the Chinese a thirty dollar hymen kit so we can proclaim and reinforce the righteousness of our own limitations. It’s amazing. Yet on one level we should be grateful. Seldom does our fragile emotional security come this cheap.
