Category: Uncategorized

We Were Here…The Human Need for Recognition

There was a story released the last couple of days about how archaeologists stumbled upon an ancient cemetery in the Sahara Desert. This Stone Age graveyard sheds light on the great mystery when the great Sahara desert was lush and green, when civilizations dwelled on the edges of it waters. One such article was in the Los Angeles Times.

Yes, the Sahara was underwater. And green. The Waters came during monsoon season, especially. There among the bodies were tools, fishing gear, harpoons and other stuff to reveal the once verdant Sahara. There were the remains of 6-foot-long, 300 pound Nile Perch. So with fish that large and people on the edge of the waters, you would have to assume the reality of Lakeside property. Whether the property was divided into sub-tracts and McMansions will remain one of the desert mysteries.

Kamagra is acheter viagra pfizer https://www.supplementprofessors.com/levitra-7377.html one of the best medicine and surely the smart choice for men with low budget. The reason may be any the solution lies in the viagra online cheap . Others will not ask for anything but the specific symptoms related to menopause joint pain best prices cialis https://www.supplementprofessors.com/viagra-5792.html include: pain, stiffness, swelling, and heat in joints. Psychological factors: Some psychological factors such as anxiety, depression and stress increases the risk of impotence. viagra free pill Discoveries are made every day. But the thing about this one that was so striking was the grave of a woman and two children, all with their fingers entwined. There they were, buried on their sides, together for all eternity. Obviously, they didn’t die in that position. Someone had the position the three bodies, my guess a mother and her two children, so that their fingers were entwined in what looks like a take off of an urban handshake.

What is remarkable of evidence not just of a civilization, but people’s eternal and inherent need for recognition. We as humans strive for recognition. Be it fabulous monuments, cave paintings or even graffiti on the side of a bridge, we must find acknowledgment that once upon a time we existed. It’s pretty remarkable really. It is our way of attempting to deal with our finite selves in relation to an infinite universe. We were here.

Whether it matters in the long run become an entirely different issue. Schools of thought debate it and will continue to debate what largely amounts to the meaning of existence as long as we truly are on the planet. It is a heated debate in certain sectors and regardless of the mythical final conclusion, it is one worth having. But here as throughout all human history, we find the markers of our existence and in this case the identifiers of humanity. A mother with hands entwined with her two children tells us not only that they existed, but they cared about each other. There was life and there was love.

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.
The most overnight shipping cialis important thing about this action ingredient is that it makes every group member come into action and make the organ functional again. Before tadalafil from canada the start of foreplay, only thing that a man needs to be a hero of his female partner. cheap levitra It improves strength, stamina and offers effective cure for sexual weakness, premature ejaculation and impotence. Avoid taking a high-fat meal when using canada pharmacy tadalafil as it may delay the effect of cialis.
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.

The prefect sexual stimulation within this time will of cialis no prescription course help in ED treatment in male by providing hard erection. We have been for example has been in the male enhancement process within the most natural rx tadalafil way, which is very appealing towards the individuals who ask, is male extra a scam lookup, on other attributes. If you are confronting quandary of long term erection staying beyond four hours, short term vision loss, issues in hearing and other chronic side effects then see you doctor viagra pfizer check out to find out more on priority. So you also should choose Kamagra online Australia is easily available at the online drug stores generally offer order generic cialis this generic pill at very reasonable price. Enter the cheap date. With movies costing ten, eleven bucks a ticket for something you don’t remember seeing a day later, and with the cost of dining out increasingly costly, more people are opting for that now famous Flat Screen Theater, with a pizza from Dominoes or Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, or in the ore rarefied places, from an actual Italian pizza joint that still makes real pizza.

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.

The Paparazzi Go Surfing

Last Thursday, several performers, testified at Los Angeles City Hall about the tribulations of the dreaded Paparazzi. Dutifully, the performers pronounced to City Councilman Dennis P. Zine’s stalwart task force how they were put upon, set upon and otherwise infringed upon by an uncaring, avaricious bunch of tabloid journalists who make their living following celebrities around. Of course no one offered how the Paparazzi could boost careers as well as hinder personal lives.

Sometimes getting photographed or getting written up in the tabloids is a trade off. You are annoyed, even hounded. Your business, as they say, it out on the street. But in return you receive more public exposure. It’s fair to say career have never really been made or broken by the Paparazzi. But careers have been boosted and lives have been damaged. The recent romp through the Beverly Hilton hotel and the subsequent cornering of former Senator and Vice Presidential Candidate, John Edwards, who had allegedly been visiting his mistress and love child, I’m sure did little to boost his chances for a cabinet position.

Then there is the recent situation up in Malibu where some of the youthful denizens decided to experiment with some notion of honor by intimidating the Paparazzi who were there to take photos of Matthew McConaughey who was surfing. I can well understand that McConaughey wanted his privacy but the notion of nobility among the privileged Malibu surfer dudes is about as laughable as another Brittany Spears beaver shot.

I remember when celebrities and aspiring performers had their publicists and managers tip the Paparazzi to ensure the tabloid media was present for whatever was deemed a seminal event. Like when dinner that night at Spago with a new love interest that would attract a lot more coverage than a mere dinner with friends. There was always some tipoff, some tempest in a teapot that could play out like scandal that the tabloids could embrace and for which the celebrity would benefit.
This liquefying version became the reason to buy generic sildenafil pill for the ED sufferer; any viagra buy in usa other men or women must not think to use it. The man has a sexual erection only when you are canada cialis sexually stimulated. Beans, oats, green tea and nuts sildenafil sales actively reduce cholesterol. Many of these buy levitra online toxins can mimic hormones and cause the occurrence of further hormonal imbalance.
I also remember hanging out for an hour or so with one famed Paparazzi photographer. He and his sometime partner were considered gruff and callous. They were infamous for taking photos in the most unusual ways, like one burying the other in sand and cover him with a newspaper, the popping out when the target strode past. Or using a really long lens to snare a shot of a really famous political personality who was topless on her private beach.

The day I sat with this photographer he showed me photographs he had taken not for the tabloids but for himself. They were photographs of famous people, of course. But the photos were sensitive and captured aspects of personality I hadn’t seen in other photos. There was one particular photo of the Kennedy matriarchy that was taken back when Rose Kennedy was still alive. The photographer had struck a bargain and offered that if the Kennedy women would pose for the photo, he would leave them alone. Well at least for the rest of the day. He took the photo and kept his word. They went on their way. The photo remains, and I still think about that photo from time to time. For the supposed gruff guy, the crass Paparazzi, there was artistic sensitivity working underneath.

But let’s face it, the world has changed and its hunger for photos and information about famous people defies all logic. I mean how much can you really care about someone else life? But more on that some other time. It is sufficient here to remark that celebrities have been hounded beyond any common dignity. Princess Diana was the most notable instance, and all conspiracy theories aside, what went on that fateful night in Paris’ Pont d’Alma Tunnel may have well been caused by an overzealous tabloid media.

The media can be ruthless. The path to celebrity can also be ruthless. When you sign aboard, you may get more than you bargained for. So at the end of the day, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the restaurant.