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A Parisian Femme Fatale – by Gary S. Smolker
She Is A Parisian
by Gary S. Smolker
My Femme Fatale is a Parisian.
In my imagination she is so beautiful that making love with her would be like climbing Mount Everest without a Sherpa.
Waking up next to her (Femme Fatale) would be a wonderful way for a man to start his day.
Femme Fatale likes cats.
Femme Fatale likes flowers.
Femme Fatale likes the ocean.
Femme Fatale is a dreamer.
Femme Fatale is a painter, a poet, and a hypnotherapist.
Femme Fatale paints self-portraits.
She exudes sensuality.
She emotes sexuality.
She is hypnotic.
She has a cheerful temperament.
Her voice conveys likability.
She hypnotizes me and will hypnotize you with her voice.
Femme Fatale is sweeter than the most delicious churro dunked in the highest quality hot chocolate drink.
When you meet her, you will know why highest quality hot chocolate drinks are served with a spoon.
When you meet her you will know the meaning of the phrase “Food of the Gods.”
Are you imaging what Femme Fatale looks like?
Are you wondering if there an expiration date on her beauty?
What Does A Femme Fatale Look Like? — Set Your Imagination Free.
“What does Femme Fatale look like?”, you ask me.
There are many different kinds of beauty, many kinds of physical beauty, social beauty, attitudes towards beauty and cultural aspects of beauty.
Paris is a hodge podge of people of many different nationalities and religions and ethnicities which encompass and are embedded in different degrees in people from many different countries.
Paris is very cosmopolitan.
France is not what France is like.
In the French countryside people are different than the people in Paris.
French people in Paris come from many countries.
Beauty is subjective.
Parisian Femme Fatales look like this:
Style
My Parisian Femme Fatale has style.
She is calm, civilized and sweet.
She doesn’t judge herself by whether she looks like a cover girl.
She is secure; she is comfortable in her own skin.
Being with her is like eating dinner by candlelight.
When I am with her I feel my spirits rising in a hopeful way.
If you get to be with her you too will feel your spirits rising in a hopeful way.
You will find being with her is how you imagine it would be to dunk a magnificent churro in hot chocolate and then savor every drip of chocolate that gets on your tongue and every chew of the churro as it enters your mouth.
When you are with her your endorphin level will sky rocket, make you feel better.
I would love to introduce you to Femme Fatale.
Joie de Vie
Recently I told Femme Fatale, “Churros with high quality hot chocolate before breakfast or with breakfast will help your day go better.”
Femme replied,
“I am now about dunking. My breakfast is toasted dark bread with salted butter dunked into black coffee only,
“Dunking is great and I cannot wait to dunk churros in hot chocolate, that will be an entirely new experience.
“Yay.”
Growing Up
Life is complicated.
Growing up is a process.
It takes time.
The burden of growing up is unique to each person.
When you wake up tomorrow you will be able to see clearly that life is beautiful and full of promises.
Conclusion
The question I have answered in my own life is: Why sleep when you can dream?
Copyright © 2016 Gary S. Smolker
“Food, Sex, Chocolate and Mortality” – by Gary S. Smolker
Food, sex, chocolate and mortality are the four great givens of human existence.
Below are pictures of me cooking New Year Eve dinner on December 31, 2015.
Enhancing Pleasurable Activities
Cooking is fun, and eating is a social activity.
Eating chocolate is fun too.
Chocolate was a beverage of the elite known as the “Food of the Gods” during most of the thousands of years humans have been enjoying it.
Chocolate is manufactured from cacao.
An unknown Mexican Indian in the lowlands of Southern Mexico first turned cacao beans into the Food of the Gods.
Today, chocolate is the most famous Mexican food on Planet earth.
During 9/10th of its history, chocolate was drunk not eaten.
The caffeine, theobromine, serotonin, and phenylethylamine that chocolate contains makes it an anti-depressant and anti-stress agent, enhancing pleasurable activities, including making love.
Serotonin is a mood-lifting hormone produced naturally by the brain; phenylethylamine is similar to other mood changing brain chemicals.
Two of the above substances (caffeine and theobromine) comprising one to two percent by weight of the cacao are known to have physiological effects on humans. These are the alkaloids (or, more technically, methylxanthines).
Alkaloids form salts when treated with acids and have physiological consequences on the animals that ingest them. Humans pursue some of them with passion.
Theobromine, like all alkaloids, is a stimulant to the central nervous system. Its specific talent is to dilate the blood vessels; it is also a diuretic, that is, it stimulates the flow of urine.
Caffeine is credited with lessening fatigue, enhancing the intellectual faculties, stimulating gastric secretions, and promoting urination.
Cacao is the source of the world’s first stimulating drink.
Chocolate was the first drink to introduce Europeans to the pleasures of alkaloid consumption.
By the way, chocolate, tea, and coffee only became widely available to the European public in the middle of the 17th century, albeit the first European encounter with cacao took place when Columbus, on his fourth and last voyage, came across a great Maya trading canoe with cacao beans amongst its cargo.
A very expensive modern chocolate product has been named Guanaja, the place where this happened.
Some women claim that as far as they know chocolate is a substitute for sex at Christmas, because of all the chocolate.
The Food of the Gods
During most of its existence chocolate has been a beverage of the elite, the aristocracy, royalty and the Church.
That remained the case until Europe’s Age of Reason where in England and other Protestant countries chocolate (and coffee) houses sprang up as meeting places and eventually clubs for nascent political parties.
The idea that coffee/hot cocoa deserves to be drunk in stylish surroundings is not new.
The original trendy cafe – in which coffee and pastry were paired for the first time – [Cafe Procope] opened its doors in Paris in 1675 on rue de Tournon. A few years later it moved to the rue des Fosses Saint-Germain (today’s rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, where the establishment now the oldest continually functioning cafe in the world, can still be found at number 13.
When the Revolution brought down the Catholic and royal establishment in France, coffee and tea, – the favored hot drinks of the philosophes and salons of the Enlightenment – replaced drunk chocolate.
Tea, of course, is most enjoyable if one drinks their tea while eating a treat such as short cake with dark chocolate, or plain German dark chocolate or plain Belgium white chocolate or Dutch milk chocolate.
One must have chocolate with their tea.
That is to say, tea is most enjoyable with chocolate — one must eat chocolate while sipping their tea.
[Aside: If you are interested in biscuits, check out http://www.ibcfood.com]
At the end of the Age of Reason, the marquis de Sade, was a staunch “chocoholic” in spite of his wildly anti-establishment prose and actions.
The history of chocolate began thousands of years ago when unknown Mexican Indian (a member of the first civilization of the Americas – the Olmec – which existed from 1500 to 400 BC) first turned cacao beans into the “Food of the Gods”, chocolate. This happened more than 3,000 years ago.
Among the Aztecs, cacao beans were used as money as well as foodstuff; chocolate was the beverage of choice of Aztec nobles and before them the Maya elite and later of the Jesuit clerics that came after Cortes’ conquest of Mexico.
Where and How the Tree that Bears Cacao Beans Grows
The tree that bears cacao beans/seeds is difficult to grow.
With few exceptions it refuses to bear fruit outside a band of 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the Equator.
It will not grow if temperatures fall below 60° F or 16° C and it demands year round moisture.
Pollination
The flowers produced on the cacao tree are pollinated exclusively by midges.
The ideal breeding ground for midges is the litter and mess natural to the rain forest floor.
Unless flowers on a cacao tree are pollinated they will not produce a pod containing cacao beans.
Growing cacao trees in well groomed plantations is counterproductive.
For that reason, the yield of cacao beans in huge modern well groomed neatly manicured cacao plantations from hundreds of flowering flowers on a single cacao tree is a disappointing one to three percent.
From Pollinated Flowers on a Cacao Tree to Hundreds of Thousands of Cacao Beans
Once pollinated, each flower on a cacao tree produces a large pod containing 40 to 50 cacao beans/seeds.
The pods take five months to ripen.
From Cacao Bean to Chocolate
Once a pod on a cacao tree is opened and its seeds/beans are extracted four steps must be taken to produce cacao nibs which are then ground into chocolate.
These are (1) fermentation, (2) drying, (3) roasting, and (4) winnowing.
During the first day of fermentation all sorts of chemical processes take place which rise the temperature of the beans; during fermentation, the adhering pulp becomes liquid and drains away.
Most importantly the seeds briefly germinate and soon thereafter are killed by the high temperature and increased acidity caused by fermentation of the seeds and pulp.
This must take place because ungerminated seeds/beans do not give a chocolate flavor to the finished product.
By the third day, the temperature of the mass of cacao beans stays between 45°C (113°F) and 50°C (122°F). The mass of fermenting beans must stay at this temperature for several days after germination, for if it does not the “chocolate” will not taste like chocolate.
Once fermentation is completed, the cacao beans are dried. Traditionally the cacao beans are dried on mats or trays left in the sun for one to two weeks, depending on the weather.
During the drying process the enzymatic action initiated by the fermentation process continues, and the beans lose more than half their weight.
After the beans are dry they are roasted for 70 to 115 minutes at temperatures of 99° – 104°C (210° – 219°F) for chocolate and 116° – 121°C (240° – 250°F) for cocoa powder. This is absolutely necessary for development of flavor and aroma.
Due to chemical changes and loss of moisture during roasting, the nib becomes a darker brown in color, more friable, and less astringent.
After roasting, during the final step (winnowing), the thin shell is peeled off or otherwise removed. The resulting nibs can then be ground into chocolate or cocoa powder.
Fat
Over half the weight of the cured, dried roasted nib is made up of fat.
The exact percentage of fat depends on the variety of cacao and growing conditions.
Besides fat, each cacao bean contains less than 10% by weight of protein and starch.
The remaining portion of the cacao bean (which contains hundreds of identified compounds) that provokes the many varied responses to chocolate.
Caffeine and theobromine make up 1 to 2 percent by weight of the cacao.
Fat obtained from the nibs by a mechanical process is called “cacao butter” or “cocoa butter.”
In addition to being used in the production of high-grade chocolate, cacao butter in used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
The cacao solids which are left after cacao butter is extracted are “cocoa.”
Chocolate connoisseurs are concerned with the percentage of cacao solids in the chocolate the consume.
“Junk chocolate” has only 15% cacao solids.
Really fine chocolate has up to 70% cacao solids.
The remaining composition being sugar, milk solids, and solid vegetable fat.
The valuable cacao butter is taken out and sold elsewhere.
Aside: A natural preference for sweetness is not acquired but built in: even newborns suck faster on sweetened liquids.]
Toasted Marshmallow Hot Chocolate Is A Wonderful Double Chocolate Cocoa Concoction
I love the Toasted Marshmallow Hot Chocolate served at my local IHOP Store in Encino, California at 5635 Ventura Blvd., Encino, CA 91436.
Below is a picture of Maria Sanchez enjoying a Toasted Marshmallow Hot Chocolate and another one of me enjoying a Toasted Marshmallow Hot Chocolate with Maria on New Year’s Day, January 1, 2016 at the Encino IHOP store.
Have you ever had toasted marshmallow hot chocolate?
If not, try it some time.
Men: Try having a huge cup of toasted marshmallow hot chocolate with a woman and find out what a pleasurable conversation you will have.
You and she will be smiling while you are drinking your huge cups of toasted marshmallow hot chocolate, and doing so will become a pleasant memory.
It ancient Maya civilization, after Maya kings and high nobles died, they were buried in tombs with chocolate drink to accompany them on their journey to the next world.
Copyright © 2015 and 2016 by Gary S. Smolker, All Rights Reserved
The Perfect Picture of Love In Action on Christmas Eve, A Tzaddik’s View of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth – by Gary S. Smolker
December 25, 2015
On Christmas eve, last night (December 24, 2015), I saw a picture of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth:
I saw a young exhausted man (Aki Nicholas Gibson) sleeping on a couch with his head in his wife’s (Holly R. Gibson’s) lap.
Holly was stoking Aki’s head, while Aki was sleeping.
I saw that scene in the living room of my friend Richard C. Gibson’s house, about an hour after we finished having Christmas dinner.
Attending this Christmas Dinner were Aki, Richard, me and nine important women in Aki’s life.
To me that was the perfect picture of love in action.
Aki is the Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Karais Group in Austin Texas.
The Karais Group is a professional services firm specializing in patient advocacy, health care navigation (comparison shopping for patients, i.e., finding different prices hospitals etc. charge for the same procedures and exact services) and medical bill mediation.
The Karais Group helps patients navigate medical care in a knowledgeable professional manner to reduce their health care costs and medical bills.
Aki’s wife Holly is the Director of “Woman Who Code, Austin.”
“Women Who Code, Austin” teaches women computer programming then helps them get jobs as programmers.
Aki and Holly came from Austin, Texas to be at this Christmas Eve Dinner which took place in Woodland Hills, California; Aki’s aunt Vernon flew in from New York to be at the dinner.
Below is a photograph of Aki surrounded by family and friends, sitting on a couch, before we all move to the dinning room to enjoy a Christmas Eve Dinner together.
Gary S. Smolker
Copyright © 2015 by Gary S. Smolker
“Creativity, Progress, Political Correctness, Different Ways of Thinking About Progress, and the Goals of Conservative Muslims Reflected in the Paris Massacres on November 13, 2015” – by Gary S. Smolker
What Are the Truths About the Paris Massacre Last Week?
According to one of my friends, conservative Muslims are called strict Islamists by people who are either too afraid to call them what they are or too ignorant to know what conservative Muslims believe.
According to him, Conservative Muslims believe men and women should be separated, women should not perform in public, nor should women wear the kind of clothes the “Good Lovelies” wore during their performances at the concert I attended on November 14, 2015.
They believe women are inferior to men.
They strongly believe that women should not be independent.
Conservative Muslims do not believe in “affirmative action”, women’s rights, women liberation, etc. etc.
Conservative Muslims believe they are superior to all people who are not conservative Muslims.
They believe they are superior to all people who wholeheartedly follow their interpretation of Sharia Law.
Conservative Muslims also believe that the harsh penalties and punishments set forth in the Koran are reasonable and should be followed
According to that friend, the reason the so-called Muslim/ISIS terrorists randomly shot people in the audience at the concert hall in Paris, tried to bomb the soccer stadium and randomly shot couples in Paris who were out for the night is that they consider it is their duty to rid the earth of people like the people who were in those places at those times.
They have NO tolerance for people who don’t behave in a POLITICALLY CORRECT WAY; they have no tolerance for people who don’t strictly follow their interpretation of rules set follow in the Koran; they have no tolerance for people who have a different interpretation of what the Koran commands people to do then they do.
Look at recent movies which portray politically correct behavior under Sharia Law in rural communities in Muslim countries.
Recent Movies Which Portray Politically Correct Muslim Behavior
“Rock the Kasbah”
The recently released Bill Murray movie “Rock the Kasbah” is about a young unmarried young Muslim woman living with her family in a small village in Afghanistan.
In “Rock the Kasbah” Bill Murray is an entertainment talent manager.
While in Afghanistan promoting one of his clients, who is a singer, Bill Murray accidentally discovers this young woman.
She has a beautiful voice.
Thereafter, Bill Murray talks this young Muslim woman into entering and into singing on a nationally broadcast singing contest.
When her father and other people who live in her village learn that she has sung in a singing contest they “disown” her.
I saw this movie recently (in November, 2015) at a local theater in Sherman Oaks, California.
“He Named Me Malala”
“He Named Me Malala” is a documentary.
It is the true story of a young woman who at age 15 (Malala Yousafzai) was shot in the head by a Taliban assassin while riding home in a school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley.
The Taliban attempted to assassinate Malala because Malala was an outspoken champion of the idea that girls should be given an education.
The Taliban targeted Malala for assassination because Malala wanted to learn how to read and publicly said she wanted other girls to learn how to read.
The movie makes it clear that the Taliban, following strict conservative Muslim/Islamic law, is vehemently against women being taught to read.
Malala was targeted by Taliban militants for her outspokenness in support of girls’ education.
Malala has an astounding eloquence and boldness.
Even when Malala was eleven years old she was attracting the attention of international reporters because of her outspoken advocacy.
During the course of the movie, the film shows various village schools in the Swat Valley where girls are taught to read had been bombed, had been completely destroyed by the Taliban.
Malala and her father Ziauddin Yousafzai spoke after the showing of “He Named Me Malala” which I attended.
Malala told the people in attendance: When you tell your story it is a healing, it is a rehabilitation.
Malala and her father then thanked Academy Award winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim for making the documentary we had just watched.
I saw the international premiere of this documentary in September at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
“Parched”
This is an Indian film about the plight of women in rural villages in India.
Lena Yadav, the filmmaker, stated at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival that the story told in this movie is based on true events.
According to Yadav: 80% of the women in India don’t know what an orgasm is; they are sexual slaves.
The village elders and all the local men in the village where the story told in this movie takes place repeatedly tell each other: Don’t get an educated wife, they have books riding their minds.
The story in this movie revolves around the life of a young girl who is forced to marry a young boy she doesn’t want to marry.
Her young husband brutalizes her, steals from his mother, drinks excessively and is a lazy oaf.
Watching her son brutalize his child bride disgusts her.
She then begins to thirst for more than what life has given women in her village.
The men laze around and talk to each other while the women do all the work in the village..
As the story in the movie progresses, she questions the status quo in her village, the rules of conduct in her village which favors men, sends child brides to abusive husbands and ostracizes women for being educated and opinionated – and begins to have a series of lengthy conversations with female friends – outside the hearing of men in the village – about “how women should value themselves” and what stops them from doing so.
According to the film maker the life of women portrayed in this movie is the typical life of all women in rural Muslim and Hindu villages in the countryside and in strict religious communities in big cities in India.
I saw the world premier of this movie in September at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
“Maintenant ils peuvent venir” (“Let Them Come”)
This French/Algerian movie is about the dark decade in Algeria in which strict Islamists tried to take over Algeria, and 200,000 died in the ensuing conflict.
It is set in Algeria in the late 1980s.
In one scene a Muslim man is told by his strict Islamist father-in-law that the marriage between he and his wife (his marriage to the daughter of the father-in-law) is not valid because he is not a strict Islamist. He is an infidel because he is hot a strict Islamist.
The father-in-law has taken his daughter away; he has married her to a strict Islamist; and now lives with the second man.
That man already had a wife.
That man now has two wives.
His daughter is now that man’s second wife.
This film is a family chronicle which begins shortly before the man characters get married to each other in an arranged marriage, and follows that marriage and the man and woman who got married from that time forward.
I saw the world premier of this film in September at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.
Progress, Creativity, Political Correctness and Different Ways of Thinking
If we are going to solve the problems that are rampant on our planet, we need to have creative people with creative ideas.
Yet we continue to close down creative people, with invalidations that ever more imperiously impose from without, an institutional mentality that squashes [young] people in a way that forces them to give up the expression of their souls and, instead to worry about winning the approval of authority figures, the approval of grown-ups, college administrators, the federal government, all sorts of protesters who don’t feel welcome in society and all sorts of other bosses and audiences.
This violation of self is insulting and injures who we are deep in our hearts.
In hopelessness and despair some people become tormented, depressed or suicidal.
In such a society everyone is forced to worry about what everyone else thinks about them, which is the route to vapid mediocrity.
Truly creative people think differently.
Seeing the Big Picture
“Free speech” is under attack in the United States: Forty percent of Millennials in the United States are okay with limiting free speech if it is racist.
“Freedom of Religious Choice” is under attack in the United States: The Mormon Church (the Church of the Later Day Saints) recently adopted a same-sex marriage policy barring children of married same-sex couples from being baptized [hence forth they will not be allowed to become members of the Church] until they are adults, until they are 18 years old.
In order to become members of the Church children of same sex couples are now required to leave their parents’ home and to disavow same-sex marriage and co-habitation.
At the street level, on my recent travels in different parts of the United States, I have read bumper stickers which state:
- CHOICE. What a beautiful right.
- Democracy is not a spectator sport.
- Freedom of religion means any religion.
- Compassion is the radicalization of our time.
- Don’t believe anything until it has been officially denied.
- I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
- You don’t have to burn books to destroy culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Those bumper stickers are a sign of the way some (I don’t know how many) people are thinking in the United States.
Responding to Our Ever-Evolving World
The history of the human race is violent.
Only by striving to understand the behavior of people throughout history and in remote places can we hope to understand from where we have come and how much of the past lives unrecognized with us.
What is happening in the world today is culturally contextual, historically contextual, in our faces every day and very dramatic.
In a recent article by Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, in Foreign Policy she states:
“The Paris attacks were not surprising. Occasional terrorist attacks in the West are virtually inevitable; … we’ll see more attacks in coming decades, not fewer. We need to stop viewing terrorism as shocking and aberrational, and instead recognize it as an ongoing problem that needs to be managed, rather than defeated.”
In a recent article by Charles Gave, written for a French paper in September, 2015, Mr. Gave explains that nobody can understand the disaster that is unfolding if he knows nothing of history, past events that shaped the world today.
Mr. Gave explains:
For the past 50 years, money has flowed in a torrent from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Europe to build Wahhabi mosques: “schools” where the only things taught – and only to boys – are the Koran and religious extremism.
The goal of this project is to “purify” the Middle East and eventually the rest of the world to an “original” form of Islam.
According to Mr. Gave:
- First: The West must clearly identify the enemy which is not the Muslim religion,but the Wahhabi sect. And it must immediately break off relationships with the states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are exporting this virulent form of extremism.
- Second: We will have to stop accepting political donations from these countries to finance our electoral campaigns.
- Third: We will have to stop selling those countries warplanes, helicopters, missiles, radars, tanks and other weaponry. One does not prosper by selling weapons to one’s enemies. As Lenin said:“The capitalists will sell us rope with which we will hang them.”
There Is No Such Thing As Zero Risk
How are you going to change what you are doing now?
How are you going to change what you will be doing in the future?
Consider the impact of the confluence of highly impactful forces in the news every day (geopolitical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural, historical, local political, local social, global financial forces, local financial forces).
Many political “experts” will tell you that U.S. foreign policy is responsible for the rise of ISIS, and for the rise of terrorist attacks:
- There were no terrorists threats against U.S. citizens from the Middle East when Saddam Hussain was running Iraq and when Omar Qaddafi was running Libya.
- The consequence of the United States destabilizing countries in the Middle East has been the reign of terrorist terror we are now experiencing.
Other political “experts” will tell you that the current surge of terrorist attacks is the result of Saudi Arabia and Qatar funding fundamental extremist Muslim clergy and funding their schools which teach boys the Koran and extremism.
Consider the impact of all of the above forces on you personally, including the impact of such forces (a) on your current investment strategies, (b) on your current investments, (c) on your current travel plans,(d) on your current career plans, (e) on your current retirement plans, and (e) on all your other current strategies and goals.
For further input on all of the above topics see the post titled “We Need to Rethink What Security Means” posted on the Gary S. Smolker Idea Exchange Blog on November 30, 2015 at http://www.garysmolker.wordpress.com.
Good luck.
Copyright © Gary S. Smolker, All Rights Reserved
Poetic Soulful Gracefulness Practices of Graceful People, Being In Tune with Nature and As One with the Poetic Panache of the Dance of Nature and My Love Affair with Passionately Expressive Signs which Make Me Smile and Give Me Joy – by Gary Smolker
Poetic Soulful Gracefulness
I appreciate human gracefulness.
I also appreciate the poetic beauty of nature.
Below are stories of human gracefulness and photos of nature’s beauty (the dance of nature) I recently experienced.
I took the photos below of the fall change of colors of the leaves of trees from green to yellow, orange and red during a recent long weekend (October 16 through October 19, 2015) I spent in the Eastern Sierra in Northern California.
They are photos of romantic and enchanting spots I visited in the Eastern Sierra during change of the color of leaves from green to yellow, orange and red as the days get shorter and colder.
The series of three e-mail letters below (a call for help and the answer to that call) were exchanged on October 9, 2015.
I extracted/deleted the personal phone numbers of the correspondents in those emails.
Tami, the person who called out for help, lives in Los Angeles.
Sidney, who answered Tami’s call for help, lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
I live and “work” in Los Angeles, California.
The letters below demonstrate that there is beauty in the human spirit, the correspondents are some of the many caring people in the world, despite news reports to the contrary, “people are beautiful.”
Call for Help Letter No. One
Sidney,
Cry for Help Letter No. 2
Hello Sidney,
I am a paralegal that works in the same office where Gary leases an office. He tells me you are a brilliant individual. Gary has heard what is happening in my life with my 25 year old daughter, and her boyfriend Chris. I’m not sure how you can help. But if you can help, or know someone that can help, I will accept any help I can get at this point. This is a very sad situation where a 25 year old male who was perfectly healthy last Christmas (as I spent last Christmas with them), and was in his 3rd year of chiropractic college, went from a normal person to a non-functioning human being with extreme nerve pain in his eyes and now has such severe hearing pain that he has to eat soft foods or even baby foods because he cannot stand the sound of the chewing in his head.
If you can offer any insight, please let me know. Please reply to this email or call me at PHONE NUMBER DELETED BY GSS. Again, I’m not sure why Gary thought you might be able to help.
Tamara
Prompt Unstinting Help
Hi Tamara,
It is probably a good idea for Chris to be seen by a neuro-ophthalmologist, which is a specialist who deals with the neurology of the eye.
UCLA Medical Center is nationally ranked in the specialties of (1) Adult Ear, Nose and Throat, (2) Adult Ophthalmology and (3) Adult Neurology.
See the U.S. News Rankings below.
You can search the UCLA Medical Center web site for (a) a neuro-ophthalmologist and for (b) an otologist (ear doctor). When you have come up with some doctors who seem very qualified, we can brainstorm the choices. If you are having any difficulty accessing the specialists, let me know and we can talk by cell as we simultaneously access the UCLA website. Please feel free to contact me at any time by cell phone.
Talk soon,
Sidney
[PHONE NUMBER DELETED BY GSS]
U.S. News Rankings — deleted by GSS
Cucumber Salad with Smashed Garlic and Ginger
On Thursday, October 8, 2015, while I was reading Yotam Ottolenghi’s book “PLENTY – Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi” and looking at the pictures at Toast Cafe on Ventura Blvd, in Sherman Oaks, California I showed the owner a picture of the Cucumber Salad (picture below).
The owner of “Toast Cafe” proved to me that he is a beautiful person, by what he did after he looked at that picture.
My Love Affair with Coffee Shops, Life, Lively People and Lively Places
I love life, lively people, lively places and coffee shops full of life owned by people who express their love of life with the signs they post.
I love the way enthusiastic people who own coffee shops I have visited have expressed themselves through the signs they have posted in their cafes.
Below are photos of signs in my favorite coffee shop, in San Francisco, taken by me.
.
Below are a photos of signs posted in a coffee shop I took in a cafe I visited in June Lake, California on October 20, 2015.
The City of June Lake is in the Eastern Sierra.
Below is a photo I took of a magnet I saw on a coffee machine in a coffee shop I was in the day before. That coffee shop is located in Lee Vining, California.
The City of Lee Vining is in the Eastern Sierra.
The Eastern Sierra Is Lively Exciting Place
I invite you to enjoy the following signs I saw during my long weekend (October 16 – October 19 2014) while in the Eastern Sierra.
Observing the Dance of Nature
I found peace of mind last weekend (October 16 through October 19, 2015) by looking at the fall colors of trees growing along the side of streams in California’s Eastern Sierra and by looking at the sky, clouds and a mountain reflected in a still pool of water in the high sierra.
Below is a picture of one of those streams.
Below is another picture of that stream.
The reason we see fall colors is part of an annual cycle that begins in spring and summer, when green chlorophyll pigments are active in cells that make food for the tree to grow. It’s during this time that leaves also contain lesser amounts of yellow, orange and red pigments that are masked by the chlorophyll. The appearance of fall colors is actually the disappearance of green chlorophyll.
Below is a picture of trees whose leaves have changed color from green to yellow, orange and red.
I hope you enjoy looking at mountains and trees from the bridge I was on while taking the picture below, while I was hiking around one of the many lakes at Mammoth Lakes, California.
Imagine what it was like for me to be on a bridge, in the City of Mammoth Lake, away from urban distraction, away from the frustrations I feel whenever I find myself caught in a traffic jam going to my office in Encino, California in the morning.
Below is a picture I took while on a bridge which crosses over the still waters of a lake in the City of Mammoth Lake on October 19, 2015.
You too can personally experience a momentous wonderment while looking at mountains and trees reflected in the still water while looking at the still lake while you are looking out from a perch on this bridge to the horizon.
When I took the above photo, yesterday (October 19, 2015), it was a clear day, the visibility was about 20 miles.
A few days before I took the following two pictures of sky, clouds and mountain reflected in the still waters of a pond in another part of the Eastern Sierra.
The sky and clouds in the sky you see in the above photos are reflected in still waters of a pond in that peaceful place.
The change of color of leaves in the fall color season goes on and on and on in the Eastern Sierra.
The trees peak in color change at different times depending on the elevation.
The Eastern Sierra has varied elevations – from approximately 5,000 to 10,000 feet.
The intensity of a leaf’s color is determined by the air’s temperature and moisture and amount of daylight.
The trees peak in color at different times.
I was truly be at one with nature during the change of color of the leaves of trees while l was in the Eastern Sierra for a long weekend, October 16 through October 19, 2015.
By the way, the High Sierra is rated No. 2 for Fall Colors in the U.S.A.
The Nature of Being Human and How to Succeed in the Dynamic Human Marketplace (Part Two – Why Do We Do Anything? and the Sexual Strategies Women Pursue) – by Gary S. Smolker
For readers’ convenience the material which follows is a portion (approximately 1/7th) of a combination book report and movie review previously published/posted on this blog.
That entire article/post can be found at http://www.garysmolker.wordpress.com, posted on August 2, 2015.
Why Do We Do Anything?
According to Steven Quartz and Anette Asp (the authors of “Cool”) our brain has three behavior control systems:
- A survival oriented behavior control system
- A habit oriented behavior control system, and
- A goal oriented behavior control system.
Until I read “Cool”, I didn’t realize that evolution had rigged my brain to be biased to instant gratification; or that when there is a conflict between my brain’s survival instinct (survival behavior control system) with my brain’s goal oriented behavior control system my brain’s survival control system (seeking instant gratification) wins.
That explains how the survival behavior control system in our brain results in many of us becoming overweight – Most of us prefer sweet deserts over celery stalks (because of our survival control system), because our brain justifies a second trip to the desert bar by taking note of the possibility of a famine in the future.Most of us do not consciously realize that is the reason we prefer sweet deserts over celery stalks.
Grocery Cart Choice Architecture
According to Quartz and Asp: Two-thirds of the items in the typical shopper’s cart aren’t planned purchases.
There is a biological logic to that phenomena.
Unplanned purchases appear in the typical shopper’s cart because the human brain is a computational system which tells us for the purpose of survival it is more important to eat things with a lot of calories “while the getting is good” than to put off eating them for another time.
The sweet and fatty goods we reflexively put in our grocery cart taste good because evolution has shaped our brain to align our eating preferences with the evolutionary beneficial goal of survival by making us want to eat sweet and fatty foods.
That is why our “taste” for sweet foods and fatty foods has such a strong sway over us.
Take away:
- The reason why you consume sweet and fatty foods is that you have an evolutionary driven biological instinct to survive.
- The survival control behavior system in your brain thinks eating sweets and fatty foods will increase your chance of survival.
BEWARE: Although “fat” is the “metabolic dollar in the bank” stored for future energy needs, crucial for survival during times of food storage, the fat you eat will be the fat you will wear no matter the source.
“Good fat” like olive oil is no more attractively worn around a person’s waistline than “bad fat” from lard.
Impulse Buying
In “Cool”, Quartz and Asp explain:
- We buy items in a grocery store on impulse that will increase our pleasure short-term (which is a survival oriented behavior) even if doing so will decrease our chances of meeting long-term goals.
- Our brain prefers “survival” (instant gratification) over long-term goals.
The physical presence of a good (such as a bag of potato chips or Cheetos) triggers programmed responses, such as the impulse to reach for the bag of potato chips or Cheetos automatically.
Reaching for a bag of potato chips or Cheetos is the result of a survival process that launches motor behaviors to contact the bags of potato chips and Cheetos.
The Shopping Cart of Dieters
According to Quartz and Asp: “A striking example of this can be found in the shopping carts of dieters, which are likely to be filed with more calorically dense items and fewer fruits and vegetables than those of non-dieters – the very food choices that sabotage diets. Here’s what’s happened: The dieter’s hypothalamus senses a caloric deficit. That can only mean one thing: ‘You are starving!’ The right course of action is to adjust the Survival value system, upping the value of calorically dense foods while lowering the value of calorically sparse foods. These altered values create cravings for foods such as potato chips, bread, pies, ice cream, and other calorie-rich fare. Without being aware of what the hypothalamus is up to, the dieter finds a cart full of the wrong foods.”
Confirmation
After I read the above quote in “Cool” I asked a friend of mine who is a exercise physiologist if the above quote made sense to her.
In reply, she told me: ”
- “Right after the Northridge Earthquake I had an irrepressible and irresistible urge to eat Hostess Cupcakes and Hostess Twinkies.
- “I hadn’t eaten Hostess cupcakes or Hostess Twinkies or thought of eating them in over twenty years.
- “But, after the earthquake, I realized I could die at any moment and with that in mind I went out and got myself lots of Hostess cupcakes and Twinkies and ate all of them.
- “I have not eaten Hostess cupcakes or Hostess Twinkies since them.
- “I hadn’t thought of them since then, until You [I] asked if that quote made sense.
Sex and Sexual Strategies Women Pursue
According to Quartz and Asp: Two forms of behavior are intimately connected to survival (our own and that of our genes): food and sex.
In “Cool”, Quartz and Asp ask: Why would a shrewd politician risk a successful career for a brief tryst?
They provide the following explanation:
‘While we are not enslaved by our Survival system, its pull is strong and its myopia great, and we inevitably fall back into Survival patterns despite concerted efforts to avoid them.”
According to Quartz and Asp a human being’s survival instinct, biology and evolution has shaped human (men’s and woman’s) sexual activities and strategies.
Women choose men with a certain type of face (a rugged face) as a one night stand sexual partner and a woman’s evaluation of male job applicants is controlled by the type of face a man has and where that woman is in her cycle.
Female preferences for male faces are not fixed but fluctuate across a woman’s cycle and according to their own relationship status
Women’s preferences shift towards the more masculine (rugged faces) when they are in the follicular phase of their cycle, when conception is most likely.
This shift in preferences towards more-masculine faces also coincides with the frequency of short-term mating and extra-partner affairs. Sexual affairs are 2.5 times more likely when a woman is ovulating.
What women wear to attract men’s sexual attention (how much skin they show and how tight their clothes are) shifts according to where a woman is in her cycle.
Women going to a club during this phase wear shorter skirts and show more skin than they doing during other parts of their cycle. Women are three times more likely to wear pink or red when they are ovulating.
When presented with photographs of women taken across their cycle, independent judges are able to reliably identify when a woman is ovulating based on assessing when the women are trying to look most attractive.
According to Quartz and Asp:
These shifts in how women evaluate male faces impact more than just mating strategies. In one study, women were given resumes of various male job applicants that included the man’s picture (the faces had independently been rated in terms of masculinity). They were asked to assign the candidates to various job positions, which differed in terms of salary, perks, office size, and so on. The assigned positions shifted across the women’s cycle. In particular, they assigned more high-status positions to highly masculine faces when they were near ovulation or ovulating.
In “Cool” the authors ask you to imagine looking at the faces of Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic and Daniel Craig in his role as James Bond. Or, if you prefer, to think of Orlando Bloom and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Craig and Schwarzenegger have much more masculine rugged faces than do DiCaprio and Bloom.
In “Cool” the authors then tell you
- which “kind of face” people typically think is more trustworthy,
- which face type heterosexual women typically judge (cuter vs. rugged) as being better potential long term partners and/or to be a better potential short-term hookups,
- what women want sexually and how they behave sexually during different times in their cycle.
According to the authors, “… what we look for in a partner[‘s face] depends on the kind of relationship we are after, and especially the duration.”
“Trainwreck”
The casting director of “Trainwreck” deserves to receive an academy award for casting men with the face types the authors of “Cool” tell us women are likely to pick for short-term hookups as the actors to play the parts of the men with whom the star of this movie (a younger sister) has short-term hookups.
In the opening scene of “Trainwreck”, a father asks his two very young daughters to repeat after him: “Monogamy doesn’t work.”
The rest of the movie is about the youngest daughter’s “sex life.”
This movie makes fun of traditional concepts of the relationship of men with women and of women with men.
In “Trainwreck” the main character is a younger sister who is an aggressive sex driven woman — she has one-night-stand-sex with many different men throughout the movie.
Eventually, the main character (the younger sister) falls in love with a man who has the face type the authors of “Cool” tell us women judge to be a better potential long term partner.
Copyright © 2015 Gary Smolker, All Rights Reserved
The Nature of Being Human and How to Succeed in the Dynamic Human Marketplace (Part One – Human Nature; Can and Should Women Have Sex Like A Man?; Economic Life and, Social Image) – by Gary S. Smolker
For the readers convenience the material which follows is a portion (approximately 1/7th) of a combination book report and movie review previously published/posted on this blog.
That entire article can be found at http://www.garysmolker.wordpress.com, posted on August 2, 2015.
Introduction
The book “Cool” and the movie “Trainwreck” are about the same topics: human nature, human tendencies, human motivations, why we think the way we do, why we do what we do, why things happen to us they way they do and the forces causing society to be visibly changing in front of our eyes.
Among other things, “Cool” is about money, power, sex, instant gratification, relationships, food, diets, dieting, dieters, vanity, why we consume what we consume, what our pattern of consumption reveals and conveys about ourselves, the dramatic changes in society that have occurred in the past thirty years including the sex life of women, dramatic changes in the status of women, the dramatic changes in women’s participation in society, the evolving status, the self-image women have of themselves and what a man should do to if he wants to get the favorable attention of a woman.
The story told in the movie “Trainwreck” illustrates many of the points made in the book “Cool” and vice versa.
“Cool” is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the nature of being human or who seeks guidance on how to succeed in the dynamic human marketplace.
Any one who wants to sell anything to younger people should read “Cool.”
The authors of “Cool” discuss how young people decide what to buy.
The authors of “Cool” report:
- “Today, young people believe that their musical taste is the best indicator of their identity…”
- There is a deep consensus among young people about what various kinds of music reveal about fans’ personalities, values, ethics and even social class.
- The authors of “Cool” point out there are about 25 million songs for sale today and more than one thousand distinct musical genres.
- Just before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee of the United States Senate held hearings on offensive content in records in response to Tipper Gore’s campaign and proposal to have music rating labels, requiring albums bearing warnings to be be placed under store counters, forbidding such works to be broadcast, and asking music companies to reassess their contracts with musicians who produced explicit music (rating categories to be based on sex, masturbation, violence, the occult, and drug and alcohol use content), none other than Donny Osmond made the point on Nightline that a sticker would make an album cool and kids would want it that much more. He even said he might have to add some suggestive lyrics to his own songs to avoid a dreaded G rating that would doom sales.
- Madonna, whose album in 1984 Like A Virgin sealed her global recognition has gone on to become the best selling solo artist of all times, to appear on Time’s 2010 list of “The 25 Most Powerful Women of the Past Century, and was the highest-paid musician of 2013, earning $125 million.
- Even as early as her 1984 “Like A Virgin” performance, Madonna parodied the social commodification and fetishizing of female virginity.
Can and Should A Woman Have Sex Like A Man?
“Cool” contains a very interesting discussion of sex therapist Ian Kerner’s 2009 article titled “Can You (and Should You) Have Sex Like a Man?”:
Writing on “Today’s” health blog, he warned that the female orgasm releases oxytocin, a hormone that predisposes women to attachment, and when attachment is not forthcoming ‘orgasm becomes a regretful reminder of the hollowness of the sex that preceded it.’
Suggesting an even worse picture of the dire emotional consequences of casual sex, the University of Southern California professor Ruth White adds that while a woman’s brain releases oxytocin, men’s brain release testosterone, which ‘drives them off to find some other women with whom to spread their biological material.’
Quartz and Asp point out that the authors (Kerner and White) get the biological facts wrong. They leave out the fact that male orgasm likewise releases oxytocin – indeed oxytocin appears to play a central role in male monogamy.
They also point to a study which reported that men and women college students report identical rates of casual sex, and that women were not more motivated by the thought that hookups might result in long-term relationships, indicating casual sex has equal appeal for both sexes. They found no negative effects on well-being.
The movie “Trainwreck” takes the path cut by Madonna in “Like A Virgin” one step further by showing what would happen if women were able to turn-the-tables on men in their sexual relationships with men.
By the way, in the United States, the last forty years have seen the most dramatic and most rapid transformation of gender relations in the United State’s history.
The movie “Trainwreck” takes the path cut by Madonna in “Like A Virgin” one step further by showing what would happen if women were able to turn-the-tables on men in their sexual relationships with men.
“Cool”
The authors of “Cool” (Steven Quartz and Anette) discuss what they found from studying brain activity scans.
They also talk about biological and evolutionary forces that cause us to do what we do.
They talk about food – why we eat what we eat; they talk about dieting – why and how the human brain works against dieting.
In addition to talking about food, they talk about sex, they talk directly about how women choose their sexual partners, how women evaluate men.
They also talk about personal, cultural, and group identities and why those identities are so important to us.
They talk about having street creed and securing the trust of other people.
They talk about how the three “identities” (our personal identity, group identity and cultural identity) impact our behavior, including what we buy and sell and how we act.
They talk about what our actions signal to others.
They talk about status (swagger and star presence), social identity, and social norms.
They talk about why social hierarchies exist.
They discuss how your pattern of consumption conveys who you are to yourself and to others.
They discuss how and why material objects are symbols with meanings that communicate values, identities, aspirations and even fears.
They even discuss Margaret Thatcher’s remark that there is no such thing as society.
They tie all of the above to (a) what we consume, (b) why we consume what we consume, (c) how we interact with (i) other people, (ii) society, and (iii) the world we live in.
They also discuss the “real reason” people work.
Economic Life and Social Image
According to Quartz and Asp our economic life isn’t about just the bare necessities.
If it were, we’d stop working as soon as we had food and shelter – just like every other animal.
According to Quartz and Asp after people obtain bare necessities what people really work to obtain is recognition from others – to be viewed favorably.
Why does that happen?
According to Quartz and Asp:
- Human beings are social animals.
- Your brain keeps track of your social image – your perception of how other people evaluate you.
- It’s doing it all the time, usually outside your awareness.
- You and me and all other human beings are exquisitely sensitive to the approval and disapproval of others.
- When you see a product your brain computes how much it will likely enhance or hurt your social image.
TAKE AWAY: In an economy of abundance people invest great personal meaning in their purchasing decisions.
I don’t know to what degree people invest a great personal meaning in their purchasing decisions.
Many people don’t have time to go shopping, they are too busy working and/or they have to struggle to pay for and sometimes can not pay for their bare necessities.
I expect whether or not people invest great personal meaning in their purchasing decisions depends upon a person’s personal situation and personality, including their age, their health, their maturity, their wealth, the groups they belong to (if any), their success in whatever they are doing, their self-esteem, their education, their experience, their job, their satisfaction with whom they are, etc.
Brain Based Quest for Esteem
Quartz and Asp are convinced we have a brain based quest for esteem.
Status seeking is not artificial.
Status seeking is not imposed by an unjust and crass society.
Status seeking is a natural element of being human.
Products Have a Social Life
According to Quart’s and Asp’s point of view, products are valued for their imaged effect on social image.
The impact of products on social identity (personal identity, group identity and cultural identity) is discussed in the following sections titled “There’s A Big Symbolic Difference Between Riding A Harley and Riding A Ducati,” “Our Social Life Is Rife with Displays of Our Value As A Social Partner,” “Communication Involves More Than The Words You Speak”, “Car Culture and Social Identity”, “What Is Your Favorite Book?” and “Signaling Your Social Identity to Others.”
Copyright © 2015 by Gary Smolker, All Rights Reserved
Gary S. Smolker 