text:
PRESENTATION of EARTH IS THE AIM 6 , Exodus and survivors
Now , as I have finished to write the 7 volumes in French , I undertake to translate my book :
DESTINATION TERRRE , in english , i.e. EARTH IS THE AIM
Also , I'm French :
Nobody is perfect !
So , thank you to not blame me too much for my poor English
Thank you for your kind support and also do not hesitate to write me , I will clear all points if necessary
Enjoy reading
Douglas MOONSTONE
Now published :
1 : Eden and China's gods
2 : The Atlantean gods
3 : Dissolution of the gods
4 : The Tokharians
5 : The Indo-Europeans
6 : Exodus and survivors
To be published soon :
7 : Mu and the others worlds
Expected on May 2019
EARTH IS THE AIM 6 , Exodus and survivors
The Earth has been adapted to the invasion of the Edenist and Atlantean gods
But not without battles or genocides
In this volume , we will try to trace the history of the exoduses that have resulted from it and to determine the place that has been left to the indigenous landowners who survived to the glaciations
Cover Photo :
The Exodus of the Cossacks from the Dnieper up to Kuban
If it still exists , this painting which was painted by a Cossack during their exodus , must be somewhere in Kuban
This painting illustrates the colonization of the Earth , suffered by the Earth populations , always hunted up to farther , elsewhere
It is a Cossak , owner of this photo , who allowed me to use it and who told me the story of the painting
Exodus and survivors
Part 1 : The Gobi Peoples
Page 009 Chapter 1 : The peoples of the Gobi Valley
Page 013 Chapter 2 : The Yukaguirs
Page 021 Chapter 3 : The Nenetses
Page 027 Chapter 4 : The Khanthys and the Mansis
Page 036 Chapter 5 : The Komis
Page 052 Chapter 6 : The Finnish
Page 064 Chapter 7 : The Baltics
Page 085 Chapter 8 : The Magyars
Page 092 Chapter 9 : The Thracians
Page 096 Chapter 10 : The ancient wars
Part 2 : The Peoples of the Seas
Page 101 Chapter 1 : The Indo-europeans
Page 105 Chapter 2 : The Dorians
Page 109 Chapter 3 : The Illyrians
Page 114 Chapter 4 : The Venetians
Page 131 Chapter 5 : The Etruscans
Page 139 Chapter 6 : The Umbrians
Page 146 Chapter 7 : The Sardinians
Page 152 Chapter 8 : The Italics of the South
Page 158 Chapter 9 : The big Liguria
Page 167 Chapter 10 : The Iberians
Page 182 Chapter 11 : Tartessos
Page 189 Chapter 12 : The 10th labor of Heracles
Page 196 Chapter 13 : The Basques
Page 211 Chapter 14 : The Azores
Page 217 Chapter 15 : The Cape Verde Islands
Page 225 Chapter 16 : Madeira , the Selvagens and Canary islands
Page 237 Chapter 17 : The Guanches
Page 249 Chapter 18 : The peoples of the Seas
Part 3 : The Earth Peoples
Page 252 Chapter 1 : Men and gods
Page 256 Chapter 2 : Arctic areas
Page 263 Chapter 3 : America
Page 271 Chapter 4 : Africa
Page 282 Chapter 5 : FromIndonesia up to the
Page 289 Chapter 6 : The nature
Page 291 Acknowledgments
Page 291 Bibliography
Page 292 Contents
EARTH IS THE AIM , 1 to 7
This book is the history of the unknown history , the history of before the knowed history
It is the history of the Edenists and the Atlanteans , and of their Erath colonization
The Bible , the Pop Wuh , the Kojiki , mythology , Chinese legends and all the other legendary tales of the world , are the sources of this history, our history …
The Easter Island , the pyramids , Atlantis , and many other mysteries , appear to us on a new point of view
This book tells us that in Africa , people used iron 3000 years before the Europeans , that the Mayans and the Hopis were developed and civilized peoples 5000 years ago , and reminds us that Chinese legends are not tales , but the reality seen by the population living at these periods
This book brings coherent explanations to many mysteries of our Earth
The existing theories explaining these mysteries are very often contradicted with each new scientific or archaeological discovery …
So far , every new scientific or archaeological discovery has confirmed the theories evoked in this book
Some of the theories found in this book already exist , but for the first time , they are grouped into a sequence and a coherent story
EARTH IS THE AIM 1 , Eden and China's gods
It is the story of the Edenist gods who came from space and of their colonization of the Earth …
The Bible and the legends of China describe these invasions with all technical details
Just read them and forget what we have been taught :
Progress is linear , before it was not so developed
So the men in the antiquity were savages
Besides , they lived in the Stone Age , not knowing neither the wheel , nor the agriculture , nor the technology
But yet they have left us fantastic legends , gigantic constructions , art , metallurgy , agriculture and so many other things
EARTH IS THE AIM 2 , The Atlantean gods
In the Volume 1 , the Edenists arrived on Earth
In this volume 2 , we will see the arrival of the Atlanteans
This will not happen without clashes …
The menhirs and the megaliths which cover all the Earth , are Atlanteans
As so well told by the Tibetean monks , they are the needles which rely the forces of the Earth to the forces of the sky
EARTH IS THE AIM 3 , Dissolution of the gods
In the Volume 1 , the Edenists arrived on Earth
In the Volume 2 , the Atlanteans arrived on Earth
In this volume 3 , Atlantis been sunked , the gods , without maintenance infrastructures , will dissolve themselves into the peoples
But they still want to keep the power …
EARTH IS THE AIM 4 , The Tokharians
In the Volume 1 , the Edenists arrived on earth
In the Volume 2 , the Atlanteans arrived on earth
In the Volume 3 , without Atlantis , the gods have been dissolved into the peoples
In this volume 4 , we will relate the sagas of a the civilization of the Tokharians , who dominated , towards 5000 years ago , almost the half of the planet
With the Mayans , their allies , who dominated almost the rest , they dominated more than the 2/3 of the Earth
And nobody knows them …
Neither the Tokharians nor the Mayans …
We can summarize by saying that Mayans controlled the skies and that the Tokharians controlled the seas
EARTH IS THE AIM 5 , The Indo-Europeans
The official theory:
The Indo-Europeans are a population arrived from nowhere and arising by spontaneous generation at the North of the Black Sea towards -4000
Towards -1500 , they conquered India and wrote the Vedas
This theory will justify the British supremacy and colonization
Yet it is well known today that the Vedas were written towards -4300 …
In this volume 5 , we will try to trace the true history of those who are called the Indo-European
EARTH IS THE AIM 6 , Exodus and survivors
The Earth has been adapted to the invasion of the Edenist and Atlantean gods
But not without battles or genocides
In this volume , we will try to trace the history of the exoduses that have resulted from it and to determine the place that has been left to the indigenous landowners who survived to the glaciations
EARTH IS THE AIM 7 , Mu and the other worlds
The Neanderthal peoples were taller , stronger , and more intelligent than the Sapiens ones
Who can believe that during their 520 000 years of existence they were only able to remain into the Stone Age ?
They had to leave the Earth to escape to its cyclical cataclysms
But the planet where they took refuge had also its cyclical cataclysms
In fact , all planets have cyclical cataclysms
Then they returned to their land on Earth:
Travels albums serie
Hi ,
If you do not believe that a trip is an adventure , it is why you have not read :
TRIPS 1 , Madras
I was fortunate , thanks to my trade business , import-export , to make fantastic trips during which I made many improbable and surprising encounters , and that made me live fabulous adventures
I give you the story of the first of these trips , which I hope will please you
Others will follow
Forthcoming :
2 – Beirut
3 – Kigali
4 – Belfast
And so on …
Brittanny reportages serie
Discover the Morbihan's Gulf , Houat Island and Monks's Island
With photos , comments , and legends
In Brittany , the Morbihan's Gulf , especially with the sunshine , is a paradise on sea
We ship from the head of Locmiquel and sail to the exit of the Morbihan's Gulf
We will continue our trip to the island of Houat , then return to the Morbihan's Gulf , to visit the Monks's island
Everyone on board , cast off
To be published soon : 2 – Le Bono
Moonstone auto-édition :
Douglas Moonstone / Frederic le voyageur
All my books are available on amazon.com
in E–Book or Paperback book or Colour printed
http://www.amazon.com / Douglas Moonstone
http://www.amazon.com / Frederic le voyageur
Author : Douglas Moonstone
Earth is the aim 1 : Eden and China's Gods
Earth is the aim 2 : Atlanteans Gods
Earth is the aim 3 : Dissolution of the gods
Earth is the aim 4 : The Tokharians
Earth is the aim 5 : The Indo-Europeans
Earth is the aim 6 : Exodus and survivors
Earth is the aim 7 : Mu and the others worlds
Author : Frederic le voyageur
Tours 1 : Houat and Morbihan's gulf
Just trips 1 Grouped: Madras
Auteur : Douglas Moonstone
Destination Terre 1 : Les dieux d'Eden et de Chine
Destination Terre 2 : Les dieux atlantes
Destination Terre 3 : La dissolution des dieux
Destination Terre 4 : Les tokhariens
Destination Terre 5 : Les indo-européens
Destination Terre 6 : Exodes et rescapés
Destination Terre 7 : Mu et les autres mondes
Auteur : Frederic le voyageur
Evasions 1 : Houat et le golfe
Voyages en vrac 1 : Madras
Grouped blogs :
The books
My travels : Brittany , France and over the world


text:
By Nadia Oehlsen
An infant smiles blissfully, eyes closed, as her mother kisses her cheek. It's a perfect moment captured in black and white by an imperfect negative. "There is hardly any image on it--a very thin negative," says Jack Leb, describing his efforts to create adequate contrast in the print. "But that's a beautiful photograph."
The photographer who shot the portrait normally has another lab print her work, but she's come to Polaris, the small lab where Leb and a partner hand print black-and-white film, hoping they'll be able to save the underexposed shot and match it to others in the series. "It's gonna take a lot of time," Leb says. "She shot ten different subjects of the same baby. She wants all the photographs to be matched in density, in the content. So to do that, you're gonna spend a lot of time and a lot of paper." And the paper's not cheap. It's a Hungarian brand of fiber stock that's double the weight of the resin-coated paper most photographers use. "But RC, you can't get good-quality prints made from it, and it won't last so long," he says. "RC prints, maybe four, five years end up just turning yellow. But the fiber photographs will last you 30, 40 years--50 years."
Leb joined Gamma Photo Labs shortly after it started up in 1959, and longtime customers of the local photography giant use gushing superlatives to describe his work. "He's the Dalai Lama of black-and-white printing," says Marc Hauser, a Chicago photographer who's renowned for his portraits. "He is the master in art in what he does."
Hauser was 16 when he first walked into Gamma, in 1968. His relatives owned Astra Photo Service, but they were often too busy to develop his film. Someone suggested Gamma. "They said, 'If you really want good prints, go to the back of the place and talk to the printer, Jack Leb.'" Hauser kept coming back to Gamma, for Leb's advice as much as for his printing. "He'd always say, 'Marc, expose the negative a little longer or don't shoot the ASA of the film. Give me a richer negative. I wanna have detail in those shadows.' Even to this day, sometimes he says to me, 'Marc, the reason why this looks like this is you need a little gutsier negative.'"
Archie Lieberman was already an award-winning photographer for Life, Look, Time, and Collier's magazines in 1960, when Mickey Pallas, who owned Gamma, solicited his business. Lieberman says he was hesitant to let someone else develop and print his film. "I kept saying, 'Hey Mickey, I can make a living on a dollar and a half a picture.' And he rightfully said, 'You've got more stuff to do than just print pictures.'" Pallas eventually got Lieberman's business, and Leb has kept it ever since. "I used to tell young photographers who were printing their own pictures, 'Go get your pictures printed by Jack and see how they could look,'" Lieberman says. "They would do it, and they were so proud of themselves. The guy's a master. He's a genius. He's one of those very talented people that come into your life not very often."
Leb continued to work at Gamma after Pallas sold the business in 1972 and remained its chief printer and a vice president while the lab changed hands a few more times. But he left after it was sold in 1995. Some photographers say they withdrew their business from Gamma because they suspected the lab's new owners of pressuring Leb to leave so they'd be rid of his high salary and benefits package. Leb says he was never told that outright, but he acknowledges being bothered by several cost-saving changes the new owners had implemented, including cutting staff and encouraging those who remained to spend less time talking to customers. "It didn't work because I had a good relationship with our customers," he says. "I couldn't talk to them and tell them what's going on anymore." (In November 1999 the lab was sold again, to Photobition, a British company, for $4.3 million.)
Lieberman says he doesn't worry about Leb's professional future. "He's tough," he says. "Nobody can take advantage of him."
Leb's toughness no doubt has its roots in his upbringing during a turbulent time in the Middle East. He was born Hagop Leblebijian on Christmas in 1925 within the walled compound of an Armenian Orthodox Christian convent in Jerusalem's Old City. The compound, about the size of two football fields, encompassed two churches and several other buildings originally built as a home for priests and Armenian boys who were being groomed for the priesthood. There was also a smaller area for nuns. During World War I the convent began to take in refugees fleeing massacres by Turkish soldiers and irregulars in which more than a million and a half Armenians would eventually die.
Leb's father, Haroutoun Leblebijian, had been born just before the turn of the century in Urfa, a small city in what's now southeastern Turkey that had a large Armenian population. Haroutoun lost several family members, including his parents and five of his seven brothers, in the massacres and in 1915 barely escaped being killed himself. A year later he and several friends were arrested by Turkish soldiers and taken to a prison in Aleppo, in what's now Syria, to be hanged with several other Armenian men. "My family's [paternal] side are good singers," Leb says. "So in the prison [he] used to sing all the time. The guy in charge of the prison used to say to the guards, 'Who is this guy singing?' And they say, 'You know there's this guy that we brought in from Urfa.' He said, 'Bring him over.' So my dad used to go and sing for him every night. What he did, he postponed the hanging."
An Armenian horse-and-buggy merchant who was friends with the prison's warden was visiting one night and heard the Armenian prisoners singing. "The Armenian guy was very wealthy, so he did the arrangement with this guy in charge of the prison, paid him in gold," Leb says. "And one night he brought a carriage and took all the guys back to Urfa."
There Haroutoun married Osanna Qassabian, a former neighbor, and soon after, they and their surviving relatives and friends fled to Cyprus. After a brief stay there, they decided to try to join the Armenians in Jerusalem. But the chaos of World War I, as the Allies fought the Turks and Germans for control of their favorite pieces of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, made it hard to travel anywhere in the region. The group made it to Damascus, where they boarded a train that was supposed to go to Amman, Transjordan, about 60 miles west of Jerusalem, as soon as the tracks were repaired. "They lived in it for a year, year and a half," Leb says. "There my mother had her first daughter."
In 1921 Leb's parents finally made it to Jerusalem and the Armenian compound, where a few thousand other Armenians were living. They moved into a one-room house in the convent, sharing a bathroom with four other families. "We lived in the convent like a family," says Leb. "In the morning, at five o'clock, huge doors used to open up, and at nine o'clock at night they closed the doors. If you stayed out you were out. You couldn't come in. And so it was like a family. We had a lot of friends. We used to sit and play at night, so it was very safe."
When Leb was 11 his father found him a summer job in the home photography lab of a Jewish man who lived ten miles from the Old City. "In the old days they had chrome plates," says Leb. "You'd put the photographs in a special solution that they had. Then you'd lay it on the glass, then you'd roll it. You take all the water out, and there is a plate dryer. You put it inside, you cover it, and with that heat it dries and gives a shine. If you don't roll it well you don't get a good gloss on it. If you want it to be matte, you put it upside down. So that was my job--drying prints all day long and mopping the floors, warming the chemicals." He worked at the lab every summer and many weekends for four years.
To avoid walking the entire ten miles four times a day--to work, home for midday meals, back to work, then back home--Leb sneaked rides on the backs of trucks and buses. When he was 14 he saved enough money to buy two wheels and a seat, and using other materials he'd scrounged up, fashioned a brakeless bicycle. "I was so happy," he says. "I had to stop with my foot--that was the brake. I used to ride the bicycle every day after school, so I was very good at it. We had a neighbor, his father was doing well, so he bought him a bicycle with two seats. Me and him, we used to go every weekend right out of [town]. We used to pack every Sunday morning--three, four o'clock. We used to go [as if] from here to Wisconsin or different places, and we used to ride back."
The British didn't provide free education for their subjects in Palestine, and when Leb was 16 his family could no longer afford the high school tuition. Like many of his Armenian peers, he dropped out to apprentice in a trade. He was soon hired by a Swedish photographer who received most of his commissions from wealthy international patrons of the elegant American Colony hotel in Jerusalem. "At that time everything was glass plates," Leb says. "There were no sheet films in older days. So when we had to go to a location I had to carry his two boxes, like shoe-shine boxes. They were heavy."
The Swedish photographer taught Leb how to bleach parts of images with potassium ferrous cyanide. "He used to do that in prints, in glass plates," Leb says. "He used to bleach open the clouds, things like that. In a fraction of a second you can just ruin the photograph, so it's got to be diluted a certain way."
In the 1940s massive numbers of Jewish immigrants began arriving in Palestine, fleeing anti-Semitism, war, and the holocaust. Tension over who would control the region after the British pulled out began to erupt in violence. "I saw people shot on the street," Leb says. To make himself less of a target, he changed his look to fit the neighborhoods he passed through. "I used to wear a--what do you call it?--like a fez, because we were living in a Muslim neighborhood so they knew that I wasn't a Jew, because they used to give me a hard time," he says. "Once I got where I was working--it's a border, Arab and Jewish neighborhood--I had to take that off because of snipers."
Leb and his two younger brothers finally left Palestine in the spring of 1947. "We were living in no-man's-land, and they were shooting at each other, so we had to move out of there," he says. "My mom saw the massacres in Turkey, and she told us three brothers, 'Pack everything and go to Jordan.'" His two older sisters were already in Amman, and his mother would eventually join them, though his father stayed behind a few years longer to help in the convent.
Leb quickly found a part-time job retouching photos for a portrait photographer, and his brothers were hired at an auto body shop. During their off hours they hung out at a cafe frequented mostly by Armenians, who came to socialize, hear the news, and share leads on better jobs. Through one of those leads, Leb was hired as an assistant to a wealthy Armenian who was the chief photographer for Transjordan's King Abdullah ibn Hussein and his family. "At that time 95 percent of the photographers [in Amman] were Armenians," he says. He was soon given more responsibility. "My boss, he was in his 60s. He was having problems with his hands shaking. The photographs were not that sharp." So Leb began to take the pictures. "Every week there was something I had to go to. For two, three hours I had to sit there, wait until they called me," he says. "I just took the pictures and put it in the album, and the driver came, the sergeant came. We just gave the album to him. We'd send a bill to the palace, and they paid the bill."
Leb spent countless hours observing the king and his associates and family while he waited to take photos of official and personal events. When no one else was around King Abdullah would ask him questions. "Where were you born? Where do you come from? How many people are in your family? How do you pass your time?" Leb says. "He'd start talking like a regular person. He talks, and you can answer. But if there were other people next to him, then you gotta raise your hand."
Abdullah had always been accommodating to the British. He'd been the unofficial ruler since 1921 and had become the official king in 1945, when a treaty with Britain made Transjordan an independent state. In May 1948 Transjordan seized control of a large chunk of the west bank of the Jordan River, which Israel had claimed the month before as part of its new state. Abdullah formally annexed the area in April 1950 and declared its inhabitants official residents of what would from then on be called Jordan. Many members of the Arab League opposed this move, arguing that it seemed to concede the rest of Palestine to Israel, and on July 20, 1951, during a visit to the Dome of the Rock mosque in East Jerusalem, Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian who suspected him of colluding with Israel.
Abdullah's son, Talal ibn Abdullah, was installed as the new king. Leb says he was more devout and formal than his predecessor. "Every Friday--that is their Sunday--he used to ride a white horse around the city and just look around," he says. "Very seldom he spoke to you, unless he wanted you to do something or take a picture." Talal opposed cooperation with Britain, which still wielded a considerable amount of power over the country's affairs. The Jordanian parliament disliked that position and deposed him in August 1952, declaring that Talal had a mental problem--though Leb thought he'd seemed perfectly sane.
Talal's 13-year-old son, Hussein ibn Talal, then became king, with a council of regents acting on his behalf until he turned 18. Leb had felt intimidated by Abdullah and Talal, but he didn't feel intimidated by Hussein. "I was older than Hussein, and when he talked to me he talked to me like a friend," Leb says. "He didn't have that--what do you call it? 'I am the king.' He was close to people more than Talal and Abdullah were."
Educated in Britain, Hussein spoke English and classical and common Arabic, but his elders often found other languages useful. At Hussein's 14th birthday party, his aunt and an ambassador's wife began to converse with Leb in Turkish. "Some of these ladies, they speak Turkish with each other if they want to keep something secret. So she started talking to me," Leb says. The ambassador's wife, who'd spent a lot of time in Europe, said she expected Hussein would be bored in Amman, which didn't have the hopping nightclubs and restaurants it has today. "Jordan is a grave for younger guys," she told Leb. "There is no place to have fun for them."
Hussein knew that when his elders switched languages they were keeping something from him, and he asked Leb how he knew Turkish. "I said, 'I learned it from my family, my mother and father.' He said, 'You know what? I'm gonna learn this language.' He never learned the language."
During their early years in Amman the Leblebijians occasionally visited family and friends who remained in the Armenian compound in Jerusalem. In 1949 Leb proposed to Anna Leblebijian, a childhood friend still living in the compound, at the suggestion of her mother and his. When Anna's father was a child his entire family was killed in one of the Urfa massacres, and Leb's father had raised the boy.
No one expected Leb and Anna to take so long to get married. Though he worked for a rich man photographing royalty, he wasn't paid any more than the pittance earned by most photographers. "I didn't have no money," he says. "I said, 'How am I gonna get married?' You're gonna have a house, you're gonna have furniture, you're gonna have a wedding." But he visited Anna when he could, warding off other would-be suitors and enduring the criticism of impatient relatives and friends while he tried to save enough money.
His boss wanted to keep up with the latest photographic innovations, so he would send Leb to Germany for two weeks at a time to learn new techniques from manufacturers. "We were the only lab [in Amman] processing Ektachrome and making color prints," he says. "We used to make thousands and thousands of slides, duplicating them in Jordan." Color processing was more complicated than it is today, and good prints harder to achieve. But Leb quickly learned how to improve what he shot. "Let's say the faces were light. I used to add colors with Q-Tips, make them more red or yellow. I did a lot of things like that in my younger days."
Leb's boss also sent him to photograph Jordanian high-society events, many of which were attended by members of Britain's air force. At a party in 1948 he met an officer named Heller, a photographer who was fascinated by the new strobe Leb was using. It was still a novel device, allowing him to take up to 350 photos on one battery charge. Heller asked Leb to take several photos at the party and soon became his best customer. They also became close friends, and later Heller offered to set Leb up with his own darkroom so that he could moonlight. "He says, 'I buy anything you want, then you can pay me back,'" Leb says. "Then he bought everything that I needed. I started doing the processing at home, and I was busy until midnight, literally, seven days a week."
A couple of years later Heller returned to England, but demand for Leb's work continued. He met an Arab photographer for the Jordanian army, and they became partners. "We had so much business," Leb says. "We had weddings, we had parties, newspaper jobs, agencies. We used to turn jobs down. I used to do processing, printing at home. I used to shoot on the weekends. He used to shoot during the week." Leb finally thought he had enough money to support Anna, and the two were married in 1953.
Four years later the United Nations began to offer refugees in the Middle East loans to cover the airfare if they wanted to move to Canada, Australia, Britain, or the United States. Anna liked the idea of joining Leb's sisters in Chicago, but he was reluctant to leave his booming photography business for a country in which he had no interest. She applied for visas for herself and their two children, and she kept pushing him to apply for one too. When their visas took a year and a half to come through, Leb figured he could risk applying for one. "I said to myself, 'My family waited a year and a half to get their visas. If I apply now, in a year, year and a half, she will see that we have a shop, good business, money's coming in. She will forget.'" He hadn't counted on getting special treatment in return for his years of service to Jordan's elite. "After one week they called me," he says. "They said, 'Your visa is ready.' They didn't know that I didn't want to come here."
The Leblebijians, including Leb's parents, arrived in Chicago in April 1959 and moved in with Leb's sister's family, who lived near Winthrop and Thorndale. Leb found a handful of photography businesses in the phone book, and within two days was hired by Dave Kleiman Studio, at Wabash and Lake Streets.
Leb was fluent in Armenian, Turkish, and Arabic, and had a good command of Hebrew and British English, but it took him a while to understand American English and photography lingo--what he knew as acetic acid in Jordan was called shortstop here, what he knew as hypo was called fixer here. And there were other adjustments to make. When his boss sent him to photograph the president of Pure Oil at a building half a block from the lab, he got lost because he was looking for a painted sign rather than a name chiseled into the stone of the building. "I got in there--these guys are running around," he says. "They say, 'You're late! It's 4:30! The president's got another appointment!' And I say to myself, 'What the hell are these guys hollering for? I photographed kings. Nobody hollered at me.'"
Still, Leb felt lucky to have been hired as a photographer--most of the Armenian immigrants he knew had to work in factories. But he found Chicago's culture and work environment a depressing contrast to what he'd known in the Middle East, where, for instance, most people went home for a midday family meal. "Lunchtime, I saw all of the sudden everybody opens his lunch bag and goes on the fire escape behind the building. I said, 'What kind of a life is this?' And I used to talk to some of my friends, they'd say, 'You know, I'm working night shift.' I'd say, 'Night shift?'"
After a couple of weeks Leb decided he wanted to return to Amman, but Anna wouldn't allow him to give up on America so soon. She recalls, "I said, 'If you wanna go, go ahead. I'm not coming with you.'" Not that she found life here easy. While Leb worked she, knowing few English words and with two young children in tow, walked for hours looking for an apartment to rent. "Everyplace I go for rent it's marked. I go, I ring the bell, and everybody come outside, says, 'What do you want?' I say, 'I wanna look in apartment for rent.' 'You have kids?' I say, 'Yes, I got two kids.' 'We don't give you.'" Finally she found some European immigrants who allowed children in their building at Lakewood and Thorndale.
Leb had worked for Kleiman for only a couple of months when he heard that Mickey Pallas had just opened a studio and lab. Soon Leb was working part-time for Pallas, though he considered himself more a photographer than a printer. But Pallas said he had enough customers to keep them both busy taking pictures, and meanwhile they'd process and print other people's film. Leb says that when photographers saw how good their prints were they told Pallas they'd give him all their business if he hired Leb full-time.
Hagop Leblebijian unofficially became Jack Leb shortly after he started at Gamma and grew tired of hearing his name butchered by colleagues and customers. At first he thought about changing it legally. "But my dad got mad at me," he says. "I told him once before he passed away. He said, 'You can't do that. After I am dead, you can do that--not now.'"
Leb, Pallas, and Pallas's wife, Millie, handled all of Gamma's business at first. Within four years they'd added 15 employees and outgrown their space, so they moved Gamma to 319 W. Erie. For a few years they had a studio space where they could do product shots for magazines, ad agencies, and other businesses, but processing, duplicating, printing, and mounting orders from Leo Burnett, Playboy, and scores of other clients brought in enough revenue and took enough time that they decided to scrap the studio and build more lab space.
Leb, who was given shares of stock in the business, oversaw Gamma's black-and-white processing and printing lab, which left him less and less time for photographing. He found he didn't mind. Printing, he says, "was always a challenge, not something you just put in there, expose it. This had to be done right. And you are adding backgrounds to the photograph, you are extending it. You can't do it over again, and if you mess it up you're gonna lose that client. So I had to make sure that it was done right and that it was good. So I never looked back and said, 'What about if I go back again and shoot?' I did shooting for 15, 20 years, so I don't care about shooting anymore. I don't even know where my cameras are." He says his children long ago took over as photographers of family events.
Demand for color processing and printing increased during the early 60s, so Pallas and Leb brought in Andre Shellenberg to oversee a full-fledged color lab. Leb had duplicated some color transparencies for Playboy, but his first love was black and white, and now he could do it full-time.
After seven years at Gamma, Leb and Anna bought a three-flat in Rogers Park. They still live in the tidy second-floor apartment, which is decorated with a couple hundred family photos, including some old black-and-white and colorized portraits of the young Anna and Leb.
Mickey and Millie Pallas lobbied Leb to let Anna come work with them. But Anna had had a job for two years at a small electrical parts factory, and Leb's mother had grown tired of watching Anna and Leb's three children. So Leb refused to hire Anna. "My mom didn't wanna take care of the kids," he says. "My dad says, 'Yes, I will take care of all the kids,' but my dad can't take care of all of the kids. You know, mothers always take care of the kids. So that was the reason that she said, 'You stay home, take care of the kids.' Otherwise, I will be happier if she came with me to work. She'd learn a lot of things at Gamma."
It's still a sore subject with Anna, who's now 69. "I say, 'Jack, I wanna come work with you. I learn everything.' He say, 'No, stay home, take care your kids.' When you go to work you learn everything--how to speak good, everything. All his fault!"
And she didn't like it that Leb worked 50 to 60 hours a week. "Sometimes I get mad," she says. "I liked he come early. No, he never do. He said, 'First come job.'" Leb admits his work habits might have been a bit extreme but says that's typical of his generation and of a new immigrant trying to support a large family. "When we came we worked so hard to make money to support our family," he says. "And it was a new company we started, and I made sure that it was running well, it's gonna be good.
"My kids were first generation. They didn't see all that. They lived here. I bought them cars when they were in high school. They were in Gordon [Technical High School], a private school. And they went to colleges. They didn't see all that, so their first priority is their families, then their jobs."
Nevertheless, on weekends and holidays their apartment was the social center of their extended family. "We had always a big party, all the family around the table from here to there," says Leb. "We had always every Christmas, Thanksgiving, whatever, we had a party in our apartment. Very rare we went to my sister's or my brother's. Now they are all gone. They are all retired. They live in Vegas. I am the only one that's still working."
Anna's mother still lives on the first floor, and Anna and Leb's daughter, Astina Kokuzian, lives with her husband and their youngest son in the apartment above her parents. Kokuzian describes her father as a workaholic. "[Photography] was something that he had started when he was very young and luckily was able to get into when he came to this country," she says. "That's been his whole life and his love, and I think that's why he probably still does it today. Not because he really likes to work--I'm sure that's part of it--but it's also because he enjoys and he loves what he's doing. I think that's what keeps him going. As a result of that, I think it's instilled a lot of good values in us, in the children, as far as work ethics, pride in what you do, enjoying and liking what you do, because it makes a difference. I think he's been a good provider because of it. He was a great father."
Kokuzian worked at Gamma two summers when she was a teenager. One morning on the way to work she asked her father for a raise. "I said, 'Well, you know this is the second summer I'm working for you, and you're paying me the same amount of money that you did last summer.' And back then you were making about $3 an hour, so I was asking for like $3.25 or something. He stopped the car and he said, 'If you don't like working and getting what you're getting, you can take the train home and forget about working.'" She kept working. "It reinforced everything about him--that business was business, and he had to treat everybody fairly."
She adds, "It's different seeing someone at home and seeing someone at work, because he's quite different in both environments. At work he is just so motivated and so involved in what he does and is so focused on his work that he tunes everything out--personal issues, whatever. And then once he gets home it's a total reverse. He's able to switch gears and then kind of relax and be himself as a person. He separates the two very well. I think he had to do that because we've had family members work at Gamma. Between my brother and his son-in-law and cousins and uncle, he had to treat everyone equally."
In 1969, Kokuzian's future husband, Varouj, had moved from Jerusalem to Chicago with his parents, who'd grown up with Leb in the Armenian compound. Leb gave Varouj a summer job and daily rides to and from work. Varouj started college wanting to become a dentist, but he found he preferred his part-time job at Gamma. "So I wound up staying in it," he says. "And Jack kinda liked me, because I reminded him of himself when he was younger. I loved the business so much, and I wanted to learn so much, and I wanted to learn everything so fast. He taught me how to do proof sheets, he put me in spotting one year, he put me in processing. Then one day I said, 'Jack, it's time for me to print.' He says, 'Oh, you need a few years for that.' I said, 'Just give me a chance. Let me do it.'" Varouj bugged other printers at the lab to let him practice until Leb relented. "Jack gave me negatives, said, 'Go ahead, print.' I printed one. He said, 'Mmm, not bad. But you still need a lot of work.'"
Varouj says Leb was a moody boss, a perfectionist who expected the same from his coworkers. "I've got him really mad," Varouj says. "If something was out of focus a little bit, then Jack would say something like, 'You know, I have such good eyes that I can see a fly, when it is flying, if it's male or female.'" He laughs. "If you were late from a break he would give you a look and then he would look at the clock. He won't say nothing, but you knew exactly what he meant." But Varouj credits Leb's high expections for his own success as a black-and-white printer. "I get a lot of compliments at work from customers, and I always say I thank Jack for these compliments. He taught me everything."
Leb says much of his talent is innate. "I have a feeling when I look at scenery or a photograph or a painting I can see things better than a normal person can see," he says. "It's gifted from God. I can see things, and I can tell if I do this it will look much better to other people." He also credits his own teachers and years of practice for his command of rare skills, which he has taught Varouj and other Gamma printers, especially his Swedish boss's trick of bleaching parts of photographs with potassium ferrous cyanide. "When I first came to this country nobody knew about it," he says. "The people that do now, most of them, they learned it from me. They worked for me. I teached them, I trained them. So some of them, they still use it now. Some of the people that worked with me for Gamma--two, three of them--they know. Now they're not as good as I am, but they do a good job."
When Pallas sold Gamma in 1972, Leb socked away his $200,000 share of the sale to pay for college for his kids and continued to work at Gamma as its vice president and chief printer. He continued to attract a dedicated following of photographers, many of whom came for his free advice and his willingness to help them out. "You know how poor photographers are," he says. "I gave them breaks. Let's say the guy came in for a job and said, 'Jack, I can't afford to pay you except for this. If you do this job for me, next time I will pay you for another job.'"
When Leb left Gamma in 1995 he found that after a lifetime of working overtime he missed being busy. He had a couple of months of restless leisure, then jumped at the suggestion of Elie Berkman, a longtime customer, that the two set up their own lab. When Berkman first visited Gamma in 1970 he had more enthusiasm than talent behind the camera. "I began learning and teaching myself," he says. "Jack was the one who critiqued me all the time. He was vicious. Oh God, he cut me to pieces." But, Berkman adds, "Always he was so patient with me, and I had so many questions. When photographers come to him and he sees a potential--and the photographer doesn't see his own potential, Jack sees it--he begins to suggest ideas. 'Why don't you try that way and try that way?' Then they come back to him, and [he says], 'Oh, that's really good. But you made a mistake here.' Things begin to happen, and the photographers begin to realize that they're really good. In essence, Jack nurses them into photography and then he makes them into a professional photographer."
Berkman and Leb called their lab Polaris, and the plan was that Leb would develop black-and-white prints for a select group of his former Gamma customers, including Archie Lieberman, who'd called Leb at home shortly after he left Gamma and asked for his help in preparing an upcoming exhibit. Leb was also supposed to print Berkman's photos of China, Israel, and America, which were to be turned into three books.
Word spread among photographers around the country that Leb was back in business, and soon he was again working 40 to 50 hours a week filling orders for more than 50 photographers from the U.S. and abroad. Berkman says he sometimes resents that his books get put on hold while Leb fills other orders, but he believes Leb's unique talents should be shared. "He's not a printer, he's a painter--he paints with light," Berkman says. "His visual memory is so amazing. He remembers photographs he developed 30 years ago for Hauser or for Archie. He remembers how many seconds burned or dodged on this side or that side."
Though a growing number of photographers use only digital film, Polaris has plenty of customers. The phone number isn't even in the book.
As Leb's successor at Gamma--which the new owners are trying to get people to call Photobition-Chicago--Varouj says he's adopting his father-in-law's habit of working 50- to 60-hour weeks. "Unfortunately," he says. "I always said, 'I want to be like Jack, but I want to work smarter'--meaning less time and making the same amount of money. But the demand is so high that we need to put in so many hours. There's a lot of pressure in this business."
He oversees a staff of 15 hand printers, ten fewer than worked under Leb. He says Photobition-Chicago directs many customers to its cheaper digital and machine-printing services for both color and black and white. He's been hearing for years about the eventual demise of hand printing, but he still sees plenty of demand for hand-printed black-and-white photos destined for book publishers, exhibits, museums, and family photo albums. "Hand printing, it's not gonna last, and I should be learning computers and all that," he says. "But if it's slowing down, I sure don't see it. I can't keep up with the work."
Marc Hauser says he often scans images to show clients and publishers, but his final prints are always done by hand. "When I deal with book publishers, I give them all my original prints and they scan them," he says. "At some point maybe they'll ask for transparencies or digital. Some things I get called for, they say, 'Send us digital files,' but very rarely. For a whole book that I'm doing, they ask for the prints. I think there'll always be a group of people that will want film. For my own stuff, it'll always be a real photographic print."
Leb, who doesn't plan to slow down anytime soon, says he's confident the art of hand printing black-and-white photos will outlast him and his proteges. "There is film that they shoot, 3200 ASA, 1600 ASA--these are films that you can't put through machines. It needs to be processed by hand," he says. "Now maybe there's more color than black and white--it's everything done by computer now in color. But still, there is enough business for black and white. You can make a good living in black and white. It depends how good you are."
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Elie Berkman.

subset: commoncrawl


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Having access to advanced business technologies is not sufficient in today's data-driven and digital world. Knowing where, how, and when to use these technologies is just as crucial. The effective conception, planning, design, and execution of sound IT strategies can aid in optimizing resources, capitalizing on emerging trends, and building a strong business. A company needs to invest in a technical team that covers a complete range of business needs such as cloud computing, data center, application of platforms and development, data management, and mobility.
Consultants at Persistence Market Research support clients by devising up-to-date business technology strategies that can enhance customer experience and drive revenue. We help companies keep up with the rapidly evolving needs and expectations of their customer by careful optimization of the organization's technological portfolio and development of relevant, personalized strategies. The application, optimization, and impact of social media, geomarketing, and digital marketing also forms an important part of PMR's offerings for its clients.
Technology Simplified
Technology has transformed the way businesses – small, medium, and large – function and conduct their operations. For smaller companies, implementing the latest technologies can help level the playing field with bigger organizations. For larger firms, advanced business technologies can lend competitive advantages in the economic marketplace. At Persistence Market Research, we address the challenges that technical professionals may face by providing them a historical as well as forecast impact of the technology environment so they can focus solely on achieving their set goals. Our team helps clients make sense of the rising number of technology options available to them and guides them to frame as well as execute business decisions that drive their choice of technology.
Insight into Emerging Trends
Given the rapid pace at which technology has been evolving and the significant impact it has on business activity, it has become imperative for companies to be at the top of their game. Identifying emerging technology-enabled trends and recognizing their potential in a competitive business environment is the responsibility as well as the goal of every technology professional. Persistence Market Research offers clients unbiased and thorough research focused on upcoming technology trends and forecasts. Making sense of the technological changes impacting the business world and providing clear insight into how they will pan out is PMR's forte, which can guide technical professionals in making assisted-economic decisions.
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Simply identifying popular technology-enabled business trends is not sufficient for the growth of a company. Determining the appropriate and most profitable applications for the technology at hand and carefully optimizing technical know-how and abilities is equally crucial for any business. Taking into account today's new-age digital customer and the impact of social media and mobile phones, the expectations of integrated cross-channel service delivery are high. Technical professionals need to manage scarce technology investments to build a strong future for a company and at the same time, ensure that the millennial customers are catered to. Persistence Market Research helps clients prioritize technology investments to add value to the company and meet future challenges.


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*this post contains PR samples unless indicated otherwise
Wednesday, 18 January 2017
Latest In Beauty - Le Fashion Fetish Box
*this post contains PR samples unless indicated otherwise
8 comments:
Love the look of this box. You get so many products from great brands!ReplyDelete
While there's loads of great products here and it's certainly great value there's nothing that jumps out to me so much that I'd want to spend £60 on it xReplyDelete
What a great looking box of goodies. Especially the first one you listed, the rose face mask. Fabulous.ReplyDelete
This looks like a pretty good beauty box! I especially love Nails Inc nail polishes :)ReplyDelete
That box looks so pretty - I love that you can sign up to one off boxes like these on Latest in Beauty.ReplyDelete
This looks like such a great selection of items. I don't know if I'd drop £60 on the box mainly because I have too many products as it is but if this was available after a giant clear out, I'd be all over it.ReplyDelete
Definitely need to find a good hair mask and face cream to try this all sounds like a brill subscription to receive.ReplyDelete
That nail polish looks great. I love Nails IncReplyDelete


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Giant retailer with hundreds of licenses PT Mitra Adiperkasa Tbk (MAPI) last week launched Denim Destination-The Ultimate Denim Heaven, a special concenp store inside Debenhams Department Store, Senayan City.
The launch of Denim Destination is aimed to tap demand for stellar premium brand Denim in the middle-up size consumers.
"Denim Destination is created for Denim lovers. They can find variety of range of Denim products," said Fetty Kwartati, Mitra Adiperkasa Corporate Secretary in a press statement submitted to Indonesia Stock Exchange last week.
At end of February, MAPI operated 870 stores in 25 cities in Indonesia. In department store segment, MAPI is holder of British-based Debenhams. In food and beverage, MAPI is holding licenses of Burger King, Cold Stone, and Starbucks. But, hey...where is Krispy Kreme doughnuts?
Krispy Kreme doughnuts is a US-based doughnut which penetrated Indonesia's market on August 30 2006. The entrance was initiated by the opening of Krispy Kreme's the first outlet was opened at Pondok Indah Mall 2.
Under a license agreement agreed on July 20 2006 between Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation, North Carolina, US, and PT Premier Doughnuts Indonesia, a sister company of MAPI. Nowadays, Krispy Kreme manages 9 outlets which are in Pondok Indah Mall 2, Senayan City, Plaza Senayan, Grand Indonesia,
Kelapa Gading Mall, Pejaten, Soekarno Hatta airport terminal 1A, 1B, dan 2F.
In Indonesia, Krispy Kreme offers varieties of doughnuts, including the signature Original Glazed doughnut and several others that are iced, glazed, and filled with cream.
Under the license agreement, which is guaranteed by MAPI, Premier Doughnuts shall pay royalty and other fees and should purchase the essential materials from Krispy Kreme or from suppliers approved by Krispy Kreme.
However, on October 6 2010, MAPI and PT Premier Capital Investment, a wholly owned subsidiary, acquired 80,000 shares in Premier Doughnuts Indonesia, Krispy Kreme license holder, at Rp75 billion from PT Lumbung Nusantara and PT Resource Java. Who are the sellers?
You could not find anything about Lumbung Nusantara and Resource Java via Google search. Who are they?
In a company research published by CLSA on March 29, MAPI generated Rp725 billion operating cashflow last year, but shows only Rp24 billion net increase in cash. The company used the money to invest in fixed assets, acquire Krispy Kreme, and debt repayments,
MAPI acquired Premier Doughnuts at Rp75 billion. The purchase price was set at 10x EBITDA, relatively high, remembering that MAPI only trades at 6x EBITDA. Fair value of net assets acquire is Rp33 billion, while the remaining of Rp42 billion is goodwill.
"We are less keen on Krispy Kreme's pricey acquisition. Though Krispy Kreme has a good brand name in the US, its presence was overshadowed by a local doughnut company Jco when the doughnut craze was first started in 2006," said the report.
JCo currently has near to 100 outlets while Krispy Kreme manages 10 outlets on smaller scale.
"We would expect no impact from Krispy Kreme's takeover to earnings, but will adjust up this year's capex estimates to accomodate management plan to open 10 more Krispy Kreme stories," CLSA said.
2010 Performance
MAPI posted a 22.61% increase in net income to Rp201.07 billion or Rp121 per share last year from Rp163.99 billion or Rp99 per share in the previous year.
Operating income rose 45.94% to Rp449.09 billion from Rp307.72 billion. Operating margin improved to 9.53% from 7.48%.Gross profit increased 15.53% to Rp2.37 trillion from Rp2.06 trillion. Net revenue grew 14.59% to Rp4.71 trillion from Rp4.11 trillion.
At end of 2010, PT Satya Mulia Gema Gemilang controls 58.83% shareholding in MAPI and public shareholders own 51.17% stake.
Satya Mulia Gemilang is also a 24.83% stake holder in PT Polychem Indonesia Tbk (ADMG), a polyester products maker. Polychem is also 28.91% owned by Indonesia's largest tire maker PT Gajah Tunggal Tbk (GJTL). Satya Mulia was 99.99% controlled by PT Mitralestari Adiperkasa and F.X. Boyke Gozali owned 0.01%. Previously, Boyke Gozali was MAPI's Vice President Commissioner.
On last Friday, MAPI gained 2.65% to Rp2,900 per share, reflecting 23.96x price to earning ratio.
Disclosure: No position at the stock mentioned above.
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I had just finished reading Eric Greitens's book, The Heart and the Fist, when I heard the news of the downing of an American Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan which resulted in the death of 30 of America's best, brightest, and toughest, including 22 Navy SEALS from SEAL Team 6.
Earlier this summer, I had read the first two books by Richard Marcinko, Rogue Warrior and Red Cell. All three books were written by former Navy SEALS from Seal Team 6. Written in the 90's, Marcinko's first two books describe personal accounts of his early efforts and training which eventually led to the establishment of SEAL Team 6.
In the other book published this year, Eric Greitens, a Rhodes Scholar who earned a PhD from Oxford University, describes his humanitarian work in Bosnia, Rwanda and Bolivia, prior to his becoming a Navy SEAL
Greitens writes of how he was troubled by his firsthand observations of the suffering being inflicted in those countries and elsewhere by regular as well as rogue military forces. That's when he decided that there were times when the proper application of force becomes necessary as a balance to compassionate civilian help.
Matching action to his thinking, Greitens joined the U.S. Navy. There, he would make it through the most difficult military training in the world. He graduated from Officer Candidate School; endured punishing BUD/S (basic underwater demolition/SEAL) training, followed by advanced combat preparation before being deployed as a Navy SEAL to Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Kenya, and eventually Fallujah, in Iraq.
Shortly before Greitens was to complete his tour of duty, one of his fellow SEALS was killed in a firefight while covering Greitens after an Iraqi insurgent suicide bomber attacked their quarters.
A Chinook helicopter just like the one that took the lives of those American warriors in Afghanistan came under enemy fire when it evacuated Greitens and others. It was his last mission before leaving for the U.S.
In its account of yesterday's downing of the Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, The Boston Globe quotes a U.S. Captain of how, after a decade of fighting in that country, not only are the Afghan National Security Forces unable to control the area where the attack took place, but that "The [Taliban] fighters [there] are entirely Afghans and almost all local residents . . . we don't capture any fighters who are non-Afghans."
And for that, we continue to empty our treasury and to spill the blood of our best, brightest and toughest warriors. Enough!
- A. Dear D.S., Thanks so much for lending me your copy of The Heart and the Fist. It is a real mind opener.
- B. As promised, the photos in the previous blog, Nature goes its Own Way . . . are of the Hummingbird Hawk Moth. When I first spied it flitting about in my garden, I thought surely that it must have been a hummingbird – close, but no prize!


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Camila Cabello: The Romance Tour presented by Mastercard - CANCELED
With Opening Act PRETTYMUCH
Camila Cabello: The Romance Tour presented by Mastercard - CANCELED
With Opening Act PRETTYMUCH
DateJuly 31 2020
Event Starts7:00PM
Ticket Prices$39-$74
On SaleOn Sale Now
Seating ChartView Seating Chart
Event Details
POSTPONED - Date will be updated as the information comes in. Watch our website and social media for updates.
To View VIP Packages Click Here
With opening act PRETTYMUCH
Multi Grammy nominated Cuban born singer/songwriter Camila Cabello (Epic Records / SYCO) released her debut solo album, CAMILA in January 2018 to rave reviews. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart at the same time as her single "Havana" Reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making Camila the first solo artist in nearly 15 years to reach the #1 spot on the Hot 100, Billboard 200 and Artist 100 charts in the same week. The RIAA platinum-certified album, CAMILA, launched its debut at #1 on 110 iTunes charts around the world, breaking the record for most #1 positions for a debut album in iTunes history. Camila also became the #1 artist on global Spotify. At the end of 2018, Camila was nominated for two Grammy awards, "Best Pop Vocal Album" for her album, CAMILA, and "Best Pop Solo Performance" for "Havana" (Live). She took home awards for Artist of the Year and Video of the Year for her hit "Havana" at the 2018 Video Music Awards. Beginning her official solo career after four years in Fifth Harmony, Camila released her RIAA 9x platinum smash hit "Havana," in August 2017 where it obtained the #1 spot on the pop radio chart, marking her second top 40 #1 as a solo artist. Furthermore, "Havana" hit #1 on iTunes overall top songs chart, #2 on the Spotify Global chart and hit #1 in 80 countries around the world. "Havana" is the first song by a female artist to reach No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary, Pop Songs and Rhythmic Songs charts in 22 years, it has earned over 1.1 billion on-demand U.S. streams, according to Nielsen Music, and attained the longest run at No. 1 on Pop Songs for any song by a female artist since 2013. Havana became the most streamed song of all time by a female artist and was the number one song of 2018 globally. Her triple-platinum single "Never Be The Same," was released in January 2018 and peaked in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Camila became the first artist in history to have two multi-format number one singles as the first two singles from their debut album. Camila had previously earned a chart-topping smash with her double platinum-certified hit "Bad Things" with MGK. The track generated over 400 million on-demand streams. As a result of its success, she became the fifth female artist to hit #1 on the Pop songs chart with and without a group. Camila released the global smash single "Señorita," with Shawn Mendes in June 2019, which debuted at #1 on iTunes worldwide and broke Spotify's record for the biggest debut from a male/female duet in its history, it is currently the most streamed song of any song released on Spotify this year globally. . "Señorita" marks Camila's second #1 at Hot 100 and fourth #1 at Pop Radio. Camila is currently the most listened to female artist in the world on Spotify and broke the record for the most monthly listeners for a female artist in Spotify history. She is the first female artist since Adele to triple up atop Billboard's Hot 100, Billboard 200 & Artist 100 charts. In November 2018, Camila was named the new ambassador for Save the Children. She is set to make her acting debut starring in Sony Pictures' CINDERELLA, to be released February 5th, 2021. The film will be directed by Kay Cannon and produced by James Corden and Leo Pearlman.


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Alter Ego reinvents the paella with pandan leaves
And they turned French onion soup into gyoza
- Alter Ego
- European-Asian Fusion
- 41 Dona Hemady Corner 1st Street, New Manila, Quezon City
- 10:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
- 622-6209
- 717-8033
- ₱P1,200 for two people
- @iamalterego.ph
Identity crisis. It's something that usually plagues college kids, twenty-something-year-olds, and middle-aged adults. It is also what brought life to this new European-Asian fusion bistro in Quezon City aptly named Alter Ego.
Alter Ego is the brainchild of chefs Joy Tan, Ronald Lim, and Benedict Bernardo. It came about from these three chefs' own experiences with frustrated passions. Chef Joy, for instance, studied accountancy in college to please her folks despite wanting to pursue the culinary arts. After she graduated and got certified, she enrolled in a culinary arts school and that's where she met Lim and Bernardo. It's also where they first dreamed of making a restaurant together.
A fusion restaurant 14 years in the making, Alter Ego is home to culinary wonders that remain familiar and approachable to the untrained Filipino palate. Their play on western and eastern cuisines results in some interesting dishes. The french onion soup gyoza, for example, is quite an experience to eat. You pour the soup around the gyoza, and then the gyoza becomes like a xiao long bao with delicious soup bursting in your mouth.
My favorite creation from them, however, is the homey and hearty meeting of Spanish and Filipino cuisine in the form of the chicken pandan on paella. The chicken is a simple and well-prepared inasal, wrapped in pandan leaves. It's served on a bed of vibrantly colored paella. The chicken's sweet-savory taste brings out the brightness of the paella's flavor.
But if there's a dish that stands to represent the restaurant and it's owners' story as a whole, it's their coconut mango gateau. This cake-like dessert is treated as sort of a blank canvas for the chefs' self-expression. Each mini cake is served in various shapes, sizes and plating, all depending on the mood of the chef preparing it.
Given the chefs' backgrounds, the restaurant becomes somewhat poetic. It becomes a reflection of the various lives they live, a mirror of the two conflicting sides that every person must temper: the passionate and the practical.
Read more:
For PappaRam Malaysian Kitchen, fusion is not an option
Cafe Enye wants you to get in touch with Spanish cuisine again
A multitasking foodie's dream: legit Thai chow beside a laundromat
TAGS: Alter Ego Bistro Chef Joy Tan eats Europea-Asia Fusion European cuisine Joy Tan nolisoli restaurant
Go for their coconut mango gateau. The creamy, cake-like dessert is served with varying shapes and plating depending on your chef's mood for the day.
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A pot of greens that pays homage to an African-American classic


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The Times notes several 311 calls from Manhattan complaining of a maple syrup smell in the air. A similar phenomenon had been reported in October of 2005, as was its disappearance, its December 2005 reemergence (this time "with Eggos, or pancakes," per one complainant), and a similar sighting, or smelling, in Jersey the following month, as well as a nearly concurrent outbreak of a worse smell. The trail thereafter quickly grows cold, and we can imagine the circulation of a memo in the Times newsroom, telling reporters to knock it off, which may also reemerge if this story catches on again.
For the record, at Manhattan Avenue and Driggs yesterday afternoon the air smelled of Chloraseptic. We did not call 311, as we received only very late satisfaction from our complaints in that venue this spring and summer about the night construction at P.S. 110 (which only ceased when the weather turned cold), and intend henceforth to handle our civic problems vigilante-style, with industrial sprayers filled with peppermint if necessary.
This article from the Village Voice Archive was posted on January 6, 2009
More:The Planet


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zutara month 2018 day two | day one
Katara was distracted.
She couldn't stop thinking about the previous night, about the masked man in the Siagyo household. It wasn't even because he'd grabbed her and nearly held a blade to her throat, or that she felt his heart pounding against her back as hard as hers. If she were being honest, it wasn't even completely because someone else had even been in the house before her. The moment he helped her—that's what her thoughts all snagged on. That, and his mask. Though her glance of it had been brief, she'd clearly seen that it was blue and white. Despite it being the visage of a grinning demon, the colors alone struck a homesick chord in her.
Would she see him again, if she visited another house with an ill family member? Was he trying to do the same as she? It seemed unlikely, armed with that sword like he was. Yet, it was obvious that he'd distracted the mother of the household so that Katara could get upstairs to help the coughing child. So why was he there?
"Hello? Anybody home, Katara?" Toph's voice brought her out of her reverie.
She shook her head to clear it and smiled vaguely. "Yes, hi. Of course. What is it?"
"Nothing. You just seemed out of it." Toph hesitated a moment, then leaned in, her voice dropped to a near whisper. "Are you okay? You're heart's pounding like crazy."
Embarrassed, Katara waved her hand a bit, dismissing the notion. "Nope, I'm fine."
"You know that I can tell when—"
"I'm just fine," Katara interrupted, standing up from her place at the table and going into the kitchen.
They were staying in a tiny abandoned house beyond the outskirts of the Fire Nation town of Ha It Yai. When they first arrived, Aang thought to find an inn to stay within the town itself to resupply and sleep indoors for a few nights, but not only was that a dangerous idea if they were to be found out, but they quickly learned that a sickness had spread to many people. It hadn't been quite enough for the town's officials to call a quarantine, but it was enough for their small group to not want to risk it.
"What if you catch some weird Fire Nation cold?" Sokka had exclaimed to Aang. "You have to be in top shape when you face the Fire Lord."
"Yeah." It'd been clear Aang was disappointed. "Wouldn't want to face him with a runny nose."
Toph had come to the rescue, though, and sensed the empty house just outside of town, so that was where they set up camp. It wasn't much, and more than a little ramshackle, but it was a roof over their heads and a safer spot to sleep than in the middle of the jungle. Of course, it'd fallen to Katara to resupply their food stores while the boys investigated for any interesting information or non-essentials they might need (or, in Sokka's case, want), and Toph relaxed back at their temporary home. It was a far cry from their luxurious house in Ba Sing Se, but Katara suspected Toph actually liked this better.
It was while she was in town that Katara learned more about the sickness that was plaguing the town. People talked, and she was genuinely interested to learn more about it. Many people were worried—though it didn't seem to spread from person to person very quickly, it took a heavy, rapid toll on the people who did catch it and fell ill. Consumed them from the inside out, one person described in a hushed tone. It'd been an easy decision for her to pick up her Painted Lady persona again and visit as many houses as she could. She'd been more careful this time than at Jang Hui, and she was sure that neither Aang nor Sokka were the wiser about her nightly goings. Toph, she could never be sure of, so she just assumed the other girl knew. But, after their reconciliation, she thought Toph would keep her secret. For at least two nights, she hadn't been proven wrong.
Last night, the Siagyo house was the third she visited, and finding another disguised person there had been quite the surprise. In the market, she'd heard a few people mention a mysterious woman appearing to heal the sick, but nothing about a masked man. Would it be too suspicious to ask around about him?
"You're thinking about whatever it is again," Toph said from behind her.
Katara looked back to see the earthbender leaning against the doorframe. Crossing her arms over her chest, she leveled a glare at Toph, though it had no effect. "So? What does it matter?"
She received a shrug in reply. "I don't know, but you're really preoccupied with it today. Must'a been really something to keep distracting you."
Katara didn't quite know what to say to that, casting her gaze down at the floor and feeling her cheeks warm. Toph tilted her head. "The boys aren't back from town yet, so…" A sudden grin split her face. "Is it a boy?"
If Katara's cheeks had been warm before, they flared like a blaze now. "What? No!"
"I can tell you lying," Toph sang.
She buried her face in her hands and spoke through her fingers. "Okay, yes. But, not like that!"
Toph's grin only widened. "I knew it. You've been sneaking out every night since we've been here, so I knew something was up." Well, that confirmed Katara's suspicion, at least. "Is he cute?"
"I actually don't—I said it wasn't like that!"
The earthbender chortled. "You don't know what he looks like? How come? Do you just admire from afar?"
There was no way Katara could see getting out of this, but at least it didn't seem like Toph knew what she was doing at night, even if she did know she was sneaking out. Then again, she wasn't sure it'd really matter if Toph knew. It couldn't hurt, Katara figured, to talk about it a bit more. She lowered her hands and resigned herself to the conversation.
"He was… wearing a mask."
Toph's eyes widened beneath her heavy bangs. "A mask?" she echoed. "Why the heck would he be wearing a mask?"
A quiet exhale escaped her. "Probably because he didn't want people seeing his face."
Toph rolled her eyes. "You don't say. Listen, you don't have to tell me what you've been doing at night. I don't really care, to be honest; it's your business, and you can take care of yourself. But, something about this guy's got to you." Her voice softened a bit. "So, if you want to talk about that… well, I'm here, I guess."
Katara smiled, touched. "Thanks, Toph. I… really appreciate that." She drew in a breath and released it. "I don't know why I can't stop thinking about him," she began. Toph's eyebrows lifted, but she didn't say anything, so Katara continued. "I didn't expect to meet him, it was a surprise. And—and it wasn't an ideal situation, so I didn't know if I could trust him right away. I thought he was going to attack me." She remembered his arm tight around her, holding her trapped against him, his blade raised close to her neck. Had she absolutely needed to get away, she could have used her bending, but she hadn't waned to resort to that if she didn't need to.
"But," she said, her voice growing subdued, "he didn't. He actually ended up helping me. It all happened so quick, it was just… surprising."
"So… you really just want to find him to thank him for helping you?" Toph guessed.
Did she? Katara wondered. She'd said it then, though she wasn't certain he'd heard her. He moved so quickly and so silently, and his black clothes made him seem more shadow than human. For all that she'd been dressed as a spirit, she might have thought he really was one, had she not felt his solidness firsthand. Her face warmed again at the thought.
"I… guess," she said finally. "Yeah."
She moved to lean against a small table in the kitchen. "I don't know what I would say even if I could find out who he was. It just… it'd be kind of nice to know, you know?"
Toph nodded, and joined Katara at the table, sliding into one of the two chair at it. "It's not like you can head into town and ask every good-looking guy if they helped you while wearing a mask last night."
"Hey! Why would it matter if he was good-looking?"
Toph shrugged. "Because it'd make for a better story?" She made a wide sweeping arc with her hand, fingers spread. "Waterbending master helped by handsome young mystery man in a mask," she declared. "I can hear the crowd oohing and aahing already."
That made Katara laugh. "It's hardly anything to make a story out of." Still, she allowed herself a moment of fantasy, gaze drifting up toward the cobwebbed ceiling. With all of Toph's talk, now she was wondering if he was handsome or not. He was certainly in excellent shape, that much she'd been able to tell when they were standing flush together in the dark. He also seemed skilled with a blade, perhaps as much as moving unseen and unheard. She wondered if she'd run into him again when she went out again tonight.
"You know what else?" Toph asked after a moment, breaking her wandering thoughts and resting her elbows on the rough wooden table.
"It's all terribly romantic. I hope you meet him again tonight and tell me all the juicy details."
Katara reddened and buried her face in her hands again.


text:
Pierre, Marlins run out of chances, lose to Mets
When the Miami Marlins needed to dispatch a backup catcher to deliver a message to the bullpen in person, they probably figured this would be a strange game.
It was, with an exceptionally rare ruling by an umpire going against them Saturday in a 7-3 loss to the New York Mets.
An instant after scoring the tying run in the seventh inning, speedy Juan Pierre was called for interference when he collided with Mets catcher John Buck far from home plate.
"Two guys trying to make a play, going full speed, then the ball goes wide. I guess in the sense of the rule it's interference, but I don't understand why it should go against us," Marlins manager Mike Redmond said.
The crazy sequence began when Greg Dobbs hit a two-out single with Pierre at second base. Pierre dashed home easily to make it 3-all as right fielder Mike Baxter's throw was 10 feet wide.
Buck retrieved the ball toward the first base side. Then it turned bizarre.
Pierre slowed down a few steps after scoring, but still bumped into Buck as the catcher planted for a throw to second to try and get Dobbs. Both players bumped knees and tumbled to the grass.
"I looked up and saw Dobbs wasn't even halfway to second. Since Juan had already scored and the rule states somebody has to be out on interference, Dobbs had to be the one," plate umpire Jim Joyce said.
"I have never seen that play before in my life. I asked all the guys on my crew and none of them have ever seen it, either," he added.
Said Pierre: "You see something new every day."
"It's kind of weird they get rewarded for making a bad throw. I see him leave the plate so I didn't slide," he said. "I wasn't expecting to hit him. I was shocked more than anything else. I looked up and said, `Y'all right?' and he said, `You all right?'"
The Mets scored three times in the seventh, helped by a pair of throwing errors from catcher Miguel Olivo.
Brandon Lyon (1-0) pitched one scoreless inning. Ryan Webb (0-1) took the loss.
Besides the Buck-Pierre play, there were other odd moments.
At one point, the bullpen phone in the Marlins' dugout wasn't working. Backup catcher Kyle Skipworth was sent as a messenger.
"I was sitting there and Skip said, `Get Webb going.' I didn't understand at first, then he said `Go, Go!' so I ran out there as fast as I could," Skipworth said.
Webb gave up two hits and walked two in 1 2-3 innings.
"Sometimes you only get one batter to get ready, and that's when the phone is working," he said.
Also, Joyce had a discussion with both managers after a fan was apparently shouting out pitch locations to hitters.
Buck drove in four runs and has a team-high nine RBIs in his first year with the Mets. He hit a two-run double off Ricky Nolasco in the sixth for a 3-2 edge and also had two sacrifice flies.
An All-Star in 2010, Buck dipped to .192 last season with the Marlins. They traded him to Toronto in November, and the Blue Jays dealt him to the Mets in December as part of a package for NL Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey.
"Last year, if something could go wrong, it went wrong. And then I tried harder to fix it," Buck said. "It was a lot of stuff."
NOTES: Marlins RHP Jose Fernandez is set to make his major league debut Sunday. At 20 years, 250 days, he will become the youngest pitcher in team history. Fernandez, who has never pitched above Class A, was the youngest pitcher on a big league roster on opening day, STATS said. "Will he be nervous? Absolutely," Redmond said. Redmond said the staff wasn't loading up Fernandez with too much information on the Mets' hitters. "Get through the first inning" and go from there was among Redmond's suggestions. Another key message from the longtime backup catcher to the prized prospect: "You don't have to be Superman." ... While Redmond was meeting with the media in the dugout before the game, bench coach Rob Leary politely interrupted to present the rookie manager with the Marlins' lineup card from his first win Friday night. Leary said he hoped it was the "first of many," drawing claps and cheers from other Miami coaches. ... Once Redmond got back to Manhattan after his first victory, he celebrated in New York style - he bought a gyro sandwich from a street vendor. "It was a big night," he said. "I think I'm paying for it today." ... Webb is the son of Hank Webb, who pitched for the Mets from 1972-76.


text:
There is a mighty revival of worship waving across our nation.
Beautiful melodies of pure, prophetic worship are rippling across social media streams, church websites, and over the airways of religious networks. Often in the same locations, the manifest presence of Almighty God demonstrates His love with spontaneous healing and life transformations. If the participants were interviewed of their takeaways, they would likely have one theme in common:
Jesus is calling us closer to Him–to know Him more intimately, not for our purposes but so we can display His love to the hurting world.
God didn't call everyone to serve in the office of a prophet, evangelist or pastor. But, He did call us to tell people the Good News (Mark 16:15); He did tell us to distinguish ourselves by how well we treat others (John 13:35); He did tell us to live in a way that glorifies the Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16).
In and of ourselves, these are impossible tasks. Thankfully, His Grace empowers us to fulfill His mission. He intercedes on our behalf and promised to be an ever-present Helper and Guide.
So, keep moving forward!
Scripture Reference:
Jude 1:20-25 (NIV)


text:
Hello again!
I'm happy to be back with my very first attempt with the delightful Something Sweet stamp set and coordinating cups...
It took a little trial & error to get all the dimensions just right so that the punched circle was centred & so that the little photo anchors closed the card properly, but in the end I got there! I really wanted to ensure that the sweets could be consumed withouth the card being destroyed. After all, it took a lot of time to create - ha ha! And I must say that I'm quite happy with the end result. What do you think?
Whisper White, Chocolate Chip & Pretty in Pink cardstock, Chocolate Chip & Pretty in Pink, circle punch oval & scallop oval punch, sweet treat cup, little flowers, photo anchors, brads & marshmallows.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Something Very Sweet
Posted by Andrea at 8:24 AM 2 comments:
Labels: Something Sweet, Vintage Labels
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Remember Me?
Remember me? No? Well, I don't blame you. What a crazy time these last few months have been. Hopefully, now that school has started again & everyone is back into their routines, things will start to settle down.
Here are a couple of masculine cards that I made quite some weeks ago but didn't get around to posting until now...
Stamps sets used were Sense of Time and Vintage Labels from the upcoming Sale-a-Bration catalogue. The large circles were cut using the Circle Scissors from the Summer Mini catalogue. This tool is fantastic!
The smaller circles & the oval shapes were punched out.
Colours used were Sahara Sand, Very Vanilla & Chocolate Chip. Ink pads used were Chocolate Chip & VersaMark. The Tearing Edge (another great tool) was used to tear the cardstock evenly.
The finishing touch were some silver brads.
Well, I hope you're all off to a great start this year. Take care & I hope to be back soon.
Posted by Andrea at 1:36 PM No comments:
Labels: Circle Scissors, Sense of Time, Vintage Labels.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)


text:
Even though it took several hours, the result was very tasty, and worth the effort. I followed the recipe almost verbatim, except that I substituted dried tarragon for fresh basil in the stuffing, since my basil plant is pretty much dead. Clare enjoyed it too, though as I predicted, she wasn't too wild about the sun-dried tomatoes. She couldn't put her finger on it until I told her the ingredients though. She also mentioned that I should have put more olive oil on the eggplant, which is correct.
Tofu-stuffed eggplant with mushroom ragout
second choice, which I did make, instead called for rolling up thin slices of eggplant. I decided that the eggplant would taste better this way, so I went with it.Tonight I made a new recipe. Clare had bought some mushrooms the other day, and I bought eggplant yesterday. I thought that an eggplant mushroom ragout sounded good, though I didn't know exactly what it would entail. I googled it, and found 2 good possibilities. The first possibility, which I did not choose, was more what I would think of as stuffed eggplant. It involved slicing the eggplants in half and filling them. This particular recipe seemed to throw away most of the eggplant flesh though, which seemed strange to me. The


text:
Eating Toast Comic Strips - Page 16
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159 Results for Eating Toast
View 151 - 159 results for eating toast comic strips. Discover the best "Eating Toast" comics from Dilbert.com.
Thursday July 02,
Dilbert Eats A Berry
Tags #google, #internet, #off the grid, #question, #query, #allergy, #berry, #reaction, #swelling, #anaphylaxis, #technology
Dilbert goes off the grid: minute three. Dilbert: I wish I could Google this berry before eating it. What's the worst that could happen? Wow. This is a very specific answer to my question.
Top Dilbert Searches
marketing, project, cloud, catbert, leadership, budget, birthday, engineer, time sheet, sales, wally, strategy, dogbert, powerpoint, project management, topper, leader, boss, change, meeting, data, management, mordac
Monday January 16,
Rather Eat Garbage
Tags #choosing, #choices, #boredom, #listening, #trash, #garbage, #suffering
Wally: Would you rather eat garbage or listen to our boss talk about his weekend? Dilbert: I'd have to know more about the garbage to make that decision. Wally: Let's say it's mostly kitchen stuff. Dilbert: Am I eating it from the can or fighting birds for it?
Sunday April 16,
Tags #waiter, #restaurant, #service industry, #impatient, #patience, #complaining
Waiter: Here are your french fries. Dilbert: Gaaaa!!! I have no salt. Waiter: I will bring the salt right away. Dilbert: No, you won't. This isn't my first time eating out! You say you will bring salt, but you will be distracted by another table. I will sit here in anger while I watch you do things that do not involve bringing me salt. As the temperature of my fries drops, my cortisol levels will increase. In five minutes I will hate your guts and this restaurant, too. I also need ketchup. Waiter: That will take a little longer.
Saturday August 12,
Boss Cancels Food Service
Tags #lunch, #Food, #stealing, #refrigerator, #property, #misunderstanding
Boss: I've decided to cancel our food service to save money. Dilbert: We don't have a food service. We all bring our own food and keep in the break room refrigerator. Boss: I've been eating the food in there for seven years. Dilbert: I'd keep that to myself if I were you.
Wednesday August 23,
Gain Weight Using Product
Tags #warning, #caution, #labeleing, #weight, #safety, #medical
Tina: Did I leave out any risks on the product warning page? Boss: I don't see anything about the risk of overeating while owning the product. Tina: Our product has nothing to do with eating. Boss: Then why did I gain weight when I used it?
Saturday February 17,
Bad Analogies
Tags #ideas, #criticism, #critique, #simile, #language
Man: Your idea is awful. Dilbert: Can you explain your reasons without using an absurd analogy? Man: It's like a pregnant squirrel eating a sandwich. Dilbert: I'll take that as a no.
Saturday August 18,
Gravy On Keyboard
Tags #Wally, #tina, #gravy, #keyboard, #coffee
Tina: Do you know why my keyboard has gravy all over it? Dilbert: Oh, sorry, my phone rang while I was eating at my desk and I didn't have a napkin so I used your keyboard. Tina: I... Don't even know how to respond to that. Wally: Phew! That's what I was hoping.
Sunday January 06,
Tags #argument, #boss, #complaining, #eating, #managers & supervisors, #office, #office workers, #sounds
Boss: I need to talk to you about your apple-eating. Dilbert: My what? Boss: Every afternoon you eat an apple at your desk. Your co-workers are complaining because it's loud. They can't work with all of your crispy chewing noise. Dilbert: In my defense, my co-workers are so incompetent that the less work they do, the better off the company is. Boss: That is a surprisingly robust defense. I'll come back if I can think of a counter-argument. Dilbert: Good luck. Crunch.
Sunday March 31,
Tags #conversation, #Food, #friends, #office, #office workers
Man: I'm a foodie. Are you foodie too? Dilbert: I think of food as fuel. Man: But you enjoy eating good food, right? Dilbert: I try to avoid food that tastes good. That way, I won't overeat. I usually just check my plate for any stray bandages, and that's about it. If my food passes that test, I shovel it toward my mouth while reading stuff on my phone. Man: I don't think I can be your friend. Dilbert: That worked out better than I hoped.


text:
Meditation May Help Us Cope with Unfairness
Most individuals often make irrational decisions, particularly when it comes to money. But decades of study suggest one group of individuals consistently scores higher in making rational decisions — Buddhist meditators.
A new study uses neuroimaging to study brain activity when an individual is confronted with a monetary choice that may seem unfair, and finds Buddhist meditators use different areas of the brain than others when confronted with unfair choices, enabling them to make decisions rationally rather than emotionally.
A research team led by Dr. Read Montague, professor of physics at Virginia Tech University, hypothesized that the meditators have trained their brains to function differently and make better choices in certain situations.
Their research "highlights the clinically and socially important possibility that sustained training in mindfulness meditation may impact distinct domains of human decision making," Montague said.
The research came about when Montague wondered whether some people are capable of ignoring the social consideration of fairness and can appreciate a reward based on its intrinsic qualities alone. "That is," he said, "can they uncouple emotional reaction from their actual behavior?"
Researchers recruited 26 Buddhist meditators and 40 control subjects and looked at their brain processes using functional MRI (fMRI) while the subjects played the "ultimatum game," in which the first player proposes how to divide a sum of money and the second can accept or reject the proposal.
The researchers hypothesized that "successful regulation of negative emotional reactions would lead to increased acceptance rates of unfair offers" by the meditators. The behavioral results confirmed the hypothesis.
But the neuroimaging results showed that Buddhist meditators engaged different parts of the brain than expected. Researchers found Buddhist meditators were able to shunt brain activity from an area of the brain linked to the emotion of disgust, rejection, betrayal and mistrust to a brain area that monitors their inner body feelings.
Apparently the Buddhist meditators were able to avoid emotions associated with unfairness and focus on acceptance and thankfulness for whatever reward they did receive.
As noted by the researchers, "This study suggests that the trick may lie not in rational calculation, but in steering away from what-if scenarios, and concentrating on the interoceptive qualities that accompany any reward, no matter how small."
Source: Virginia Tech
Nauert PhD, R. (2018). Meditation May Help Us Cope with Unfairness. Psych Central. Retrieved on November 30, 2020, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2011/04/21/meditation-may-help-us-cope-with-unfairness/25525.html
Last reviewed: By a member of our scientific advisory board on 8 Aug 2018
Published on Psych Central.com. All rights reserved.


text:
Critical Focus eBook, $6.99. Available from ISBN 9780961872564 eBook edition © Paul Richards, 2014 All Rights Reserved Published by Estuary Press Oakland, CA eBook design by Paul Richards Resources for Teachers and Students. Critical Focus, The Black and White … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Critical Focus
Critical Focus, The Black and White Photographs of Harvey Wilson Richards CRITICAL FOCUS: THE BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HARVEY WILSON RICHARDS written and compiled by Paul Richards, Ph.D. 104 pages, 123 photos ISBN 0-9618725-0-0 LC 87-81720 1987, Estuary Press Harvey Richards' … Continue reading
1960s Photography eBook Estuary Press has published an eBook edition of Critical Focus: The Black and White Photographs of Harvey Wilson Richards. The eBook contains more than the photos and text of the original 1986 book. Now, Critical Focus is a gateway to well … Continue reading
Part 1: Why eBooks? Looking Back See Part 2: Publishing Poetry eBooks Bringing Nina Serrano's poetry to the widest possible audience drew Estuary Press into publishing the Heart Suite trilogy as both print and eBooks. The difficulties using traditional distribution routes combined with the decline of … Continue reading


text:
Organisations are under increasing pressure to improve their flexibility capability. Flexibility can no longer be confined to the working relationship between an employee and their manager, but must become a standard way of working to meet the demands of modern life. Flexible working arrangements help teams and individuals to work productively, be more strongly engaged with their work, and stay longer with the organisation. Implementing flexible working arrangements across teams and organisations presents a variety of challenges that managers and employees will need to negotiate. Teams that are working flexibly still need to operate productively with other teams and departments that are also working flexibly. This requires new and different approaches to management, drawing on individual abilities to connect, enable and collaborate with their teams and other stakeholders in the organisation.
The benefits of flexibility for teams and organisations
Research has shown there are a number of benefits for individuals, teams and organisations when employees are enabled to work flexibly.
- Improved output. For jobs that require concentration, working at home, working at hours when the office is quiet, or working from another location can help with the quality and speed of the work.
- Flexible workers can be more effective. Successful flexible workers are excellent self-managers who are both well organised and effective communicators.
- Improved ability to meet the needs of clients and stakeholders. An organisation that works flexibly can expand service delivery hours, meeting customer needs for out-of-hours contact with the organisation. Flexible work locations may extend the organisation's ability to react more quickly to client needs, or to extend their reach to more or different clients. Extra levels of service can increase loyalty.
- Retaining knowledge, skills and experience / avoiding the cost of recruitment and retraining. In the current job market, flexibility has become an attractive feature of organisations and has been marked as a key influence in candidates' job choices. Retaining existing knowledge and skills is also important to ensure maximum value is gained from the organisation's investment in recruitment and training. Offering flexibility reduces the likelihood that employees will leave and increases loyalty to the organisation.
- Employers of Choice do flexibility well. If your organisation aims to become a WGEA Employer of Choice for Gender Equality, providing employees with flexibility may align nicely with that aim.
- Increased job satisfaction. Employees who have opportunities to work flexibly have been shown to have greater job satisfaction and this increases both their productivity and their sense of loyalty to the organisation.
- Improved teamwork. Teamwork often improves as knowledge and enthusiasm are shared among a more motivated flexible working team.
Understand your role as a manager of flexible workers
Managers play a critical role in enabling and embedding workplace flexibility. Key aspects of this role are to:
- ensure employees are aware of their rights and responsibilities around flexible work
- provide employees with support and build a team culture based on high performance, trust and outcomes
- ensure communication and resource management are enabled between teams and departments
- set an example by openly supporting flexibility and working flexibly themselves, which will help employees and teams understand that working flexibly is a normal and accepted part of work.
This toolkit is designed to help managers at all levels implement productive, successful flexible working arrangements. It is intended to be of particular use to managers who directly manage employees working flexibly.
The toolkit outlines strategies that can guide you as you seek to maximise the benefits of flexibility. These strategies can be applied to the implementation of flexible working arrangements across whole teams or for only a few employees.