Monthly Archives: December 2009

Nobody in Singapore

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There are places in the world where dance crazes still pop up.  This is good news to people who love pop culture, because the idea of a dance craze is something that we all want to see in our lifetimes, but haven’t found anything worthy of a craze.  It may just be a cultural moment, however, and it might take a place as sophisticated about being ironic as Singapore, to bring all the right ingredients together and at the exact temperature too.  Singapore has a splendid way of quoting the world at large, and is enormously responsive when other countries make the right quotations in just the right way.  This might be part of the remix phenomenon in general, where everything is already out and has been lying under the sun for a bit too long, so the ingenuity has to come through revision and repetition, to use Suzan-Lori Park’s notion of the term.

This idea of renovation is actually very useful in considering cuisine as well.  In Singapore, there are multiple cultures living here in one small island city state, and restaurants in Singapore offer a stunning variety of food from all over the world.  The best restaurants seem to have a flair for cooking up traditional tastes with contemporary touches and twists.  This is good to consider when looking at the latest and greatest dance craze.  The song Nobody, by the Wonder Girls, from Korea is responsible for a whole generation of girls in Singapore spending hours learning the dance moves from their infectious video.

It is dangerously infectious, too, and it’s very difficult to get the track out of your head.  The song is a fairly straight-forward pop song, written to be a bubble gum hit, and the video is a quotation of girl bands from decades gone by.  This kind of instant nostalgia is very interesting to see these days, because it’s never as light as it seems.  There is a terrific complexity here that speaks to a kind of mistrust of nostalgia in general, while quoting it in an attempt to rewrite it correctly the first time.  Add to this another layer, and local Singapore singer Jillian-Marie Thomas covers the song with brilliance and a melancholy that is completely unexpected.  Her quotation of a quotation makes a new invention that is nothing less than a work of art.

Ghosts and Gettysburg

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Many people come to Pennsylvania to tour the battlefields of the Civil War, to explore the old buildings and soak up the history, but how many come for the ghosts?  Ghost tours, over the years, seem to have become increasingly popular and popping up everywhere.  It seems like most places have a ghost tour, from London to New Orleans to Albuquerque and Hollywood.  The desire is strong to see the spot where other people claim to see ghosts and to hear the stories about what deeds transpired in these spots.  And, believe it or not, the ghost tour that appears to be considered the best of the top ten scariest tours in America is the the Ghosts of Gettysburg tour run by a former National Park Service Ranger and Historian, Mark Nesbitt.

The list of the top ten suggest that these tours are the best place to hear about ghosts and to experience a ghost.  While I’m skeptical about the latter claim, the first one has my attention.  Gettysburg is as good a place as any for ghosts to be seen, with its battlefields serving as a turning point in the American Civil War in mid-1800s.  Since then, people have reported seeing soldiers in the fields, apparitions appearing and vanishing.

Nesbitt began his ghost tour in 1994, giving out facts from his own books about the ghosts in town.  The guides for the tour dress in period costume and walk visitors through parts of town that were once the battlefields in which Union and Southern armies clashed.  Nesbitt has appeared on cable and television networks such as the History Channel, Unsolved Mysteries, A&E, and the radio program, Coast to Coast AM, which delves into supernatural mysteries.  Just six years ago, in 2004, his books received the National Paranormal Award.  His titles include, “Best True Hauntings Collection” as well as “Best Local Haunt Guidebook.”

The very building in which his tour is headquartered is supposedly haunted, over on 271 Baltimore Street.  Whether or not you believe in paranormal activity, ghost tours in general keep our interest in the past active, reviewing the human story of what once happened.  If you find yourself in one of the hotels Gettysburg has ready for you, as you review your itinerary for the day (seeing the Gettysburg National Military Park or the spot on which Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg address), you might consider the events that have happened in Gettysburg over the years and how these events resonate today, whether or not they’re supernatural.

The Advantages of Cooking on Gas Stoves

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I have lived in many different houses and apartments, and for many years I had an electric stove top.  The first time I had a gas stove, I was living in an old house in Tempe, Arizona, and at first the thought of gas frightened me just a bit.  I had the idea that it was unpredictable, liable to blow at any minute.  But the more I became familiar with gas stoves, the more I knew that they were the only stoves I wanted to cook upon.

For me, they were just so accurate, they are immediately on, and immediately off.  It was not until I worked in a few different restaurants, and had conversations with a few different chefs, gourmet chefs, that I learned that gas stoves are their preference as well.  Chefs need precision, in the cutting of vegetables and the butchering of meat, and the temperature of their skillets.  A great sauce can be ruined in seconds, if the temperature is not exactly right.

Gas stove tops are precise and offer much more control than the electric coil of a burner.  One thing you will know if you have ever worked in a restaurant, is that the kitchen temperature can be quite extreme.  The chefs are in there for hours on end, and another advantage to gas as opposed to electricity, is that the temperature of the kitchen is actually lower when cooking over a gas flame.  This has the consequence of less incidence of burns, as well as a more comfortable atmosphere for the chefs to work in.

Chefs need to be comfortable, it kind of cuts down on the cranky personality generalizations of restaurant chefs.  Electric coiled burners must be flat, to ensure that the bottom surface of the pan or skillet will not burn the food in one area.  Not so important with a gas burner.  This offers a bit more freedom in the kitchen.  In all, the gas stove is much more preferred in the kitchens of fine dining restaurants, and will be much more appreciated in your own kitchen at home.

Nearly Free Los Angeles

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Some days you want to visit a city and spend as little money as possible.  You’ve all seen the travel books extolling various famous cities for fifty dollars a day ($50 a day in Paris, $50 a day in London).  Perhaps you haven’t seen such books, but for a while they used to be everywhere, and it made me think about what there is to do in Los Angeles inexpensively or even free.  There’s lots of activities in L.A. that will cost you money.  Theme parks, trips to Catalina Island, whale watching, and so on.  But where do you go when you don’t have that much cash in your pocket?  First, I recommend you check into a Los Angeles cheap hotel, and then shake out the piggy bank for a few coins for the following trips:

First, I’d recommend the Los Angeles County Museum on a Thursday night.  The main exhibits are free after five p.m. until closing as a kind of service to the community, and it’s well worth it.  Also, while many parking meters in the city have raised their closing hour from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., many remain at the 6 o’clock cut off.  Search for one of these for cheap parking.  Then you’ll be able to wander around works of local and international art to your heart’s content.

In keeping with Museums, I’d travel over to a side street on Bundy Drive (somewhere around the intersection of Bundy and Santa Monica Boulevard may work) and park your car, then take a winding bus ride up through Brentwood for about seventy-five cents on the Big Blue Bus, or a dollar twenty-five, for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit bus, to find yourself at the Getty Center, a world class museum perched high above Brentwood, overlooking Santa Monica Bay and Los Angeles simultaneously.

To complete the museum theme, I’d make my way over to Griffiths Park Observatory, which has free parking, and an excellent newly refurbished museum (reopened within the last couple of years after years of renovation).  Wandering about the museum is free and you’ll see a number of dazzling items, including an actual TESLA coil in operation, and a spectacular display of the planets, which shows your relative weight on each of the eight worlds in our solar system (and, I believe, Pluto, too).  If you want to see the planetarium show, it will cost about seven dollars (the last time I checked), and it’s well worth it, providing a context for everything else in the observatory.

Patio Flames

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This is certainly the time of year to strike a match on that patio fireplaces and cook up some marshmallows. Sip on some hot chocolate and sing some great campfire songs. Christmas or other winter holiday songs are great too as you strum along with a guitar. What kind of patio fireplace to you like? There are many to choose from these days. We can have more style than just the old stone or brick tossed together in the center of the yard and hope it’s big enough to fit all the chairs around.

How about a Chiminea? These are great patio fireplaces. They are made of a few different types of material like clay or terra cotta, Ceramic, Aluminum and cast-iron. They do usually contain smaller fires if you go with the ceramic or clay but if you go for the cast-iron you can find them large enough to get quite the roaring blaze going. This is a better way to get into the warm fire mood than just a patio heater. The little clay Chiminea’s are so cute with there little pot belly bottom with the form shooting up for the chimney.

But maybe you want more of a campfire feel. Somewhere to put your feet. Try the Grated Cylinder type of fireplace. You can even cook on these. If you want more than just Smores you can cook some great steaks or seafood and veggies on this kind of fireplace. I suppose it’s what you would call the two in one approach to back yard nighttime fun. These pits also have a much bigger flame. If you are trying to get a real statement out of your patio fireplace go with a permanent outdoor fireplace. This is like taking the big one out of our house, mantel and all, and sticking it in the yard. This makes for a grand time.

Hot Tubs & States of Relaxation

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There are many different kinds of benefits you’ll discover from using your new personal spa.  There are immediate physical benefits that include increased circulation, and deeper sleep cycles, and there are also many mental and emotional benefits, too, and some of these of course are very subtle.  But you will get to experience them all, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to find and enhance the benefits that suit you best.  The most difficult part of it can be the selection, but with choosehottubsdirect.com, they make it easy.

Their choices are very wide, and the website is very user-friendly so you can get all the information you need to make a decision you’ll be happy with.  And you can also rest easy, because you’re working with a company where the customer’s needs come first, and their record of service is very high, basing their business reputation on positive word of mouth.  They depend on your satisfaction as much as you can depend on them for excellent service.  This saves you more time and energy so you can focus on your new lifestyle.

Depending on how your metabolism works, and how easy you take to suggestions, can be determining factors in how well certain relaxation techniques will work for you.  It’s certain, however, that you’ll find yourself enjoying more moments of relaxation than ever before when you start spending time in your hot tub.  You’ll have the chance to explore how you best relax, and can start to work with decreasing the time it takes to get to a calm state of being.  The hot tub can put you in the beginning stages of this process, and from there, you’ll soon discover, the deeper you go, the more there is to learn, and the more enjoyable it can be.

The Fort Collins Lincoln Center

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The Fort Collins Lincoln Center is one of the major cultural institutions of this large college town. And while much of the cultural orientation of the city is based on the college population, there are also events and establishments that while not specifically aimed away from the students they are more standard population structured. The Lincoln Center is an extremely diverse performance venue that attracts both the non-student population as well as the college kids. It is commonly considered to be the primary performance venue of the city and hosts not only locally produced performances but also major touring shows. It is one of the most popular places to visit for most of the guests who are staying in one of the hotels Fort Collins.

The building itself was built in mid-1970s and remains the largest performance venue of its kind in the city, and is one of, if not the largest in all of Larimer County. There are multiple venues in the center that serve various purposes. The Performance Hall is the largest of these and seats up to 1,180 audience members. This is the home of the Fort Collins Symphony Orchestra and also hosts visiting performers and shows. The Mini Theatre is a much more intimate venue and seats up to 220. This is the standard venue for local theatres to use, as well as various community organizations such as churches and business lectures as well as seminars. The Terrace Gardens is a beautiful outdoor performance area, which is also a sculpture garden. It hosts a series of performances throughout the summer including dances and band concerts. This is also a common sight for weddings or receptions as well as other celebrations. In addition there are art galleries, the Canyon West and the Columbine spaces. Some of the major touring shows to come through the Lincoln Center during the 2009/2010 season include Jesus Christ Superstar, The Drowsy Chaperone and To kill a Mockingbird among

Technology and Business

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Technology and good customer service don’t have to be polar opposites.  In these times, when we’ve had a little bit of time to adjust to the radical changes that computers and the internet have brought to the way we do things in the world, business sensibility has had time to catch up to the way things work these days.  There is a certain anonymity about doing business online, surely, but in the hands of truly skilled salespeople, and businesses that truly do care about the well-being of their customers, the human element has had time to creep back in.  It’s a very good thing, too, because it gives people like Steven Barbarich the opportunity to really put his customer service skills to good use.

It wasn’t very long ago that computers tended to put a lot of people off, where the complaints about entering into another machine age, devoid of a human face, were everywhere, and no one really knew what we were in for.  But we live with a whole generation now who has grown up knowing the internet as a fact of life since their birth, and it’s a very technologically savvy generation, ironically teaching their parents how things work.  While this has been going on, we’ve all become more and more accustomed to the presence of the virtual in the physical world, and we’ve had time to do some thinking about what this means about how we see the world, and how we live our lives.

It’s enormously fascinating research, and one thing that does seem to be apparent: we have become savvy about how we shop on the internet.  Generally, people are starting to understand the ease and convenience of shopping online, and also understand that they don’t have to sacrifice human exchange for this convenience.  This means that somewhere there are salespeople who understand that we have become hybrids in many ways.  We expect technology to work and to serve us, but we’re not willing to move completely toward a virtual existence.  We can shop on a website that doesn’t have emotions, but we also know we’ll be dealing with real human beings at some point during the transaction, and the salespeople with the edge are the ones who, like Barbarich, make sure that there is always another human voice at the other end of the phone, and the best parts of the business happen when human beings are speaking directly to one another.

Hot Tubs Offer More Than Just Health Benefits

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I’m an RN and a few years back, I managed to injure my back when I attempted to life a 350 pound patient off the floor. I had to take leave of work while I went through 4 months of physical therapy. I went back to work, but lifting was no longer required, but my back was sill bothering me. I even avoided bending over when ever possible. My husband and I recently moved to San Francisco and I thought this would be a perfect time to purchase and install a hot tub in our big back yard.

I’ve heard about the marvellous benefits that a hot tub provides and I’ve been checking out all the information on the Internet concerning the different types of hot tubs. My husband also suffers from diabetes, and not only will a hot tub benefit me, it apparently does wonders for diabetes type II. After much consideration, I finally went with choosehottubsdirect.com to be the company to provide me all that is necessary to get, install and help me maintain a hot tub.

My back has never felt better! And my husbands neuropathy has been greatly reduced. I also, recently, had foot surgery and my doctor recommended whirlpool therapy, and I told him about my marvelous hot tub and the foot jets, and he said that would be perfect. I didn’t have to be out of pocket for physical therapy or travel to a medical building, because my physical therapy was right in my backyard.

We invited a friend, who has Multiple Sclerosis, to come by and use our hot tub. At first she was leery, she told us her doctor thought it might be too stimulating, but we coaxed her in and adjusted the jets so we could all enjoy the gentle massage, she completely loved the hot tub! When she called us the next morning, she told us she had the best nights sleep ever. We also invited a friend, who has high blood pressure, over to use our hot tub, but he told us that due to his blood pressure, he’s not allowed to use the hot tub. I told him that we keep our temperature at 99 to 100 degrees and that I’m a Registered Nurse and I’ll check his blood pressure before and after he gets in. He agreed to try, once he was in the hot tub, I checked his blood pressure and it actually went down.

Both my friends now come by frequently to use our hot tub. My husband and I use it every night and our health has improved, our lives have improved and the best benefit of all is how happy and relaxed we are ever since we installed our hot tub.

Jackson History, Civil Rights and Pop Culture

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The capital of the state of Mississippi is Jackson with a population of around 174,000. This city’s nickname is City With Soul. Originally, the area around Jackson, and most of Mississippi belonged to the Choctaw Nation. But, with pressure from the US Government, in 1830 they signed the Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty. After the treaty, many of the Choctaw Indians were relocated to Oklahoma. Those that remained in Mississippi established many Indian communities throughout the state. A French Canadian trader, Louis LeFleur was the first to settle this area along what was known as the historic Natchez Trace trade route. LeFleur named his little settlement Parkerville. The name was later changed to honor Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States. Unlike so many cities that build along a river and grow because of the commerce established via water, the railroad was the catalyst that grew Jackson. Natural gas was discovered here in the 1930’s, another boon to the economy. The Civil Rights Movement was extensive here and after many hard years the long deserved victory was finally theirs.

There is a lot of history in and around Jackson. While you are here, be sure and visit the museums and historic landmarks. Music is very important to Jackson. They have their Gospel, Blues and R & B. Johnny Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash recorded the hit song, Jackson. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon sang that song in their 2005 movie, Walk the Line, which was based on Johnny Cash’s life. Jackson also has the ballet, the CelticFest, Crossroads Film Festival, Jubilee!Jam and so much more. And of course the hotels Jackson offers are comfortable and luxurious. You will be greeted by polite and friendly staff who are more than ready to accommodate you. Your days will be busy with activities, your nights restful and relaxing. Enjoy what Jackson has to offer.