Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? It Depends Who You Ask.

The following “quotes” from famous people on why the chicken crossed the road are great because they show how we all interpret the world from our own limited perspective. And not only that, we believe our interpretation is the universal truth and that everyone is seeing it from out point of view too (of course we see it more clearly than them but it is still from the same point of view).

The truth is that the world is holographic (and yes this is my point of view :). We all are looking at the large elephant but nobody is big enough to see the whole animal. So one person describes the elephant as having a huge foot. Somebody else says no, it is an animal with a trunk. They are all correct.

The moral of the story? It is possible that you and another person are looking at the exact same thing and come up with completely different but correct interpretations. It seems impossible until both of you raise up above your perspectives to another higher one that includes both.

For example, an argument between a couple. She says he is being an asshole. He says she is being a bitch. Odds are they are both correct. If they both raise their perspective to include the other person’s view they can easily resolve the problem by both admitting fault and taking responsibility.

Here are the various interpretations of why the chicken crossed the road. They are funny:

DR. PHIL : The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on ‘THIS’ side of the road before it goes after the problem on the ‘OTHER SIDE’ of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not taking on his ‘CURRENT’ problems before adding ‘NEW’ problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.

GEORGE W. BUSH : We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.

COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road…

DR SEUSS : Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY : To die in the rain. Alone.

GRANDPA : In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.

JOHN LENNON : Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2007, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your chick book. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken. This new platform is much more stable and will never cra…#@&&^(C% ……..
reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What is your definition of chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

Tags: famous people, interpretation, why the chicken crossed the road

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Anca Gavris - painter

I love the paintings of Anca Gavris. They are really beautiful. She’s got some on myspace.

Tags: Anca Gavris, painter, painting

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I endorse Barak Obama

I like Bill Clinton and by default like Hillary Clinton. She would do a great job. She is passionate about her work. And having a woman in power would drastically change the dynamics. The government was created by and and for men, thus immediately setting up a system whose very foundation is deaf to over half the population. I am tempted to vote for her just because she is a woman. But then I think of Margaret Thatcher and realize that just because you don’t have things dangling between your legs does not exclude you from stupidity.

So it is with some regret that I endorse Barak Obama. Not because he isn’t very capable but because I think Hillary would be ok too. But he is more of an outsider and I think will mix it up more than she will. The government was also created by rich white people for rich white people. And that is a foundation that excludes over 90% of the entire population. And any black man, no matter how “white” he is inside or no matter how rich he is has at some point or other come into contact with the horrors of his oppressed past.

And that history is a constant reference point for the future. There is always the risk of the Animal Farm Syndrome, where the oppressed becomes the oppressor, but this is really not a concern of mine with Obama.

I think he has in his blood a deep understanding of what does not work. The government is a white, rich government. Sideline: Condoleezza Rice, bless her heart, sold her soul a long time ago. She knows it (IMHO) and will come around one day hopefully…

But Obama is still raw (well, you know, as raw as a politician can be) and it seems to me he still holds idealistic concepts in his heart that are more in line with the majority. And these ideals will drive him and possibly even effect the foundations of a government founded by an elite and so far for an elite.

Or he could just be a patsy plant by the Illuminati who are always in power behind the scenes. Hey, who the hell knows these days. I watched the twin towers collapse. I inhaled the smoke. I have seen the slow motion videos. Those towers were felled with explosives. And still the official stance is that it was done by some half baked student pilots. A silent feeling of hopelessness? Yes I get that feeling sometimes. A low bubbling collective rage that one day will erupt “out of nowhere” like the falling of the Bastille? Hey, I can’t be the only one percolating.

But then maybe Obama really is going to help change for the better and all my internal percolations will dissipate into hand holding and songs of Kumbaya Lord.

As for Bush, I quote this:

Handle every stressful situation like a dog. If you can’t eat it or hump it.
Piss on it and walk away.

I pissed on him and his father a very very long time ago. God what a misguided bunch of idiots they are.

Tags: Barak Obama, politician, superhero

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Aruba Kitesurfing

I am in Aruba having a total blast kite surfing! The wind is amazing, the water crystal baby blue, the sand soft and white. It is also really shallow so if you fall you can easily stand up and chill.

I highly recommend working with Lysander at Aruwak.com . He is the best!

Tags: Aruba, kite surfing, Lysander

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Nigel Dickinson - cool photographer

Nigel Dickenson is a cool photographer. I think he is almost as good as me! OMG!

He has some great photos of Roma. If I had to describe the difference between his style and mine it would be that my photos are a little more romantic.

Tags: image, Nigel Dickinson, photographer

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Love them all day but sleep in your own room

Despite being in a relationship I have slept in my own bedroom for years. I LOVE IT. The quality of sleep when not in somebody else’s “aura” is a million times better for me.

When I sleep in the same bed or room as somebody else I am bothered by the little things like their breathing or going to the bathroom. But it is more than that. I like to breathe my own air. I like to ride the sleep realm alone. It allows me to get in touch with myself in a way that no waking time can.

Sleep is a deep communion with our soul. When you share that time with another passenger the communion is diluted. The day time is when you should look outward to other people. Nighttime is when you look inward alone, free from other people’s energy.

And this is not limited to people sleeping in the same room with you since an aura can pass through walls.

Many people think auras are too woowoo and granted a lot of hippie freaks have given the discussion of auras a bad name. But a lot of scientists are studying the effects of auras too. We might disagree on what the aura’s role is but I think it is generally accepted that the body does have some sort of electromagnetic field around it.

And these fields can pass through most walls, just like sounds, electromagnetic waves, x rays, gamma rays and many other kinds of waves. An aura differs in size but from my experience it goes out to about ten feet from a person.

So if your bed is against a wall and on the other side of that wall is another person’s bed, in my opinion you are basically sleeping in the same bed energetically.

Thats why city living where you are in an apartment building is called an “aura box” because you are actually living with the person on all four sides of your apartment.

If you don’t think this has an effect on you, try hanging out with a crazy person for a few days. Or an alcoholic. Granted some of it is their actions, but a lot of it is the actual energy they give out.

So if you spend ten years in an apartment sleeping in the same place and on the other side of that wall is another person doing the same I will bet money you two will influence each other greatly.

So I pay a lot of attention to where I sleep and whose aura I sleep in. I live in a four story brownstone in Brooklyn so it is easy to find out who lives on each side of me. I am lucky in that nobody sleeps on the other side of my wall.

Anyway, here is the NY Times article. It doesn’t get as woowoo as I did but it still acknowledges the value of sleeping apart.

=========

March 11, 2007
To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime
By TRACIE ROZHON
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/us/11separate.html

Not since the Victorian age of starched sheets and starchy manners, builders and architects say, have there been so many orders for separate bedrooms. Or separate sleeping nooks. Or his-and-her wings.

In interviews, couples and sociologists say that often it has nothing to do with sex. More likely, it has to do with snoring. Or with children crying. Or with getting up and heading for the gym at 5:30 in the morning. Or with sending e-mail messages until well after midnight.

In a survey in February by the National Association of Home Builders, builders and architects predicted that more than 60 percent of custom houses would have dual master bedrooms by 2015, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president of research at the builders association. Some builders say more than a quarter of their new projects already do.

What could be called the home-sleeping-alone syndrome is not limited to the wealthy. For middle-income homeowners, it may be a matter of moving into a spare bedroom, the recreation room or the den. In St. Louis, Lana Pepper, a light sleeper who battled for years with her husband’s nocturnal restlessness, reconfigured the condominium they bought recently, adding walls to create separate bedrooms. Mrs. Pepper said the advantage to separate rooms was obvious: “My husband is still alive. I would have killed him.”

“It was more than snoring,” she said, recounting the bad old days of a shared bed. “He cannot have his feet tucked into any of the covers; I have to have them tucked in. So I took all the linens and split them with scissors. Then I finished the edge so that half of the sheet would tuck under and the other half he could kick out.”

That did not help his snoring, so she bought a white noise machine; she even went to a shooting range to buy “a pair of those big ear guards they wear.” They did not suit her.

According to the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, 75 percent of adults frequently either wake in the night or snore — and many have taken to separate beds just for those reasons. In a report issued Tuesday, the foundation found that more than half the women surveyed, ages 18 to 64, said they slept well only a few nights a week; 43 percent believed their lack of sleep interfered with the next day’s activities.

Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council of Contemporary Families in Chicago, said many couples she interviewed were “confident enough that they have a nice marriage, but they don’t particularly like sleeping in the same room.”

“I don’t think it says anything about their sex lives,” Ms. Coontz said.

Mrs. Pepper, 60, who co-founded St. Louis’s annual Shakespeare festival, takes her sleeping seriously. On her nightstand is an arsenal of remote controls: for the adjustable bed, the television, the lights, the humidifier and the DVD player. Her mattress is made from a foam developed by NASA that rests in a four-poster frame under a skylight.

At Escala, a condominium project in Seattle, a quarter of the 270 units have double master bedrooms, said John Midby, a partner in the development. In St. Louis County, Dennis Hayden, president of Hayden Homes, said that each of the 30 detached homes in his latest planned community would have two separate-but-equal bedroom suites.

Kristen Scott, an architect in Seattle, said about one-third of her empty nester clients asked for separate bedrooms, which can cost a few thousand dollars to more than $100,000. In Honolulu, Nancy Peacock, an architect, said her clients increasingly requested “punees,” as daybeds are known in Hawaii — sometimes on the lanai, the covered porch of the house.

In St. Louis, Carol Wall, president of Mitchell Wall Architects, said that three or four years ago her company began “doing a lot of these little rooms off the master bedroom where the snorer would go.” More recently, couples, including some in their 30s, have started asking for two master suites, “and we don’t ask any questions,” Ms. Wall said.

Not everyone wants to talk about it. Many architects and designers say their clients believe there is still a stigma to sleeping separately. Some developers say it is a delicate issue and call the other bedroom a “flex suite” for when the in-laws visit or the children come home from college. Charles Brandt, an interior designer in St. Louis, said, “The builder knows, the architect knows, the cabinet maker knows, but it’s not something they like to advertise because right away people will think something is wrong” with the marriage.

An interior designer in Chicago moved into her son’s bedroom when he went off to college. “Separate bedrooms are de rigueur for us,” she said, adding that she and her husband sleep together on the weekends. The couple asked that their names not be published.

Fred Tobin, a builder in North Canton, Ohio, is friends of a prominent couple in Columbus whose house was remodeled with two master bedrooms. The wife sleeps on one side of the house, the husband on the other. “It’s a hush-hush thing,” Mr. Tobin said. “The husband travels a lot, all the time, and he comes home late, and he wants to be able to check his e-mail and go to bed without waking her up.”

The move to separate sleeping spaces is yet another manifestation of changing marital patterns.

“Couples today are writing their own script, rewriting how to have a marriage,” said Pamela J. Smock, a University of Michigan sociologist. “The growing need for separate bedrooms also represents the speed-up of family life — women’s roles have changed — and the need for extra space eases the strain on the relationship. If one of them snores, the other one won’t be able to perform the next day. It’s nothing to do with social class, and it’s not necessarily indicative of marital discord.”

Nevertheless, Professor Smock said husbands were less willing to change familiar patterns.

“Men are supposed to be one, dominant, and two, sexual,” she said. “Their wives might be thrilled to have their own bedroom, and see it as a romantic thing — going back to their romance, going back to dating, to intimacy, but the husband might not see it that way.

“As a social pattern, this could increase,” she continued. “A lot of people I know fantasize about living in the same apartment building as their husband — but in a separate apartment. That could be next.”

Paul C. Rosenblatt, a professor in the department of family and social science at the University of Minnesota, has studied couples who sleep separately, and wrote a book last year on the challenges and benefits, “Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing.” To him, a large part of the phenomenon has to do with aging. Many of those Professor Rosenblatt surveyed, like the Chicago couple, split into separate bedrooms when their children grew up.

“It’s suddenly available,” he said, “and if you have trouble sleeping you go into the kid’s room and find you slept better than with your partner.”

But some of the people he studies still want a place to cuddle. “In my research, couples had separate places for their sleeping arrangements but also had a together place,” he said. “Some do their cuddling before going their separate ways.”

Occasionally, the need to separate does have to do with sex. Professor Rosenblatt said one older woman he interviewed said she had her own bedroom because, “I’ve paid my dues. I’m old enough that I don’t want to have sex at 1 a.m.”

No matter what the reasons, architects and builders say they know enough not to call them “master” bedrooms anymore.

“Women are buying more homes, and women are sensitive to that terminology of the ‘master suite,’ and they’re opting for the term ‘owners’ suite,’ ” said Barbara Slavkin, an interior designer in St. Louis.

Dale Mulfinger, an architect in Minneapolis, said, “How about ‘couples’ realms’?”

Whatever you call them, they certainly seem to suit the Peppers, the St. Louis couple who reconfigured their new condominium to give them each a sleeping sanctuary.

Ted Pepper’s room, lined with a bank of windows that open onto a rooftop terrace, has none of the sleeping paraphernalia — the sound machine, the sleeping mask — found in his wife’s room. The only evidence of his sleep habits is the twisted knot of sheets and blankets on his bed.

“Now, there’s a demonstration,” said Mr. Pepper, 67, gesturing toward the swirl of bedding and chuckling. “She’d wake up if I moved even a little.”

The Peppers agree: separate bedrooms have added spice to their relationship. “It’s more exciting,” Mrs. Pepper said, “when you can say: ‘Your room or mine?’ ”

Reporting was contributed by Malcolm Gay in St. Louis, Christopher Maag in Cleveland, Claudia Rowe in Seattle and Katie Zezima in Boston.

Tags: couples, married, sleeping in separate rooms

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Let's All Breathe Together Now! Well Now You Can at DoAsOne.com!

For just one moment, think of what might happen if one billion people on earth were to be breathing in & out in perfect unison, creating ONE human heartbeat.

I don’t mean everyone breathing, I mean everyone breathing IN and then OUT exactly at the same time with consciousness. What impact could this have on humanity and the entire living Universe?

The term Multiple Awareness Simultaneous Consciousness is what happens when
multitudes of people hold their conscious awareness simultaneously.

The Do As one and the Breathe Together movement are here to raise the awareness of healthy, conscious breathing while orchestrating the opportunity for humanity to experience its own inherent Oneness through the power of Breath:

Check out their beautifully designed website and try breathing in the room. It is really cool.

ou can play the breath sound in the background whilst you work if you really want to get woowoo.

(The Universal Breathing room is free, though users who make a donation have the option to enter many other different ‘rooms’ beyond the ‘Universal’ Breathing room- there are the ‘Calm’, ’Activation’, ‘Full spectrum’, ‘Square Flow’ and ‘Triangle Flow’ Breathing rooms- see site for more info.

It is cool!

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Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley
had some cool quotes.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Experience is not what happens to a person; it is what a person does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley

READ MORE QUOTES

Tags: Aldous Huxley, change the world, experience, happiness

Posted in Quotes | 1 Comment »

Yael Naim - I'm a new soul

I just discovered Yael Naim. She is French-Israeli and she sings in French, English, and Hebrew. When she sings in English she has this great accent.

But in Hebrew, it doesn’t do it for me. Her voice is great and the song is beautiful but singing in Hebrew sounds like your throat is full of phlegm and you’re trying to clear it. Sorry!

The duo between Yael Naim and Lucie Star is also great:

Tags: French-Israeli, singer, Yael Naim

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Study Reveals Pesticides from Foods in Children's Bodies

This small study is pretty straight forward.

* Harmful pesticides found in everyday food products
By Andrew Schneider
Seattlepi, 1/30/2008
Straight to the Source
copied from organicconsumers.org

Government promises to rid the nation’s food supply of brain-damaging pesticides aren’t doing the job, according to the results of a yearlong study that carefully monitored the diets of a group of local children.

The peer-reviewed study found that the urine and saliva of children eating a variety of conventional foods from area groceries contained biological markers of organophosphates, the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II.

When the same children ate organic fruits, vegetables and juices, signs of pesticides were not found.

“The transformation is extremely rapid,” said Chensheng Lu, the principal author of the study published online in the current issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

“Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets,” said Lu, a professor at Emory University’s School of Public Health and a leading authority on pesticides and children.

Within eight to 36 hours of the children switching to organic food, the pesticides were no longer detected in the testing.

The subjects for his testing were 21 children, ages 3 to 11, from two elementary schools and a Montessori preschool on Mercer Island.

The community has double the median national income, but the wealth of Mercer Island made no difference in the outcome, he said.

“We are confident that if we did the same study in poor communities, we would get the same results,” he said. The study is being repeated in Georgia.

The study has not yet linked the pesticide levels to specific foods, but other studies have shown peaches, apples, sweet bell peppers, nectarines, strawberries and cherries are among those that most frequently have detectable levels of pesticides.

Measuring the harm

Lu is quick to point out that there is no certainty that the pesticides measured in this group of children would cause any adverse health outcomes. However, he added that a recent animal study demonstrated that persistent cognitive impairment occurred in rats after chronic dietary exposure to chlorpyrifos.

Death or serious health problems have been documented in thousands of cases in which there were high-level exposures to malathion and chlorpyrifos. But a link between neurological impairments and repeated low-level exposure is far more difficult to determine.

“There’s a large underpinning of animal research for organophosphate pesticides, and particularly for chlorpyrifos, that points to bad outcomes in terms of effects on brain development and behavior,” Dr. Theodore Slotkin, a professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University in North Carolina, said in the April 2006 Environmental Health Perspectives.

Lu says more research must be done into the harm these pesticides may do to children, even at the low levels found on food.

“In animal and a few human studies, we know chlorpyrifos inhibits an enzyme that transmits a signal in the brain so the body can function properly. Unfortunately, that’s all we know.”

Not many chemicals, including pharmaceutical products, were designed specifically to kill mammals, which was genesis of organophosphates.

“It is appropriate to assume that if we — human beings — are exposed to (this class of) pesticides, even though it’s a low-level exposure on a daily basis, there are going to be some health concerns down the road,” said Lu, who is on the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide advisory panel.

The EPA says it eliminated the use of organophosphates on many crops and imposed numerous restrictions on the remaining organophosphate pesticide uses.

Congressional concern that children were being harmed by excessive exposure to pesticides led to the unanimous passage of the Food Quality Protection Act. At its heart was a requirement that by 2006, the EPA complete a comprehensive reassessment of the 9,721 pesticides permitted for use and determine the safe level of pesticide residues permitted for all food products.

“As a result, the amount of these pesticides used on kids’ foods (has undergone) a 57 percent reduction,” said Jonathan Shradar, the EPA’s spokesman.

But that’s not nearly enough to prevent birth defects and neurological problems, said Chuck Benbrook, chief scientist of the Organic Center, a nationwide, nonprofit, food research organization.

“The pesticide limits that EPA permits are far, far too high to say they’re safe. And, the reduction that EPA cites in the U.S. has been accompanied by a steady increase in pesticide-contaminated imported foods, which are capturing a growing share of the market,” he said.

Yet the EPA continues to insist that “dietary exposures from eating food crops treated with chlorpyrifos are below the level of concern for the entire U.S. population, including infants and children.”

That statement is “not supported by science,” Benbrook said.

“Given the almost daily reminders that children are suffering from an array of behavioral, learning, neurological problems, doesn’t it make sense to eliminate exposures to chemicals known to trigger such outcomes like chlorpyrifos?” he asked.

What to do

While the gut reaction of some parents might be to limit the consumption of fresh produce or switch completely to organic food, Lu cautions not to make the wrong decision.

“It is vital for children to consume significantly more fresh fruits and vegetables than is commonly the case today,” he says, citing such problems as juvenile diabetes and obesity.

“Nor is our purpose to promote the consumption of organic food, although our data clearly demonstrate that food grown organically contains far less pesticide residues.”

Lu says an all-organic diet is not necessary. He has two sons, 10 and 13, and he estimates that about 60 percent of his family’s diet is organic.

“Consumers,” he says, “should be encouraged to buy produce direct from the farmers they know. These need not be just organic farmers, but conventional growers who minimize their use of pesticides.”

Understanding how fruits and vegetables grow can help guide the consumer, he says.

For example, organic strawberries probably are worth the money because they are a tender-fleshed fruit grown close to the dirt, so more pesticides are needed to fight insects and bugs from the soil. He adds apples and spinach to his list.

“It may also be money-smart to choose conventionally grown broccoli because it has a web of leaves surrounding the florets, resulting in lower levels of pesticide residue,” Lu says.

He is greatly concerned about one finding from the study.

“Overall pesticide (marker) levels in urine samples were even higher in the winter months, suggesting children may have consumed fruits and vegetables that are imported. The government needs to ensure that imported food comply with the standards we impose on domestic produce,” he said.

Dangerous science

Chlorpyrifos, made by Dow Chemical Co., is one of the most widely used organophosphate insecticides in the United States and, many believe, the world.

For years, millions of pounds of the chemical insecticide were used in schools, homes, day care centers and public housing, and studies show that children were often exposed to enormously high doses. Just as the EPA was ready to ban the product, which analysts said would have damaged Dow’s overseas sales, the company “voluntarily” removed it from the home market. Yet, with few exceptions, the agricultural uses continued.

The EPA’s Web site is a study in contradictions when it comes to chlorpyrifos.

At one section, it “acknowledged the special susceptibility and sensitivity of children to developmental and neurological effects from exposure to chlorpyrifos.”

But in another section, the agency reports that infants and children face no risk from eating food crops treated with chlorpyrifos. However, the agency doesn’t say how it reached that conclusion. There is no agreement of how much of the neurotoxin is too much.

Benbrook said the EPA has refused orders from Congress to study the cumulative developmental risk to children from low-dose exposures.

“Perhaps we can rest assured that EPA has protected us adults from acute insecticide poisoning risk, but our kids are on their own,” Benbrook said.

Tags: children, foods, organicconsumers.org, pesticides, study

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