We toota toota ferghet el 7adoota.

{My sister told me this story yesterday}

I never really thought about where the meat came from, because ground beef comes from cows right.  In my imagination it came from one happy cow that munched on green grass somewhere with blue skies and maybe a fresh water stream in the background.

Wrong!  It come from cows in these extremely highly packed feeding areas and one burger can come from literally thousands of cows.  There was a part about a mom turned food activist because her 5 year old son ate a burger and contracted E.Coli then passed away 12 days later.  That wasn’t what scared me the most.  It was the bit where she described how his kidneys had failed and he would beg for water.  I am not a particularly healthy eater  ( I’d be very happy to live on pizza, brownies and diet pepsi if I could get away with it)  but this isn’t about healthy eating or not.  This is about the fact that even the food that you might assume to be healthy or hygenic could be the exact opposite.

How about fruits and vegetables.  Do you have any idea what has been done to them to make them season less?  No wonder everything tastes like cucumbers and cucumbers taste like cardboard.  A couple of weeks ago my husband bought some kiwis.  I love kiwis,  but they tasted like pipes.  They were so metallic in their taste that we forced ourselves to eat them.

Any way, this started the search for the best homemade burger recipe.  We made burgers twice (from beef, ground before my eyes from a trusted butcher), they were good but not perfect yet.  It took us over six months (26 thursdays) to get our pizza the way we wanted,  so we are not in a hurry.

I just realized that it takes the same amount of time to make burgers that it takes to order them, although if you order them you get to sit on your butt for 30 minutes and don’t have to wash any dishes.

Or the chicken, eeeewwwwwww.  I am not eating chicken unless it is free range.  Gross how they have re engineered chicken.

One of the other interesting facts was how the food industry has always fought labeling.

This is a movie that you really should see.  Just make sure you are not eating dinner (or have plans to).

Back to the specific podcast I mentioned, which was quite interesting.  Britt discusses how men in most cultures need to prove their manhood, and how many cultures have rites of passage men have to go through to go from being boys to men whereas women in most cultures have nothing similar.  The podcast was inspired by a specific study about the subject; how also men were more sensitive and defensive about their gender identity than women were.  What I also found interesting was that men were more likely to react to to negative situations by aggression whereas women used relational aggression.  In other words men fight while women exclude, gossip or spread rumors.

Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think.  Do you believe men have to prove their manhood?  Why do you think women don’t have to prove their womanhood?  That’s what I find really weird, shouldn’t both genders have the need to prove their gender identity?

You can also watch the rest of the episodes on YouTube in HDTV.

Patrick Jane is a fictional character portrayed by Simon Baker on the American TV crime drama The Mentalist. Jane is a consultant for the fictitious “California Bureau of Investigation” and helps by giving advice and insight from his many years as a fake medium. He uses his keen powers of observation, deduction, and knowledge of social engineering to help lead the investigation. He plays an important role in the show and could be considered the protagonist. [Wikipedia]

The positivity blog has an interesting post on 7 powerful tips for charisma which you can learn from the mentalist.  You really should read the post but here they are in short:

1. Smile.
2. Be interested, open and curious.
3. Be fully present.
4. Be assertive.
5. Be confident.
6. Be amused.
7. Be socially free and authentic.

Personally I have some other reasons I think the character is so cool.

Crazy cool car.  He drives a Citroen DS a 60s model maybe.  I’ve always wanted a crazy cool car.  Something totally unique.  Of course it would have to be blue and I’d love to redo the leather interior hot pink and install an iPod dock and cup holders.  I always think a car is a lot like it’s owner and your choice of car can tell us something about you.

Cold Reading. Cold reading is a series of techniques used by mentalists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine details about another person in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than he or she actually does. Even without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by carefully analyzing the person’s body language, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses. [Wikipedia].  Yes I would love to be a master of cold reading.

Hypnosis.  My first brush with hypnosis was when I was 9 and read The Demon Headmaster series and then like any self respecting nerd I walked into the adult section and asked for a book on hypnosis.  The librarian gave me a dark navy blue book which I read but didn’t understand and I’ve been intrigued by hypnosis ever since.  Fast forward a couple of years later and I started reading about NLP and cold reading.  I am not an expert but an amateur who thinks we are not harnessing our brains’ real capacity.

Who would you like to be when you grow up?

What skills does that person have that you would love to have?