The Writers’ Cafe

I am about to tell you a story that covers three distinct time periods. One is a story from my childhood. The other one is from pre 9/11, and the other as recently as last summer.

However all these time periods have one common thread.

Okay, It sounds great, but will it fly. Follow me on a little journey back in time. You neither had to pay for television reception nor did anyone drink bottled or filtered water. Flipping baseball cards was the juvenile vice, (it was pretty close to gambling) and other than summer the coolest two thing kids could look forward to was Halloween, and mischief night.

My mom, dad (zichrona L’bracha) and brother lived in a rented house in Union NJ. Considering that I was all of say 5 years old, I really am not sure why I knew that our house was indeed rented, and that we were not owners. It may have had something to do with my grandfather (zichrona L’bracha) being in the real estate business.

The Setting

We had the greatest train set that any kid on the block could possibly desire The Lionel Land and Sea set. Amongst the many cool cars, there was one that carried a submarine. The submarine itself was easily removed from the train set, and If I correctly recall, it had these little pills that you could put inside it so that bubbles came out of its top when it was submerged in water. I remember it being a pretty good bathtub toy, but I do not really recall it having any special procedure for launching the sub from the train.

Contrast this with the helicopter car, the helicopter car was a very cool thing. The car itself was a flat blue carrier, with this winding mechanism. An essential component of the helicopter car was this special section of tract. The special track had a set of wires leading from it to a a small thin black base (about half the size of a business card) with a red button in it’s center.

Yeah, it sounds great, but will it fly? 

Here is how in theory, the helicopter car was supposed to function. The winding mechanism of the flat carrier car gets wound up. The helicopter is carefully placed on top of the helicopter carrier car. When the helicopter car reaches the special section of track. The red button is depressed, and the helicopter launches. The following visual is being provided for you using words, because we did not take home movies of this when we were kids.

My dad (zichrona l’bracha) used to sit on one side of the track with my older brother, lovingly cradled between his legs. Together this team of two people managed to control the speed of the train via the transformer with its single dial control. I on the other hand, sat at the other side of the track and had the very important job of launching the helicopter. Now when I was five years old I am not saying that I had the best eye hand coordination, but I felt I was pretty good, and definitely was up for the task.

As the train apporached the special section of track, my dad (z’tl) and my brother would invariably cry out “SteeeVen!” in a humorous semi panicked kind of tone. This however did not phase me one bit! I was already on task! My job was simple in the fact that I only had one singular concern, and that was one of timing. Having had so many opportunities to launch the helicopter car provided me with some useful insights into the entire matter. One, you really had to be in a state of readiness before the car actually passed over the special section of track. Two, you had to assume that there would be some time delay between your brain tellling your fingers to press the button, and the button actually getting pressed. After say about the 33rd pass I had learned through experience that you had to press the button even before the car had passed over the special section of track. ( to be continued )

Stephen C. Sanders August 18, 2008

This is the sequel to “The Cold Fusion Diet”, By Aharon Moshe Sanders, August 17, 2008, courtesy of The Writers’ Cafe.org.

You can blog anytime!

If you happen to be an orthodox Jew, you have to wait six hours (or less) after eating meat in order to eat dairy chocolate ice cream.

When you eat chocolate ice cream, most likely you’ll be going off your diet.

Blogging, helps you lose weight, when your be so busy blogging, who has time to eat.  

When you finished eating chocolate ice cream, you think to yourself, I shouldn’t have eaten that.

When you have completed your blog, and upload it unto the web, you think wow, I did that!

In order to eat chocolate ice cream, you will need some ice cream, and a spoon would be nice.

In order to blog, you will need a computer, some way to connect to the Internet, some sort of text editor (wysiwyg: what you see is what you get, works well), some sort of host (be it Google or Word Press) an Internet browser (that’s the icon you click on that takes you away into the Internet world) and a keyboard would be nice!

editors note: Blogging is better than eating chocolate ice cream not necessarily simpler.

If you eat chocolate ice cream too fast, you might get an ice headache.

If you blog too fast you might make a few typos, a much different sort of headache.

While your eating chocolate ice cream, you might be tempted to do something else. If you do something else while eating chocolate ice cream, you might spill your ice cream, and make a mess.

If you get bored while blogging, well then I think you need to improve your content. However, if you try to do several things at the same time; say for example searching out a reference for your article in another browser window while blogging, you might inadvertantly close your browser on your wysiwyg editor and lose all your precious words in one fell swoop.

Sometimes chocoalte ice cream stains just do not come out.

If your wysiwyg editor on you blogging software does not have an auto save feature, then you may never retreive your lost words. Beleive me it happens sometimes, and its a terrible feeling.

In conclusion, chocoalte ice cream stains are better then lost postings, or even lost website.

About the Author:

Aharon Moshe Sanders is one the major contributors here at The Writers’ Cafe.org. He also is a prolific writer of blogs on the ggogle hosted blogspot. He came to us here at this site where the primary blogging tool is Word Press. He is provided with a great deal of artistic freedom, however his opinions are not necessarily those of the publisher.

Publisher, August 2008

I had a nice little kicker for this, something about reaching for the sky and a handful of dirt, but I did not remember it exactly, and also am not so sure if the saying itself is really true.

I have not posted in the philosophy or deep thinking category for some time and am now feeling that I am overdue. I am looking forward to making some design changes, as well adding some nice little gadgets or widgets to these pages. I also realise that I have kind of left my old site a little bit in the lurch. Readers who are new to this site of course will have no idea about what I am talking about. The simple statement needed here is that my google blogs are hosted for free. The current site you are viewing started out as a tripod site (just one year ago) which was also hosted for free.

While we are on the topic I thought that I might mention that my first web site which was uploaded on to the world wide web from August 2001 stayed up mainly unchanged for a good 7 plus years. Had the site not been arbitrarily taken down sometime in April 2008 (without notice or warning) by the folks at tripod/lycos, that site would have now been celebrating it’s seven year anniversary.

While the actual site itself had been entirely taken down (luckily I keep copies of my html files on my home computer in case of such occasions) there still however was a remnant of the site, complete with its accompanying images in a different directory conveniently provided by the same host. While it is entirely within the nature of any creative writer or artist to want to proudly display his works, I also am somewhat reluctant to continue to drive traffic to this provider.

Additionally even though I only recently discovered that most of  the original web pages (circa August 2001 911) survived  the random acts of tripod/lycos, I still am greatly concerned that if I send too much traffic to these 2001 pre 911 web page artifacts that the penny-wise pound foolish bureaucrats at Lycos/Tripod will wake up and realize that they maybe they should also take down these pages about Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, as performed in Central Park on August 18, 2001. 

Then of course there is a part of me that is telling me, hey why not just send them the twenty bucks, that they are now saying is the reason for their arbitrary action. I guess the idea here is, okay will we host your site for free, but then one day we may just take down the site, just for the heck of it, and then tell you the reason we did it is because we want you to give us twenty dollars.

If you start seeing me shamelessly running web traffic to some domain that has the name “tripod” as part of the url, then you will realise that the geniuses at Tripod/Lycos finally had their actions vindicated. Oh yeah, by the way I did of course save my precious pages to my home computer as soon as I had discovered them.

Aharon Moshe (Stephen C.) Sanders. August 14, 2008

Have you ever wondered why some of the heaviest people you happen to meet are eternally on a diet? Of course if we look at what the words really mean one could say that we are all on some kind of diet. The fundamental problem of any sort of diet is that most people are looking to diet as the quick fix solution.

A person might have taken a good five to ten years to put on say between 20 to 40 extra pounds (or more) and now they would like to take it off in say between two to four weeks!

Okay, I hear my reader agreeing, we all know that, “so why am I still reading this article?”

Good point, so lets start with the basics. The reason people gain weight is because they have consumed more food in the way of calories then their body needs to carry out its many millions of reactions which are essential for good health. Very often a diet will fail because a person is only focusing on one thing to cut out of their diet entirely. A perfect example of this is fat. Just like the other nutrients, the human body requires a certain amount of fat to function properly, However it is  pretty well believed by most, that the typical American diet provides too much fat.  

So the common response is okay, let me cut fat entirely out of my diet. Such individuals will spend more money at the grocery store to buy products which have been cleverly labeled by their manufacturer to be low fat. Alternatively individuals trying to lose weight will buy products that are labeled no fat. The fact that many of these foods are not even supposed to have fat in them are of relatively little concern for the uninformed dieter.

Another important aspect of dieting that is often misunderstood by most is the entire issue of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the most abundant ingredient in just about all types of foods. It is highly unlikely that one could seriously expect to lose weight, if they are not seriously looking at the way they are consuming carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are the natural fuel source for our bodies.

When in an individual takes in more carbohydrates then their body needs, the excess carbohydates are easily formed into fat by the body. Even though there are many dangers and pitfalls to the high protein, or Scarsdale Diet, it does have some fundamental ideas which allow an indivual to lose weight. One of the fundamental principles that allows the high protein diet to work is that; the body must expend more energy (burn carbohydrates) to turn excess protein into fat (the body’s energy reserve) then it does to turn excess carbohydrates into fat.

The primary danger of the Scarsdale Diet (or whatever they are calling it these days) is that it is throwing the entire human body into a metabolic pathway which is known as ketosis. This potentially dangerous metabolic pathway kicks in because of an extreme lack of carbohydates. The body can no longer utilize its normal fuel source and now must turn to either breaking down stored fat (this is what we are hoping for and why we diet) or begin to break down either ingested protein, or alternatively break down protein which makes up the body, perhaps even breaking down muscle through cataboloic pathways (this is usually a bad thing)

Protein is made of amino acids, amino acids contain nitrogen. Excess nitrogen in the body is actually very harmfull. The excess nitrogen (nitrogenous wastes)  get removed by the body via the kidenys. anyone even having a little knowledge of The Scarsdale Diet, aka The Atkins Diet or other high protein diets also know the importance of consuming a lot of water.

I had the opportunity to do some research on the entire topic of what is commonly known as the high protein diet. I suppose now might be a geat time to state that I am not an MD, and am not making any official dietary reccomendations here. My hope is simply to educate the reader using relatively easy (non-technical) terminology.
or low-carb diets are dietary programs that restrict carbohydrate consumption usually for weight control. Foods high in digestible carbohydrates (e.g. breads, pasta) are limited or replaced with foods containing a higher percentage of proteins and fats (e.g. meats, soy products) and often other foods low in carbohydrates (e.g. green leafy vegetables).

From wikipedia (link below)
Low-carbohydrate diets

The precise definition of low-carbohydrate diets varies greatly. The term is most commonly used to refer to ketogenic diets, i.e. diets that restrict carbohydrate intake sufficiently to cause ketosis like the Atkins diet,[1][2][3] but some sources consider less restrictive variants to be low-carbohydrate as well…

From another site About.com

Question: What is Ketosis?
Answer: A lot of people are confused by the term “ketosis.” You may read that it is a “dangerous state” for the body, and it does sound abnormal to be “in ketosis.” But ketosis merely means that our bodies are using fat for energy. Ketones (also called ketone bodies) are molecules generated during fat metabolism
Source for above:
What is Ketosis? By Laura Dolson, About.com Updated: July 5, 2008

I believe the article:
What is Ketosis?
By Laura Dolson, About.com
Updated: July 5, 2008
may be truly understating the significance of ketosis.

The primary thing that one should understand when taking on a major dietary change in consultation with a physcian is that ketosis comes about as the body’s mechanism for obtaining its energy need when carbohydrate intake is reduced to an overall level of say around 15-20 grams of carbohydrate per day. That right not per serving, or per donut, but per day. Also I have heard users of this type of diet strongly suggest getting the bulk of these 15-20 grams of carbs in the morning. Ketosis is what will happen when the body starts using the its vast energy reserves which is stored as fat in the human body.

Why do so many diets fail?

Getting the human body to use fat as its fuel is apparently going against the general method for which the human body is designed, regarding using energy stored as fat.

The body must go into an emergency mode which is the mode it goes into during fasting, and later starvation. Yes the body can consume fat as its preferred source of energy, however the carbohydrate intake must be extremely restricted to very low levels. Also you can not go on a diet like this for a day, go off the next day and then go back on (and expect it to work) because the body first uses up the energy stored in the liver (as glycogen) and also to some extent and will actually break down muscle during its first 24 hours of extreme carbohydrate deprivation.

Another usefull Link:

A new way to surf the internet, and lose weight too!

In one of my blogs, about Albert Einstein, I started to write an article about a new concept in writing which I called fusion. The general idea is that I am drawing from many different areas of interest and expertise to write about one overall encompassing idea. Having a had a chance to further consider the true meaning of my words, I might have more appropriately entitled the article Fission Writing. The reason being that like the nuclear reaction known as fission, ideas come up, interact with other ideas and take off in a wide range of different directions.

If we could judge a book from its title or a post by its title, I would now have to at least touch on the various topics being introduced by the title of this post.

From my understanding as I write this essay, there is no such thing as cold fusion. Perhaps, I will do some research on the topic however I do recall seeing a movie where there was major part on how cold fusion technology was going to save the planet.

The general idea of fusion reactions is that when the two nuclei of two different atoms come together and fuse, a tremendous amount of energy is realeased. On a very simple level consider two hydrogen atoms; each having one neutron, one proton and one electron, fusing together to form a different element that would now have two electrons, two protons, and two neutrons, the new element is Helium. It is not so easy to get this to happen think extremes in both temperature and pressure. However the resultant release of energy is tremendous. This is the basic principle under which the Sun operates creating the immense energy which sustains the earth.

There is no doubt in my mind that it will take some time for us at TheWritersCafe.org to get used to this new interface. Patience is not the problem. I would say,  the true problem here is, that no matter how bad things might have been @ Lycos/Tripod, people still are most comfortable with things that they have become familiar with.

While throughout our first year we have avoided gettting caught up in some of the very important, yet very technical areas of grammar, we hope with our new crop of talented writers in the wings to finally get better consistancy in both grammar and the ever so important area of spelling and catching the typos before they ever get published.

Oh, and by the way, on this new host-site we at TheWitersCafe.org are eagerly anticipating the contributions of new aspiring and experienced writers alike. At this time I would like to extend a very warm invitation to a true sister in writing, and a sister in the url world. The Writers’ Cafe @ Blogspot.com

Too many Camera and Not Enough Food, Song Lyrics By The Police.

I had that thought today, as I arrived at Shoprite thinking, that they had a real great price on a digital camera. The particular model is FinePix Z10fd. At the same time I could not help wondering how come I have not seen any of the two 2-lb bags of the pre-washed star K heksher lceberg lettuce mix. I know that I sometimes look too deeply into things but for some reason I have gotten used to spending say between $3 to $5 for either a two or three pound bag of washed star k heksher lettuce. However I simply can not bring myself to spend say $2.99 for 1 lb of lettuce, even if it is prewashed and has a star k heksher.

Iceberg lettuce in its normal cellophane wrapped (but non star k heksher form) normally costs anywhere from say 99 cents when on sale, to maybe just under a $2.00. How come the 2lb bags can not be found, nor the three pound bags at Shoprite. Could this have something to do with the 9 days, and Dole thinks it can make a little more money on their special niche product star k heksher lettuce mix?

Or, is it one of those farming issues that due to the lack of rain in California, we now all must pay $2.99 for a pound of lettuce?

Conclusion: If you do go to Shoprite  check out the price on the FujiFilm FinePix Z10fd (7.2 MP 2.5″ LCD , while supplies last, I saw a price of under $105 before tax. However don’t even bother looking for the 3lb bags of Dole iceberg lettuce mix which you can usually buy for $4.49, because they are nowhere to be found! If your Rabbi says its okay, you might consider buying the cellophane wrapped iceberg lettuce for 99 cents each, however there is a limit of two.

Labels: Shopping Tips, Digital Cameras, Iceberg Lettuce

Aharon Moshe August 7, 2008