Natural Pain Relievers
August 11th, 2008
I can’t stop clicking on Prevention.com http://www.prevention.com/paincures/index.html
August 11th, 2008
YumYum Recipe
August 11th, 2008
Peanut Noodles with Tofu
Add protein-packed tofu to the classic Japanese dish
peanut noodles tofu
TIME: 15 MINUTES
SERVINGS: 4
4 oz soba noodles
1/2 c creamy reduced-sodium natural peanut butter (MUFA)
3 Tbsp reduced-sodium soy sauce
3 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
1/2 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp chile paste with garlic (optional), see note
1 tsp sesame seeds, toasted
4 oz light firm tofu, drained, patted dry, and cut in 1/2″ cubes
2 c shredded or grated carrots (about 2 lg)
3 scallions, thinly sliced (1/4 c)
1. PREPARE noodles per package directions. Place peanut butter in small microwaveable bowl and microwave on high 15 seconds to soften.
2. WHISK together peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, oil, chile paste (if using), and sesame seeds in large bowl while noodles cook. Set aside.
3. HEAT medium skillet coated with cooking spray over medium heat. Add tofu and sauté until lightly browned, about 5 minutes.
4. DRAIN pasta and add to peanut sauce along with all but 1/2 cup of the carrots. Mix until well combined. Top with tofu and remaining carrots and sprinkle with scallions. Serve immediately or chill and serve cold.
Nutritional Info Per Serving
377 cal, 16 g pro, 36 g carb, 5 g fiber, 19.5 g fat, 3.5 g sat fat, 0 mg chol, 551 mg sodium
NOTE: Chile paste is available in the ethnic food section of most supermarkets or via importfood.com.
Flat Belly Bonus
The fiber and protein in Japanese soba noodles (made from buckwheat) will keep you satisfied longer than a bowl of traditional pasta.
August 11th, 2008
Peanut Noodles with Tofu
Add protein-packed tofu to the classic Japanese dish
peanut noodles tofu
TIME: 15 MINUTES
SERVINGS: 4
4 oz soba noodles
1/2 c creamy reduced-sodium natural peanut butter (MUFA)
3 Tbsp reduced-sodium soy sauce
3 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
1/2 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp chile paste with garlic (optional), see note
1 tsp sesame seeds, toasted
4 oz light firm tofu, drained, patted dry, and cut in 1/2″ cubes
2 c shredded or grated carrots (about 2 lg)
3 scallions, thinly sliced (1/4 c)
1. PREPARE noodles per package directions. Place peanut butter in small microwaveable bowl and microwave on high 15 seconds to soften.
2. WHISK together peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, oil, chile paste (if using), and sesame seeds in large bowl while noodles cook. Set aside.
3. HEAT medium skillet coated with cooking spray over medium heat. Add tofu and sauté until lightly browned, about 5 minutes.
4. DRAIN pasta and add to peanut sauce along with all but 1/2 cup of the carrots. Mix until well combined. Top with tofu and remaining carrots and sprinkle with scallions. Serve immediately or chill and serve cold.
Nutritional Info Per Serving
377 cal, 16 g pro, 36 g carb, 5 g fiber, 19.5 g fat, 3.5 g sat fat, 0 mg chol, 551 mg sodium
NOTE: Chile paste is available in the ethnic food section of most supermarkets or via importfood.com.
Flat Belly Bonus
The fiber and protein in Japanese soba noodles (made from buckwheat) will keep you satisfied longer than a bowl of traditional pasta.
Prevention is Great
August 11th, 2008
Actually, their whole site is great! Exercise, recipes, go here: http://www.prevention.com/cda/homepage.do
Belly Flat Recipes
August 11th, 2008
I found this recipe from Prevention’s website too, using flax seed oil, YUM!
Belly-Flattening Foods
August 11th, 2008
From AOL/Prevention’s website…who knew! http://www.prevention.com/flatbellyfoodslideshow/?cm_mmc=AOL-_-Flat20Belly20Diet20Slideshow-_-Article-_-Top20Flat20Belly20Foods
Let’s Hear It For The Boys
February 5th, 2008
From The TimesFebruary 1, 2008
Where have all the men gone?
British women in their thirties want mates. They can’t find any. Why? Because most eligible males are selfish, mixed-up man-boys chasing no-strings sex, says our correspondent
Laura Nolan
Men are like eggs. They must hatch or go bad. I came to this conclusion after seeing in the new year with a gang of university friends and hearing one of them, a single guy of 35 called Jamie, declare with complete sincerity that his resolution for 2008 was not to get a girlfriend.
I groaned. His vow struck me as odd, not just because Jamie is a remarkably warm, kind and entertaining individual rather than some ropey Lothario, but because I knew him ten years ago when he was mustard keen to marry his then girlfriend. And when I thought harder about it, I realised that over the past decade Jamie has effectively been degenerating from the man he was at 25 years old to the boy he is today.
The person who fell in love and believed that when you found a great girl you counted your blessings and married her has morphed into someone in search of nothing more than a bit of fun, who views any relationship that he can’t get out of at the ping of a text message with genuine unease.
Where have all the men gone? Instead, we have an overload of man-boys – which leaves a generation of single, thirtysomething women who are their natural mates bewildered. I am one of those women.
I am often told that our problem boils down to bad timing. In our early twenties (the age at which our parents tended to meet and marry), we, arguably the first generation of properly educated and professionally ambitious women, were not ready to settle down and start having babies.
By our late twenties many of us did end up reconnecting with our first loves, or met men of a similar age who were still young enough to want to match and hatch. But for those who didn’t, life is increasingly complicated – and infuriating.
The assumption seems to be that it is our fault that we can’t find “him”. I have lost count of the number of articles by female columnists that I’ve read, urging “career women” like me to get pregnant before it is too late. I want to point out that I work to eat, and that earning a salary funds the social life needed to meet new people.
What do they think we are doing? Take India Knight’s attack, in The Sunday Times, on what she called “the sweetly retro notion of mooching around pining for Mr Right as the (biological) clock ticks away”. “My advice to all my girlfriends is, just do it,” she announces. “Get pregnant. Don’t wait. Mr Right can turn into Mr Wrong overnight: there are no certainties.”
And we wonder why men are afraid to commit, when women like me are depicted as hormonally charged sperm-bandits interested in nothing beyond the urge to have a child.
Does society really want usto settle for Mr Only OK rather than the real deal? Marriage strikes me as hard enough work without saddling yourself with someone for whom you don’t quite feel all that’s necessary. And giving birth with your mother at your bedside because your child’s father isn’t that into you, or the baby, strikes me as far sadder than never getting pregnant at all.
Having lived in New York for five years, and compared notes with friends in other cities (Hong Kong, Paris and Singapore among them), I can assert that the attack on thirtysomething singletons seems to be a particularly English trait. In other cities we are left alone at worst, celebrated at best, and most people find someone at some stage, even if it is at the age of 40. In my view, London is quintessentially chauvinist, a state of affairs exacerbated by the City, the all-male drinking clubs, the pub and football culture, and the strong, albeit small, group of women who seem to treat marriage as their sole raison d’être.
But what of these Brit boys who fail to hatch by their mid-thirties? Do they really turn bad? They don’t necessarily become bad company – as long as the relationship is kept platonic. Many of my best friends are utterly charming bachelors, but they are also the first to admit that they are rubbish boyfriends. Interestingly, they also agree that this wasn’t always the case.
“Looking back, I can see a couple of girls I was ready to marry ten years ago. But I seem to have drifted farther and farther away from being ready since then,” one of them confided as his 40th birthday approached. “I felt a level of certainty about people then that I don’t feel now.”
Personally, I think an odd thing happens to man-boy brains at about the age of 30. Some neural pathway, hitherto well oiled through a diet of normal relationships and an awareness of such terms as “compromise” and “I’m sorry”, tunes in to a specific area of the brain labelled “navel gazing”. If it miraculously misses that zone, it veers into another equally exclusive area: “near-total romantic/emotional shutdown beyond the next 24/48-hour period”.
My last few years of dating reads like either a therapist’s dream or a dictionary of neuroses. On the neurotic front, one man-boy aged 32 had a panic attack at dinner, which he thought was a heart attack until we got to A&E and he was assured otherwise. Another wore a watch that monitored his sleep patterns.
More common, however, are those who insist on persuading you that they are the one you have been waiting for, only to run away the second you show signs of agreeing. One man rang me every two hours for a week to persuade me that what we had going was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, until I started to think that he might be right – at which point he told me that he was too messed up for a relationship.
Another invited me to Spain after one date, only to say at the end of it that it was “all too full-on”. Another couldn’t stop sending soppy texts, until I sent one back. All were thirtysomething, bright, successful bachelors. They had all had therapy. They all talked ad infinitum about their “ishoos”. But not one of them asked about mine. I listened, and either left, or they did.
Nobody expects these guys to settle for Ms Only OK, either, but it’s fair to say that most of them are not looking to settle for anyone – and, in fact, dating a series of Ms Only OKs fills the gap nicely.
“In theory I’d like a family,” says one. “But it doesn’t feel urgent and in the meantime I have a great life with plenty of sex – all on my own terms. Love has sort of disappeared from the menu. And yes, now I’ve learnt that I can, I mess women around in ways I’d never have done in my twenties.”
Horror stories from friends abound, too. “I spent most of last year with a guy who used to weigh me every day and refused to sleep with me if I got too heavy,” admits a colleague. “How bonkers was that? But the awful thing is that once you pass 36, you find it’s single men rather than single women who are the prize commodity.”
I don’t know of any woman my age (35) who hasn’t spent several years in love with a boyfriend, only to have to give up on the relationship after realising that children and commitment were not going to happen for ages, if at all.
Many of these guys would be living happily as husbands and fathers if they had taken the plunge. But they haven’t. So what’s the answer? Become more hard-boiled and accept that, in return for children, we will have to make do with someone Only OK? Go after men ten years younger than us? Or try bruised divorcés ten years older?
There is another option, of course. And that is that the whole generation of single man-boys start behaving like men. Meanwhile, everyone else could stop asking us why we’re not married yet, and wrongly assuming that it’s because we are so work-obsessed that we don’t want to be.
Believe us, we are not single through want of trying.
It’s a statistics thing
For every 100 females, 108 males are born in the UK. But owing to the higher mortality rates of young males, by the mid-teens the numbers have evened out. This remains the case until old age, when a surplus of women arises again.
In some big cities, including London, there are more women than men. There is debate about the reasons for this, but it is nothing new. The thirtysomething single status is new, however – mainly because women now leave it later to marry. In their mid-thirties they find themselves in a predicament, whether they outnumber men of their age or not.
A study I carried out on lonely hearts ads indicated that, while single females typically advertise for men three to five years older than them, men advertise for women of a certain age irrespective of their own. Their preferred age is 24 to 25. So the men that the women want are looking for women, but younger ones.
So should a woman in her mid-thirties be looking for a man in his forties instead? Perhaps – but only in his late forties. I was involved in research that looked at how the sexes perceive their market value – ie, what they think their “package” is worth to the opposite sex. The results suggested that males in their early and mid-forties overestimated their standing the most. They are getting richer at this age, and become self-deluded about what they can get in return. They also want to attract a twentysomething, but are less likely to succeed than younger men. Only in their mid to late forties, when their risk of death increases (they may be rich, but they may also die), do they become more realistic.
In short, women seem to hang on to the ideal, and many get lucky. But when they start wanting to settle down, they opt for what biologists call the Hobson’s Choice Strategy. In layman’s terms, they opt for something over nothing.
— PROFESSOR ROBIN DUNBAR
Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford
The man’s view: try this instead
Most single men want love. But they are also terrified of failure, poverty and being trapped. They are scared of turning into their dads, or, if divorced, repeating their old mistakes. They are scared that their women will make them throw out their comics, their motorbikes and their dreams of writing novels.
It doesn’t really matter which type of man you go for – younger, older, divorced. What matters is that you go for him.
Personally, I think the divorced man is more realistic. He’s not like a young man who can’t commit because he yearns for a fairytale goddess whose heart he may one day capture. The older man just wants someone who won’t shout at him. If it takes her two minutes to get into the car, she’s ideal. If she’s giving, and laughs at his jokes, he’ll love her for ever. Give those bruised men a try. Stop expecting to find The One. Find someone, and give him love recklessly.
Or you can snare one of the single man-boys, but you must be cunning. You must wait for him to call but, when he does, you must be devoted and give him glorious sex in flattering lighting.
There is only one time when a man knows, for certain, that he loves his woman and will stay with her for ever: when she has just chucked him. The rest of the time he’s not sure. I remember the first time my wife said: “Let’s have children!” I knew that this was an historic moment. I must respond like a man. So I ignored her. Men’s heads are filled with confusion, fear and football statistics. And whenever they are made an offer, they always feel the negatives first – and if they can’t express them, they clam up like oysters.
In which case, trapping them may involve trickery. After five months – preferably during a three-day trip to Paris, so he can’t get away – you must say, lightly and just before sex: “I love every part of your life. I want to see you richly succeed. But you must marry me.” Then you must change tack and become very soft. You have touched on his deepest fears. Listen. Tell him to write that novel. Tell him that you love ELO. After a two-day sulk, which will be immensely wounding for you, he will begin to express his horrid, selfish fears, and thus you will be stumbling towards your perfectly imperfect life.
Try not to worry about what happens. Remember, there are also loads of men like me: the ones who hatched, and still went bad. We wish you luck. We wish you love. We’ll see you by the swings in five years.
— ANDREW CLOVER
Andrew Clover’s Dad Rules is published by Penguin in May
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article3283690.ece
Very interesting article, but not beauty related ;)
December 1st, 2007
Keepers of the Lost Ark?
Christians in Ethiopia have long claimed to have the ark of the covenant. Our reporter investigated
* By Paul Raffaele
* Photographs by Paul Raffaele
* Smithsonian magazine, December 2007
“They shall make an ark of acacia wood,” God commanded Moses in the Book of Exodus, after delivering the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. And so the Israelites built an ark, or chest, gilding it inside and out. And into this chest Moses placed stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as given to him on Mount Sinai.
Thus Jews came to revere the ark as an earthly manifestation of God. The Old Testament describes its enormous powers—blazing with fire and light, halting rivers, blasting away armies and bringing down the fabled walls of Jericho. (Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark provides a special-effects approximation.) According to the First Book of Kings, King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem to house the ark. It was venerated there during Solomon’s reign (c. 970-930 B.C.) and beyond.
Then it vanished. Much of Jewish tradition holds that it disappeared before or while the Babylonians sacked the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
But through the centuries, Ethiopian Christians have claimed that the ark rests in a chapel in the small town of Aksum, in their country’s northern highlands. It arrived nearly 3,000 years ago, they say, and has been guarded by a succession of virgin monks who, once anointed, are forbidden to set foot outside the chapel grounds until they die.
One of the first things that caught my eye in Addis Ababa, the country’s capital, was an enormous concrete pillar topped by a giant red star—the sort of monument to communism still visible in Pyongyang. The North Koreans built this one as a gift for the Derg, the Marxist regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991 (the country is now governed by an elected parliament and prime minister). In a campaign that Derg officials named the Red Terror, they slaughtered their political enemies—estimates range from several thousand to more than a million people. The most prominent of their victims was Emperor Haile Selassie, whose death, under circumstances that remain contested, was announced in 1975.
He was the last emperor of Ethiopia—and, he claimed, the 225th monarch, descended from Menelik, the ruler believed responsible for Ethiopia’s possession of the ark of the covenant in the tenth century B.C.
The story is told in the Kebra Negast (Glory of the Kings), Ethiopia’s chronicle of its royal line: the Queen of Sheba, one of its first rulers, traveled to Jerusalem to partake of King Solomon’s wisdom; on her way home, she bore Solomon’s son, Menelik. Later Menelik went to visit his father, and on his return journey was accompanied by the firstborn sons of some Israelite nobles—who, unbeknown to Menelik, stole the ark and carried it with them to Ethiopia. When Menelik learned of the theft, he reasoned that since the ark’s frightful powers hadn’t destroyed his retinue, it must be God’s will that it remain with him.
Many historians—including Richard Pankhurst, a British-born scholar who has lived in Ethiopia for almost 50 years—date the Kebra Negast manuscript to the 14th century A.D. It was written, they say, to validate the claim by Menelik’s descendants that their right to rule was God-given, based on an unbroken succession from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But the Ethiopian faithful say the chronicles were copied from a fourth-century Coptic manuscript that was, in turn, based on a far earlier account. This lineage remained so important to them that it was written into Selassie’s two imperial constitutions, in 1931 and 1955.
Before leaving Addis Ababa for Aksum, I went to the offices of His Holiness Abuna Paulos, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which has some 40 million adherents worldwide, to ask about Ethiopia’s claim to have the ark of the covenant. Paulos holds a PhD in theology from Princeton University, and before he was installed as patriarch, in 1992, he was a parish priest in Manhattan. Gripping a golden staff, wearing a golden icon depicting the Madonna cradling an infant Jesus, and seated on what looked like a golden throne, he oozed power and patronage.
“We’ve had 1,000 years of Judaism, followed by 2,000 years of Christianity, and that’s why our religion is rooted in the Old Testament,” he told me. “We follow the same dietary laws as Judaism, as set out in Leviticus,” meaning that his followers keep kosher, even though they are Christians. “Parents circumcise their baby boys as a religious duty, we often give Old Testament names to our boys and many villagers in the countryside still hold Saturday sacred as the Sabbath.”
Is this tradition linked to the church’s claim to hold the ark, which Ethiopians call Tabota Seyen, or the Ark of Zion? “It’s no claim, it’s the truth,” Paulos answered. “Queen Sheba visited King Solomon in Jerusalem three thousand years ago, and the son she bore him, Menelik, at age 20 visited Jerusalem, from where he brought the ark of the covenant back to Aksum. It’s been in Ethiopia ever since.”
I asked if the ark in Ethiopia resembles the one described in the Bible: almost four feet long, just over two feet high and wide, surmounted by two winged cherubs facing each other across its heavy lid, forming the “mercy seat,” or footstool for the throne of God. Paulos shrugged. “Can you believe that even though I’m head of the Ethiopian church, I’m still forbidden from seeing it?” he said. “The guardian of the ark is the only person on earth who has that peerless honor.”
He also mentioned that the ark had not been held continuously at Aksum since Menelik’s time, adding that some monks hid it for 400 years to keep it out of invaders’ hands. Their monastery still stood, he said, on an island in Lake Tana. It was about 200 miles northwest, on the way to Aksum.
Ethiopia is landlocked, but Lake Tana is an inland sea: it covers 1,400 square miles and is the source of the Blue Nile, which weaves its muddy way 3,245 miles through Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean. At the outlet where the water begins its journey, fishermen drop lines from primitive papyrus boats like those the Egyptians used in the pharaohs’ days. I glimpsed them through an eerie dawn mist as I boarded a powerboat headed for Tana Kirkos, the island of the ark.
Slowly the boatman threaded his way through a maze of tree-covered islands so dense that he began to wonder aloud whether we were lost. When, after two hours, we suddenly confronted a rock wall about 30 yards high and more than 100 yards long, he cried, “Tana Kirkos” with obvious relief.
A fish eagle circled and squawked as a barefoot monk clad in a patched yellow robe scurried down a pathway cut into the rock and peered into our boat. “He’s making sure there are no women aboard,” my translator said.
The monk introduced himself as Abba, or Father, Haile Mikael. “There are 125 monks on the island, and many are novices,” he said. “Women have been banned for centuries because the sight of them might fire the young monks’ passions.”
Another monk, Abba Gebre Maryam, joined us. He, too, wore a patched yellow robe, plus a white pillbox turban. A rough-hewn wooden cross hung from his neck, and he carried a silver staff topped by a cross. In response to my questioning, he elaborated on what Abuna Paulos had told me:
“The ark came here from Aksum for safekeeping from enemies well before Jesus was born because our people followed the Jewish religion then,” he said. “But when King Ezana ruled in Aksum 1,600 years ago, he took the ark back to Aksum.” Ezana’s kingdom extended across the Red Sea into the Arabian peninsula; he converted to Christianity around A.D. 330 and became hugely influential in spreading the faith.
Then Abba Gebre added: “The baby Jesus and Mary spent ten days here during their long exile from Israel.” It was after King Herod ordered the death of all boys under the age of 2 in Bethlehem, he said. “Would you like to see the place where they often sat?”
I followed him up a wooded path and onto a ridge where a pair of young monks were standing by a small shrine, their eyes closed in prayer. Abba Gebre pointed to the shrine. “That’s where Jesus and Mary sat each day while they were here.”
“What proof do you have that they came here?” I asked.
He looked at me with what appeared to be tender sympathy and said: “We don’t need proof because it’s a fact. The monks here have passed this down for centuries.”
Later, Andrew Wearring, a religious scholar at the University of Sydney, told me that “the journey by Jesus, Mary and Joseph is mentioned in only a few lines in the Book of Matthew—and he gives scant detail, though he does state they fled into Egypt.” Like its former parent institution the Orthodox Coptic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox faith holds that the family spent four years in western Egypt, Wearring said, in the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta, before returning home. But western Egypt is over 1,000 miles northwest of Lake Tana. Could Jesus, Mary and Joseph have traveled to Tana Kirkos? There’s no way to know.
On the way back to the boat, we passed small log huts with conical thatched roofs—the monks’ cells. Abba Gebre entered one and pulled from the shadows an ancient bronze tray set on a stand. He said Menelik brought it from Jerusalem to Aksum along with the ark.
“The Jerusalem temple priests used this tray to collect and stir the sacrificial animals’ blood,” Abba Gebre went on. When I checked later with Pankhurst, the historian said the tray, which he had seen on an earlier visit, was probably associated with Judaic rituals in Ethiopia’s pre-Christian era. Lake Tana, he said, was a stronghold of Judaism.
Finally, Abba Gebre led me to an old church built from wood and rock in the traditional Ethiopian style, circular with a narrow walkway hugging the outer wall. Inside was the mak’das, or holy of holies—an inner sanctum shielded by brocade curtains and open only to senior priests. “That’s where we keep our tabots,” he said.
The tabots (pronounced “TA-bots”) are replicas of the tablets in the ark, and every church in Ethiopia has a set, kept in its own holy of holies. “It’s the tabots that consecrate a church, and without them it’s as holy as a donkey’s stable,” Abba Gebre said. Every January 19, on Timkat, or the Feast of the Epiphany, the tabots from churches all over Ethiopia are paraded through the streets.
“The most sacred ceremony occurs at Gonder,” he went on, naming a city in the highlands just north of Lake Tana. “To understand our deep reverence for the ark, you should go there.”
Gonder (pop. 160,000) spreads across a series of hills and valleys more than 7,000 feet above sea level. On the advice of a friendly cleric, I sought out Archbishop Andreas, the local leader of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. As Andreas ushered me into a simple room in his office, I saw that he had the spindly frame and sunken cheeks of an ascetic. Despite his high position, he was dressed like a monk, in a worn yellow robe, and he held a simple cross carved from wood.
I asked if he knew of any evidence that the ark had come to Ethiopia with Menelik. “These stories were handed down through the generations by our church leaders, and we believe them to be historical facts,” he told me in a whisper. “That’s why we keep tabots in every church in Ethiopia.”
At noon the next day, Andreas, in a black robe and black turban, emerged from a church on a slope above Gonder and into a crowd of several hundred people. A dozen priests, deacons and acolytes—clad in brocade robes in maroon, ivory, gold and blue—joined him to form a protective huddle around a bearded priest wearing a scarlet robe and a golden turban. On his head the priest carried the tabots, wrapped in ebony velvet embroidered in gold. Catching sight of the sacred bundle, hundreds of women in the crowd began ululating—making a singsong wail with their tongues—as many Ethiopian women do at moments of intense emotion.
As the clerics began to walk down a rocky pathway toward a piazza at the center of town (a legacy of Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s), they were hemmed in by perhaps 1,000 more chanting and ululating devotees. At the piazza, the procession joined clerics carrying tabots from seven other churches. Together they set off farther downhill, with the trailing throng swelling into the thousands, with thousands more lining the road. About five miles later, the priests stopped beside a pool of murky water in a park.
All afternoon and through the night, the priests chanted hymns before the tabots, surrounded by worshipers. Then, prompted by glimmers of light sneaking into the morning sky, Archbishop Andreas led the clerics to celebrate the baptism of Jesus by playfully splashing one another with the pool’s water.
The Timkat celebrations were to continue for three more days with prayers and masses, after which the tabots would be returned to the churches where they were kept. I was more eager than ever to locate the original ark, so I headed for Aksum, about 200 miles northeast.
Just outside Gonder, my car passed Wolleka village, where a mud-hut synagogue bore a Star of David on the roof—a relic of Jewish life in the region that endured for as long as four millennia, until the 1990s. That was when the last of the Bet Israel Jews (also known as the Falasha, the Amharic word for “stranger”) were evacuated to Israel in the face of persecution by the Derg.
The road degenerated into a rutted, rocky pathway that twisted around the hillsides, and our SUV struggled to exceed ten miles per hour. I reached Aksum in darkness and shared the hotel dining room with United Nations peacekeepers from Uruguay and Jordan who told me they were monitoring a stretch of the Ethiopia-Eritrea border about an hour’s drive away. The latest U.N. bulletin, they said, described the area as “volatile and tense.”
The next day was hot and dusty. Except for the occasional camel and its driver, Aksum’s streets were nearly empty. We weren’t far from the Denakil Desert, which extends eastward into Eritrea and Djibouti.
By chance, in the lobby of my hotel I met Alem Abbay, an Aksum native who was on vacation from Frostburg State University in Maryland, where he teaches African history. Abbay took me to a stone tablet about eight feet high and covered in inscriptions in three languages—Greek; Geez, the ancient language of Ethiopia; and Sabaean, from across the Red Sea in southern Yemen, the true birthplace, some scholars believe, of the Queen of Sheba.
“King Ezana erected this stone tablet early in the fourth century, while still a pagan ruler,” Abbay told me. His finger traced the strange-looking alphabets carved into the rock 16 centuries ago. “Here, the king praises the god of war after a victory over a rebel people.” But sometime in the following decade Ezana was converted to Christianity.
Abbay led me to another stone tablet covered with inscriptions in the same three languages. “By now King Ezana is thanking ‘the Lord of Heaven’ for success in a military expedition into nearby Sudan,” he said. “We know he meant Jesus because archaeological digs have turned up coins during Ezana’s reign that feature the Cross of Christ around this time.” Before that, they bore the pagan symbols of the sun and moon.
As we walked on, we passed a large reservoir, its surface covered with green scum. “According to tradition, it’s Queen Sheba’s bath,” Abbay said. “Some believe there’s an ancient curse on its waters.”
Ahead was a towering stele, or column, 79 feet high and said to weigh 500 tons. Like other fallen and standing steles nearby, it was carved from a single slab of granite, perhaps as early as the first or second century A.D. Legend has it that the ark of the covenant’s supreme power sliced it out of the rock and set it into place.
On our way to the chapel where the ark is said to be kept, we passed Sheba’s bath again and saw about 50 people in white shawls crouched near the water. A boy had drowned there shortly before, and his parents and other relatives were waiting for the body to surface. “They say it will take one to two days,” Abbay said. “They know this because many other boys have drowned here while swimming. They believe the curse has struck again.”
Abbay and I made our way toward the office of the Neburq-ed, Aksum’s high priest, who works out of a tin shed at a seminary close by the ark chapel. As the church administrator in Aksum, he would be able to tell us more about the guardian of the ark.
“We’ve had the guardian tradition from the beginning,” the high priest told us. “He prays constantly by the ark, day and night, burning incense before it and paying tribute to God. Only he can see it; all others are forbidden to lay eyes on it or even go close to it.” Over the centuries, a few Western travelers have claimed to have seen it; their descriptions are of tablets like those described in the Book of Exodus. But the Ethiopians say that is inconceivable—the visitors must have been shown fakes.
I asked how the guardian is chosen. “By Aksum’s senior priests and the present guardian,” he said. I told him I’d heard that in the mid-20th century a chosen guardian had run away, terrified, and had to be hauled back to Aksum. The Neburq-ed smiled, but did not answer. Instead, he pointed to a grassy slope studded with broken stone blocks—the remains of Zion Maryam cathedral, Ethiopia’s oldest church, founded in the fourth century A.D. “It held the ark, but Arab invaders destroyed it,” he said, adding that priests had hidden the ark from the invaders.
Now that I had come this far, I asked if we could meet the guardian of the ark. The Neburq-ed said no: “He is usually not accessible to ordinary people, just religious leaders.”
The next day I tried again, led by a friendly priest to the gate of the ark chapel, which is about the size of a typical suburban house and surrounded by a high iron fence. “Wait here,” he said, and he climbed the steps leading to the chapel entrance, where he called out softly to the guardian.
A few minutes later he scurried back, smiling. A few feet from where I stood, through the iron bars, a monk who looked to be in his late 50s peered around the chapel wall.
“It’s the guardian,” the priest whispered.
He wore an olive-colored robe, dark pillbox turban and sandals. He glanced warily at me with deep-set eyes. Through the bars he held out a wooden cross painted yellow, touching my forehead with it in a blessing and pausing as I kissed the top and bottom in the traditional way.
I asked his name.
“I’m the guardian of the ark,” he said, with the priest translating. “I have no other name.”
I told him I had come from the other side of the world to speak with him about the ark. “I can’t tell you anything about it,” he said. “No king or patriarch or bishop or ruler can ever see it, only me. This has been our tradition since Menelik brought the ark here more than 3,000 years ago.”
We peered at each other for a few moments. I asked a few more questions, but to each he remained as silent as an apparition. Then he was gone.
“You’re lucky, because he refuses most requests to see him,” the priest said. But I felt only a little lucky. There was so much more I wanted to know: Does the ark look the way it is described in the Bible? Has the guardian ever seen a sign of its power? Is he content to devote his life to the ark, never able to leave the compound?
On my last night in Aksum, I walked down the chapel road, now deserted, and sat for a long time staring at the chapel, which shone like silver in the moonlight.
Was the guardian chanting ancient incantations while bathing the chapel in the sanctifying reek of incense? Was he on his knees before the ark? Was he as alone as I felt? Was the ark really there?
Of course I had no way of answering any of these questions. Had I tried to slip inside in the darkness to sneak a look, I’m sure the guardian would have raised the alarm. And I was also held back by the fear that the ark would harm me if I dared defile it with my presence.
In the final moments of my search, I could not judge whether the ark of the covenant truly rested inside this nondescript chapel. Perhaps Menelik’s traveling companions did take it and spirit it home to Ethiopia. Perhaps its origins here stem from a tale spun by Aksumite priests in ancient times to awe their congregations and consolidate their authority. But the reality of the ark, like a vision in the moonlight, floated just beyond my grasp, and so the millennia-old mystery remained. As the devotion of the worshipers at Timkat and the monks at Tana Kirkos came back to me in the shimmering light, I decided that simply being in the presence of this eternal mystery was a fitting ending to my quest.
Paul Raffaele is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian. His story on Congo’s imperiled mountain gorillas appeared in October.
Books
Ethiopia & Eritrea by Matt Phillips and Jean-Bernard Carillet, Lonely Planet Publications (Oakland, California), 2006
Searching for the Ark of the Covenant by Randall Price, Harvest House Publishers (Eugene, Oregon), 2005
The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant by Graham Hancock, Simon & Schuster, 1992
Find this article at:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/ark-covenant-200712.html
© Smithsonian Institution
Hips Don’t Lie
November 12th, 2007
Curvy women may be a clever bet
Women with curvy figures are likely to be brighter than waif-like counterparts and may well produce more intelligent offspring, a US study suggests.
Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests - as did their children.
The bigger the difference between a woman’s waist and hips the better.
Researchers writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour speculated this was to do with fatty acids found on the hips.
In this area, the fat is likely to be the much touted Omega-3, which could improve the woman’s own mental abilities as well as those of her child during pregnancy.
Men respond to the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child, the researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California said.
The findings appear to be borne out in the educational attainments of at least one of the UK’s most famous curvaceous women, Nigella Lawson, who graduated from Oxford.
But experts are not convinced by the findings.
“On the fatty deposits being related to intelligence front, it’s very hard to detangle that from other factors, such as social class, for instance, or diet,” said Martin Tovee of Newcastle University.
“And much as we logically like the idea that men are interested in the waist to hip ratio, it actually features relatively low down the list of feature males look for in a potential partner.”
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/7090300.stm
Published: 2007/11/12 10:40:08 GMT
She’s My BFF
September 4th, 2007
LOS ANGELES TIMES
SPECIAL WOMEN’S HEALTH SECTION
Our innate need for friendship
Science is just now catching on to what women have known all along: Strong female bonds can protect against life’s hardships.
By Melissa Healy
Times Staff Writer
May 9, 2005
Women are keepers of each other’s secrets, boosters of one another’s wavering confidence, co-conspirators in life’s adventures. Through laughter, tears and an inexhaustible river of talk, they keep each other well, and make each other better.
Across species and throughout human cultures, females have banded together for protection and mutual support. They have groomed each other, tended each other’s young, nursed each other in illness and engaged in the kind of aimless sociability that has generally mystified male anthropologists.
But the power of girlfriends is beginning to yield its secrets to science. For women, friendship not only rules, it protects. It buffers the hardships of life’s transitions, it lowers blood pressure, boosts immunity and promotes healing. It may help explain one of medical science’s most enduring mysteries: why women, on average, have lower rates of heart disease and longer life expectancies than men.
“Women are much more social in the way they cope with stress,” says Shelley E. Taylor, author of “The Tending Instinct” and a social neuroscientist at UCLA. “Men are more likely to deal with stress with a ‘fight or flight’ reaction - with aggression or withdrawal.” But aggression and withdrawal take a physiological toll, and friendship brings comfort that mitigates the ill effects of stress, Taylor says. That difference alone, she adds, “contributes to the gender difference in longevity.”
Women’s reliance on their female friends - and the benefits they believe they get from those friendships - crosses the lines of ethnicity, income and age.
“There’s a sense of well-being with Liza; I just feel stronger - more alive - when I talk to her,” Brea resident Susie Gonzalez, 27, says of her best friend Liza Melendez.
To be sure, friendships - the feeling of being connected to a supportive network - profoundly affect the health of both genders, according to researchers. Men and women who report loneliness die earlier, get sick more often and weather transitions with greater physical wear and tear than those who say they have a support network of friends or family. “Loneliness is simply one of the principal causes of premature death in this country,” says Dr. James J. Lynch, a Maryland-based author and psychologist who works with cardiac rehabilitation patients.
Men rely heavily on their marriages - on their wives, specifically - to ward off the corrosive health effects of loneliness. Married men are markedly healthier and live longer than bachelors or widowers.
Married women, by contrast, are only slightly better off than unmarried women or widows when it comes to health and social support. Researchers attribute the difference to women’s greater reliance on friendships outside of marriage. These friendships make women’s support networks broader, deeper and more resilient than the webs of support that men have.
“When a romantic relationship ends, a woman still has other sources of intimacy - her friends - and that provides her with another source of support,” says Beverley Fehr of the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, author of a scholarly study of friendship titled “Friendship Processes.” When a man loses his primary female partner, says Ohio State University psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, “he’s in trouble.”
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Calming hormone
Increasingly, researchers think that the hormone oxytocin is, for women especially, the elixir of friendship - and, by extension, of health.
Present in both men and women, oxytocin levels spike in females following childbirth and when nursing. But oxytocin levels also increase at times of isolation and stress. And when the hormone interacts with estrogen, studies have shown, it impels females to seek the company of others. “We call it a ’social thermostat’ that keeps track of how well [females’] social supports are going,” Taylor says. When the thermostat reads too low, females tend to reach out to others. When they reach out to others, oxytocin levels rise again and with that prolonged exposure comes a distinctive “calming, warm” effect, says Taylor. “We don’t see the same mechanisms in men,” she adds.
Stacy Anderson, a 36-year-old Culver City mother of two young children, recognizes oxytocin’s effects. That, she says, must be the chemical that delivers that “wash of love” she feels when she sits down to breastfeed her baby. When she and her friend and fellow mother Terese Jungle leave the kids with husbands and take themselves out for an evening, there’s a special warmth as well, she says.
The women talk about poetry and architecture and jewelry, and mimic the British-accented commentary of television naturalists while they people-watch. “We laugh a lot,” says Anderson. “It’s almost romantic.”
By nudging women to build networks of support, oxytocin has a powerful indirect effect on their health. At least 22 studies have shown that having social support decreases the heart-racing, blood-pressure-boosting responses that humans and other social animals have to stress and the hormones it sends surging.
When oxytocin levels are high - even as a result of injection - reactions to stress are dampened. As a result, stress is less likely to do the kind of physiological damage that can lead to chronic diseases such as heart disease and metabolic disorders. When oxytocin levels are elevated, humans and other social animals also have been shown to heal faster and better from wounds.
Researchers at Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University have shown that people who report strong social supports have more robust immune systems and are less likely to succumb to infectious disease. Kiecolt-Glaser, who studies friendship and health, calls social support “the most reliable” psychological indicator of immune response that has been found.
There is even evidence that the broader network of friends and support that women tend to have may protect from the effects of dementia. A large survey of Swedes age 75 and older found in 2000 that the risk of developing dementia was lowest in men and women who maintained a wide variety of satisfying contacts with friends and relatives. The researchers surmised that the mental exercise of juggling many relationships kept the brains of those with rich social networks in better tone.
The health benefits of friendship are not news to Irene Miller, 59, of Woodland Hills. With her friend of 38 years, Anita Kienle, never far from reach, Miller has weathered the dissolution of her first marriage, depression and a malfunctioning thyroid gland. She, in turn, helped nurse Kienle, now 63, through breast cancer a decade ago. “I know this friendship has gotten me better from psychological and physical illness,” she says. “You don’t have to show me rats in a maze.”
In 2000, when ovarian cancer survivor Jewel Williams met Faye Anderson of Compton, then a newly diagnosed breast cancer patient, she recognized a woman in need of a friend.
“I took her under my wing,” says Williams, now 67, of Los Angeles. “I just knew it was in God’s plan for me to stick with her and get her through the tough times.” Today, Williams and Anderson, 63, visit and talk regularly on the phone, and the friendship is one of many that Williams says has filled her life with joy and purpose, and “kept me from going into a shell.”
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Male friendships not the same
But are women’s friendships uniquely health-promoting? Do women glean benefits from their women friends that could not be gotten from boyfriends or husbands?
Among researchers, the answer is a definite maybe. Girlfriends, however, are unanimous: The answer is yes. “With women, you can bare your soul. You don’t do that with your husband, and they don’t do that with you,” says Suzanne Dragge, 82, of Pasadena. She and her friend Connie Smith, 85, have counted church offerings, kidded each other and fly-fished together for almost a decade. “Thank goodness for lady friends.”
In fact, for women, there is some evidence that a male partner, in times of stress, can make things worse. In a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine in 1995, German researchers found that when subjects were given a stressful task - in this case, preparing a speech for delivery in front of an audience - men who were joined by their female partner for the preparation period showed much lower stress levels than those who had no support. For women, it was a different story. When women preparing their speeches were joined by their male partners, their stress hormones surged.
Taylor of UCLA surmises that findings such as this may reflect a major difference between the way men and women give support. Men’s support to a friend or partner tends to take the form of advice, she says. Women’s support more frequently comes in vaguer forms of encouragement, validation and acceptance. That, in turn, may let a woman work out her own solution to a problem, with less pressure to satisfy the expectations of her advisor.
Kiecolt-Glaser adds that differences in the ways that men and women converse may result in large differences in their social supports.
“Women tend to talk about feelings, whereas men tend to talk about events,” says Kiecolt-Glaser.
On meeting a friend, a man may open a conversation with a comment on sports. By contrast, a woman is more likely to spill a personal problem - ‘I’m having a tough time on my job’ or ‘my kids are driving me crazy’ - right from the start.
“It’s the self-disclosure aspect of the conversation that matters” to women - and which leads to supportive comments and validation from a friend, says Kiecolt-Glaser. “To say ‘what a pity about the Sox’ is not exactly a way to evoke warm support from others,” she says.
As Kris Frieswick, a 41-year-old business columnist in Boston, says of self-disclosure among her circle of eight friends: “It’s what you do … you spill.”
She adds: “That’s the basis of our mutual relationship, the mutual spilling, the purging and not being judged … these are women who accept you totally.”
For the last decade, says Taylor, researchers have been scrambling to overcome decades of neglect in studying the factors that uniquely affect women’s health. From the Bible’s Ruth and Naomi to “Sex and the City’s” quartet of friends, stories abound, but rigorous study of women’s friendships remains in its infancy. Scientists, she adds, need a “wake-up call” to take it further.
“This is one of those areas that is relegated to nice stories and pretty prose rather than hard science,” Taylor says. “What this body of evidence suggests is that there’s an important biological role for women’s friendships that scientists have largely ignored.”
FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES