Say Thank You

by shirolusagi

Every other Christmas Eve my mom and me go to my uncle's for a family and friends party. On the way going there we we usually pick up my aunty (my mom's oldest sister.) My mom tried calling her in the morning to tell her we are gonna pick her up before going to my uncle's, but she didn't pick up so she left a message. As we left my mother tried again, no answer. Concerns raised for my mom. We ended up having to go to her condo door finding a pile of mail against the door, no answer to the door bell or knocking. The ads in the mail bundle was dating from the 12th. And last time we saw or her from her was Thanksgiving. My mom being very concerned at this point called my uncle about the situation and called 911 for help. Later on the police came knocking on the door themselves, still no answer. My mom also called her cell phone and the police officer said he heard the cellphone inside. They went on trying to find information of the manager to contact and calling their supervisor to check up the situation. When the supervisor came he said they could kick the door down, but after that we are held responsible to fix it, and knowing it was Christmas Eve he really didn't want to kick it down having us to deal with it. Later on they were able to get in contact with some emergency number, but we found out no extra keys were available since these were condos and the owners have the key(s.) The supervisor still being very on the edge about kicking the door down, they try to use the credit card trick, but they said because of a deadbolt(?) cannot get through. My aunty's place did have a balcony, so they called up the fire department for a ladder so they could scan inside the place (which is really just on big room split into a kitchen, dining room, and bed area. Later on the firetruck came and they I heard loud hellos through the other side of the door. Shortly after the police came back up and said for us to wait at the chairs near the elevator while they check inside. Few minutes later the police came back and came with bad news. She passed away laying in bed. My mom started to burst into tears, while I just sat there with a dead face can't really take in what has happened that she is no longer here. I am usually a person who tries to hold back their tears as hard as I can till if the right tick happens can make me really cry or funny enough my feelings are hurt really bad I'll cry (lol.) So after the news the police and firefighters had to collect some information for the case and the firefighters and the police that came with the supervise left. Two police officers stayed behind and said they can stay and guard the room till a mortuary picks my aunty up. Since my aunty was a very private person we didn't really know much anything personal. So she called my uncle with the update of the situation and he came down to talk to the police himself and my brother came down as well. We decided on a mortuary and then waited for them to take her away. After her body was recovered the police gave their consolidations and said we were able to go into her condo and left. Before they left we asked what her body was like, they said the air conditioning was on, but she didn't look like she was laying there for a long time. So we went into the room and it was semi messy. The kitchen had a lot of teabag wrappers. We also came to a basket full of tissue paper which looked like blood on it (but we can't really tell for sure.) She had no medication, but there was Advil near her bed. We can never be 100% sure how she passed away but she most probably closed her eyes to go to sleep and never woke up again. But it seemed like she was sick with something. She was a healthy person far as we knew, with no medical problems. She walked everyday (and that's how she got around town along with the bus if it was super long. She was 70, but she pretty much had a very stress free retirement life. Even till this moment it is hard to accept she is gone. She was my closest aunty. Knowing she won't be at the things we go together as a family. So many relatives has passed over the past few years, I am considered myself for my mom that it's too much. My grandma passed away a few years ago, then my dad passed 2 years ago, then two uncles passed this year, Everyone is passing on and I cannot really think about anymore passing on. This is pretty much shocking news to the family. And still this is very odd to me. The concept of the person never returning is very surreal to me. I didn't really cry at my dad's funeral, but almost did. But I have cried to myself realizing I will never get to do the things I wanted to do with my dad. I'm still pretty shocked myself, not sure how long it will take me to realize she won't be around anymore.

I just hope everyone has a good Christmas day weather you like Christmas or not enjoying your day. I will try enjoy my day as well baking the rest of my Christmas cookies and cook the prime rib and deliver some to my other relatives who were gonna come to the dinner that was supposed to happen today.My wish is for everyone just to take care of yourselves into the next year I am gonna try to take better care of my health as well to lose weight (like I should have been doing for the past years ^^;; ). And if something is horribly wrong please do contact someone for assistance.

Ales and Lagers - An Introduction to Beer

by bangsecks

I think you'd benefit from a quick run down of the ingredients of beer and what each does and how it affects the taste and character of beer. First is water, obviously, which should be clean and more or less balanced in terms of pH; water can be the simplest thing or very involved when we get into mash temps., residual pH, relative mineral concentrations and other chemical considerations and so on. For now lets leave it as being simple and not pay it any more attention.

The next ingredient, really at the other end of the dial, is the yeast. This is a galaxy on its own and really, like the intricacies of water chemistry, best left alone for now. Just keep in mind that much of the flavor of beer comes from the yeast, which ferment the sugars into alcohol and CO2 and there are two major classes of beer depending on the yeast, lagers and ales.

The other two ingredients, barley and hops, are where we should really concentrate for someone like you. What are they and what do they do? Barley is a grain, like wheat or rice or corn or oats, and it's the traditional grain for making beer although others can be used like those just mentioned. Barley grains are subjected to a few processes to get them to a stage where they can turn all the starch or endosperm into sugar for the yeast to eventually eat and ferment into alcohol. There are two major types of barley, 2-row and 6-row, quite similar to one another, each of which can be subjected to additional processes to develop flavor characteristics. This is where I think you might benefit from learning something about the process as it relates to your ability to select a beer you will be likely to enjoy.

First, after barley is malted, that is germinated and then kilned just enough to halt further germination and sprouting, it can be roasted to varying degrees. Think of a piece of bread; if you eat it straight out of the oven a bit undercooked it will be a bit bland and will taste more like the wheat itself than if you take a slice and then toast it a while. Once it's toasted it will have that wheat taste but it will also have other tastes, those we associate with toasting, nuttiness, caramel, a little burned and so on. What if we really toasted the bread to where it was nearly blackened? That would be quite a different taste, bitter and less like wheat. We can do the same with barley for beer; roast it, like coffee beans, to varying degrees to bring out those different flavors. The more we do this the darker the grain and the darker the resulting beer. We can also mix grains of varying degrees of roast together for one beer, a bit of light and bit or dark and so on, to further complicate things.

Once we have our grain, whether not roasted at all and just plain, or roasted to the point of being black, we then have to basically soak the grain in water for some period of time, this is before we actually brew the beer, at some temperature to get the enzymes within each kernel to convert the starches into small sugars the yeast can metabolize. The different temperatures at which we do this give us different sugar and carbohydrate profiles; the overall temp. window is about 145F to 165F in terms of extremes, the best ranges are about 148F-152F for one type of conversion and about 156F-160F for another type of conversion. The first type breaks down the starch molecules in such a way so as to give us a very dry beer, in other words it gives us a lot of simple sugars which the yeast can totally convert into ethanol leaving little else behind, while the other type breaks down enough to still give us alcohol but leaves a lot of longer chain sugars which the yeast can't eat but our tongue can still detect slightly as a sugar. This means that if we do this, mash the barley, at a lower temperature we get a dryer beer and the higher we do it the more sweet and malty a beer we get.

Now, it's important to note that we don't usually do one or the other, we can try to reach a compromise so we get something in between, we might for instance mash somewhere in the middle, say 154F, or we might start low for a while then raise the temperature half way through. Basically, the point I'm trying to make, is that there are two major barley characteristics, dry and alcoholic and often a bit thin, or sweet, thicker and full of body. Light beers are often dry and dark beers a bit sweet.

A quick note here returning to yeast; there are two major types of beer which I mentioned before and with which I am sure you're already familiar, lagers and ales. These are basically the same type of yeast but different strains, although there are some different species altogether in some cases, and these different strains ferment best at different temperatures. The Bud and Coors and Miller and Michelob you reference are examples of lagers; there's a whole story behind why American macrobeers were and are lagers and where that came from and why ales were the default face of microbrews thereafter, but that's a different story which could take up a lot more room than I'm already doing here, but, basically, these beers are lagers and lagers are beers that ferment at low temperatures and give light, clean flavors. Ales are more versatile and ferment higher and can be light but can also be dark, like the Guinness you like. The point here is that there are two major branches of beer depending on the yeast, lager and ale, and a good ale is a dime a dozen, they're easier to make, and a good lager is a bit more difficult, plenty of cheap bad ones out there. An example of a quality lager is the Sam Adams you mentioned.

Now, on to bitterness, the last ingredient, hops. Hops are the oil and resin laden glandular buds of Humulus lupulus, a plant not too distantly related to the Cannabis genus and similarly containing many pungent alkaloids. These compounds give beer its bitter taste and if treated properly its spicyand often citrus nose and bouquet. These compounds are called collectively alpha acids and part of the reason beer needs to be brewed, boiled, is to cause a reaction with these acids wherein they change shape slightly and they thereafter gain shelf life and bitter the beer. Depending on when hops are added to the boil, this well after the barley has been mashed and sugars converted, they give varying degrees of bitterness. Just as when cooking where you can add your herbs at the beginning and by the end they're all cooked down and not vibrant or add them at the end right before you're done so they stay green and pungent so too do hops retain their flavor the less they're cooked. So there are two factors where, boiling longer and getting them to bitter the beer or adding them later so they keep the higher notes and aromas, and so we add hops in stages, a bit early on and then a bit later to get the full range of their flavors and aromas.

What the North Koreans are taught about the second world war

by Cenodoxus

We actually don't have to speculate too much about it. While we don't have access to everything that's been written or published within North Korea, South Korea has a ministry that collects North Korean publications and media, and both Korean and Western scholars have been able to establish what the dominant narrative in North Korean culture has become. While it's frustrating not to have every detail, it's fairly obvious how and why that narrative has come to exist.

What the North Koreans are told: Kim il-Sung and his band of freedom fighters bravely forced the Japanese to relinquish the Korean peninsula, conducting brilliant attacks from a secret base on the sacred Mount Paektu. During the struggle, the future Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il was born, and he fired at retreating Japanese as early as age three. Sometime in the middle of all this, the freedom fighters also found the time to carve predictions of Kim il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il's eventual greatness into 13,000 trees in the forest surrounding Paektu. The secret base, chairs, cups, and trenches used by Kim il-Sung were miraculously preserved and are available for tour by appointment. When he had time off from slaughtering the Japanese, Kim also wrote several revolutionary operas that are performed in North Korean theaters to this day.

Foreign visitors tend to have problems keeping a straight face on the rare occasions when they're taken to these sites. Some of the more obvious "slogan trees" referenced above were also quietly removed in the late 1990s when a visiting Japanese arborist asked how it was possible for 60-year old carvings to exist on 30-year old trees.

What actually happened: This narrative is really only accurate in the sense that Kim il-Sung fought against the Japanese, but I have yet to find any historian -- Korean, Russian, Chinese, or otherwise -- who's argued that he was anything other than a fairly minor figure in a widespread anti-colonial struggle. In fact, he didn't fight in Korea at all, but rather Jiandao province in Manchuria (the northeast portion of China that has a sizable Korean-speaking minority), leading companies and battalions of the Second Corps in what became known as the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. While not the highest-ranked officer in the Corps, he seems to have been competent, and by 1935 the Japanese had put a price on this head. At that point he'd been harassing them for about 4-5 years, and he lasted another 4-5 before things got too hot and he had to run for it. He sat out World War II and the rest of the fight against the Japanese occupation in a Red Army camp in Siberia. Kim Jong-Il was actually born there in 1942, and not in Korea at all.

Small interjection: Most of what we know of this period has been constructed from old Soviet, Chinese, and Japanese records, and Kim wasn't sufficiently important to merit mention at every turn. By necessity, there's some guesswork involved, and we don't have as much information as we'd like about Kim's actual record in (X) battle, or when Kim left Manchuria, etc.

By the time Kim returned to Korea with the Red Army in 1945, he'd been out of the country for something like 20 years and spoke Chinese much better than Korean. He was tasked with giving a speech in Pyongyang -- the Soviets were on the lookout for someone they could install in local government to help control the peninsula, and he seemed like a good prospect because he took orders well and had credibility as an anti-Japanese fighter -- and Soviet Koreans not only wrote the speech for him but had to coach him on pronunciation. This was only the first of many speeches he gave, and both these and the initial run of propaganda (again, largely written by other Soviet Koreans) were heavy on gratitude to the Soviets for their assistance in driving the Japanese off the peninsula and the Chinese for having supported the anti-colonial movement.

How and when this changed (i.e., we have always been at war with Eurasia): Now, the most interesting thing about North Korean propaganda is tracing how and when it changes (subtly or otherwise) to reflect contemporary political needs. As far as the NK government is concerned, their history is flexible and can be made to serve whatever ideology they need to push at a given time. This has even extended to archaeologists going on the hunt for ancient tombs in central Pyongyang in order to prove the city's classical importance. But that's not really what you're asking about.

Anyway:

• During the early 1960s and Khrushchev's tenure in Moscow, references to Soviet aid before and during World War II start to vanish from both North Korean history books and records of Kim's speeches. Why? Because Khrushchev was trying to reform both the Soviet Union and its client states away from the Stalinist model (something to which North Korea was heavily wedded), and he also ridiculed both Mao and Kim's personality cults. While Kim had always been the figure of primary importance in the North Korean narrative concerning World War II, he changed from being the beneficiary of Soviet generosity who used resources wisely to being someone who struggled without any serious help from other nations.
• References to Chinese aid wax and wane too. To the best of my knowledge, they, too, have largely vanished from the North Korean narrative of World War II, and they are definitely not acknowledged as the people who were really running the army in which Kim was an officer.
• Nothing is said of American or Allied involvement in the fight against Japan in the Pacific. Unfortunately, I don't know what, if anything, is said about the European theater.
• References to the juche doctrine start appearing in Kim il-Sung's speeches about 15-20 years after they were actually given. IIRC, Kim's actual mention of the doctrine dates to 1961 at the earliest, but juche starts showing up everywhere in the mid-1960s to early 1970s. Why? Because Kim Jong-Il was starting to build a power base for himself in the government, and needed a concrete contribution with which to be identified; they couldn't really pass him off as a major freedom fighter when he'd been all of 3 as the war ended. So juche was it. The actual architect of the policy was Hwang Jang-Yop, who defected to South Korea in 1997, but Kim Jong-Il expanded on it, wrote papers, essays, and books (or, just as likely, had someone write them for him), and juchemysteriously started being peppered in speeches Kim il-Sung had given two decades earlier in order to establish an unbroken line of thought concerning North Korea's need for economic self-reliance.Juche is not the only idea to have been given this treatment; in fact, scholars "mined" Kim il-Sung's speeches for pro-capitalist sentiments when the government needed a way to justify its tolerance of private markets in the 1990s and 2000s.

I'm trying and failing to remember if there's anything else that jumps out about North Korean education on World War II, but I think that addresses the most important stuff.

How to keep a conversation going

by NoAttentionAtWrk

You need to understand that to keep a converstaion going, you need to be a good listener. That word is thrown around a LOT but what I mean by a good listener is NOT that you just sit there and listen to whatever anyone has to say but what you need to do is really listen!

Let me explain the difference : the difference being that when someone says a line you make mental notes of different things.(very very important - I'll get back to this point) Then from within those things, pick up one and ask something about that. Repeat the same thing with whatever reply you get from the person.

Every now and then add to the conversation. Share your own related story/thought/experience related to what you are talking about. That keeps the conversation from becoming an interview.

Almost everyone does this naturally (yes, even most of the socailly awkward), but what you need to do to keep conversation from dying out are just 3 simple things :

• Avoid simple yes/no questions, one word reply questions or questions you reply with ok. Avoid them as much as you can ! these are conversation killers ! specially when the other person is not as talkative. Dont ask them unless you have something else you can go on about even with a one
• Never EVER reply with a one word reply when asked something. Those are conversation killers. Since the other person doesnt have much to go on about, they might not be able to reply (remember : they have probably not read this wall of text that I am typing, they might not conciously know what they are doing when they are having a conversation with you/anybody). Eventually what happens is even though they are as interested in carrying on the conversation, it turns into an awkward sielnce. If you are asked something that can only be answered in a one word reply, follow up with a question / statement.

Example:

ABC : Are you still friends with XYyou : no.

end of conversation because you didnt add anything here

ABC : Are you still friends with XYZ

ou : No. We fell out of touch when we started different colleges; I went to <some place> and he went <somewhere else>. Facebook is where we mainly keep in touch. I heard he married recently

you added something to the conversation and bam! you have something new to talk about!. like "you know who else got married?"

• remember those mental notes that I was talking about? Those are THE MOST important tool for keeping any conversation alive. If nothing else, read this! When a person says something you have to pick up on the important phrases that they mention. Keep those in mind and pick one of those to continue on the conversation. DO NOT FORGET the other points that the person mentions. These are your go back to points when you dont have conversation flowing with your previous point.

So, for example, if someone mentions they went to college in a different state, you now have 2 things that you can take your conversation forward on. One that they lived in that state and second that they went to college.

Say, you pick up on the state You can talk about how it was like living in that state, if the person worked there or how did they handle their finances without work. etc etc etc. 5 mins into this conversation (where you are still picking up more phrases the entire time) you find that you are approaching that awkward silence phrase (we all can tell if it is coming in, even though if you start to follow this, you'll probably avoid this phase for a long time). When you are about to get to that phase, look at your list. You now know that this person went to college in a state, worked for a bit managed mostly on his parents money. All the things you haven't talked about ! ask him which subjects did he take? were the professors any good? what was the craziest thing that he did in college ? where did he work? what was it working like over there? you'll start a completely different thread of that conversation. Add a few of your own thoughts/ opinions / (occasional) jokes into the mix. Tell them where you lived all your life. How it was like growning up there etc.

Dont make the convesation about yourself too much, concentrate on the other person. Everyone loves talking about themselves - specially the ladies. No guy or girl, young or old, ever complained that they had a boring conversation with someone cos they only talked about themselves.

Another example :

You : So where are you from ?

Person A : <XYZ City> 

You : Born and brought up there?

you avoided a potantially conversation killer, a one word answer, by asking a related open ended answer.

Person A : No, I was born in ABC town but then moved to <DEF> for college

    and then moved here after working in <RST> city for a while.

That one line was a potential goldmine! you know ABC town, college, DEF city, first jobin RST city, RST city, XYZ city. What was the person doing there, how was the place, what made them move, etc etc etc. pick one of these and start! then come back to this and continue a different thread. Throw a few non offensive jokes in the mix and the other person would have a fun time and they'll try to make sure the convo doesnt die out too!

People LOVE talking about themselves. It gives thier experiences a third party validation. It puts them back in the good times mode or reduces their stress. End result is always the same. The person would want to talk to you more.

Additional Notes :

• Fake enthusiasm in wanting to hear the other person. If the other person senses that you are interested in knowing about something they'll talk more. If they sense you are just asking for the sake of asking they are going to stop talking.
• Body language and expressions - read up on body language and figure out how to fake interest (things like slightly lean in, smile, nod occasionally). Laugh with the other person as hard as they are laughing even if you didnt find the joke as funny as the story teller.
• Always remember : Sometimes it is okay not to say anything. There is the awkward silence and then there are the perfectly acceptable, sometimes short, sometimes long non-awkward silence which is like a break you both would need in between conversations. For example : if you are both travelling in a car for say 4-5 hours. It can be okay to just take a few minutes every now and then and observe the view around you. Point something interesting out and you can continue the conversation.
• This is amazingly effective in one on one conversations but a variation can be applied when talking to a group of people. You need to be able to dail it back a notch with asking questions (let othes chip in) and you need to get better at keeping track of different things that different people are talking about. When find out similarities between 2 thigns that 2 people said, point it out (not abruptly) with a joke/question say something like

Person A : blah blah blah "so after that I lived in LA for about 2 years"

random convo

Person B : blah blah "I went to college in UCLA" blah blah

You : oh you went to UCLA ? is that how you two met ? while person A was living in LA and you went to college there?

• By the way you cannot have a script for a conversation with anyone. You can start every other conversation with a few selected lines ("interesting weather" "where are you from" "funny thing that happened today") and you can try to stear the conversation into a direction but you cannot have the exact same conversation with everyone because no 2 people would reply with the exact same thing every time.

Dealing with the past

by MrMentallo

I was 15 and moved to Philly from Texas. I had a pretty strong accent and had never been out of the state before so I didn't know what to expect socially. On my first day of school I had the bad judgement to wear a Dallas Cowboys jersey thinking people will just laugh. Throughout the day, I got a few dirty looks and a few "you've got balls" comments. Last period goes by and I'm waiting for my bus out front when this huge guido comes up and starts talking shit. I tell him to piss up a rope and he knocks me out in one punch. He gets suspended and I'm told not to antagonize things.

Time goes by and he's a constant pain in my life bullying me around on a weekly basis. He outweighed me by about 75 pounds thanks to his steroid use and had a temper to match. I got my ass kicked many times thanks to him and his manipulations. We graduate and I don't see him for a few years.

I had always been into cooking and decided that's what I wanted to do with my life so I went to culinary school and started working in the industry. I worked my way up the ladder quickly thanks to focus, a willingness to sacrifice a social life and hard work. A few years later I was the executive chef of a small bistro and we had a policy of taking a prisoner on work release from the county jail as part of a rehabilitation program. The owner was a great guy who grew up without guidance and made some bad decisions early in life that got him thrown in jail for a few years. He got out, got a job as a dishwasher where the owner of that place saw some promise and took him under his wing giving him the life lessons he never got from his family and so on. This was his way of paying forward what he got. We had gone through a few guys that seemed to do well and so far the program was working out well. One day we were slated to get a new guy and guess who walks in the door... He doesn't notice me at first but then is introduced to me as his direct boss. The owner starts to introduce me but I interrupt saying that we already know each other quite well and need no introductions. I told the owner about our history not leaving any details out and he asks me what I want to do. I tell him give me a few minutes in the walk in (large walk in refrigerator that is soundproof) with him and it's all good. I take him in there and ask him why he was in jail and where he was in his head. I also told him how I would treat him was up to him and that this could go well or he could turn right around and go right back to jail. He ended up breaking down and spilling his heart out. Between drugs, an abusive household and having no real friends in school due to a total lack of social skills, he had no idea how to have a real relationship. He told me that the days he would kick my ass were the days after his old man would beat him when he got drunk. His life just went downhill after school and he ended up getting busted for dealing. I told him to clean himself up and I'd do my best to show him how to get his shit together. He ended up being one of the hardest workers I have ever seen. Five years later he ended up being my sous chef. He has his own restaurant now and we guest chef at each other's place all the time. I wouldn't trade his friendship for the world.