Empress of the Universe

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Ashley....the Christmas Angel

Today's guest-post courtesy of my cousin Kimberley, in her end-of-year-sending-Christmas-love message:



While contemplating whether or not I could afford to send out Christmas cards this year, my daughter helped me make the decision to NOT send out Christmas cards.

Here is WHY: She asked me one day, about a week ago, if she could cut her hair short. Very short. And guess where all of her hair went? It is being donated to "Locks of Love", an organization that makes wigs for children who suffer from the ill-effects of radiation and have lost their hair, (or some other terminal illness which has resulted in hair loss).

So, off we went, Christmas Card Budget= Re-Routed to Hair Salon for a good cause.....And that, my friends and how this loved one is helpin' to "Kick Cancer A**"!! (Or at least to look and feel better when you've lost your hair. Only a few women in the world look beautiful when they are bald; like my cousin Roni.....exceptional!)





What a wonderful and generous gift from a child to another.... We could all learn an important lesson from young Ashley.....

Thursday, December 21, 2006

It is Destiny... I AM the Empress of the Universe

My sister, Roni, sent me this link: "What Tarot Card are You?" Roni is the Moon card. The Moon is a creative sign, but with this warning: "You may be going through a time of emotional and mental trial." How would it know she's going through cancer therapy?


I took the test, answering 20 or so questions. And this is what came up:


You are The Empress
Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.

The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents, beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.

The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.

OK, so now that it's official, was there ever really any doubt?

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

The CIA has a Website!

While researching United States population statistics at www.ask.com for my last blog post, I discovered that the CIA has a website. Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency.

When my search results appeared, I clicked on the top link without checking to see who hosted the site. I suppose at first I thought I landed at the World Book Encyclopedia. Then I saw the url: www.cia.gov.

I'm pretty sure this is not a spoof site since it's a .gov domain (you must be a government agency to register a .gov address).

What does the CIA need a website for? Marketing and public relations? Wouldn't you think if you were working for the CIA and needed intelligence that you would visit a secret, secure website and not a publicly accessible www domain?

The main page of the site includes these fascinating navigation options: "The Factbook on Intelligence" - "Speeches and Testimony" - "Current Recruiting Ad" - and so much more, plus an entire section on the CIA for kids. Honest! I am not making that up! I can barely read this with a straight face: "National Clandestine Recruiting Services - You Can Make A World of Difference!"

Oh, how I wish I could read Arabic -- there's a link from the home page titled "Iraqi Rewards Program" but the text is entirely in Arabic. What kind of "Rewards Program" is this? How do I sign up? What kind of freebies can I get with my points? I've been wanting one of those robot floor vacuums, I wonder how many Iraqi Rewards Points I need! Or maybe only Iraqi's can earn Iraqi Reward Points? Like 100 points for every litre of oil?

Then it occurred to me.... what if it's really a decoy site, filled with misinformation to throw off foreign spies and potential terrorists? What if they lied about the land mass of the United States, its climate, key industries and infant mortality rates in order to deke out their enemies?

Hey, wait. There's a careers section here. Ooops, gotta run. I'm going to take the CIA Personality Quiz to see if I'm suited for a life running through dark alleys, wearing fabulous disguises and sipping champagne on a yacht in the Mediterranean. Wait! I just read the fine print, which probably now excludes me from any career considerations:

"Important Notice: You are interested in a position as an overt employee---which means you can acknowledge your affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency. But should you? There may be friends, family, individuals or organizations who would be very interested to learn that you are an applicant for or an employee of the CIA. Their interest, however, may not be benign or in your best interest. You cannot control who they would tell. We therefore ask you to exercise discretion and good judgment in disclosing your interest in a position with the Agency.

I guess I just got myself crossed off the hire list!

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Monday, December 11, 2006

Someone has to think about these things....that must be MY job!

I haven't been feeling well the last couple of weeks, hence my absence. But this topic inspired me out of my stupor...

The December 4th edition of Time magazine featured a cover story entitled Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn't... ...And Ignore The Things We Should. Click here to read the full story. In effect, the article is about risk assessment, as opposed to risk management. Turns out there are real, prehistoric, physiological symptoms that alert us to risk and help us assess its potential. I love this section in particular:

"Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us in a traditional way, like an auto crash," says Slovic. "That's the dread factor." In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get, and the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of the thing actually happening. "It's called probability neglect," says Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor of law specializing in risk regulation.

The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year. We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way."


I love the idea of a "science of risk." Almost wish I'd thought of that myself. In fact, they even have names for the process of risk analysis - like "habituation" (ie. to grow accustomed to certain risks, thereby becoming desensitized to the reality of the risk) or "optimism bias" ("the convenient belief that risks that apply to other people don't apply to us").

I found the article fascinating and stored it away in this overstimulated brain of mine.

Until today when I read an alarming headline on AOL.com: "BEWARE: 13 Foods That Kill". Doesn't that sound frightening? At first, you'd think the two stories were completely unrelated, right? Bite into this:

"According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), about 76 million Americans will suffer from food-borne illness, and at least 5,000 will die this year. Children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems are at the greatest risk."

The short list? 1. Lettuce. 2. Water. 3. Raw sprouts. 4. Unpasteurized milk, juice, cheese. 5. Moldy peanuts. 6. Raw or undercooked shellfish. 7. Shark, swordfish, mackerel, tilefish. 8. Caesar salad. 9. Wild mushrooms. 10. Raw cookie dough. 11. Rare hamburger. 12. Turkey and stuffing. 13. Shakes and eggs.

Click here to read the entire story. I do recommend it.

Now I've had severe food poisoning (hospitalized on IV and everything) and it is NOT a pretty thing. I would wish it on no one. The intro to the story says that the CDC predicts at least 5,000 people will die each year from these everyday food dangers. Look out!

But wait, the principal source for the Time magazine story was the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), too. According to the Time story, here's the breakdown of American deaths:

TOTAL ANNUAL DEATHS 2.5 MILLION
  • Homicide 17,732
  • Suicide 31,484
  • Accidents 109,277
  • Other diseases 681,150
  • Diabetes 74,219
  • Chronic lower-respiratory disease 126,382
  • Stroke 157,689
  • Cancer 556,902
  • Heart disease 685,089
  • All other deaths 8,364


  • Diseases account for 2.3 million deaths a year, or about 92% of all deaths. "All other deaths" total 8,364 -- which, I guess, includes the 5,000 people who will die from eating those 13 deadly foods. According to the CIA website (Huh? Spies have a public website? Really -- I'm killing myself laughing, there's a subject for another post!) -- According to the CIA, the population of the United States is 298,444,215 souls. If I'm doing the math correctly, 2,500,000 people die each year, so that's less than a 1% risk or, statistically, a 1 in 119 random chance (not factoring for age/risk assessment) of dying in the next 12 months. If that person does die, s/he has a 92% chance of dying of disease - and a 2/100th of a percent chance of dying of food poisoning. Or, another way of looking at it: you have a 1 in 119 random chance of dying in the next year, you have a 1 in 60,000 chance of dying of food poisoning.

    Compare that to the chances of dying in a car accident: 1 in 6,000.

    Back to the Time story:

    Officials are fond of reassuring the public that they run a greater risk from, for example, drowning in the bathtub, which kills 320 Americans a year, than from a new peril like mad cow disease, which has so far killed no one in the U.S. That's pretty reassuring--and very misleading. The fact is that anyone over 6 and under 80--which is to say, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population--faces almost no risk of perishing in the tub. For most of us, the apples of drowning and the oranges of mad cow disease don't line up in any useful way.

    But such statistical straw men get trotted out all the time. People defending the safety of pesticides and other toxins often argue that you stand a greater risk of being hit by a falling airplane (about 1 in 250,000 over the course of your entire life) than you do of being harmed by this or that contaminant. If you live near an airport, however, the risk of getting beaned is about 1 in 10,000. Two very different probabilities are being conflated into one flawed forecast. "My favorite is the one that says you stand a greater risk from dying while skydiving than you do from some pesticide," says Susan Egan Keane of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Well, I don't skydive, so my risk is zero."


    I think I'll continue living dangerously -- taking my chances eating lettuce, turkey dressing, seafood, hamburger and still drinking the water. But then again, I'm lucky I don't live near an airport!