Me! In a Newspaper! Talking About Filipino Martial Arts!

Yours truly was interviewed for an article about Filipino Martial Arts that appeared in Marine Star, a local newspaper. The PDF is available here. Enjoy!

Recipe Wednesday: Ful Medames

In the United States, legumes are often regulated to lunch or dinner while various cereals, breads, meats and eggs dominate the breakfast table. However, in other parts of the world they have staked their claim as early morning staples.

Consider, for example, the fava bean (no Hannibal Lecter jokes please). A part of the human diet since at least 6,000 BC, fava beans are commonly served throughout the Middle East at breakfast. They are especially popular in Egypt, where they are the stars of what is often called the Egyptian national dish: ful medames (“buried beans”).

Ful medames is also widely consumed in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Israel, Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia. Like any dish eaten by so many people in so many places, there are countless variations on the basic recipe. Mine is pretty simple, and more or less representative of the average ful medames recipe you are likely to come across.

Ful Medames
(Serves 2-3)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 15-oz. can fava beans, rinsed
1 teaspoon cumin
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons tahini
Salt to taste

Preheat the oil in a medium size skillet on medium heat. Add the onion and sauté until soft. Toss in the garlic and stir for a couple of minutes.

Add the fava beans and cumin, stirring until everything is nicely mixed. Remove from heat.

Empty the contents of the skillet into a sturdy mixing bowl. Use a fork or potato masher to mash everything to together. Add the lemon juice, tahini and salt and stir well.

Ful medames is sometimes served with fresh tomato or eggs. I like to have it with a big dollop of hummus on top. It is pretty much always served with a flatbread such as pita. Hot, strong tea makes the perfect accompanying beverage.

If you’re feeling especially operatically-inclined while enjoying your ful medames, cue up Giuseppe Verdi’s classic “Aida,” which is set in Egypt and first premiered in Cairo in 1871. It remains one of the most performed operas in the world, just as ful medames is one of the most popular dishes in the Middle East.

Don't Be a Hero: The Risks of Employees Resisting Robberies

Fox News had this headline today: Army veteran fired from CVS after trying to stop robbery.

I won't bother recapping the story, as it's pretty short and you can quickly read it yourself. 

Not surprisingly, lots of people are all bent out of shape about this, rallying behind the fired veteran. I'm not usually one to play apologist for large corporations, but there are valid reasons employees are told not to resist robbery attempts.

Examples:

* According to the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, "When faced with an employee who chooses to actively resist and is in a face-to-face confrontation, robbers may resort to injuring the worker to avoid apprehension. Higher injury rates are consistently found to be correlated with measures employees take during the robbery."

* A 2006 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that, "Resisting the perpetrator of the crime was consistently related to increased risk for injury for both employees and customers, and the risk was higher for robberies than for all violent crimes combined." The study also found that customers are especially at risk when an employee resists a robbery.

*A 2015 study published in the Journal of Occupational Environmental Medicine concluded, "Customers had higher injury risk when employees resisted the perpetrator, compared with robberies where employees did not resist. Employee resistance against a perpetrator during a robbery increased customer injury risk. Businesses can train employees to not resist during a robbery, providing benefits for both customers and the business itself."

I'll conclude with some wisdom from self-defense expert Marc 'Animal' MacYoung at No Nonsense Self-Defense... 

The—and we use this term loosely—good news is that robbers tend to be more 'job oriented.' They want what they want and and if they get it, then they are done. In many ways this makes them safer to deal with—if you cooperate. 

That is to say their motives are based on financial gain rather than  gaining the more subjective and fluid 'props'  common among the younger, less experienced and dysfunctional criminals. As far as robbers are concerned they are offering you a choice, cooperate and give them what they want or be hurt. If you cooperate there is no reason to hurt you. In fact, if the target is the business money you may be no more involved than being ordered to the floor while the cash is collected. 

This is why—unless you are ordered to a secondary location—it is advisable to cooperate with a mugger/robber who has gotten the drop on you. This gives your best chance of not being hurt.

Book Review: Slavery Inc. by Lydia Cacho

I've done a few book-related posts (here, here, and here) over the last few weeks, so I decided to take things one step further and start writing the occasional book review.

Since I'm a pretty avid reader with rather diverse tastes, I will try to limit my reviews to books that have some relevance to the overall themes of this blog.

So without further ado, here are my brief thoughts on Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking by a writer by a writer Amnesty International called "perhaps Mexico’s most famous investigative journalist and women’s rights advocate," Lydia Cacho.

What does this book have to do with this blog? I've touched on the subject of evil before, and this book is indeed about evil. Personally, I believe that part of 'being a better person" is understanding the bad things going on in the world so we can be prepared to do our part—no matter how small—to make things better.

Obviously, a book such as this is not especially pleasant to read. Accounts of the sexual exploitation of women and children are hard to bear. Fortunately, Cacho writes elegantly and with compassion, managing to convey the stories survivors tell without being graphic or sensationalist. I don't need to hear specific details about a child being raped. This simple yet heartbreaking quote from Yeana, a 10-year-old sex trafficking survivor, sums up the horror quite well...

"Violence is not good because it hurts and it makes me cry."

More on Meditation: Three Ways Meditating Has Improved My Life

A little over a year ago I wrote a post about Self-Hypnosis and Zen Breathing which touched on meditation.

Since then, I've become way more disciplined in my meditation practice. While I'm still not super hardcore about it, pretty much every morning I meditate for 10 minutes and go through 10 minutes of yoga poses before moving on to make workout. If pressed for time, I'll skip the workout but not the mediation and yoga. Those 20 minutes just have such a profoundly positive impact on the rest of my day.

My way of meditating is pretty basic. I sit cross-legged on a couple of my cushions on the floor, relax, rest my hands on my knees, and close my eyes. My spine is straight, and my tongue is lightly touching the area behind my two front teeth. While I used to use a  simple "one-two" method for my breathing—Inhale ("one"), exhale ("two"), repeat—I now tend to favor the method advocated by Robert Aitken (1917 - 2010), founder of the Diamond Sangha, a Zen Buddhist society he founded in Honolulu. He advocated the counting of breaths to people who were new to sesshin, or intense Zen meditation:

If you are counting your breaths, then count "one" for the inhalation, "two" for the exhalation and so on but let the count do the counting.  In other words, let that point one count one, let that point two count two, let that point three count three and so on up to ten and then repeat.

Inspired by Thích Nhất Hạnh's book Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, I've started making an effort to smile with every exhalation. As he writes,

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment!

I won't go into all the potential benefits of meditating. There are plenty of books and articles about that. Instead, I want to share three of the benefits I've noticed personally.

This One Goes to 11: Favorite Books Read in 2015

As a follow-up to my Books Read, 2015 list, here's a list of my favorite 11 books in two categories read last year, in no particular order. 

FICTION

• Abhorsen by Garth Nix
• Lirael by Garth Nix (These are the final two books of Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy. Technically YA novels, I was impressed by the characterization, world-building, and interesting take on death.)
• Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee (Lee died in 2015. She was a master of strange, dark fantasy and science fiction.)
• Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre (An almost psychedelic, woman-centric apocalyptic SF classic.)
• Godslayer by Jacqueline Carey (Preceded by Banewreaker, this is the conclusion of Carey's Sundering Duology, which is essentially a morally ambivalent retelling of Tolkien from the point of view of the villains.)
• Mort(e) by Robert Repino (Incredibly original, emotionally powerful story of animals declaring war on humanity and the adventures of one really badass cat.)
• The Southern Reach Trilogy byJeff VanderMeer (Brilliant yet hard to describe. Maybe John Le Carre meets H.P. Lovecraft with a dash of Jules Verne?)
• The Woman Who Loved the Moon and Other Stories by Elizabeth A. Lynn (Dreamy, slightly surreal stories from an author who sadly no longer writes.)
• The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin (Radical political SF from a true legend.)

NONFICTION

• Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World by Trevor Paglen
• Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
• The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson (These four books are all excellent primers on modern U.S. history and foreign policy. The books by Paglen and Cockburn are especially relevant to current events.)

Books Read, 2015

I love reading. I've loved reading ever since I was a kid. And since I don't watch television, reading is my go-to form of entertainment and enlightenment. 

A couple of years ago I decided to log every book I read and then compile a master list at the end of the year. In the past, I haven't posted the list because I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested. However, some people have told me they would be interested, so without further ado, here's my Master Reading List for 2015, in alphabetical order by title...


FICTION

• A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
• Abhorsen by Garth Nix
• Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
• Angel with the Sword by C.J. Cherryh
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
• Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
• Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb
• Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
• Bad Men by John Connolly
• Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
• Dreams of Dark and Light: The Great Short Fiction of Tanith Lee