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The bottom line is: Don't stress if you're getting less than eight hours of sleep each night. A big part of insomnia is psychological: If you think you're getting enough sleep, then you probably are. But if you start stressing about how much sleep you're getting, then that stress can not only create a self-fulfilling viscious-circle prophesy (worrying about sleep keeps us awake, which makes us worry even more about sleep, and so on), but can actually be more damaging than the lack of sleep itself.
To view previous posts about insomnia and other sleep-related issues, click
here.
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She claims to have "cheated" and used Google to track down the title of the film, but how do I know she's not a closet fan—embarrassed, as so many of us are, to publicly admit having watched it muliple times? Just teasing, Mary!
As the winner, she'll be receiving a free packet of Top Leaf Green Tea.
Congratulations, Mary!
—Mellow Monk
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—Mellow Monk
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The Japanese language is rich not only in onomatopoeia (called giongo), which represent sounds and actions (such as "buzz" in English) but also in what are called gitaigo—mimetic words that primarily represent emotional states. For instance, shun represents a feeling of being lonely or forlorn, whereas niya niya suggests a sly grin. In fact, I've always considered gitaigo to be one of the last hurdles to complete fluency in Japanese.
—Mellow Monk
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Now that the whole "harvest organs from the healthy against their will" theme has been played out, someone needs to add an interesting twist before churning out another version. The idea of harvesting from clones (who don't know they're clones) instead of people intentionally put into a coma was the latest twist. What will be the next?
—Mellow Monk
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That video clip was sans subtitles, but now some kind soul has, out of the goodness of his or her heart, put in subtitles. So, here you are again for your viewing pleasure, but this time with subtitles, and in two parts:
—Mellow Monk
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What the heck. It's Friday.
—Mellow Monk
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You can download a PDF of the press release here.
—Mellow Monk
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An 81-year-old lady fought off a knife-weilding attacker with a tea kettle full of boiling water.
This story reminds me of a line from a movie:
A: A fish saved my life once.
B: How?
A: I ate it.
—Mellow Monk
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Here is a previous post about square watermelons, a novelty that apparently started in Japan.
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However, the only change was to the name, and this filter is still an excellent choice for brewing loose-leaf green tea. I've seen it in action at a friend's house, and it's simple, clean, and convenient: You put the tea leaves into the filter and pour in hot water. Once the tea's steeped for 3 to 5 minutes, you simply place the filter onto your mug or cup. The spring-loaded bottom of the filter is pushed up, allowing the tea to drain into the cup by gravity. Once your cup is full, you simply pick the filter up off the cup, stopping the flow instantly, without any dripping. (The only catch is that your tea cup or mug can't be too wide for the base of the filter.)
I highly recommend this to anyone for brewing green tea at home or at the office.
—Mellow Monk
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The research study shows that individuals suffering from stress-related health problems such as chronic pain, depression, or anxiety are often helped a great deal by floating. The effect remains four months after the treatment period.
Stress is largely about how we worry about things that have happened and are going to happen. When an individual, instead, manages to reach a sort of ‘here-and-now’ state, the brain can rest. These researchers believe that floating is a way of achieving just such a state. In a dark and silent floating tank, the patient is cut off from many sense impressions. Besides the rest the brain gets, the muscles also become relaxed.
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All three Japanese companies are anticipating that the ranks of retirees will swell over the next several years. Toyota's American arm, for example, has just 258 retired production workers (G.M., by contrast, has more than 400,000 retirees).
But things will change over the next five years. In 2011 and 2012, a combined 1,700 workers will be eligible for retirement at Toyota — about 6 percent of its current labor force.
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Now, another study warns that 80 percent of these "therapy dogs" may carry diseases that are infectious to humans.
—Mellow Monk
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Hookworm will never take off as an extreme asthma treatment. Instead, the promise lies in isolating the chemical compounds released by the worm that stop asthma and other auto-immune diseases.
—Mellow Monk
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The top 5 numbers are for Amazon.com, Ebay.com, PayPal.com, Yahoo.com, and Microsoft.com.
—Mellow Monk
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The sneakers, with a tabi-style split toe for improved balance, are for wearing during the physical training that astronauts perform to keep their muscles from atrophying in the microgravity of Earth's orbit.
—Mellow Monk
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The article's a nice summary of how Japanese has changed in the 60 years that have passed since the end of WWII. There are plenty of pics, such as the one below showing the living room of a typical middle-class family in the late 1950s.
—Mellow Monk
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And what does Brain Training do? Well, you hold your Nintendo DS like a book (with left and right screens), and you basically use the touchscreen to undergo a wide variety of simple, cleanly-designed, interesting exercises intended to make you smarter. Or, at least, keep your brain sharp and fresh and delicious. At the end of your "fun", the game eventually calculates and reports your "mental age" — often with painful/comedic effect — and tracks your progress over the weeks and months of self-education. And that's about it.
See previous posts on the topic of brain training here.
—Mellow Monk
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Notice that the plastic bottle in commercial is colored to make the tea look ultra-green. Another thing that the commercial doesn't tell you is that a lot of the polyphenols in green tea start to break down within a few hours of brewing, so that by the time that bottle of tea reaches you, it's lost of lot of its health-promoting "punch".
So don't succumb to the temptation of bottled tea—it's healthier to brew your own. The whole tea-brewing process is also an excellent opportunity to take a step back and relax. Green tea isn't just a drink; it's an experience.
—Mellow Monk
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Scientists based at the Satou hospital in Japan found that kissing worked by relaxing the body and reducing the production of histamine – a chemical that the body produces in response to pollen, causing the sneezing, runny noses and streaming eyes that characterise hay fever attacks.
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But remember: Medical research into the many health benefits of green tea has a short history. It will take a long time to thoroughly study all of the many traditionally accepted health benefits of green tea.
And in almost every other area of green tea research, the news turning up is good: Green tea is good for you in a lot of ways. Just take a look at some of the findings I've posted before about green tea and cancer, diabetes, and cholesterol, just to name a few.
So keep on drinking that green tea. As more and more studies affirm its positive health benefits, you'll be glad you did!
—Mellow Monk
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The move is hitting hard at the Japanese, who use up a tremendous 25 billion sets of wooden chopsticks a year — about 200 pairs per person. Some 97 percent of them come from China.
But pretty soon, some fear, Japan won't even be able to get expensive chopsticks from China: Japanese newspapers Mainichi and Nihon Keizai reported that China is expected to stop waribashi exports to Japan as early as 2008.
—Mellow Monk
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Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes.
The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say.
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Who knew there was an actual technique to this. I thought tea-leaf-readers and other fortune tellers simply made it up as they went..
—Mellow Monk
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Here's a video of two old-school country music legends, Johnny Cash and Charley Pride, doing a medley of Hank Williams songs on "The Johnny Cash Show." This espisode originally aired on September 6, 1969.
—Mellow Monk
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[L]aughter reduces levels of certain stress hormones. In doing this, laughter provides a safety valve that shuts off the flow of stress hormones and the fight-or-flight compounds that swing into action in our bodies when we experience stress, anger or hostility. These stress hormones suppress the immune system, increase the number of blood platelets (which can cause obstructions in arteries) and raise blood pressure. When we're laughing, natural killer cells that destroy tumors and viruses increase, as do Gamma-interferon (a disease-fighting protein), T-cells, which are a major part of the immune response, and B-cells, which make disease-destroying antibodies.
—Mellow Monk
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hey all you fungis
happy yeaster!
—Mellow Monk
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(The audio track is all Japanese, but it's easy to see what the tricks are supposed to be.)
Now, I'm not a big believer in magic, but I thought this clip was interesting because it's representative of what's on TV in Japan.
—Mellow Monk
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The early forest dwellers may also have found that rubbing tea on to wounds, or binding up a wound with some ground-up tea inside it, helped healing, and we know from recent accounts that tribesmen in the Naga, Shan, Kachin and neighboouring hills use tea as a medicine in this way. Such vitalising and medicinal properties would have given tea-chewing humans, and tea-chewing monkeys, a competitive advantage. For thousands of years there existed a symbiosis between tea and mammals as the latter, through their consumption and handling of the plants, unconcsciously encouraged widespread growth of the tea tree.
—Mellow Monk
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The athletes in question are retired NFL star Phil Simms and his son Chris, currently quarterback with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Mellow Monk, meanwhile, continues to rely on its simple message: Mellow Monk green tea is good for you, tastes great, and is grown sustainably.
—Mellow Monk
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The bagged rice will be shipped overseas as part of the government's relief effort. The picture below is of a ceremony commemorating the end of the project and the donation of the rice.
Parents and teachers hope that the project also gives the students a greater understanding and appreciation of a crop that is still important to the local economy: rice.
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It's interesting how such studies often arrive at conclusions that sound a lot like the sort of commonsense advice you'd get from your grandmother.
The commonsense translation of this study is: "Stop worrying so much! Go out and get your mind off it!"
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The author is calling for a middle ground between extreme permissiveness and prison guard.
They might kick you in the shins when you do it, but your children actually want to be shown where the boundaries of behaviour are set. ... "Because I say so" is not child abuse. It is not always necessary to engage perfect logic to make children behave well. Cicero was probably a lousy dad.
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When Natick Labs chemist Ferdinando Bruno began researching potential uses for a component found in green tea, his goal was simple: build an efficient and light plastic battery to power equipment used on the battlefield.
Bruno never dreamed he would instead find a new cancer treatment that may heal patients without the painful side effects associated with most forms of chemotherapy.
His discovery, which is being pursued at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell with collaboration from U.S. Army scientists from Natick Labs, is showing promise in
treating colorectal cancer and cancer of the breast, head, and neck.
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Hmm... I wonder what's Japanese for "soulmate."
—Mellow Monk
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Obviously it was after this bulb was made that light bulb manufacturers hit on the concept of planned obsolescence.
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From Google Video: a video clip from Japanese TV featuring anime otaku ("animation geeks") from America pilgrimaging to the motherland. Their goal? To buy much-coveted anime products, sing anime-themed karaoke, and attend anime conventions dressed as their favorite characters.
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A neurologist interviewed for the article describes what could be called "the caffeine trap":
"The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness," [Harvard Medical School neurologist Charles] Czeisler says. "But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine."
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Alright, we all have to feed our sweet tooth once in a while, but I can't resist pointing out the irony of drinking a super sugar-charged green tea beverage "because it's good for you." (Kinda like washing down your vitamin supplements with whiskey. Not that I'd know anything about that.)
Besides, can you even taste the green tea in a green tea latte?
Come out of the darkness and into the light, o drinkers of green tea lattes!
—Mellow Monk
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The town in question is Japan's Ubuyama (population 1,754), situated not too far from the source of Mellow Monk green tea. The news in question is about—are you sitting down?—three bamboo shoots that a farmer found growing out of a single root node.
Below is a photo of the shoots from the local rag, the Kumanichi.
The farmer who found them, a Mr. Sakai, explained that a node on a bamboo root normally produces only a single shoot, and that it's very rare to find three growing from a single node. Usually, nodes are spaced about a yard apart.
So pleased was Mr. Sakai with his find that he brought it to the local onsen (hot spring bath house), where it was proudly put on display at the entrance to the wonderment of tourists and locals alike.
The entire Mellow Monk staff feels privileged and honored to break this news to the world. Remember: You heard it here first.
(Stories like this one are a sure sign that the first-string reporters and editors are on vacation for Golden Week, Japan's longest string of holidays.)
—Mellow Monk
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Lesson 1: When a new technology comes out, wait a year or two for the kinks to get worked out.
Lesson 2: Brew your beverages the old-fashioned way. It's healthier—and safer!
—Mellow Monk
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—Mellow Monk
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—Mellow Monk
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—Mellow Monk
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[L]ocal governments in Japan are prepared to provide financial support for the businesses that organize dating events as part of its efforts to tackle what it sees as a major social problem.
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